status of individuals.  In whatever community we may live, we need only look around to discover that its real leaders are not the merely intelligent, educated, and good, but the energetic, the self-asserting, the aggressive.  Nor will mere passive strength of will prevent subjection; for how often do we see a spirit, whose only prominent characteristic is a restless and tireless pugnacity, hold in complete subserviency those who are far superior in actual strength of mind, purely through the apathy of the latter, and their indisposition to live in a state of constant effort!  It is because this petty domineering temper is found much oftener in women than in men, that we see a score of henpecked husbands to one ill-used wife.  Woe to the man who falls into this kind of slavery to a wicked woman! for through him she will commit acts she would never dare in her own person; and a double woe to him, if he be not as wicked and hardened as his mistress!  The bargain of the old Devil-bought magicians was profitable, compared with his; since he gets nothing whatever for the soul he surrenders up.

In the present case, a couple of years sufficed for the energetic and ever-belligerent temper of the wife to subdue completely the mild and peaceable nature of the husband.  At her bidding most of his former acquaintances were discarded; and even his warmest friends and nearest relations, no longer meeting the old hearty welcome, gradually ceased to visit his house.  But the bitterest effect of this weak and culpable abdication of his rights was experienced by his slaves.  Sad indeed for them was the change from the ease and abundance of the bachelor’s-hall, where slavery meant little more than a happy exemption from care, to their present condition, in which it meant hopeless submission to the power of a capricious and cruel mistress.  The worst form of female tyranny is that exhibited on a Southern plantation, under the sway of a termagant.  Her power to afflict is so complete and all-pervading, that not an hour, nay, hardly a minute of the victim’s life is exempt, if the disposition exist to exercise it.  Besides, this species of domestic oppression has this in common with all the worst tyrannies which have been most feared and hated by men:  the severities are ordered by those who neither execute them nor witness their execution,—­that being left to agents, usually hardened to their office, and who dare not be merciful, even if so inclined.  It adds two-fold to the bitterness of such tyranny, that the tyrant is able to acquire a sort of exemption from the weakness of pity.  It is wisely ordered that few human beings shall feel aught but pain in looking upon the extreme bodily anguish of their fellow-men; and when a monster appears who seems to contradict this benign law, he is embalmed as a monster, and transmitted to future times along with such rara aves as Caligula, Domitian, and Nana Sahib.  And here—­as a Southern man, brought up in the midst of a household of slaves—­let me remark, that the worst feature of our system of slavery is the possibility of the negroes falling into the hands of a brutal owner capable of exercising all the power of inflicting misery which the law gives him.