Among the most attractive of these visitors was Reid’s cousin, Miss Martha Denny Martin, daughter of Colonel Robert Martin of Rockingham County, North Carolina.  Rumor has it that Douglas speedily fell captive to the graces of this young woman.  She was not only charming in manner and fair of face, but keen-witted and intelligent.  In spite of the gay badinage with which she treated this young Westerner, she revealed a depth and positiveness of character, to which indeed her fine, broad forehead bore witness on first acquaintance.  In the give and take of small talk she more than held her own, and occasionally discomfited her admirer by sallies which were tipped with wit and reached their mark unerringly.[295] Did she know that just such treatment—­strange paradox—­won, while it at times wounded, the heart of the unromantic Westerner?

Colonel Robert Martin was a typical, western North Carolina planter.  He belonged to that stalwart line of Martins whose most famous representative was Alexander, of Revolutionary days, six times Governor of the State.  On the banks of the upper Dan, Colonel Martin possessed a goodly plantation of about eight hundred acres, upon which negro slaves cultivated cotton and such of the cereals as were needed for home consumption.[296] Like other planters, he had felt the competition of the virgin lands opened up to cotton culture in the gulf plains of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; and like his fellow planters, he had invested in these Western lands, on the Pearl River in Mississippi.  This Pearl River plantation was worked by about one hundred and fifty negroes and was devoted to the raising of cotton.

When Douglas accepted Reid’s invitation to visit North Carolina, the scene of the romance begun on the Potomac shifted to the banks of the Dan.  Southern hospitality became more than a conventional phrase on Douglas’s lips.  He enjoyed a social privilege which grew rarer as North and South fell apart.  Intercourse like this broke down many of those prejudices unconsciously cherished by Northerners.  Slavery in the concrete, on a North Carolina plantation, with a kindly master like Colonel Martin,[297] bore none of the marks of a direful tyranny.  Whatever may have been his mental reservations as to slavery as a system of labor, Douglas could not fail to feel the injustice of the taunts hurled against his Southern friends by the Abolitionist press.  As he saw the South, the master was not a monster of cruelty, nor the slave a victim of malevolent violence.

The romance on the banks of the Dan flowed far more clearly and smoothly toward its goal than the waters of that turbid stream.  On April 7, 1847, Miss Martin became the wife of the Honorable Stephen Arnold Douglas, who had just become Senator from the State of Illinois.  It was in every way a fateful alliance.  Next to his Illinois environment, no external circumstance more directly shaped his career than his marriage to the daughter of a North Carolina planter.  The