COLD IN SOUTH CAROLINA AND GEORGIA—CURIOUS APPEARANCE OF ICE—TIME
NOT VALUED IN THE SOUTH—WHY AMERICANS WILL NOT CULTIVATE THE
OLIVE—TEA MIGHT GROW IN GEORGIA—ATLANTA BOUND TO BE GREAT—CATTLE
BADLY OFF IN WINTER—A VIRGINIAN’S RECOLLECTION OF THE WAR—HIS
POSITION AND PROSPECTS—APPROACH TO MOBILE BY THE ALABAMA
RIVER—MOBILE—THE HARBOUR—WHY NO AMERICAN SHIPS THERE—A DAY ON THE
GULF—PONCHATRAIN—NEW ORLEANS—FRENCH SUNDAY MARKET—FRENCH APPEARANCE
OF TOWN—A NEW ORLEANS GENTLEMAN ON THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH—BISHOP
ELECT OF GEORGIA—MISSISSIPPI—THE CEMETERIES—EXPENSIVENESS OF
EVERYTHING—TRANSATLANTIC NEWS—FUSION OF NORTH AND SOUTH—FRENCH
HALF-BREEDS—ROADS—THE BEST IN THE WORLD—APPROACH TO NEW ORLEANS BY
LAND—SUGAR PLANTATIONS—A PRAYER FOR A BROTHER MINISTER.
I left Charleston at midday. It was a cold day, but there was no ice in
the town. A few miles out of the town, on the Augusta railway, it was
freezing sharply, the railway-side ditches were coated with ice, and
the ground was white with hoarfrost wherever the sun had not touched
it. I supposed that the warmer air from the bay had kept the frost out
of the town. All through that day in travelling as far as Augusta, and
for the next two days, I found the frost in the country between Augusta
and Atlanta very severe. We should have considered them unusually cold
days in England; and yet there was not a cloud to intercept a ray of
the Southern sun. To my sensations it was colder than I found it on
any other occasion during my tour in the United States. I mention this
because it is satisfactory to collect indications of large districts of
the South being adapted to white labour. No doubt the summer throughout
this region is very warm, but here it was cold enough to brace up
relaxed constitutions.
[Sidenote: _The Olive unfitted for America._]
I here saw an effect of frost, which, I suppose from differences in
radiation and evaporation, is never seen in England. Everywhere along
the railway embankments and cuttings, the ice appeared to have shot out
in rays or spikes, three or four inches in length, and then to have
bent over. When the rays were shorter they remained straight. I asked a
gentleman how the people of the country explained the phenomenon. ‘Our
explanation of it is,’ he replied, ‘that in these parts the land spues
up the ice.’
A Southern man does not set the same value on time a Northern one does.
The day, he thinks, will be long enough for all he has to do. I often
saw trains stopped, not at a station, for the purpose of taking up or
putting down a single passenger. I even saw this done that a parcel
or letter might be taken from a person standing by the railway side.
On one occasion an acquaintance with whom I was travelling that day,
and myself, both happened to have had no dinner. We mentioned this to
the conductor, and asked him if he could manage in any way to let us
have some supper. ‘Oh, yes,’ he readily replied, ‘I will at eleven
o’clock stop the train at a house in the forest, where I sometimes
have had supper myself. I will give you twenty minutes.’ I suppose the
other passengers, none of whom left their seats, imagined that we had
stopped to repair some small damage, or to take in wood or water, for
on returning to the car we heard no observations made on the delay.
Whenever I suggested to Americans the probability that their long range
of Southern coast was well suited for the culture of the olive, the
suggestion was met with merriment. ‘There is no one in this country,’
they would say, ‘who looks fifteen or twenty years ahead’ (the time it
takes for an olive tree to come into profitable bearing). ‘Everybody
here supposes that long before so many years have expired he shall have
sold his land very advantageously, or that his business will have taken
him to some other part of the country, or that he shall have made his
fortune and retired from business.’
The same objection does not lie against the culture of tea, for which
the uplands of Georgia appeared well adapted.
Atlanta I thought the most flourishing place in the South. I saw
several manufactories there, and much building was going on. It has
34,000 inhabitants. ‘Sir,’ said an Atlantan gentleman to me, ‘this
place is bound to become great and prosperous, because it is the most
central town of the Southern States.’ I suppose he had not yet been
able to divest his mind of the idea that the Southern States formed a
political unit, and must have a central capital.
[Sidenote: _A Virginian’s Recollections of the War._]
The cattle of the South must, during the winter, be among the most
miserable of their kind. I saw nothing at all resembling what we
call pastures; and if such institutions (in America everything is an
institution, even the lift in an hotel) are known in the South, they
can be of little use at that time of year, for every blade of grass
in America is then withered and dry. The cattle appeared to be kept
generally in the woods, and in the maize fields, where of course they
could get nothing but the leaves that were hanging on the dead stems.
In the North, where the dead grass is buried in snow, and the cattle
therefore must be housed and kept on artificial food and grain, they
are sufficiently well off; while their brethren in the South become the
victims of a more beneficent climate.
I sometimes repeat the remarks of persons I casually met, without
noticing whether I accept or disagree with the statements they
contain, or the spirit which appears to animate them, because what
I thought about the matter is of no consequence, while by reporting
occasionally what I heard I enable others to form some idea of what
passes in the minds of the people I came in contact with. For this
purpose I will report what a fellow-passenger said to me one night
on our way through the interminable forest in Alabama. I had several
times during the day had some talk with this gentleman, and had been
much struck with him and interested in what he said. He was a handsome
man—a very noble-looking specimen of humanity; and his manners and
ideas corresponded to his appearance. At night we were seated together
talking about the war, and the prospects of the country, when he gave
me the following account of himself. He was a Virginian, and before
the war had possessed a good property. Though disliking the Yankees
(I am giving his own words) and their interference with the internal
affairs of the Southern States, he had at first opposed the war. But
when his State had decided for it, he took up his rifle, and joined it
unreservedly. Everything he had possessed had been lost in the war;
but he was determined neither to complain, nor to be beholden to any
man. It was not a pleasant thing, for one who had lived as a gentleman,
to work for others; but that was what he was now doing, for he had
become travelling clerk for a large mercantile house. The period of his
agreement had nearly expired, and if it was not renewed, and he could
get nothing better, he would drive a dray. He spoke bitterly of the
Yankees, for their greed of plunder, and for their want of a sense of
honour. When the South surrendered, they did it in perfect good faith;
acknowledging that fortune had entirely decided against them, and
determining to submit honestly to the award. But the Yankees would not
believe in their good faith, and had sent into every Southern State a
military dictator with an army, to oppress and insult the whites, and
to keep them in subjection to the blacks. He had loved his country, and
been proud of it: but now he had no country, no home, no prospects. He
said the blacks fought with more desperation than the Yankees. He had
been through the whole war, and had had plenty of opportunities for
comparing them. He would rather meet three Yankees than two blacks. The
black was easily wrought up into a state of enthusiasm, and would fight
like a fanatic. The Yankee was always calculating chances, and taking
care of himself. The West it was that decided the war; and he thought
it should have arbitrated at first, and prevented the fighting. I lost
sight of this fallen but brave-hearted Virginian on the steps of the
St. Charles Hotel at New Orleans, to which he was so obliging as to
guide me on our arrival at that city. He was then on his way to Texas.
[Sidenote: _Mobile._]
The railway does not run into Mobile, but ends at a wharf, about twenty
miles from the city, on the Tensas (pronounced Tensaw), a kind of loop
branch of the Alabama, which it rejoins at Mobile. It is a fine broad
piece of water, and its banks are clothed with the undisturbed primæval
forest, which is always to the European a sight of great interest. On
unloading the train I saw that we had picked up during the night a
dozen fine bucks, which we were to take on to Mobile. I had observed
in the early morning two or three small herds of wild deer feeding in
the forest. They seem to have become accustomed to the locomotive.
Even here it was freezing very sharply, and the buckets of water on
board the steamer were thickly coated with ice. This frost, I found at
Mobile, had killed all the young wood of the orange trees. The crew of
the steamer were negroes, and I was surprised to see them on so cold
a morning washing their woolly heads in buckets of water drawn from
the river, and then leaving their wet hair and faces to be dried by
the cold morning air. At the junction of the Tensas and Alabama there
was a great deal of swampy land, partly covered with reeds, and much
shallow water, upon which were large flocks of wild fowl. The river was
here full of snags and sawyers, and its navigation was still further
impeded by a fortification of piles the Confederates had driven across
it during the war, to keep the enemy from getting up to the city.
This approach to Mobile had more of the air of novelty about it than
anything I had yet seen in America. It made me feel that I was really
in a new world.
As I intended to make no stay at Mobile, I did not use any of the
letters of introduction I had with me, thinking I should in a short
time see more of the men and manners of the place, if I accompanied
a travelling acquaintance I had made, in his calls upon the firms
with whom he had to transact business. I was four times during the
morning invited, not to liquor, that expression I never once heard
in America, but to take a drink. There is much heartiness of feeling
here, and everybody carries out, to the full extent, the American
practice of shaking hands with everybody, which is a rational way of
expressing goodwill without saying anything. I walked about a mile out
into the environs to see the houses of the merchants and well-to-do
inhabitants. I passed three hospitals, one for yellow-fever cases
that can pay, one for yellow-fever cases that cannot pay, and one
for general cases. The streets of the town were full of pedestrians
and of traffic. In this respect it bore a very favourable comparison
with Charleston, where nothing was going on. The population amounts
to about 34,000. The Spaniards who originally settled the place have
been utterly obliterated. On inquiry I found that none had remained in
the city, being quite unable in any department of business to support
the competition of the Anglo-Saxon, but that among the mean whites, at
some little distance from Mobile, a few Spanish names were to be found.
These remnants of the original settlers the Alabamans call Dagos, a
corruption of the common Spanish name of Diego.
[Sidenote: _A Day on the Gulf of Mexico._]
The great cotton ships cannot come to up to Mobile. There is, however,
a magnificent bay, in the form of a great lake with a narrow inlet from
the sea, in which they ride at anchor, waiting for their cargoes, at
a distance of between thirty and forty miles from the city. I counted
thirty-seven of these ships. They were almost all English. Some said
there was not a single American among them. A few years ago far the
greater part of them would have been American; but since they have
taxed heavily everything received into the country, or manufactured in
it, they have ceased to be able to build or to sail ships as cheaply as
we can.
I shall never forget the day I passed on the Gulf of Mexico in
going from Mobile to New Orleans. The air was fresh and had just
the slightest movement in it. The sky was unclouded, and the sun
delightfully warm. We have pleasant enough days at home occasionally,
but this belonged to quite another order of things. And as the darkness
came on, the night was as fine and bright, after its kind, as the day
had been. Many sat talking on the deck till long after the sun was
down. Some, I suppose, felt that this would be their only day on the
Gulf of Mexico.
The communication between Mobile and New Orleans is not carried on by
the mouth of the Mississippi, but by the Lake of Ponchatrain. This is
a large piece of very shallow water, seldom more than seven feet deep,
which communicates with the sea. A railway is carried out into the lake
on piles for a distance of five miles. At the terminus of this long
pier the steamers deposit and receive their passengers.
On entering the city, at the other terminus of this railway, at
half-past six o’clock in the morning, the first sight that attracted
attention was the French Sunday Market. This is what everyone who
visits New Orleans is expected to see. It is a general market, and the
largest of the week. I do not remember ever to have seen a larger or a
busier one. What attracted my attention most, on passing through it,
was the great quantity and variety of wild fowl exhibited for sale.
The _Marché des Fleurs_ was very good. In short there was an abundant
supply of everything. The shops in the neighbourhood were all open;
and in the American part of the city also, I saw several open on the
morning of this day.
New Orleans still retains very much of the air of a French city.
Many of the streets are narrow, and paved (which I saw nowhere else
in America) with large blocks of granite. This is brought from New
England. Something however of the kind was necessary here, on account
of the wet alluvial soil on which the city stands; it would be truer
to say on which it floats. The houses are generally lofty, and their
external character is rather French than English. The French language
is spoken by a large part of the population. In the street cars, one is
almost sure to hear it, coming often from the mouths of coloured people.
[Sidenote: _Episcopal Church at New Orleans._]
While at New Orleans I heard Dr. Beckwith, the Bishop elect of Georgia.
His church is about a mile and a half from the St. Charles’s Hotel,
in one of the best suburbs of the city. In going I asked a gentleman,
who was seated next to me in the street car, the way. He replied
that he was one of the doctor’s congregation, and would be my guide.
This led to some conversation; he said ‘that of late years, in New
Orleans and elsewhere in the States, the Episcopal Church had begun
to exert itself, and was now doing wonders in bringing people into
its communion.’ I told him that only a few days before I had seen it
stated in an editorial of a New York paper, ‘that the Episcopal Church
was now quite the church of the best society in the United States;
and that if one wished to get into good society, it was wise to join
this communion.’ He replied ‘that statements of this kind read well
in newspapers, and that of course there were some people who could be
influenced by such considerations; but that in his opinion the most
effective reasons for attracting people to the Episcopal Church was the
character of the Church itself, and of those who did belong and had
belonged to it. It was an historical church, with a grand theological
literature of its own, and that, indeed, almost the whole literature
of England appeared to belong to the Episcopal Church; and it had,
which he thought the most potent reason of all, a definite creed and a
dignified ritual.’
Dr. Beckwith’s congregation consisted of about a thousand very
well-dressed people. As is usual everywhere in Episcopal churches in
America, there was an offertory; and I saw, as its pecuniary result,
four large velvet dishes piled full of greenbacks, placed in the hands
of the three officiating clergymen. Nobody gives less than a quarter of
a dollar note. The Bishop elect preached. He is a very good-looking,
able, and eloquent man. He ridiculed the idea of a ‘psalm-singing’
eternity, and affirmed that the possession of knowledge would be an
immeasurably nobler means of happiness. But if we concede this, there
will still remain the question whether the exercise of the feelings of
the heart would not confer on the majority of the human race far more
happiness than the exercise of the powers of the intellect.
I looked into another large Episcopal church on my way to Dr.
Beckwith’s, and found in it several young men teaching Sunday classes.
One gets so accustomed in the lakes, rivers and harbours of America,
to vast expanses of water, that the first sight of the Mississippi at
New Orleans becomes on that account more disappointing to most people
than it otherwise would be. As you cross the Levee, you see before you
a stream not three quarters of a mile wide. The houses on the opposite
side do not appear to be at even that humble distance. The traveller
remembers how many streams he has crossed, particularly on the eastern
and southern coast, some of them even unnoticed on the map he is
carrying with him, but which had wider channels. And so he becomes
dissatisfied with his first view of the Father of Waters. Still, there
he has before him, in that stream not three quarters of a mile wide,
the outlet for the waters of a valley as large as half of Europe.
What mighty rivers, commingled together, are passing before him—the
Arkansas, the Red River, the Platte, the Missouri, the Ohio, the
Wabash, the Cumberland, the Tennessee! How great then must be the depth
of the channel through which this vast accumulation of water is being
conveyed to the ocean! On this last point I questioned several persons
in the city, getting from all the same answer, that several attempts
had been made to fathom this part of the river, but that none had been
attended with success.
[Sidenote: _The Cemeteries._]
On my calling the attention of the stout, mediæval, coloured female who
had charge of the baths of the St. Charles’s Hotel, to the water in the
one she was preparing for me,—for it was of the colour, and not far
from the consistency of pea-soup,—she convinced me in a moment of my
ignorance, and of the irrational character of my remark. ‘Child,’ she
said, ‘it is Mississippi river, which we all have to drink here all our
lives.’
I visited the celebrated burial grounds of New Orleans, one in the
suburbs, and three others contiguous to one another, in an older part
of the city. None of them are more than two or three acres in size.
In each case the enclosure was surrounded with a high wall, which was
chambered on the inner side for the reception of coffins. The whole
peculiarity of these burial grounds arises from the fact that, the
soil being too swampy to admit of interment, the coffin must be placed
in some receptacle above ground. Many of the trades of the city, and
several other associations, appear to have buildings of their own in
the cemeteries, for the common reception of the bodies of those who
had in life belonged to the brotherhood. Most of the families, too, of
the place appear to have their own above-ground tombs. They are almost
universally of brick, plastered outside, and kept scrupulously clean
with whitewash. It was on a Sunday evening that I visited the cemetery
in the suburbs. It was very cold on that evening to my sensations,
and so I suppose it must have felt much colder to people who were
accustomed to the climate of New Orleans; still I saw many persons,
sometimes alone, and sometimes in parties, sitting or standing by the
tombs that contained the remains of those who had been dear to them,
and the recollection of whom they still cherished. In some cases I saw
one man, two men, or more than two, seated at a grave smoking. In some
cases there would be a whole family. This I noticed particularly at
what was far the best monument in the place. It was one that had been
raised to the memory of a young man who had fallen in the late war.
There was a small granite tomb, over which rose a pillar of granite
bearing the inscription. A little space all round was paved with the
same material, and this was edged with a massive rim, also of granite,
about two feet high. Upon this were seated many of his sorrowing
relatives, old and young. In the same cemetery I saw two other
monuments to young men who had died soldiers’ deaths in the Confederate
service. On each of the three, the inscription ran that the deceased
had died in the discharge of his duty, or in defence of the rights of
his country, or some expression was used to indicate the enthusiastic
feeling of the South. One was stated to have been the last survivor of
eight children, and the stone went on to say that his parents felt that
they had given their last child to their country and to God. These were
all English inscriptions; but I saw some that were in two languages,
English being mixed in some cases with French, in others with German.
I saw no inscriptions that had any direct reference in any way to what
Christians believe.
[Sidenote: _Amalgamation of North and South._]
At New Orleans, fifteen hundred miles from New York, you get, in your
morning paper, whatever was known in London yesterday of English and
European news. And this department of an American journal contains a
great deal more than we, in this country, are in the habit of seeing in
the _Times_ and other English papers, as the messages brought to us by
the Atlantic cable; because we want intelligence only from the United
States, whereas they wish to get from us not only what is going on in
England, but in every part of Europe, and in fact in every part of the
Old World.
As one is thus day after day, whether you be in the centre, or
thousands of miles away, at some almost unknown extremity, of this vast
transatlantic region, kept well informed as to what is passing over
almost all the earth, one feels that there are agencies at work amongst
us which in some respects render ‘the wisdom of the ancients’ a little
obsolete. Formerly it would have been thought impossible to harmonise
such discordant elements as the North and the South. How could they
ever dwell together as brethren, who were locally so remote from each
other, that while one was basking in a sub-tropical sun, the other
was shrinking from the nipping frosts of the severest winter; whose
institutions, too, and interests, and antecedents had in many essential
points been very dissimilar; and whose differences at last had broken
out into a fierce and sanguinary war? Could they ever be fused into a
single homogeneous people? Down to the times of our fathers, it would
have been quite impossible. Each would then have kept only to his own
region, and known no influences but those which were native to it.
But now we have changed all that. A few threads of wire overhead, and
a few bars of iron on the levelled ground, will do all that is wanted.
For extreme remoteness they have substituted so close a contiguity that
the North and South can now talk together. The dissimilar institutions,
interests, and antecedents of the past, however strong they may be in
themselves, become powerless when something stronger has arisen; and
this new power is now vigorously at work undermining and counteracting
their effects. And it is a power that will also exorcise envy, hatred,
and malice. Men are what their ideas are, for it is ideas that make
the man. And every morning these two people have the same ideas, and
the same facts out of which ideas are made, put in the same words
before them. The wire threads overhead do this. And if a Southern
man, from what he reads this morning, thinks that his interests call
him to the North, or a Northern man that his call him to the South,
the railway, like the piece of carpet in the Eastern story, will
transport them hither and thither in a moment. It ensures that there
shall be a constant stream of human beings flowing in each direction.
Everyone can foresee the result—that there must, sooner or later, be
one homogeneous people. Formerly the difference of their occupations
produced difference of feeling, and was a dissociating cause. Now it
will lead to rapid, constant, and extensive interchange of productions,
by the aid of the telegraph and railway. Each will always be occupied
with the thought of supplying the wants of the other. And this will
lead to social intercourse, and the union of families. So that what
was impossible before is what must be now.
[Sidenote: _High Prices._]
Everything in the United States, except railway fares and the _per
diem_ charges of hotels, is unreasonably dear; and the hotels
themselves participate in the general irrationality on this subject
as soon as you order anything that is not down in the list of what is
allowed for the daily sum charged you. I never got a fire lighted in my
bed-room for a few hours for less than a dollar, that is 3_s._ 6_d._;
or half a dozen pieces washed for less than a dollar and a half. But
the one matter of all in which the charges are the most insane is that
of hackney coaches and railway omnibuses. You get into an omnibus at
the station to be carried two or three hundred yards to your hotel. As
soon as the vehicle begins to move, the conductor begins to levy his
black mail. He is only doing to you what his own government is doing
to him. And in America it seems to be taken for granted that one will
pay just what he is ordered to pay. ‘Sir,’ he addresses you, ‘you must
pay now; three quarters of a dollar for yourself, and a quarter of
a dollar for each piece,’ that is of luggage. You have perhaps four
pieces, being an ignorant stranger; if you had been a well-informed
native you would have had only one piece; and for these four pieces and
yourself you pay about 7_s._ In an English railway omnibus you would
have paid 6_d._ or 1_s._ The hackney coaches are very much worse. I
found a driver in New York who would take me for a short distance for
a dollar and a half, but I never found so reasonable a gentleman in
the profession elsewhere. At New Orleans there appear to be a great
many hackney coaches, all apparently quite new, with a great deal
of silver-plated mounting about them, almost as if they had been
intended for civic processions on the scale of our Lord Mayor’s show.
Each of them is drawn by a very fair pair of horses. I once counted
two-and-thirty of these coaches standing for hire, on a rainy day, at
the door of the St. Charles’s Hotel; and I was told that it was their
rule not to move off the stand for less than two dollars, or to take
one out to dinner, and bring one back, for less than ten dollars.
Books of travel in the United States generally contain some remarks on
the personal attractions of the mixed race in New Orleans. From the
little I saw of them, I can add that they appeared to me as _spirituel_
as the French themselves. I am more disposed to believe that this is
hereditary, than that it is the result merely of imitation. But with
respect to their personal appearance, after having of late seen so
many of the coarse and ill-visaged half-breeds in which an Anglo-Saxon
was the father, I was much struck with their superiority in face and
figure. The features of many might almost have been called delicate
and refined; and it was so, strange to say, even when very perceptible
traces of the African nose and lips remained, and these still
surmounted with the African wool. I understood that this was also to a
great extent the case where a Spaniard was the father. The reason of
this difference I believe to be a very obvious one, that Frenchmen and
Spaniards, having much smaller bones than the Northern nations, are
better able on that account to correct, in their mixed descendants,
the grossness of the physiognomy and figure of the African. The
German half-breeds are still more unattractive than the Anglo-Saxon;
the Scandinavian are worse; but the worst of all are those whose
long-headed and high cheek-boned fathers come from the north of the
Tweed.
[Sidenote: _The Best Road in the World._]
No one without having seen the thing himself—and the jolting will
impress it on his memory—can form any proper conception of the holes,
the mud, and the pools of water which not unfrequently constitute what
is called in America a road. At Augusta I had seen axles disappear
in the main streets. But the most advanced specimen of this kind of
means of communication I ever passed over, was in going to the station
of the Mississippi and Tennessee railway at New Orleans. I could not
see or hear that any attempt had ever been made to form a road. The
traffic was great, and was of course confined by the houses to a narrow
street. It was a natural swamp, and there had been lately a great deal
of rain. My reflections on coming at last to the station were, that
American horses were wonderful animals, and that in nothing did the
Americans themselves show their inventive powers so triumphantly as
in constructing carriages which could carry heavy loads day after day
through such difficulties;—I do not say through such roads, because
there was nothing but a collection of the hindrances to travelling
which a road is made to remedy.
This is a subject on which the Americans themselves are very tolerant
and easily satisfied. ‘Sir,’ said a gentleman to me, on the top of
Wells and Fargo’s coach, as we were passing over the Plains to Denver,
‘Sir, this is the finest piece of road in the world.’ As nothing had
been said previously about roads, and as what we were passing along was
merely a freight-track on the dry prairie, four inches deep in dust and
sand and earth in fine weather, and as many or more inches deep in mud
in wet weather, I intimated that I believed I had not heard rightly
his remark. He then repeated his assertion even more emphatically than
at first, ‘that it was the best piece of road in the world.’ I was
beginning to explain to him, as courteously as I could, why I should
hardly have ventured to call it a road at all, when he stopped me short
with, ‘Sir, we have no faith in European practices. I am a judge of
roads. I have seen all kinds of roads; and I have seen roads in all
kinds of places; and this is just what I said it was, the finest piece
of road in the world.’ Over this model road, sometimes with six good
horses, never with less than four, we were able to manage about six
miles an hour.
The railroad from New Orleans, for the first mile or two, lies through
a most dreary dismal swamp. The water stands everywhere. The palmetto
and the swamp cedar grow out of the water. The trees are completely
shrouded with the grey Spanish moss. The trees and the moss look as if
they had long been dead. One who enters the city by this approach (had
ever any other great city such an approach?) must carry with him some
not very encouraging thoughts. Whenever in the summer or autumn the
wind blows from this direction, I suppose it will remind him of the
yellow fever, the horrible scourge of the place.
[Sidenote: _A Prayer for a Brother Minister._]
The swamp I just mentioned is succeeded by sugar plantations, the
costly machinery of which had been destroyed during the war. They
now appeared to be used as grazing farms for cattle brought up from
Texas. On one of these ruined plantations I saw some hedges of the
Cherokee rose. This is an evergreen, and makes too wide a hedge,
though its height may be an advantage in that climate. It is a common
opinion in New Orleans that all these sugar plantations will eventually
be re-established; but that this will never be done by the present
proprietors, who are all ruined, and who will have to sell the land
at a merely nominal price, which is all that the land without the
machinery is worth. Those who will buy the land will be companies, or
Northern men who will have capital enough to purchase new machinery,
and to pay the heavy costs of carrying on the cultivation of the cane
and manufacture of the sugar.
Americans are very careful not to give offence in what they say to
others. An American bishop remarked to me that the only exception to
this rule was to be found among ministers of religion, and among them
only in their prayers. He mentioned, as an instance, something that
had occurred at a public meeting at which he had himself been present.
A minister had opened the proceedings with prayer. He was followed by
a rival preacher. The latter, after dwelling for some time on general
topics, at last came up to his opponent in the following way: he prayed
that the gifts of the Spirit might be poured out on all his brethren in
the ministry abundantly, and then added, ‘and on behalf of our brother
whose words we have just heard, we offer this special supplication,
that his heart may become as soft as his head.’