field-hands going to the tide-mill, as the water served them for working
then. I believe I have told you that besides the great steam mill there is
this, which is dependent on the rise and fall of the tide in the river,
and where the people are therefore obliged to work by day or night at
whatever time the water serves to impel the wheel. They greeted me with
their usual profusion of exclamations, petitions, and benedictions, and I
parted from them to come and oversee my slave Jack, for whom I had bought
a spade, and to whom I had entrusted the task of turning up some ground
for me, in which I wanted to establish some of the Narcissus and other
flowers I had remarked about the ground and the house. Jack, however, was
a worse digger than Adam could have been when first he turned his hand to
it, after his expulsion from Paradise. I think I could have managed a
spade with infinitely more efficiency, or rather less incapacity, than he
displayed. Upon my expressing my amazement at his performance, he said
the people here never used spades, but performed all their agricultural
operations with the hoe. Their soil must be very light and their
agriculture very superficial, I should think. However, I was obliged to
terminate Jack's spooning process and abandon, for the present, my hopes
of a flower-bed created by his industry, being called into the house to
receive the return visit of old Mrs. S----. As usual, the appearance,
health, vigour, and good management of the children were the theme of
wondering admiration; as usual, my possession of a white nurse the theme
of envious congratulation; as usual, I had to hear the habitual senseless
complaints of the inefficiency of coloured nurses. If you are half as
tired of the sameness and stupidity of the conversation of my southern
female neighbours as I am, I pity you; but not as much as I pity them for
the stupid sameness of their most vapid existence, which would deaden any
amount of intelligence, obliterate any amount of instruction, and render
torpid and stagnant any amount of natural energy and vivacity. I would
rather die--rather a thousand times--than live the lives of these Georgia
planters' wives and daughters.
Mrs. S---- had brought me some of the delicious wild jasmine that festoons
her dreary pine-wood drive, and most grateful I was for the presence of
the sweet wild nosegay in my highly unornamental residence. When my
visitors had left me, I took the refreshment of a row over to Darien; and
as we had the tide against us coming back, the process was not so
refreshing for the rowers. The evening was so extremely beautiful, and the
rising of the moon so exquisite, that instead of retreating to the house
when I reached the island, I got into the Dolphin, my special canoe, and
made Jack paddle me down the great river to meet the Lily, which was
coming back from St. Simon's with Mr. ---- who has been preparing all
things for our advent thither.
My letter has been interrupted, dear E----, by the breaking up of our
residence on the rice plantation, and our arrival at St. Simon's, whence I
now address you. We came down yesterday afternoon, and I was thankful
enough of the fifteen miles' row to rest in, from the labour of
leave-taking, with which the whole morning was taken up, and which,
combined with packing and preparing all our own personalities and those of
the children, was no sinecure. At every moment one or other of the poor
people rushed in upon me to bid me good-bye; many of their farewells were
grotesque enough, some were pathetic, and all of them made me very sad.
Poor people! how little I have done, how little I can do for them. I had a
long talk with that interesting and excellent man, Cooper London, who made
an earnest petition that I would send him from the North a lot of Bibles
and Prayer Books; certainly the science of reading must be much more
common among the negroes than I supposed, or London must look to a
marvellously increased spread of the same hereafter. There is, however,
considerable reticence upon this point, or else the poor slaves must
consider the mere possession of the holy books as good for salvation and
as effectual for spiritual assistance to those who cannot as to those who
can comprehend them. Since the news of our departure has spread, I have
had repeated eager entreaties for presents of Bibles and Prayer Books, and
to my demurrer of 'But you can't read; can you?' have generally received
for answer a reluctant acknowledgement of ignorance, which, however, did
not always convince me of the fact. In my farewell conversation with
London I found it impossible to get him to tell me how he had learned to
read: the penalties for teaching them are very severe, heavy fines,
increasing in amount for the first and second offence, and imprisonment
for the third.[4] Such a man as London is certainly aware that to teach
the slaves to read is an illegal act, and he may have been unwilling to
betray whoever had been his preceptor even to my knowledge; at any rate, I
got no answers from him but 'Well, missis, me learn; well, missis, me
try,' and finally, 'Well, missis, me 'spose Heaven help me;' to which I
could only reply, that I knew Heaven was helpful, but very hardly to the
tune of teaching folks their letters. I got no satisfaction. Old Jacob,
the father of Abraham, cook John, and poor Psyche's husband, took a most
solemn and sad leave of me, saying he did not expect ever to see me again.
I could not exactly tell why, because, though he is aged and infirm, the
fifteen miles between the rice plantation and St. Simon's do not appear so
insuperable a barrier between the inhabitants of the two places, which I
represented to him as a suggestion of consolation.
[Footnote 4: These laws have been greatly increased in stringency and
severity since these letters were written, and _death_ has not been
reckoned too heavy a penalty for those who should venture to offer these
unfortunate people the fruit of that forbidden tree of knowledge, their
access to which has appeared to their owners the crowning danger of their
own precarious existence among their terrible dependents.]
I have worked my fingers nearly off with making, for the last day or two,
innumerable rolls of coarse little baby clothes, layettes for the use of
small new-born slaves; M---- diligently cutting and shaping, and I as
diligently stitching. We leave a good supply for the hospitals, and for
the individual clients besides who have besieged me ever since my
departure became imminent.
Our voyage from the rice to the cotton plantation was performed in the
Lily, which looked like a soldier's baggage wagon and an emigrant
transport combined. Our crew consisted of eight men. Forward in the bow
were miscellaneous live stock, pots, pans, household furniture, kitchen
utensils, and an indescribable variety of heterogeneous necessaries.
Enthroned upon beds, bedding, tables, and other chattels, sat that poor
pretty chattel Psyche, with her small chattel children. Midships sat the
two tiny free women, and myself, and in the stern Mr. ---- steering. And
'all in the blue unclouded weather' we rowed down the huge stream, the men
keeping time and tune to their oars with extemporaneous chaunts of adieu
to the rice island and its denizens. Among other poetical and musical
comments on our departure recurred the assertion, as a sort of burthen,
that we were 'parted in body, but not in mind,' from those we left behind.
Having relieved one set of sentiments by this reflection, they very wisely
betook themselves to the consideration of the blessings that remained to
them, and performed a spirited chaunt in honour of Psyche and our bouncing
black housemaid, Mary.
At the end of a fifteen miles' row we entered one among a perfect
labyrinth of arms or branches, into which the broad river ravels like a
fringe as it reaches the sea, a dismal navigation along a dismal tract,
called 'Five Pound,' through a narrow cut or channel of water divided from
the main stream. The conch was sounded, as at our arrival at the rice
island, and we made our descent on the famous long staple cotton island of
St. Simon's, where we presently took up our abode in what had all the
appearance of an old half-decayed rattling farm-house.
This morning, Sunday, I peeped round its immediate neighbourhood, and saw,
to my inexpressible delight, within hail, some noble-looking evergreen
oaks, and close to the house itself a tiny would-be garden, a plot of
ground with one or two peach-trees in full blossom, tufts of silver
narcissus and jonquils, a quantity of violets and an exquisite myrtle
bush; wherefore I said my prayers with especial gratitude.
* * * * *
Dearest E----. The fame of my peculiar requisitions has, I find, preceded
me here, for the babies that have been presented to my admiring notice
have all been without caps; also, however, without socks to their opposite
little wretched extremities, but that does not signify quite so much. The
people, too, that I saw yesterday were remarkably clean and tidy; to be
sure, it was Sunday. The whole day, till quite late in the afternoon, the
house was surrounded by a crowd of our poor dependents, waiting to catch a
glimpse of Mr. ----, myself, or the children; and until, from sheer
weariness, I was obliged to shut the doors, an incessant stream poured in
and out, whose various modes of salutation, greeting, and welcome were
more grotesque and pathetic at the same time than anything you can
imagine. In the afternoon I walked with ---- to see a new house in process
of erection, which, when it is finished, is to be the overseer's abode and
our residence during any future visits we may pay to the estate. I was
horrified at the dismal site selected, and the hideous house erected on
it. It is true that the central position is the principal consideration in
the overseer's location, but both position and building seemed to me to
witness to an inveterate love of ugliness, or at any rate a deadness to
every desire of beauty, nothing short of horrible; and for my own part, I
think it is intolerable to have to leave the point where the waters meet,
and where a few fine picturesque old trees are scattered about, to come to
this place even for the very short time I am ever likely to spend here.
In every direction our view, as we returned, was bounded by thickets of
the most beautiful and various evergreen growth, which beckoned my
inexperience most irresistibly. ---- said, to my unutterable horror, that
they were perfectly infested with rattlesnakes, and I must on no account
go 'beating about the bush' in these latitudes, as the game I should be
likely to start would be anything but agreeable to me. We saw quantities
of wild plum-trees all silvery with blossoms, and in lovely companionship
and contrast with them a beautiful shrub covered with delicate pink bloom
like flowering peach-trees. After that life in the rice-swamp, where the
Altamaha kept looking over the dyke at me all the time as I sat in the
house writing or working, it is pleasant to be on _terra firma_ again, and
to know that the river is at the conventional, not to say natural, depth
below its banks, and under my feet instead of over my head. The two
plantations are of diametrically opposite dispositions--that is all swamp,
and this all sand; or to speak more accurately, that is all swamp, and
all of this that is not swamp, is sand.
On our way home we met a most extraordinary creature of the negro kind,
who, coming towards us, halted, and caused us to halt straight in the
middle of the path, when bending himself down till his hands almost
touched the ground, he exclaimed to Mr. ----, 'Massa ----, your most
obedient;' and then, with a kick and a flourish altogether indescribable,
he drew to the side of the path to let us pass, which we did perfectly
shouting with laughter, which broke out again every time we looked at each
other and stopped to take breath--so sudden, grotesque, uncouth, and yet
dexterous a gambado never came into the brain or out of the limbs of
anything but a 'niggar.'
I observed, among the numerous groups that we passed or met, a much larger
proportion of mulattoes than at the rice-island; upon asking Mr. ---- why
this was so, he said that there no white person could land without his or
the overseer's permission, whereas on St. Simon's, which is a large island
containing several plantations belonging to different owners, of course
the number of whites, both residing on and visiting the place, was much
greater, and the opportunity for intercourse between the blacks and whites
much more frequent. While we were still on this subject, a horrid-looking
filthy woman met us with a little child in her arms, a very light mulatto,
whose extraordinary resemblance to Driver Bran (one of the officials, who
had been duly presented to me on my arrival, and who was himself a
mulatto) struck me directly. I pointed it out to Mr. ----, who merely
answered, 'Very likely his child.' 'And,' said I, 'did you never remark
that Driver Bran is the exact image of Mr. K----?' 'Very likely his
brother,' was the reply: all which rather unpleasant state of
relationships seemed accepted as such a complete matter of course, that I
felt rather uncomfortable, and said no more about who was like who, but
came to certain conclusions in my own mind as to a young lad who had been
among our morning visitors, and whose extremely light colour and straight
handsome features and striking resemblance to Mr. K----, had suggested
suspicions of a rather unpleasant nature to me, and whose
sole-acknowledged parent was a very black negress of the name of Minda. I
have no doubt at all, now, that he is another son of Mr. K----, Mr. ----'s
paragon overseer.
As we drew near the house again we were gradually joined by such a
numerous escort of Mr. ----'s slaves that it was almost with difficulty we
could walk along the path. They buzzed, and hummed, and swarmed round us
like flies, and the heat and dust consequent upon this friendly
companionship were a most unpleasant addition to the labour of walking in
the sandy soil through which we were ploughing. I was not sorry when we
entered the house and left our bodyguard outside. In the evening I looked
over the plan of the delightful residence I had visited in the morning,
and could not help suggesting to Mr. ---- the advantage to be gained in
point of picturesqueness by merely turning the house round. It is but a
wooden frame one after all, and your folks 'down east' would think no more
of inviting it to face about than if it was built of cards; but the fact
is, here nothing signifies except the cotton crop, and whether one's nose
is in a swamp and one's eyes in a sand-heap, is of no consequence whatever
either to oneself (if oneself was not I) or anyone else.
I find here an immense proportion of old people; the work and the climate
of the rice plantation require the strongest of the able-bodied men and
women of the estate. The cotton crop is no longer by any means as
paramount in value as it used to be, and the climate, soil, and labour of
St. Simon's are better adapted to old, young, and feeble cultivators,
than the swamp fields of the rice-island. I wonder if I ever told you of
the enormous decrease in value of this same famous sea-island long staple
cotton. When Major ----, Mr. ----'s grandfather, first sent the produce
of this plantation where we now are to England, it was of so fine a
quality that it used to be quoted by itself in the Liverpool cotton
market, and was then worth half a guinea a pound; it is now not worth a
shilling a pound. This was told me by the gentleman in Liverpool who has
been factor for this estate for thirty years. Such a decrease as this in
the value of one's crop and the steady increase at the same time of a
slave population, now numbering between 700 and 800 bodies to clothe and
house,--mouths to feed, while the land is being exhausted by the careless
and wasteful nature of the agriculture itself, suggests a pretty serious
prospect of declining prosperity; and, indeed, unless these Georgia
cotton planters can command more land or lay abundant capital (which they
have not, being almost all of them over head and ears in debt) upon that
which has already spent its virgin vigour, it is a very obvious thing
that they must all very soon be eaten up by their own property. The rice
plantations are a great thing to fall back upon under these
circumstances, and the rice crop is now quite as valuable, if not more
so, than the cotton one on Mr. ----'s estates, once so famous and
prosperous through the latter.
I find any number of all but superannuated men and women here, whose
tales of the former grandeur of the estate and family are like things one
reads of in novels. One old woman who crawled to see me, and could hardly
lift her poor bowed head high enough to look in my face, had been in
Major ----'s establishment in Philadelphia, and told with infinite pride
of having waited upon his daughters and grand-daughters, Mr. ----'s
sisters. Yet here she is, flung by like an old rag, crippled with age and
disease, living, or rather dying by slow degrees in a miserable hovel,
such as no decent household servant would at the North, I suppose, ever
set their foot in. The poor old creature complained bitterly to me of all
her ailments and all her wants. I can do little, alas! for either. I had
a visit from another tottering old crone called Dorcas, who all but went
on her knees as she wrung and kissed my hands; with her came my friend
Molly, the grandmother of the poor runaway girl, Louisa, whose story I
wrote you some little time ago. I had to hear it all over again, it being
the newest event evidently in Molly's life; and it ended as before with
the highly reasonable proposition: 'Me say, missis, what for massa's
niggar run away? Snake eat em up, or dey starve to def in a swamp.
Massa's niggars dey don't nebbar run away.' If I was 'massa's niggars,' I
'spose' I shouldn't run away either, with only those alternatives, but
when I look at these wretches and at the sea that rolls round this
island, and think how near the English West Indies and freedom are, it
gives me a pretty severe twinge at the heart.
* * * * *
Dearest E----. I am afraid my letters must be becoming very wearisome to
you, for if, as the copy-book runs, 'variety is charming,' they certainly
cannot be so, unless monotony is also charming, a thing not impossible to
some minds, but of which the copy-book makes no mention. But what will
you? as the French say; my days are no more different from one another
than peas in a dish, or sands on the shore: 'tis a pleasant enough life to
live, for one who, like myself, has a passion for dulness, but it affords
small matter for epistolary correspondence. I suppose it is the surfeit of
excitement that I had in my youth that has made a life of quiet monotony
so extremely agreeable to me; it is like stillness after loud noise,
twilight after glare, rest after labour. There is enough strangeness too
in everything that surrounds me here to interest and excite me agreeably
and sufficiently, and I should like the wild savage loneliness of the far
away existence extremely, if it were not for the one small item of 'the
slavery.'
I had a curious visit this morning from half a dozen of the women, among
whom were Driver Morris's wife and Venus (a hideous old goddess she was,
to be sure), Driver Bran's mother. They came especially to see the
children, who are always eagerly asked for, and hugely admired by their
sooty dependents. These poor women went into ecstasies over the little
white piccaninnies, and were loud and profuse in their expressions of
gratitude to massa ---- for getting married and having children, a matter
of thankfulness which, though it always makes me laugh very much, is a
most serious one to them; for the continuance of the family keeps the
estate and slaves from the hammer, and the poor wretches, besides seeing
in every new child born to their owners a security against their own
banishment from the only home they know, and separation from all ties of
kindred and habit, and dispersion to distant plantations, not unnaturally
look for a milder rule from masters who are the children of their fathers'
masters. The relation of owner and slave may be expected to lose some of
its harsher features, and, no doubt, in some instances, does so, when it
is on each side the inheritance of successive generations. And so ----'s
slaves laud, and applaud, and thank, and bless him for having married, and
endowed their children with two little future mistresses. One of these
women, a Diana by name, went down on her knees and uttered in a loud voice
a sort of extemporaneous prayer of thanksgiving at our advent, in which
the sacred and the profane were most ludicrously mingled; her 'tanks to de
good Lord God Almighty that missus had come, what give de poor niggar
sugar and flannel,' and dat 'massa ----, him hab brought de missis and de
two little misses down among de people,' were really too grotesque; and
yet certainly more sincere acts of thanksgiving are not often uttered
among the solemn and decorous ones that are offered up to heaven for
'benefits received.'
I find the people here much more inclined to talk than those on the
rice-island; they have less to do and more leisure, and bestow it very
liberally on me; moreover, the poor old women, of whom there are so many
turned out to grass here, and of whom I have spoken to you before,
though they are past work, are by no means past gossip, and the stories
they have to tell of the former government of the estate under old Massa
K---- are certainly pretty tremendous illustrations of the merits of
slavery as a moral institution. This man, the father of the late owner,
Mr. R---- K----, was Major ----'s agent in the management of this
property; and a more cruel and unscrupulous one as regards the slaves
themselves, whatever he may have been in his dealings with the master, I
should think it would be difficult to find, even among the cruel and
unscrupulous class to which he belonged.
In a conversation with old 'House Molly,' as she is called, to distinguish
her from all other Mollies on the estate, she having had the honour of
being a servant in Major ----'s house for many years, I asked her if the
relation between men and women who are what they call married, i.e., who
have agreed to live together as man and wife (the only species of marriage
formerly allowed on the estate, I believe now London may read the Marriage
Service to them), was considered binding by the people themselves and by
the overseer. She said 'not much, formerly,' and that the people couldn't
be expected to have much regard to such an engagement, utterly ignored as
it was by Mr. K----, whose invariable rule, if he heard of any
disagreement between a man and woman calling themselves married, was
immediately to bestow them in 'marriage' on other parties, whether they
chose it or not, by which summary process the slightest 'incompatibility
of temper' received the relief of a divorce more rapid and easy than even
Germany could afford, and the estate lost nothing by any prolongation of
celibacy on either side. Of course, the misery consequent upon such
arbitrary destruction of voluntary and imposition of involuntary ties was
nothing to Mr. K----.
I was very sorry to hear to-day, that Mr. O----, the overseer at the
rice-island, of whom I have made mention to you more than once in my
letters, had had one of the men flogged very severely for getting his wife
baptised. I was quite unable, from the account I received, to understand
what his objection had been to the poor man's desire to make his wife at
least a formal Christian; but it does seem dreadful that such an act
should be so visited. I almost wish I was back again at the rice-island;
for though this is every way the pleasanter residence, I hear so much more
that is intolerable of the treatment of the slaves from those I find here,
that my life is really made wretched by it. There is not a single natural
right that is not taken away from these unfortunate people, and the worst
of all is, that their condition does not appear to me, upon further
observation of it, to be susceptible of even partial alleviation as long
as the fundamental evil, the slavery itself, remains.