MY ONLY DELAY ON AN AMERICAN RAILWAY—NO CONCEALING ONE’S
NATIONALITY—RAILWAY COW-PLOUGH—PISTOLS—MEMPHIS—EMIGRATION FROM
THE SOUTH DEPRECATED—TRUE METHOD OF RESUSCITATION—THE MINISTER’S
STUDY—CONVERSATION WITH TWO MINISTERS—INVITATION TO ‘GO TO CHURCH’
150 MILES OFF—LUXURY DOES NOT SAP THE MILITARY SPIRIT—MRS. READ—ENTRY
INTO EDEN—SHARE A BED-ROOM WITH A CALIFORNIAN—HOW CALIFORNIA WAS
CIVILISED—HOW A SITE UPON THE SWAMP WAS CREATED FOR CAIRO—DECLINE THE
FOURTH PART OF A BED-ROOM AT ODIN—‘BE GOOD TO YOURSELF.’
One hears a great deal of accidents on American railways, and they
certainly appear to be very frequent, and often to be most fearful. It
is not an uncommon consequence of a railway accident in winter that a
great part of the passengers are burnt to death. This arises from the
fact that an American railway car is a long box containing between
fifty and sixty people, generally with a red-hot stove in winter at
each end, and without any possible means of egress except by the doors
at each end. The natural issue of this is that when an accident takes
place, the carriages are forced close together, the doors are thus
shut, and the stoves being overturned, or the crushed-in ends of the
carriages brought in contact with them, the train is in a few minutes
in flames. But as the Americans have more than thirty-eight thousand
miles of railway at work, which is more than three times as much as we
have in the United Kingdom, they are entitled to a good many accidents.
My own experience, but it is limited to eight thousand miles, is in
favour of the safety of American railway travelling. No train I was in
ever met with an accident. The only delay I ever had to submit to was
caused by a luggage train ahead having crushed a rail. And this delay
of four hours was not altogether wasted time, for besides giving one an
opportunity for taking a little walk in an American forest, it was the
cause of one’s hearing the following piece of wisdom: ‘There are two
things a man ought to bear well: what he can help, and what he cannot
help;’ and the following specimen of infantile Transatlantic English:
‘Mother! Fix me good. Fix me good.’ The first came from a gentleman ‘on
board’ the train, whom his friends called General, and was addressed to
some impatient passengers. The latter came from a little sobbing child
of two or three years of age, who wanted to be placed in an easier
position.
[Sidenote: _No Concealing One’s Nationality._]
In my tour throughout the greater part of the Union I was never
mistaken for a native. On some occasions, before I had spoken a word I
was addressed as an Englishman. I could not imagine what it was that
revealed my nationality. Was it my dress? or the look of my luggage?
or was it my manner? It once happened—it was between Gordonsville and
Richmond—that a gentleman in the train even went still further, by
divining at a glance not only my nationality, but also that I was a
clergyman; for he began, ‘I suppose, sir, I am addressing an English
clergyman.’ I was puzzled, and could only be certain that it was not
my dress that had enabled him to make the discovery. The single point
at which their sagacity was ever at fault, appeared to be the motive
which had induced me to undertake so long a journey (of course I am
only speaking of the persons one casually meets in a railway car). In
the South, and up the Mississippi, I frequently heard the supposition
that I had come across the water to establish some kind of business.
I was supposed on the prairies to be speculating in land; in the
Rocky Mountains to have an eye to gold mining. But to go back to the
original point. I was once told what it was that had betrayed me on
that particular occasion, and to that particular gentleman. He had
taken his seat at the same breakfast table as myself, at the Gayoso
Hotel, at Memphis. We had not been talking together long, when he
announced to me that I was an Englishman, and how he had made the
discovery. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘it is impossible for a foreigner to escape
detection in this country. His speech always betrays him. There is a
harshness and a coarseness in foreign tones which an American instantly
observes, because Americans themselves all speak with soft and musical
intonations; it is natural to them.’
[Sidenote: _Memphis._]
The railway cow-catcher, of which we used to see frequent mention
in books of American travel, appears now to have been superseded by
another contrivance with a different form; for in the United States
nothing remains long in one form. The new form resembles that of the
snow-plough, and it must act by partially lifting what it comes in
contact with, and then throwing it off to the right or left, as it may
happen. This cow-plough, though evidently superior to any contrivance
for picking up or catching the cow, does not always do its work.
Not far from the town of Jackson, we came up with one of these poor
animals that happened to be lying on the rails. On this occasion the
plough went over it, and so did the first two or three carriages;
till at last the unhappy brute got fast fixed among the springs and
wheels of the car I was in. The train was stopped, and the cow taken
out, which, though horribly mangled, proved to be still alive. The
conductor called out for the loan of a pistol to enable him to put it
out of its misery. In an instant almost from every window on that side
the train a hand was extended offering the desired instrument. On my
making some observation on the number of pistols that were forthcoming
ready loaded, at a moment’s notice, the gentleman seated next to me
replied, ‘that it was quite possible that I was the only man unarmed
in the train. That formerly in that part of the country many people
carried revolvers, but that now, from apprehension of the blacks, in
consequence of the frequent robberies committed by them, no one ever
thought of moving without his six-shooter.’
Memphis is on a bluff of the Mississippi. How strange does this
juxtaposition of the names of hoar antiquity and of yesterday sound in
the ears of a European! And it will also seem strange to many that this
city, whose name they had never heard mentioned, except as being that
of a great city of the Pharaohs, has already a population of 84,000
inhabitants, and is so well situated that it is destined to become,
under the reign of freedom, one of the largest of the second-class
cities of the Union. A bluff is a river-cliff. It may be either an
old and abandoned one (many miles of such bluffs are to be seen in
the valley of the Platte, at considerable distances from the existing
channel of the river), or it may be one at the foot of which the stream
still runs. To the latter class belongs the bluff on which Memphis is
built. It is of a soft sand, and large spaces of it have been escarped
and graded between the city and the water’s edge, in such a manner as
to enable the traffic to be carried on easily. A great many cotton
bales were standing ready for shipment on the great river steamers. As
these bales were spread out over the quays, occupying in this way much
space, they suggested the idea of a great deal of traffic. One might
perhaps have counted a thousand of them. But then I remembered that the
whole of them would be but a very sorry cargo for one of the enormous
steamers, the General Robert Lee, or the General Putman, on board of
which I had lately been, and which were the largest vessels, excepting
the Great Eastern, I had ever seen. They had stowage, I understood,
for three thousand bales, and yet as you looked through their gilded
and splendidly furnished saloons, 180 yards in length, and saw how
great was the number of sleeping berths they contained, you would have
supposed they were constructed for passengers only.
[Sidenote: _Emigration Deprecated._]
In this most modern city with most ancient name, there were many fine
shops and good buildings, but little that was continuously good;
unoccupied spaces, or spaces occupied only with poor wooden tenements,
were everywhere interposed. The streets were generally totally uncared
for. This unsightliness and neglect are to be set down to the past, and
not to the present state of things. They are some of the legacies of
slavery.
I found that from Memphis, as from many other places in the South,
a considerable emigration was going on. While I was there names of
intending emigrants were being collected for a settlement in British
Honduras: this however, I believe, was abandoned on account of the
unsuitableness of the climate for white labour. As in their own State
of Tennessee there is so much good land, and so delightful a climate,
it could have been political reasons only that prompted this thought
of leaving their country. For such persons Brazil appears just now
one of the most favourable fields for commencing life anew; as the
government is there offering, at a merely nominal price, in the hills
in the neighbourhood of the capital, land well suited for coffee
plantations, and where the climate is such as to admit of European
labour. This has been done with the especial view of attracting some
part of the emigration from the Southern States. No friend, however,
of the unhappy people of the South would advise them to accept any
offers of the kind. How much more manly would it be, and how much
better would it be financially for themselves, and morally for their
children and descendants, if they are prepared to labour with their own
hands, to do so in their own country, and remain a part of the great
Anglo-Saxon race, with all its rich inheritance of laws, literature,
and traditions, than to cast in their lot with mongrel Portuguese and
Africans!
Among the letters of introduction I carried with me to Memphis was
one to the President of the Memphis and Ohio railway. He had just
returned from a short stay at the Hot Springs Mountain in Arkansas. He
is one of those gentlemen who are doing everything in their power to
resuscitate the South by persuading the people to turn their attention
to the varied and inexhaustible resources they possess within their
own territories. As instances of this he showed me two specimens; one
of a creamy white stone he had lately brought from the Hot Springs
Mountain in Arkansas, and which could cut steel as readily as a file
does soft iron. Of this stone he was having hones and grindstones made,
which would probably be the best things of their kind anywhere to be
had. The other specimen he showed me was that of iron ore from the
Iron Mountain in Alabama. It looked almost like the metal itself. He
said it contained sixty per cent. of iron, and that the Confederates
had made use of it in the late war. This mountain is sixty miles north
of Montgomery, and there is in its neighbourhood plenty of limestone,
and of coal. For this district he expected (as who would not?) a great
future; for not only is the consumption of iron in agriculture every
year increasing, in the form of new machinery as well as tools, of
which the South now stands greatly in need, but the place itself,
from its contiguity to several large navigable streams, is admirably
situated for a great manufacturing centre.
[Sidenote: _A Conversation with Two Ministers._]
It is the custom in the American Church for the clergyman of the parish
to spend a great part of every morning in a room annexed to his church.
I always found this room fitted up as his library and study, with a
fire in winter blazing on the hearth, and the minister himself seated
at the table at work. This arrangement has great advantages both for
the clergyman and for his parishioners. He can study, and prepare for
his pulpit, without any interruptions from his children, or from the
ever-recurring little incidents of domestic affairs, to which, had
he been in his own house, he would have been expected to give some
attention; and his parishioners are more likely to call upon him in
this room, knowing that he is there for the very purpose of seeing
them, and that they shall not be disturbing anyone by their visit.
Having been requested to call on a clergyman of the place, I found him
in such a room as I have just been describing, in company with another
clergyman of the neighbourhood. Of course the conversation turned on
church affairs. They told me that there were five Episcopal churches in
the city; that the Episcopal church was not so active in the States of
Mississippi and Louisiana as elsewhere in the Union. That the church
of Rome was, in that part of the country, looking very far ahead, and
buying large tracts of land, and founding educational establishments;
that the Germans and Irish did not leave its communion. That church
partisanship was a strong feeling in America; to take for instance
our own church, there were everywhere men who were not members, that
is communicants, but yet considered themselves as belonging to the
Episcopal church, who would fight for every stitch in the surplice,
and every letter in the Prayer-book. And that it was so in all the
other churches. Much interest, they said, was taken in the ritualistic
question, because it was becoming generally felt that our service
is deficient in appeals to the senses; and that it wants variety
and animation. That in the American church, though there is no canon
forbidding _ex tempore_ preaching, there is one which imposes on the
clergyman the necessity of writing every sermon he preaches. The
object of this canon is to enable the bishop to judge of the orthodoxy
of any statements in the sermon with which the congregation may have
been dissatisfied. This was thought necessary in consequence of the
sensitiveness of some congregations, and the tendency in all American
churches to lapse into some ‘ism’ or ‘ology.’ They told me that in
some of the nascent States, as for instance in Idaho, the church was
stronger than any other religious body. In this territory (I believe it
is still in that embryonic condition), there is not a town or village
without an Episcopal church. This has been brought about by sending out
missionary bishops to plant the church in these new territories. The
missionary bishop of Idaho, Dr. Clarkson, is one of the most active and
successful of this new order. As this plan has succeeded so well, it is
much to be regretted that it was not attempted long ago.
[Sidenote: _Going to Church 150 Miles off._]
Americans are great travellers. It almost appears as if there was
something in the air of America which makes one think lightly of
distances, however great. I heard a lady at Washington talking of
starting in a few days for California—a journey of more than five
thousand miles—as if it involved no more than a journey from London
to Edinburgh. I met another lady at a dinner table at New Orleans who
had only that day arrived from New York, a distance of nearly fifteen
hundred miles; and I entered Denver with two ladies who had been
travelling continuously for about two thousand miles each—one from some
New England town, and the other from New York. But I was never made so
sensible of an American’s disregard of distance, and of the slightness
of the provocation needed for inducing him to undertake a journey, as I
was by an invitation I received from a gentleman to accompany him one
hundred and fifty miles out, and of course as many back, merely to hear
a preacher he thought well of, and who he understood would be only at
that distance from Memphis on Sunday. Now this gentleman was a lawyer
who had come all the distance from Detroit to Memphis, on the previous
day, on some matter of business, and would have to start on his return
on Monday evening; and this was the way in which he spent the Sunday
that intervened between two such long journeys, adding three hundred
miles to what anyone but an American would have thought was already a
great deal too much travelling.
It is a commonly received opinion, though perhaps more largely
entertained by authors than by their readers, that the ever-increasing
luxury of the present day has done much to weaken the warlike virtues.
This opinion, I believe, is exactly the opposite of the truth, and
is merely the echo of the opinion of those writers of ancient Rome
who made and bequeathed to us a thoroughly mistaken diagnosis of the
diseases and symptoms of the body politic of their own decaying empire.
Our own late wars, but above everything of the kind in modern or
ancient times, the late great American war, show how entirely false is
this opinion. Never was a war before carried on upon so great a scale,
in proportion to the population of the communities engaged in it;
never was a war more deadly; and never before was a war so thoroughly
voluntary in the cases of so large a majority of the common rank and
file of the combatants. The history of the 7th New York Volunteers,
a regiment of gentlemen who went out, at the beginning of the war,
of their own free will, and went through the whole of it with all
its hardships, sufferings, and deadliness, would alone disprove this
opinion. The hundreds of thousands of men who in the North left their
countinghouses, their farms, and their drawing-rooms, to risk health,
and limb, and life for an idea, are just so many hundreds of thousands
of arguments against it. And in some respects the argument from the
South is still stronger, for there a still larger proportion of the
people went to greater hardships, more cruel wants and sufferings,
and to a deadlier warfare, inasmuch as the same regiments had more
frequently to meet the enemy. In every family I visited in the South
I heard tales of suffering and of heroism. I will only repeat one,
because it shows what a lady even can do and bear in these luxurious
times. A Mrs. Read, while assisting her husband at the siege of
Vicksburg, had her right arm so shattered by a shell that immediate
amputation was necessary. It was during the night, but she would not
have anyone called off from other work to do for her what she was still
capable of doing for herself; she therefore held with her left hand the
lamp which lighted the surgeon to amputate her shattered right arm.
[Sidenote: _Eden._]
I arrived at Cairo by steamer at three o’clock in the morning. It
was a dark and gusty winter night. The rain was falling heavily. At
the landing place there was not a light, not a conveyance, not a
porter, not a negro even to direct us the way to the hotel. Self-help
was the only kind of help any of the passengers got that night. As I
scrambled up the slippery Levee, and then waded through the mud to the
hotel distant about a quarter of a mile, I congratulated myself on my
having sent on all my heavy luggage in advance, so that I had nothing
with me but a hat-box and a hand-bag. But these impediments were more
than enough for the occasion. As I struggled on I thought that if the
author of ‘Martin Chuzzlewit,’ who was then giving readings in America,
should revisit his Eden under such circumstances, he would not feel
dissatisfied with the kind of immortality he had conferred upon it.
The stream of passengers at last reached the hotel. There was no want
of light here. This had been our beacon, and we felt that we had made
the harbour. It was a large red-brick building, with a large hall,
and a large stove, red-hot, in the midst of it. I went straight to
the clerk’s counter, and entered my name in the folio guests’-book. I
was among the first to do this, that I might secure a good room. No
sooner, however, had I gone through this preliminary than the manager
turned to me, and announced that the house could not allow me a room to
myself that night, but that I must take one jointly with the gentleman
who had registered his name before me. I hardly took in the speaker’s
meaning, for this was the first occasion of my life when the idea of
occupying a bed-room with another man had been suggested to me. I
suppose I was so taken by surprise that I remained silent when I ought
to have spoken, for I was next addressed by the gentleman himself
with whom it was proposed I should share the bed-room. ‘Well, sir,’
he said, ‘what do you intend to do? It is now past three; and if you
don’t accept this gentleman’s offer, you will have to go out again
into the street.’ Having said this he took the key from the clerk,
and turning to an attendant, told him to show the way to the room. I
rather followed than accompanied him, thinking over, as I went along,
what I had read of Cairo when, fifteen or twenty years ago, it was a
nest of rowdies, robbers, gamblers, and cut-throats, floating upon
a fever-and-ague-haunted swamp. I began to be somewhat reassured by
the appearance and bearing of my companion. He was a clean-limbed and
remarkably handsome man, apparently turned of forty. His moustache
and beard were trimmed in the French style, and his bearing was
frank and soldierly. On the other side, however, I observed that he
had no luggage whatever. At last the door was reached and opened.
The attendant entered to light the gas. While he was doing this my
companion crossed the room. In crossing it he took off his coat, and
kicked off his boots, and walked ‘slick’ into bed. This was done
quietly and deliberately, but in less time than it took to light the
gas. I felt that I was becoming uncertain as to the reality of things.
Was I at Drury Lane, looking on at the transformations of a pantomime?
or was I dreaming that I was at Cairo?
[Sidenote: _A Bed-room Companion._]
As the balance of probability did not appear to be in favour of either
of these suppositions, I took off my boots, and placed them on the
outside of the door. As I closed the door a voice came to me from the
bed at the further side of the room. Its tone was manly and friendly:
‘Sir,’ it said, ‘if that is the only pair of boots you have with you’
(it was so; for I had sent my luggage on to St. Louis), ‘I would advise
you to keep them inside the room, and have them cleaned on your feet
in the morning. The last time I was here I put mine outside the door,
and never saw them again; and so I had to go barefooted till I could
get another pair.’ I thanked the speaker for his advice, and acted
upon it. My next care was to provide for the safety of my watch and
pocket-book, which contained three hundred dollars in greenbacks. This
I did by putting them into the pocket where I had my handkerchief,
which I then took out of my pocket, as if there was nothing in it (but
the watch and pocket-book were in it), and placed it under my pillow. I
have no doubt but that my companion saw through what I was doing, for
he now addressed me a second time. ‘Before you go to sleep, I suppose
you would like to know who is in the room with you; and yet I hardly
know how to describe myself. For the last four or five years I have
been on this side the mountains. For the fifteen years before that I
had been in California; and I began life in the old States as a lawyer.
In the early days of California, I went out as one of a company for
digging and mining. There were seven of us, and five of the seven were
lawyers. I came over the mountains to help the North in putting down
the rebellion. I made a great heap of money in California, and I have
lost a great heap in bad speculations since I have been over here. But
I have got a scheme on its legs by which I hope to make again as much
as I have lost. That, sir, is what I am—and I wish you good night. My
name is——’ I could not catch the word, but I afterwards ascertained it,
and found that my first bed-room companion added modesty to his other
merits, and had not told me how great a man he was in his own State.
It happened the next day that no train started for the North till
half-past four in the afternoon; and as the rain of the previous night
had turned to heavy driving sleet, I congratulated myself on the
accident, although it appeared so disagreeable at the time, to which
I was indebted for the acquaintance of the Californian. He had known
California, he said, from the first influx of gold hunters. The rogues
and desperadoes of all that part of the world were collected there; but
there was some good stuff that came in at the same time. Society would
have been completely turned upside down, and no decent man could have
remained in the place, if it had not been for Lynch law and the use of
the pistol. These two things set everything quite right in five years,
in a way in which no other kind of law, supported by all the churches
and all the teachers in the world, could have done it in fifty years.
And now the State is as orderly a community as there is on the face of
the earth. After the roughness of many years of Californian life, in
the early days of the State, he found the hardships of the late war
mere _bagatelles_. The war seemed to him only like an exciting pastime.
[Sidenote: _How the Site of Eden was Created._]
The capacity of Eden, for offering a field for such talents as those
of Mr. Mark Tapley, was very much diminished during the late war;
for being at the junction of the Ohio with the Mississippi (the Ohio
itself, not far above this point, is joined by three large streams),
it became a very important military station. But it was necessary to
create a site for a town, for the locality itself supplied nothing
of the kind. This was done by raising a levee, forty feet high, and
then, behind this, making streets in the form of embankments at
right angles to the levee, these streets again being intersected by
other embankments parallel to the levee. The whole space that was
reclaimed was thus divided by these embankments into hollow squares,
each of which is intended for a block of buildings. At present very
few of these blocks have been raised, but the streets—that is, the
embankments, with in some instances planked _trottoirs_ at their
sides—are finished. If the water should ever rise up through the
ground, or the storm-water flow into the cellars and underground parts
of the houses, it will be necessary to pump it out, for there can be
no drainage in such a place. So in America, where no difficulties are
recognised, are towns built in swamps.
One cannot help speculating on what will be the amount of inducement
required for getting people to try to live and carry on business at
this city in the swamp, for the fact that the traffic of the valleys
of the Ohio and Mississippi join and diverge here will ensure its
becoming rich and populous. And what will be the manners and customs
of the place? Will it be merely that people living here will call for
more whisky toddy and sherry cobblers, smoke more cigars, and play
more games of billiards than they would elsewhere? How far will the
beneficent railway go towards redressing the wretchedness of the place
by carrying off, for the night, for Sundays, and for holidays, all who
might wish to have their homes on _terra firma_? Democracies are stingy
and do not build beautiful cities in these days; so, however rich it
may become, it is not likely ever to become a Venice.
The train in which I had left Cairo reached a place called Odin at
eleven o’clock at night. We had to wait here for a St. Louis train
till the next morning. This is an instance of what is called, in
American railway phraseology, ‘making bad connexions.’ The gentleman
who registered after me at the chief hotel at Odin happened to be my
Californian acquaintance. Having entered his name, he said to the
manager, pointing to me, ‘This gentleman and I will have the same
bed-room.’ This was meant as a compliment; and I did not now feel as
disinclined to the proposal, particularly as it came from him, as I
had been a few nights before. The clerk, however, told him that the
house was full, and that I was the last person he could accommodate. I
was, upon this, shown to my bed-room, which turned out to be only the
fourth part of a very small apartment containing four beds, three of
which were already tenanted. My English inexperience and prejudices
were still too strong for this, so I sallied out in search of another
hotel. While thus occupied I had time to reflect, that there is not
much more harm in spending the night in a room with three others, than
in spending the day in a railway car with thirty or forty others. At
last, chance conducted me to the same house the Californian had already
reached; and we sat by the stove in the drawing-room, talking together
till the small hours of the morning. There is an unconventional kind
of frankness and manliness that is very pleasing in these Western men,
who have gone through a great deal of rough life and hardship, and
have never, for years together, been out of danger from Indians, or
desperate white men, as sanguinary as Indians, and as little troubled
with scruples.
[Sidenote: _Be Good to Yourself._]
For the words’ sake I ‘made a note’ of a parting expression I heard
used by a rough-looking and ill-clad ostler, who it appeared was not
very comfortably assured of his friend’s motives for leaving him to
go to one of the most rowdy places in the Union. His friend had taken
his place on the roof of the coach, which was in the act of starting,
when he waved his hand to him, saying at the same time with an enviable
neatness, that conveyed both his kindly feelings and his misgivings,
‘Tom, be good to yourself.’