receiving and returning visits; for even to this _ultima thule_ of all
civilisation do these polite usages extend. I have been called upon by
several families residing in and about Darien, and rowed over in due form
to acknowledge the honour. How shall I describe Darien to you? The
abomination of desolation is but a poor type of its forlorn appearance,
as, half buried in sand, its straggling, tumble-down wooden houses peer
over the muddy bank of the thick slimy river. The whole town lies in a bed
of sand--side walks, or mid walks, there be none distinct from each other;
at every step I took my feet were ankle deep in the soil, and I had cause
to rejoice that I was booted for the occasion. Our worthy doctor, whose
lady I was going to visit, did nothing but regret that I had not allowed
him to provide me a carriage, though the distance between his house and
the landing is not a quarter of a mile. The magnitude of the exertion
seemed to fill him with amazement, and he over and over again repeated how
impossible it would be to prevail on any of the ladies there to take such
a walk. The houses seemed scattered about here and there, apparently
without any design, and looked, for the most part, either unfinished or
ruinous. One feature of the scene alone recalled the villages of New
England--the magnificent oaks, which seemed to add to the meanness and
insignificance of the human dwellings they overshadowed by their enormous
size and grotesque forms. They reminded me of the elms of Newhaven and
Stockbridge. They are quite as large, and more picturesque, from their
sombre foliage and the infinite variety of their forms--a beauty wanting
in the New England elm, which invariably rises and spreads in a way which,
though the most graceful in the world, at length palls on the capricious
human eye, which seeks, above all other beauties, variety. Our doctor's
wife is a New England woman; how can she live here? She had the fair eyes
and hair and fresh complexion of your part of the country, and its dearly
beloved snuffle, which seemed actually dearly beloved when I heard it down
here. She gave me some violets and narcissus, already blossoming
profusely--in January--and expressed, like her husband, a thousand regrets
at my having walked so far.
A transaction of the most amusing nature occurred to-day with regard to
the resources of the Darien Bank, and the mode of carrying on business in
that liberal and enlightened institution, the funds of which I should
think quite incalculable--impalpable, certainly, they appeared by our
experience this morning.
The river, as we came home, was covered with Ocone boxes. It is well for
them they are so shallow-bottomed, for we rasped sand all the way home
through the cut, and in the shallows of the river.
I have been over the rice-mill, under the guidance of the overseer and
head-man Frank, and have been made acquainted with the whole process of
threshing the rice, which is extremely curious; and here I may again
mention another statement of Miss Martineau's, which I am told is, and I
should suppose from what I see here must be, a mistake. She states that
the chaff of the husks of the rice is used as a manure for the fields;
whereas the people have to-day assured me that it is of so hard, stony,
and untractable a nature, as to be literally good for nothing. Here I know
it is thrown away by cart-loads into the river, where its only use appears
to be to act like ground bait, and attract a vast quantity of small fish
to its vicinity. The number of hands employed in this threshing-mill is
very considerable, and the whole establishment, comprising the fires and
boilers and machinery of a powerful steam engine, are all under negro
superintendence and direction. After this survey, I occupied myself with
my infant plantation of evergreens round the dyke, in the midst of which
interesting pursuit I was interrupted by a visit from Mr. B----, a
neighbouring planter, who came to transact some business with Mr. ----
about rice which he had sent to our mill to have threshed, and the price
to be paid for such threshing. The negroes have presented a petition
to-day that they may be allowed to have a ball in honour of our arrival,
which demand has been acceded to, and furious preparations are being set
on foot.
On visiting the Infirmary to-day, I was extremely pleased with the
increased cleanliness and order observable in all the rooms. Two little
filthy children, however, seemed to be still under the _ancien régime_ of
non-ablution; but upon my saying to the old nurse Molly, in whose ward
they were, 'Why, Molly, I don't believe you have bathed those children
to-day,' she answered, with infinite dignity, 'Missis no b'lieve me wash
um piccaninny! and yet she tress me wid all um niggar when 'em sick.' The
injured innocence and lofty conscious integrity of this speech silenced
and abashed me; and yet I can't help it, but I don't believe to this
present hour that those children had had any experience of water, at least
not washing water, since they first came into the world.
I rowed over to Darien again, to make some purchases, yesterday; and
enquiring the price of various articles, could not but wonder to find
them at least three times as dear as in your northern villages. The
profits of these southern shopkeepers (who, for the most part, are
thoroughbred Yankees, with the true Yankee propensity to trade, no matter
on how dirty a counter, or in what manner of wares) are enormous. The
prices they ask for everything, from coloured calicoes for negro dresses
to pianofortes (one of which, for curiosity sake, I enquired the value
of), are fabulous, and such as none but the laziest and most reckless
people in the world would consent to afford. On our return we found the
water in the cut so extremely low that we were obliged to push the boat
through it, and did not accomplish it without difficulty. The banks of
this canal, when they are thus laid bare, present a singular appearance
enough,--two walls of solid mud, through which matted, twisted, twined,
and tangled, like the natural veins of wood, runs an everlasting net of
indestructible roots, the thousand toes of huge cypress feet. The trees
have been cut down long ago from the soil, but these fangs remain in the
earth without decaying for an incredible space of time. This long
endurance of immersion is one of the valuable properties of these cypress
roots; but though excellent binding stuff for the sides of a canal, they
must be pernicious growth in any land used for cultivation that requires
deep tillage. On entering the Altamaha, we found the tide so low that we
were much obstructed by the sand banks, which, but for their constant
shifting, would presently take entire possession of this noble stream,
and render it utterly impassable from shore to shore, as it already is in
several parts of the channel at certain seasons of the tide. On landing,
I was seized hold of by a hideous old negress, named Sinda, who had come
to pay me a visit, and of whom Mr. ---- told me a strange anecdote. She
passed at one time for a prophetess among her fellow slaves on the
plantation, and had acquired such an ascendancy over them that, having
given out, after the fashion of Mr. Miller, that the world was to come to
an end at a certain time, and that not a very remote one, the belief in
her assertion took such possession of the people on the estate, that they
refused to work; and the rice and cotton fields were threatened with an
indefinite fallow, in consequence of this strike on the part of the
cultivators. Mr. K----, who was then overseer of the property, perceived
the impossibility of arguing, remonstrating, or even flogging this solemn
panic out of the minds of the slaves. The great final emancipation which
they believed at hand had stripped even the lash of its prevailing
authority, and the terrors of an overseer for once were as nothing, in
the terrible expectation of the advent of the universal Judge of men.
They were utterly impracticable--so, like a very shrewd man as he was, he
acquiesced in their determination not to work; but he expressed to them
his belief that Sinda was mistaken, and he warned her that if, at the
appointed time, it proved so, she would be severely punished. I do not
know whether he confided to the slaves what he thought likely to be the
result if she was in the right; but poor Sinda was in the wrong. Her day
of judgement came indeed, and a severe one it proved, for Mr. K---- had
her tremendously flogged, and her end of things ended much like Mr.
Miller's; but whereas he escaped unhanged, in spite of his atrocious
practices upon the fanaticism and credulity of his country people, the
spirit of false prophecy was mercilessly scourged out of her, and the
faith of her people of course reverted from her to the omnipotent lash
again. Think what a dream that must have been while it lasted, for those
infinitely oppressed people,--freedom without entering it by the grim
gate of death, brought down to them at once by the second coming of
Christ, whose first advent has left them yet so far from it! Farewell; it
makes me giddy to think of having been a slave while that delusion
lasted, and after it vanished.
* * * * *
Dearest E----. I received early this morning a visit from a young negro,
called Morris, who came to request permission to be baptised. The master's
leave is necessary for this ceremony of acceptance into the bosom of the
Christian Church; so all that can be said is, that it is to be hoped the
rite itself may _not_ be indispensable for salvation, as if Mr. ---- had
thought proper to refuse Morris' petition, he must infallibly have been
lost, in spite of his own best wishes to the contrary. I could not, in
discoursing with him, perceive that he had any very distinct ideas of the
advantages he expected to derive from the ceremony; but perhaps they
appeared all the greater for being a little vague. I have seldom seen a
more pleasing appearance than that of this young man; his figure was tall
and straight, and his face, which was of a perfect oval, rejoiced in the
grace, very unusual among his people, of a fine high forehead, and the
much more frequent one of a remarkably gentle and sweet expression. He
was, however, jet black, and certainly did not owe these personal
advantages to any mixture in his blood. There is a certain African tribe
from which the West Indian slave market is chiefly recruited, who have
these same characteristic features, and do not at all present the ignoble
and ugly negro type, so much more commonly seen here. They are a tall,
powerful people, with remarkably fine figures, regular features, and a
singularly warlike and fierce disposition, in which respect they also
differ from the race of negroes existing on the American plantations. I do
not think Morris, however, could have belonged to this tribe, though
perhaps Othello did, which would at once settle the difficulties of those
commentators who, abiding by Iago's very disagreeable suggestions as to
his purely African appearance, are painfully compelled to forego the
mitigation of supposing him a Moor and not a negro. Did I ever tell you of
my dining in Boston, at the H----'s, on my first visit to that city, and
sitting by Mr. John Quincy Adams, who, talking to me about Desdemona,
assured me, with a most serious expression of sincere disgust, that he
considered all her misfortunes as a very just judgement upon her for
having married a 'nigger?' I think if some ingenious American actor of
the present day, bent upon realising Shakespeare's finest conceptions,
with all the advantages of modern enlightenment, could contrive to slip in
that opprobrious title, with a true South-Carolinian anti-Abolitionist
expression, it might really be made quite a point for Iago, as, for
instance, in his first soliloquy--'I hate the nigger,' given in proper
Charleston or Savannah fashion, I am sure would tell far better than 'I
hate the Moor.' Only think, E----, what a very new order of interest the
whole tragedy might receive, acted throughout from this standpoint, as the
Germans call it in this country, and called 'Amalgamation, or the Black
Bridal.'
On their return from their walk this afternoon, the children brought home
some pieces of sugar-cane, of which a small quantity grows on the island.
When I am most inclined to deplore the condition of the poor slaves on
these cotton and rice plantations, the far more intolerable existence and
harder labour of those employed on the sugar estates occurs to me,
sometimes producing the effect of a lower circle in Dante's 'Hell of
Horrors,' opening beneath the one where he seems to have reached the
climax of infernal punishment. You may have seen this vegetable, and must,
at any rate, I should think, be familiar with it by description. It is a
long green reed, like the stalk of the maize, or Indian corn, only it
shoots up to a much more considerable height, and has a consistent pith,
which, together with the rind itself, is extremely sweet. The principal
peculiarity of this growth, as perhaps you know, is that they are laid
horizontally in the earth when they are planted for propagation, and from
each of the notches or joints of the recumbent cane a young shoot is
produced at the germinating season.
A very curious and interesting circumstance to me just now in the
neighbourhood is the projection of a canal, to be called the Brunswick
Canal, which, by cutting through the lower part of the mainland, towards
the southern extremity of Great St. Simon's Island, is contemplated as a
probable and powerful means of improving the prosperity of the town of
Brunswick, by bringing it into immediate communication with the Atlantic.
The scheme, which I think I have mentioned to you before, is, I believe,
chiefly patronised by your States' folk--Yankee enterprise and funds being
very essential elements, it appears to me, in all southern projects and
achievements. This speculation, however, from all I hear of the
difficulties of the undertaking, from the nature of the soil, and the
impossibility almost of obtaining efficient labour, is not very likely to
arrive at any very satisfactory result; and, indeed, I find it hard to
conceive how this part of Georgia can possibly produce a town which can be
worth the digging of a canal, even to Yankee speculators. There is one
feature of the undertaking, however, which more than all the others
excites my admiration, namely, that Irish labourers have been advertised
for to work upon the canal, and the terms offered them are twenty dollars
a month per man and their board. Now these men will have for fellow
labourers negroes who not only will receive nothing at all for their work,
but who will be hired by the contractors and directors of the works from
their masters, to whom they will hand over the price of their slaves'
labour; while it will be the interest of the person hiring them not only
to get as much work as possible out of them, but also to provide them as
economically with food, combining the two praiseworthy endeavours exactly
in such judicious proportions as not to let them neutralize each other.
You will observe that this case of a master hiring out his slaves to
another employer, from whom he receives their rightful wages, is a form of
slavery which, though extremely common, is very seldom adverted to in
those arguments for the system which are chiefly founded upon the master's
presumed regard for his human property. People who have ever let a
favourite house to the temporary occupation of strangers, can form a
tolerable idea of the difference between one's own regard and care of
one's goods and chattels and that of the most conscientious tenant; and
whereas I have not yet observed that ownership is a very effectual
protection to the slaves against ill usage and neglect, I am quite
prepared to admit that it is a vastly better one than the temporary
interest which a lessee can feel in the live stock he hires, out of whom
it is his manifest interest to get as much, and into whom to put as
little, as possible. Yet thousands of slaves throughout the southern
states are thus handed over by the masters who own them to masters who do
not; and it does not require much demonstration to prove that their estate
is not always the more gracious. Now you must not suppose that these same
Irish free labourers and negro slaves will be permitted to work together
at this Brunswick Canal. They say that this would be utterly impossible;
for why?--there would be tumults, and risings, and broken heads, and
bloody bones, and all the natural results of Irish intercommunion with
their fellow creatures, no doubt--perhaps even a little more riot and
violence than merely comports with their usual habits of Milesian good
fellowship; for, say the masters, the Irish hate the negroes more even
than the Americans do, and there would be no bound to their murderous
animosity if they were brought in contact with them on the same portion of
the works of the Brunswick Canal. Doubtless there is some truth in
this--the Irish labourers who might come hither, would be apt enough,
according to a universal moral law, to visit upon others the injuries they
had received from others. They have been oppressed enough themselves, to
be oppressive whenever they have a chance; and the despised and degraded
condition of the blacks, presenting to them a very ugly resemblance of
their own home, circumstances naturally excite in them the exercise of the
disgust and contempt of which they themselves are very habitually the
objects; and that such circular distribution of wrongs may not only be
pleasant, but have something like the air of retributive right to very
ignorant folks, is not much to be wondered at. Certain is the fact,
however, that the worst of all tyrants is the one who has been a slave;
and for that matter (and I wonder if the southern slaveholders hear it
with the same ear that I do, and ponder it with the same mind?) the
command of one slave to another is altogether the most uncompromising
utterance of insolent truculent despotism that it ever fell to my lot to
witness or listen to. 'You nigger--I say, you black nigger,--you no hear
me call you--what for you no run quick?' All this, dear E----, is
certainly reasonably in favour of division of labour on the Brunswick
Canal; but the Irish are not only quarrelers, and rioters, and fighters,
and drinkers, and despisers of niggers--they are a passionate, impulsive,
warm-hearted, generous people, much given to powerful indignations, which
break out suddenly when they are not compelled to smoulder
sullenly--pestilent sympathisers too, and with a sufficient dose of
American atmospheric air in their lungs, properly mixed with a right
proportion of ardent spirits, there is no saying but what they might
actually take to sympathy with the slaves, and I leave you to judge of
the possible consequences. You perceive, I am sure, that they can by no
means be allowed to work together on the Brunswick Canal.
I have been taking my daily walk round the island, and visited the sugar
mill and the threshing mill again.
Mr. ---- has received another letter from Parson S---- upon the subject of
more church building in Darien. It seems that there has been a very
general panic in this part of the slave states lately, occasioned by some
injudicious missionary preaching, which was pronounced to be of a
decidedly abolitionist tendency. The offensive preachers, after sowing,
God only knows what seed in this tremendous soil, where one grain of
knowledge may spring up a gigantic upas tree to the prosperity of its most
unfortunate possessors, were summarily and ignominiously expulsed; and now
some short sighted, uncomfortable Christians in these parts, among others
this said Parson S----, are possessed with the notion that something had
better be done to supply the want created by the cessation of these
dangerous exhortations, to which the negroes have listened, it seems, with
complacency. Parson S---- seems to think that, having driven out two
preachers, it might be well to build one church where, at any rate, the
negroes might be exhorted in a safe and salutary manner, 'qui ne leur
donnerait point d'idées,' as the French would say. Upon my word, E----, I
used to pity the slaves, and I do pity them with all my soul; but oh
dear! oh dear! their case is a bed of roses to that of their owners, and I
would go to the slave block in Charleston to-morrow cheerfully to be
purchased, if my only option was to go thither as a purchaser. I was
looking over this morning, with a most indescribable mixture of feelings,
a pamphlet published in the south upon the subject of the religious
instruction of the slaves; and the difficulty of the task undertaken by
these reconcilers of God and Mammon really seems to me nothing short of
piteous. 'We must give our involuntary servants,' (they seldom call them
slaves, for it is an ugly word in an American mouth, you know,) 'Christian
enlightenment,' say they; and where shall they begin? 'Whatsoever ye would
that men should do unto you, do ye also unto them?' No--but, 'Servants,
obey your masters;' and there, I think, they naturally come to a full
stop. This pamphlet forcibly suggested to me the necessity for a slave
church catechism, and also, indeed, if it were possible, a slave Bible. If
these heaven-blinded negro enlighteners persist in their pernicious plan
of making Christians of their cattle, something of the sort must be done,
or they will infallibly cut their own throats with this two-edged sword of
truth, to which they should in no wise have laid their hand, and would
not, doubtless, but that it is now thrust at them so threateningly that
they have no choice. Again and again, how much I do pity them!
I have been walking to another cluster of negro huts, known as Number
Two, and here we took a boat and rowed across the broad brimming Altamaha
to a place called Woodville, on a part of the estate named Hammersmith,
though why that very thriving suburb of the great city of London should
have been selected as the name of the lonely plank house in the midst of
the pine woods which here enjoys that title I cannot conceive, unless it
was suggested by the contrast. This settlement is on the mainland, and
consists apparently merely of this house, (to which the overseer retires
when the poisonous malaria of the rice plantations compels him to withdraw
from it,) and a few deplorably miserable hovels, which appeared to me to
be chiefly occupied by the most decrepid and infirm samples of humanity it
was ever my melancholy lot to behold.
The air of this pine barren is salubrious compared with that of the rice
islands, and here some of the oldest slaves who will not die yet, and
cannot work any more, are sent, to go, as it were, out of the way. Remote
recollections of former dealings with civilised human beings, in the shape
of masters and overseers, seemed to me to be the only idea not purely
idiotic in the minds of the poor old tottering creatures that gathered to
stare with dim and blear eyes at me and my children.
There were two very aged women, who had seen different, and to their faded
recollections better, times, who spoke to me of Mr. ----'s grandfather,
and of the early days of the plantation, when they were young and strong,
and worked as their children and grandchildren were now working, neither
for love nor yet for money. One of these old crones, a hideous, withered,
wrinkled piece of womanhood, said that she had worked as long as her
strength had lasted, and that then she had still been worth her keep, for,
said she, 'Missus, tho' we no able to work, we make little niggers for
massa.' Her joy at seeing her present owner was unbounded, and she kept
clapping her horny hands together and exclaiming, 'while there is life
there is hope; we seen massa before we die.' These demonstrations of
regard were followed up by piteous complaints of hunger and rheumatism,
and their usual requests for pittances of food and clothing, to which we
responded by promises of additions in both kinds; and I was extricating
myself as well as I could from my petitioners, with the assurance that I
would come by-and-bye and visit them again, when I felt my dress suddenly
feebly jerked, and a shrill cracked voice on the other side of me
exclaimed, 'Missus, no go yet--no go away yet; you no see me, missus, when
you come by-and-bye; but,' added the voice in a sort of wail, which seemed
to me as if the thought was full of misery, 'you see many, many of my
offspring.' These melancholy words, particularly the rather unusual one at
the end of the address, struck me very much. They were uttered by a
creature which _was_ a woman, but looked like a crooked ill-built figure
set up in a field to scare crows, with a face infinitely more like a mere
animal's than any human countenance I ever beheld, and with that peculiar
wild restless look of indefinite and, at the same time, intense sadness
that is so remarkable in the countenance of some monkeys. It was almost
with an effort that I commanded myself so as not to withdraw my dress from
the yellow crumpled filthy claws that griped it, and it was not at last
without the authoritative voice of the overseer that the poor creature
released her hold of me.