whose ancestor, also William Swaim, emigrated from Holland about the year 1700 and is buried in Richmond, Staten Island, his descendants having moved to North Carolina at least ten years before the Revolutionary War. William Swaim, O. Henry's grandfather, did not found the Greensboro Patriot, of which he became editor in 1827, but he had the good sense to change its name from the ponderous Patriot and Greensboro Palladium to the simpler title that it has since borne. He does not seem to me to have been as able or as well balanced a man as Lyndon Swaim who, strangely enough, though not ascertainably related, was soon to succeed William Swaim both as editor and as husband and thus to become the only father that O. Henry's mother knew.

William Swaim had convictions and he hewed to the line. When "the nabob gentry" of Greensboro, as he called them, sought to bend the Patriot to their own purposes, he wrote as follows (May 30, 1832):

They soon learned from our tone that we would sooner beg for bread and be free than to compromise our principles for a seat upon a tawdry throne of corruption. Still bent upon the fell purpose of preventing, if possible, an unshackled press from growing into public favor, their last resort was to ransack hell, from the centre to the circumference, for slanderous fabrications; and these have been heaped upon us, without cause and without mercy, even until now. But thanks to a generous public, they have thus far sustained us "through evil as well as through good report," and we would rather bask for one hour in their approving

smiles than to spend a whole eternity amidst the damning grins of a concatenation of office-hunters, despots, demagogues, tyrants, fools, and hypocrites.

When subscribers subscribed but took French leave, Editor Swaim threw the lasso after them in this wise:

STOP THE RUNAWAYS!

The following is a list of gentlemen who, after reading our paper for a time, have politely disappeared and left us the "bag to hold." We give the name of each, together with the amount due, and the place of his residence at the time he patronized us. Should this publication meet the eye of any delinquents and should they yet conclude to forward to us the amount due, we will publicly acknowledge the receipt and restore him who sends it to better credit than an act of the legislature could possibly give. Any person who will favor us with information of the residence of any or all of these absentees shall have the right to claim the homage of our sincere thanks:

Joseph Aydelotte, Esq., Guilford County, North Carolina. Twelve dollars.

John Lackey, Tarboro. Nine dollars.

James Hiatt, not recollected.

Nine dollars.

William Atkinson, unknown. Nine dollars.

Jacob Millers, not recollected. Nine dollars.

Joseph Bryan, whipt anyhow and may be hung. Six dollars.

Is there not at least a hint of O. Henry in this "unexpected crack of the whip at the end?”

William Swaim believed that the lines had fallen to him in an evil age. He was an ardent Whig, a bitter opponent of Jackson and all things Jacksonian, a fearless and independent fighter for the right as he saw the

right, and an equal foe of fanaticism in the North and of slavery in the South. His style was ponderous rather than weighty, the humour being entirely unconscious. "I am surprised," he writes, "that my old friend Jonathan suffered this limb of the law to put afloat under the sanction of his name such a tissue of falsehood, malignity, and spleen." One must go to Jeff Peters of "The Gentle Grafter" for a sentence the equal of that. "Let me tell you first," said Jeff, "about these barnacles that clog the wheels of society by poisoning the springs of rectitude with their upas-like eye."

The ablest thing that this grandfather of O. Henry ever wrote was a protest against slavery. He was an advocate of the gradual emancipation of the slaves, a society for this purpose having been formed at Center, ten miles from Greensboro, as early as 1816. Center was a Quaker stronghold, its most influential family being the Worth family, to which O. Henry's grandmother on his father's side belonged. Hinton Rowan Helper, the most famous of North Carolina's abolitionists, refers to the valiant services of Daniel Worth in "The Impending Crisis," a book often compared with "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a sort of co-herald of the doom of slavery. "William Swaim was greeted," says Cartland,* "with a storm of abuse, but he boldly published his sentiments and often gave the threatening letters

*See "Southern Heroes or the Friends in War Time," by Fernando G. Cartland.

which he received a conspicuous place in the Patriot." In 1882 Daniel R. Goodloe writes to Lyndon Swaim from Washington, D. C.:

William Swaim in 1830 published a pamphlet entitled "An Address to the People of North Carolina on the Evils of Slavery" with mottoes in Latin and English. The imprint is “William Swaim, Printer, Greensboro, N. C. 1830." Some twenty-seven or thirty years ago the abolitionists of New York republished, I suppose, a facsimile of the original, and Mr. Spofford, the librarian of Congress, has procured a copy. He asked me who was the author, as it is a rule with him to give, as far as possible, the name of every author. I should have quoted in the title that it purports to be written and published "By the Friends of Liberty and Equality." William Swaim introduces the address with a few words over his signature, stating that it emanates from the "Board of Managers of the Manumission Society of North Carolina." I will thank you to write me all you know of this Manumission Society and of the authorship of this pamphlet. The pamphlet does great honor to all concerned with it, and their names should be known in this day of universal liberty.

O. Henry's grandmother, who married Lyndon Swaim after the death of her husband William Swaim, was Abia Shirley (or Abiah Shirly), daughter of Daniel Shirley, a wealthy planter, of Princess Anne County, Virginia. "The original Abia Shirley," O. Henry once remarked to an intimate friend in New York, "was related to the House of Stuart but she ran off with a Catholic priest." Where O. Henry learned this bit of ancestral history I do not know; but that the Shirley family to which his grandmother traced her lineage was

among the most loyal adherents of the Stuarts admits of little doubt. A letter from Charles II to the widow of Sir Robert Shirley, Sir Robert having died in the Tower "after seven times being imprisoned there and suspected to be poisoned by the Usurper Oliver Cromwell," runs as follows:*

Brusselles 20 Oct. 1657.

It hath been my particular care of you that I have this long deferred to lament with you the greate losse that you and I have sustained, least insteede of comforting, I might farther expose you to the will of those who will be glad of any occasion to do you further prejudice; but I am promised that this shall be put safely into your hands, though it may be not so soone as I wish; and I am very willing you should know, which I suppose you cannot doubte, that I bear a greate parte with you of your affliction and whenever it shall be in my power to make it lighter, you shall see I retayne a very kinde memory of your frinde by the care I shall have of you and all his relations: and of this you may depende upon the worde of

your very affectionate

Frinde CHARLES R.

This Sir Robert Shirley, who met his death in 1656, was one of the Shirleys of Wiston (or Whiston), in Sussex, though he lived in Leicestershire; and it was after Sir Thomas Shirley of Wiston that Shirley, the beautiful old Virginia place, was named. Built at an unknown date just above the point where the Appomattox River enters the James, this historic

*See "Stemmata Shirleiana" (1841), which makes, however, no references to the American Shirleys.

†See "Historic Virginia Homes and Churches," by Robert A. Lancaster, Jr.