I arrived at this place last night from Washington, where I had observed
little worth describing. The statue of our first President, by Greenough,
was, of course, one of the things which I took an early opportunity of
looking at, and although the bad light in which it is placed prevents the
spectator from properly appreciating the features, I could not help seeing
with satisfaction, that no position, however unfavorable, could impair the
majesty of that noble work, or, at all events, destroy its grand general
effect.
The House of Representatives I had not seen since 1832, and I perceived
that the proceedings were conducted with less apparent decorum than
formerly, and that the members no longer sat with their hats on. Whether
they had come to the conclusion that it was well to sit uncovered, in
order to make up, by this token of mutual respect, for the too frequent
want of decorum in their proceedings, or whether the change has been made
because it so often happens that all the members are talking together, the
rule being that the person speaking must be bareheaded, or whether,
finally, it was found, during the late long summer sessions, that a hat
made the wearer really uncomfortable, are questions which I asked on the
spot, but to which I got no satisfactory answer. I visited the Senate
Chamber, and saw a member of that dignified body, as somebody calls it, in
preparing to make a speech, blow his nose with his thumb and finger
without the intervention of a pocket-handkerchief. The speech, after this
graceful preliminary, did not, I confess, disappoint me.
Whoever goes to Washington should by all means see the Museum at the
Patent Office, enriched by the collections lately brought back by the
expedition sent out to explore the Pacific. I was surprised at the extent
and variety of these collections. Dresses, weapons, and domestic
implements of savage nations, in such abundance as to leave, one would
almost think, their little tribes disfurnished; birds of strange shape and
plumage; fishes of remote waters; whole groves of different kinds of
coral; sea-shells of rare form and singular beauty from the most distant
shores; mummies from the caves of Peru; curious minerals and plants:
whoever is interested by such objects as these should give the museum a
more leisurely examination than I had time to do. The persons engaged in
arranging and putting up these collections were still at their task when I
was at Washington, and I learned that what I saw was by no means the
whole.
The night before we set out, snow fell to the depth of three inches, and
as the steamboat passed down the Potomac, we saw, at sunrise, the grounds
of Mount Vernon lying in a covering of the purest white, the snow,
scattered in patches on the thick foliage of cedars that skirt the river,
looking like clusters of blossoms. About twelve, the steamboat came to
land, and the railway took us through a gorge of the woody hills that
skirt the Potomac. In about an hour, we were at Fredericksburg, on the
Rappahannock. The day was bright and cold, and the wind keen and cutting.
A crowd of negroes came about the cars, with cakes, fruit, and other
refreshments. The poor fellows seemed collapsed with the unusual cold;
their faces and lips were of the color which drapers call blue-black.
As we proceeded southward in Virginia, the snow gradually became thinner
and finally disappeared altogether. It was impossible to mistake the
region in which we were. Broad inclosures were around us, with signs of
extensive and superficial cultivation; large dwellings were seen at a
distance from each other, and each with its group of smaller buildings,
looking as solitary and chilly as French chateaus; and, now and then, we
saw a gang of negroes at work in the fields, though oftener we passed
miles without the sight of a living creature. At six in the afternoon, we
arrived at Richmond.
A beautiful city is Richmond, seated on the hills that overlook the James
River. The dwellings have a pleasant appearance, often standing by
themselves in the midst of gardens. In front of several, I saw large
magnolias, their dark, glazed leaves glittering in the March sunshine. The
river, as yellow as the Tiber, its waters now stained with the earth of
the upper country, runs by the upper part of the town in noisy rapids,
embracing several islands, shaded with the plane-tree, the hackberry, and
the elm, and prolific, in spring and summer, of wild-flowers. I went upon
one of these islands, by means of a foot-bridge, and was pointed to
another, the resort of a quoit-club comprising some of the most
distinguished men of Richmond, among whom in his lifetime was Judge
Marshall, who sometimes joined in this athletic sport. We descended one of
the hills on which the town is built, and went up another to the east,
where stands an ancient house of religious worship, the oldest Episcopal
church in the state. It is in the midst of a burying-ground, where sleep
some of the founders of the colony, whose old graves are greenly overgrown
with the trailing and matted periwinkle. In this church, Patrick Henry, at
the commencement of the American Revolution, made that celebrated speech,
which so vehemently moved all who heard him, ending with the sentence:
"Give me liberty or give me death." We looked in at one of the windows; it
is a low, plain room, with small, square pews, and a sounding board over
the little pulpit. From the hill on which this church stands, you have a
beautiful view of the surrounding country, a gently undulating surface,
closed in by hills on the west; and the James River is seen wandering
through it, by distant plantations, and between borders of trees. A place
was pointed out to us, a little way down the river, which bears the name
of Powhatan; and here, I was told, a flat rock is still shown as the one
on which Captain Smith was placed by his captors, in order to be put to
death, when the intercession of Pocahontas saved his life.
I went with an acquaintance to see the inspection and sale of tobacco.
Huge, upright columns of dried leaves, firmly packed and of a greenish
hue, stood in rows, under the roof of a broad, low building, open on all
sides—these were the hogsheads of tobacco, stripped of the staves. The
inspector, a portly man, with a Bourbon face, his white hair gathered in a
tie behind, went very quietly and expeditiously through his task of
determining the quality, after which the vast bulks were disposed of, in a
very short time, with surprisingly little noise, to the tobacco merchants.
Tobacco, to the value of three millions of dollars annually, is sent by
the planters to Richmond, and thence distributed to different nations,
whose merchants frequent this mart. In the sales it is always sure to
bring cash, which, to those who detest the weed, is a little difficult to
understand.
I went afterwards to a tobacco factory, the sight of which amused me,
though the narcotic fumes made me cough. In one room a black man was
taking apart the small bundles of leaves of which a hogshead of tobacco is
composed, and carefully separating leaf from leaf; others were assorting
the leaves according to the quality, and others again were arranging the
leaves in layers and sprinkling each layer with the extract of liquorice.
In another room were about eighty negroes, boys they are called, from the
age of twelve years up to manhood, who received the leaves thus prepared,
rolled them into long even rolls, and then cut them into plugs of about
four inches in length, which were afterwards passed through a press, and
thus became ready for market. As we entered the room we heard a murmur of
psalmody running through the sable assembly, which now and then swelled
into a strain of very tolerable music.
"Verse sweetens toil—"
says the stanza which Dr. Johnson was so fond of quoting, and really it is
so good that I will transcribe the whole of it—
"Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound—
All at her work the village maiden sings,
Nor, while she turns the giddy wheel around,
Revolves the sad vicissitudes of things."
Verse it seems can sweeten the toil of slaves in a tobacco factory.
"We encourage their singing as much as we can," said the brother of the
proprietor, himself a diligent masticator of the weed, who attended us,
and politely explained to us the process of making plug tobacco; "we
encourage it as much as we can, for the boys work better while singing.
Sometimes they will sing all day long with great spirit; at other times
you will not hear a single note. They must sing wholly of their own
accord, it is of no use to bid them do it."
"What is remarkable," he continued, "their tunes are all psalm tunes, and
the words are from hymn-books; their taste is exclusively for sacred
music; they will sing nothing else. Almost all these persons are
church-members; we have not a dozen about the factory who are not so. Most
of them are of the Baptist persuasion; a few are Methodists."
I saw in the course of the day the Baptist church in which these people
worship, a low, plain, but spacious brick building, the same in which the
sages of Virginia, a generation of great men, debated the provisions of
the constitution. It has a congregation of twenty-seven hundred persons,
and the best choir, I heard somebody say, in all Richmond. Near it is the
Monumental church, erected on the site of the Richmond theatre, after the
terrible fire which carried mourning into so many families.
In passing through an old part of Main-street, I was shown an ancient
stone cottage of rude architecture and humble dimensions, which was once
the best hotel in Richmond. Here, I was told, there are those in Richmond
who remember dining with General Washington, Judge Marshall, and their
cotemporaries. I could not help comparing it with the palace-like
building put up at Richmond within two or three years past, named the
Exchange Hotel, with its spacious parlors, its long dining-rooms, its airy
dormitories, and its ample halls and passages, echoing to the steps of
busy waiters, and guests coming and departing. The Exchange Hotel is one
of the finest buildings for its purpose in the United States, and is
extremely well-kept.
I paid a visit to the capitol, nobly situated on an eminence which
overlooks the city, and is planted with trees. The statue of Washington,
executed by Houdon for the state of Virginia, in 1788, is here. It is of
the size of life, representing Gen. Washington in the costume of his day,
and in an ordinary standing posture. It gratifies curiosity, but raises no
particular moral emotion. Compared with the statue by Greenough, it
presents a good example of the difference between the work of a mere
sculptor—skillful indeed, but still a mere sculptor—and the work of a
man of genius.