FIRST SIGHT OF A COTTON FIELD—SPANISH MOSS—A NIGHT ON THE RAILS—MANY
KINDS OF SAMENESS IN AMERICA—MAIZE—ORDER OF SUCCESSION IN THE
FOREST—ITS EXTENT—EVERGREENS IN THE SOUTHERN FOREST—POOR LAND IN THE
SOUTH MAY BE MORE PROFITABLE THAN RICH LAND IN THE WEST—DEADNESS
OF CHARLESTON—ITS HOTELS—A CHARLESTON SAM-WELLER—THE NAPLES OF
THE UNITED STATES—FEW ENGLISH TRAVELLERS—SUFFERINGS OF SOUTHERN
FAMILIES—WANT OF SCHOOLS—HOW THE DEFICIENCY IS BEING SUPPLIED—BLACKS
SHOULD BE PUT ON SAME FOOTING AS WHITES—DIALOGUE WITH BLACK MEMBER OF
CONVENTION—ANOTHER CONVENTION—ABLE BLACK MEMBER—SOUTH CAROLINA ORPHAN
ASYLUM.
[Sidenote: _First Sight of a Cotton Field._]
One cannot behold for the first time what one has heard and read about
all one’s life without some little emotion. I felt this when I saw for
the first time a field of cotton. It was between Petersburg and Weldon.
There is not much to attract attention in the sight itself as seen
in winter, when there is nothing to look at but a large enclosure of
dead bushes, each about the size of an ordinary gooseberry-bush, only
with fewer branches, and every branch leafless, straight, and black,
with every here and there a pod of cotton, that was missed at the time
of harvesting, showing its white wool, with which the whole field
is spotted, ‘This insignificant plant, then,’ I said to myself, ‘is
cotton; and this is the way in which it is cultivated. The plant which
has created so much wealth, and caused so much bloodshed; which was
the main support of slavery, and so the main cause of the late war;
which clothes so large a portion of mankind; which has built so many
ships and factories; upon which so much of the prosperity of England is
founded; and which has affected so largely the commerce of the world;
and the influence of which is now felt in every quarter of the globe.
The traveller has pleasure in recalling moments of this kind. I shall
not easily forget the delight I felt at the first sight of the Spanish
moss. It was in the first gray of the morning, and I was looking out
from the railway car, shading off with my hands the light of the lamps
that were still burning, that I might be the better able to see through
the window, when I beheld for the first time this curious parasite, of
which one had seen such frequent mention, hanging in slender streamers
of three or four feet in length from the boughs of the trees. I
immediately left my seat, and went to the outside of the car. I found
we were passing through a cedar swamp on a tressle-bridge of many miles
in length. We passed through several such swamps in the course of that
day, and wherever this was the case, the trees, of which the swamps
were just as full as the dry land, were always covered with this moss.
Old trees were entirely enveloped in it to the extremities of their
branches. As you approach the Gulf, the trees on the dry land as well
as those in swamps are shrouded in it. Its streamers are occasionally
two yards long near the coast. It is of a pale ashy colour, and gives
you the idea of the accumulated cobwebs of a thousand years.
[Sidenote: _A Night on the Rails._]
American ladies having been well broken in to the publicity of
their system of railway travelling, make the best of it, and seem
quite unconcerned about what would appear to those unused to it its
disagreeable incidents. Never but with one exception did I pass a night
on an American railway without finding a sleeping-car attached to the
train. It was in the South, and there happened to be about forty people
in the car, of whom eight or ten were married ladies travelling with
their husbands: like everybody one sees in America, they were young,
and of course, as all American young ladies are, were better-looking
than the generality of the fair sex. English ladies would probably,
under circumstances of so much publicity, have unnecessarily and
unwisely endeavoured to keep awake. But their American sisters passed
the night as comfortably as might be, each laying her head on her
husband’s shoulder for a pillow, and with their arms round each other,
or with their hands locked together. In the morning, when the train
stopped an hour for breakfast, they made their _toilette_ in the
carriage, there being generally abundance of water in a railway car,
with a mug to drink from, and a basin to wash in. They appeared all to
have with them brushes and combs, and towels and soap.
In travelling in the United States one is very much struck with the
great amount of sameness that is met with in many things. In outward
nature this is very observable. You go from New York to Charleston
on what appears to be one level. Throughout these nine hundred miles
you have no cuttings or embankments; at all events I do not recollect
having had to go through or to go round a single hill. Again, you may
go up the valley of the Mississippi on another longer level; and if you
start from Chicago to cross the Prairie and Plains, you cross another
thousand miles of level ground. Again, throughout all these long
levels, adding to them the space between Charleston and New Orleans,
there is in the soil a great sameness of colour. Except in the black
soil of the Prairies, and occasionally in the river bottoms—of which
latter you see little in railway travelling—yellow, of slightly varying
tints, is almost universal, whether the soil be sandy or clayey. And
then the forest which clothes this soil of the same colour and of
the same level, is also everywhere itself the same. The predominant
trees are fortunately the unfailing pine, and almost equally unfailing
oak. Sameness, too, but not quite to the same extent, characterises
the Great Lake region. There are glorious exceptions to this general
sameness in the Alleghanies, the Rocky Mountains, and California;
but these are not the situations in which the great masses of the
population have formed their homes. De Tocqueville and others have
observed a similar sameness in the ideas and customs of the Americans
themselves; and this they attribute to the completeness with which the
principles of democracy have been carried out both in their polity and
social arrangements. I have already noticed the extraordinary sameness
of their language, which, throughout the whole continent, admits of no
dialectical difference and, in passing, how great are the changes this
single fact implies have taken place in the conditions of human life,
when we recollect that in that little plat of ground of ancient Greece
every little town had a dialect of its own. The universality with
which any form of expression, any social practice, or even any state
of feeling, is abandoned or adopted throughout the vast Union, is to
those who observe these matters a very interesting fact in American
civilisation. The extent to which they are readers of newspapers is
not the cause of this, though of course it somewhat contributes to
it. The real cause is the urgent and uncontrollable desire in every
American to talk, and think, and live, and dress, and feel, and to do
everything just in the same way as other people; as we say here, to be
in the fashion, only that they apply the idea of fashion to everything.
Changes of this kind are wrought in America almost as if by magic.
There is in this a great balance of good, although it is so great a
check upon individuality, because it keeps the whole people advancing
together as one man.
[Sidenote: _Maize._]
In the agricultural reports of the United States maize is set down for
so many million bushels as almost to transcend the power of belief on
this side the water. How can so much be grown? how can so much be used?
are questions which occur to us. But after one has seen something of
America the feeling is changed into one of wonder at the inexhaustible
merits of this grain, and of its incalculable utility to man; and
one ceases to be surprised at finding it grown everywhere throughout
the Union on so large a scale. It is quite impossible that America
could have risen to her present greatness without it. While the hardy
pioneer of civilisation was subduing the forest, which reached from the
Atlantic to the valley of the Mississippi, there was nothing that could
have met his wants as maize did. As soon as he had felled the trees for
his log cabin, before the ground was cleared, or prepared sufficiently
for any other crop, he would put in his seed for a crop of maize,
which would be ready in a few months, perhaps before his log house was
finished, and would supply with food his family, and pigs, and any
other stock that he might have, till the next harvest. And when ripe,
it did not, like wheat and other grain, require immediate harvesting;
for nature had provided it with a thick strong stem to support it
against the wind, and with a sheath which kept it effectually from the
rain. And its yield, as it thus grew among the stumps of these forest
clearings, was very great. And now that the land has been cleared,
it still holds its ground as the chief crop almost everywhere, and
apparently as almost the only grain crop in many districts. It is
everywhere largely used as human food in a great variety of ways. It is
the winter food of the cattle, horses, and mules, which latter do all
the heavy work from Kentucky to New Orleans. The pork crop, too, of the
United States, which is one of its largest items of produce, is only
a certain portion of the maize crop in another form. The same may be
said of the enormous quantity of poultry produced everywhere throughout
the country. It is only transformed maize. Of all grains it is the
easiest to grow, the easiest to harvest, the easiest to keep, the
easiest to transport. It is good for man and for beast. It will grow
on any soil, and will yield in the rich bottoms of Ohio and Illinois a
hundred bushels an acre—and on some of these lands it has been grown
for twenty years in succession—and on the poor sands of South Carolina
will yield between twenty and thirty bushels, a quantity that is highly
remunerative, where the land costs nothing, and an old negro and an old
mule are all that are required for its culture. In America a head of
maize should be the national emblem.
[Sidenote: _The Forest._]
It did not strike me that the succession of trees in clearing forest
land was quite so regular as is commonly stated. I saw, for instance, a
different succession on the two sides of the same fence. The original
forest on both sides had been exclusively pine. Where the forest had
been entirely cleared off, the succession was again pine. But where the
large trees only had been removed the succession was oak. This went
some way towards showing that the amount of light and air decided which
was to come up.
In the Carolinas the forest is, along the railway, everywhere more or
less continuous: still it is all owned, as appears from the fencing.
The better trees are everywhere being cut for building, or fencing, or
firing; and the larger pines have all been tapped for turpentine. One
is surprised, at first, to see so little land cultivated along the line
of railway. The reason however is that, as a general rule, the good
land is along the banks of the streams which run from the Alleghanies
to the sea, that is, from west to east, while the railway runs from
north to south, so that in travelling along it you only get occasional
glimpses of the way in which culture is in these parts beginning, for
it is hardly more, to encroach on the forest.
In these latitudes the forest becomes a little diversified by the
appearance of several evergreens. One of the commonest is the evergreen
or live-oak. I frequently saw from the cars a small tree having very
much the appearance of our bay. There is an occasional magnolia. There
are several evergreen shrubs, and some creepers. In swampy places
there are long reaches of cane-brake. This is the Bambusa gracilis,
which we sometimes see in this country in gardens, in spots where
moisture and shelter can be combined. These cane- or bamboo-brakes
are evergreen impervious jungles about twenty feet high. But the most
interesting form to Northern eyes is that of the little palmetto palm.
Its fan-like leaf, however, is all that can be seen of it, for its
trunk scarcely rises above the ground. In some of the swamps around New
Orleans it and a kind of iris are the most conspicuous plants.
The question of the colonisation or resettlement of the South by the
North is simply one of £. _s._ _d._ Will it be more profitable for a
Northern man to grow cotton in the South, or wheat, pork, beef, &c. in
the West? People say Northern emigrants will never go to the poor lands
of the South till all the good land of the West is taken up. This is
quite a wrong way of putting the case between the two. A man would not
go to the South to grow wheat, beef, and pork. That can be done cheaper
in the fertile West. But it is not impossible that an equal amount of
capital and labour embarked in the cotton culture of the South might
produce a greater return. In that case the poor soils of the South
might be preferred to the rich soils of the West.
One infers how much more completely the fabric of society rested on
slavery in South Carolina than it did in Virginia, by the fact that
three fourths of the devastation caused by the great fire at Richmond
have been already repaired, while nothing had been done to repair the
damages done by the great fire at Charleston, which destroyed the
whole of the centre of the city. Literally not one single brick has
yet been laid upon another for this purpose. There stand the blackened
remains of churches, residences, and stores, just as if it were a city
of the dead.
[Sidenote: _A Charleston Sam Weller._]
Still, even here I was surprised at the number and magnitude of the
hotels. I had taken up my quarters at the Mills House, where I suppose
there were three hundred guests. I saw another, the Pavilion, quite
as large; and I was told of a third, the Charleston Hotel, which was
described to me as being much larger than either of the two just
mentioned.
Before I reached Charleston there had been some wet weather, and the
streets were muddy. I therefore used two pair of boots the first day
I was in the place. The next morning the Sam Weller of the hotel
refused to clean, or as he called it, to shine, more than one pair.
I remonstrated with him, but it was to no purpose, as he was quite
persuaded of the force of his own argument, ‘that if everyone in the
house was to wear two pair of boots a-day his work would be doubled.’
Boots was a Paddy, and, since his naturalisation in the land of
freedom, had become sure that he had as much right to form opinions for
himself, express them, and act upon them, as the President himself. I
carried my grievance to the manager. He promised redress, but the boots
were not cleaned, that is to say, not in the hotel. I mention this as
it was the only instance of _insubordination_ I met with in this class
in my tour through the United States.
Nature has done much for Charleston. Its fine harbour is formed by the
junction of two large navigable rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper.
It is free from yellow fever, the scourge of Mobile and New Orleans.
The orange and oleander grow in the spaces between its streets and
its houses. Hitherto it has been the chief winter resort of those in
the Northern States who were unable to bear the severity of their own
climate, and of those from the West Indies who were unable to bear
the heat of theirs. Thus the victims both of heat and of cold met in
Charleston, and each found in its delightfully tempered atmosphere
exactly what he sought. And the society of these visitors, combined
with that of the rich proprietors of the State who had their residences
here, made it a very gay and pleasant place. Of course America,
hard-worked and consumption-scourged above all other nations, ought to
have its Naples; and it will be equally a matter of course that the
Naples of America should temper gaiety with trade, and combine work
with idleness, and should not be entirely a population of do-nothings,
of Lazaroni, and of pleasure-seekers. Still, the feeling that came over
one at Charleston was, How far off this place is from the world! It was
not the distance that caused this feeling, for it is only nine hundred
miles from New York, while Chicago, where one has no feelings of this
kind, is three hundred miles further off. Perhaps fifty years hence,
when probably a busy white population will be cultivating the land
around it, there will be nothing in the place to suggest the thought
that, when there, one is out of the world.
[Sidenote: _Few English Travellers._]
I was surprised at finding how few Englishmen had, at all events of
late, been travelling in the Southern States. At Charleston, in a dozen
folio pages of names in the guest-book of the hotel, which I looked at
for this purpose, I could only see one entry from England. At Richmond
I only found two English names in forty folio pages, and the address
appended to these two names was Manchester. In the North I heard that
Lord Morley, and Lord Camperdown, and Mr. Cowper—I do not know whether
the Right Hon. W. Cowper was meant—had lately been through that part of
the country inspecting the common schools. But during my tour through
the United States, I did not fall in with a single English traveller,
nor did I fall in with one either on my outward or homeward voyage. All
my fellow-passengers on both occasions were Americans. Of course in
the summer—though it may be questioned whether that is, so decidedly
as most people suppose, the best season for travelling in the United
States—I might not have found my countrymen so conspicuous by their
absence. And yet there is no part of the world which Englishmen ought
to find so instructive and interesting. What is there in the world more
worthy of investigation than the existing condition of things, and the
events that are now taking place, upon this great continent, which
contains within itself everything that is necessary for the well-being
of man, which is indeed a world in itself, and which stands in the
same relation towards the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that this little
island does towards the Irish and North seas; and which, whatever else
may befall, will at all events be thoroughly Anglo-Saxon?
Wherever one went in the South, one heard instances of the hardships,
the deadliness, and the evils of the late war. Of the family of which
I saw most at Richmond, the three sons had been sent to the army. Of
these three one was killed, and another maimed for life. These were
men who were no longer young, and many a day in their long marches,
and when before the enemy, their commissariat having been utterly
exhausted, they had had nothing to eat but a few handfuls of horse
corn. There were regiments that did not bring home one fourth of the
number with which they originally went out; the rest having died of
disease, or fallen in battle. In the family of which I saw most at
Charleston there were two sons, the eldest only eighteen years of age.
They both enlisted in Hampton’s cavalry, for all above the age of
sixteen had to go. And so again at New Orleans the gentleman to whom I
was especially consigned, and who had held the commission of colonel in
the Confederate army, and had been a rich merchant of the place, told
me that he and his whole regiment were frequently without shoes, and
that on one occasion he went barefooted for six weeks continuously.
[Sidenote: _Who are now Schoolmasters in the South._]
One of the most lamentable results of the great cataclysm that ensued
on the close of the war, has been that almost a complete end has been
put to the education of Southern children. Formerly many were sent
to the North, but now parents have neither the inclination nor the
means to continue this practice. In the South itself schools did not
abound; and of those which existed before the war the greater number
have followed the fate of so many other Southern things. Some effort
is being made to remedy this. In one of the Southern cities I had been
advised to call on a gentleman who would be able to give me information
on these matters. I found him at last, after some trouble, teaching a
private school of his own. He was engaged in giving a French lesson.
I remember him as a remarkably handsome and well-mannered man. On my
saying something which implied astonishment at finding him so employed,
he replied that his profession was that of a lawyer; but that since the
war he had not been allowed to practise, because he was unable to take
the oaths which the North had imposed on all who had held any office
in the South during the war. But he added, ‘I am not in bad company,
for many of the best men in the South, beginning with General Lee, are
employed in teaching.’
While I was in the South the conventions were sitting. These were
assemblies elected under the new system of universal suffrage,
including the blacks, for the purpose of drawing up new constitutions
for their several States. Of course where the negroes were numerically
in the ascendant, the majority of the convention were either negroes
or negro nominees. I felt a repugnance to witness this degradation
of the whites; still it would have been foolish to have let pass the
opportunity for seeing what indications the blacks gave of fitness for
equal political power; and, as the governor of the State I was then in
offered to take me to the convention and introduce me to some of the
members, I accepted the offer. We had been talking on the irrepressible
subject of the negro, and I had said I thought the blacks ought to be
put on exactly the same footing as the whites. He had assented to this
idea, as it sounded very much like what he was there to maintain. But I
am not quite sure that he altogether approved of my explanation, when
I went on to say that what I meant was, ‘that the negro should be left
to work or starve, just as the white man was in New York, in England,
and everywhere else; that I did not at all see why the negro should
be petted, and patted on the back, and have soup given to him, while
he was doing nothing, and have expectations raised in his mind that
something would soon be done for him, which treatment could not in the
end be of any advantage at all to him, while it was very costly to the
whites.’ His reply to this was the offer I just mentioned to take me to
the convention and introduce me to some of the members who were among
the leading partisans of the negro race in the State.
I was present for two hours in this convention; during that time no
speeches were made; I was therefore unable to judge in this manner of
the intelligence and _animus_ of the black members. I did not, however,
leave the convention without a short conversation with one of them. He
was a man of unmixed African blood, and, seeing me conversing with the
white whom he regarded as the head of his party, he left his place in
the house, and came up to me and held out his hand. I extended mine in
return. On taking hold of it, he accosted me with the words,
‘Sir, you then believe that the franchise is a God-given right.’
I said ‘that was not my belief.’
‘Why?’ he asked, rather astonished.
‘Because,’ I said, ‘it was given to you by Mr. Lincoln and the North.’
‘No, sir,’ he replied, ‘it is a God-given right.’
[Sidenote: _The Southern Conventions._]
‘If it is a God-given right,’ I rejoined, ‘how does it come to pass
that so few of mankind have ever possessed it?’
He then inquired what limitation I would put to the ‘right.’ I told him
that I did not think it wise or just that those who had no property
should possess the power of imposing taxes on those who had property,
and deciding how the proceeds of the taxes were to be disposed of;
and that the argument would be strengthened, if these persons without
property were also without the knowledge requisite for enabling them to
read the constitution of their State. Instead of replying to this, he
returned to his seat.
I give the above dialogue as a specimen of what are a negro’s ideas on
the great subject of the day in that part of the world. I afterwards
heard that the gentleman who had been speaking to me was the most
prominent negro in the State.
In the convention I have just spoken of there was nothing remarkable in
the appearance of the members of either race. In another convention,
however, where I spent a morning, this was not the case; for I did not
see a single white who had at all the air of a legislator, or even the
appearance of a respectable member of society. Here I heard a man who
was black, or as nearly black as one could be, make several speeches.
He assumed a kind of leadership, or at all events of authority in
the assembly, to which, as far as I could judge, he was most fully
entitled. He certainly was the best speaker I heard in the United
States, or, indeed, ever heard anywhere else, as far as his knowledge
went. He spoke with perfect ease, and complete confidence in himself,
and at the same time quite in good taste. He said nothing but what
appeared to be most reasonable, proper, and fair to both races. He was
for putting an end at once to all ideas and hopes of confiscation on
the part of the blacks, and to the fears of the whites on the subject,
by some authoritative declaration; for he believed that these hopes and
fears were giving false expectations to his own race, and causing much
uncertainty in the minds of the whites, which prevented their setting
about the re-establishment of cultivation on their estates. He had a
good musical voice, and he could vary its tones at his pleasure. His
thoughts were clearly conceived and clearly put. I must not, however,
omit to mention that, though the traces of white blood were so slight
in the colour of his skin, he had most completely the head and features
of the European—a high forehead, a thin straight nose, and a small chin
and month. His hair was woolly in the extreme. I afterwards understood
that the whites in this convention, who were so greatly his inferiors
in debate, were almost all Northern adventurers and ‘mean whites’; the
whole of the upper class having declined to take any part in forming
the new constitution.
[Sidenote: _South Carolina Orphan Asylum._]
I was taken over the South Carolina Orphan Asylum. It is a large fine
building in the town of Charleston, with well-kept and extensive
grounds around it for the children to play in. The number of children
who are within the walls is two hundred. They are fed, clothed,
educated, and placed out in life by the institution. The expenses were
formerly divided between the State, a numerous body of subscribers, and
the interest that accrued from some very considerable bequests. But
during the war these investments went the way of all other investments
in the South. They were placed in Confederate bonds, which are now
worth nothing. Pretty nearly, therefore, the whole of the burden of
maintaining the asylum has since been met by the State alone, in its
present condition of extreme impoverishment. All the children from the
different class rooms were summoned together for my inspection, into
a large room somewhat resembling a theatre, in which they are taught
music and some other subjects collectively. Small and great, they all
appeared to be very well under control. They seemed also to be happy
and healthy, but with more (which in those who lived all the year at
Charleston could hardly have been otherwise) of the Southern lily than
of the Northern rose in their complexions. As might have been expected,
there was not the animation and zeal one sees in Northern schools,
worked at the highest of high pressures. But it is a noble institution:
in it Mr. Memminger, the first Secretary of the Confederate Treasury,
was brought up.