STUDIES IN THE SOUTH AND WEST WITH COMMENTS ON CANADA
By Charles Dudley Warner
New York: Harper & Brothers
1889
CONTENTS
PREFATORY NOTE.
STUDIES IN THE SOUTH AND WEST
I.—IMPRESSIONS OF THE SOUTH IN 1885.
II.—SOCIETY IN THE NEW SOUTH.
III.—NEW ORLEANS.
IV.—A VOUDOO DANCE.
V.—THE ACADIAN LAND.
VI.—THE SOUTH REVISITED, IN 1887.
VII.—A FAR AND FAIR COUNTRY.
VIII.—ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL TOPICS. MINNESOTA AND WISCONSIN.
IX.—CHICAGO. [First Paper.]
X.—CHICAGO [Second Paper.]
XI.—THREE CAPITALS—SPRINGFIELD, INDIANAPOLIS, COLUMBUS.
XII.—CINCINNATI AND LOUISVILLE.
XIII.—MEMPHIS AND LITTLE ROCK.
XIV.—ST. LOUIS AND KANSAS CITY.
XV.—KENTUCKY.
COMMENTS ON CANADA.
I.
II.
III.
PREFATORY NOTE. To Henry M. Alden, Esq., Editor of Harper’s Monthly:
My dear Mr. Alden,—It was at your suggestion that these Studies were
undertaken; all of them passed under your eye, except “Society in the
New South,” which appeared in the New Princeton Review. The object
was not to present a comprehensive account of the country South and
West—which would have been impossible in the time and space given—but to
note certain representative developments, tendencies, and dispositions,
the communication of which would lead to a better understanding between
different sections. The subjects chosen embrace by no means all that
is important and interesting, but it is believed that they are fairly
representative. The strongest impression produced upon the writer in
making these Studies was that the prosperous life of the Union depends
upon the life and dignity of the individual States. C. D. W,
STUDIES IN THE SOUTH AND WEST
I.—IMPRESSIONS OF THE SOUTH IN 1885.
It is borne in upon me, as the Friends would say, that I ought to bear
my testimony of certain impressions made by a recent visit to the Gulf
States. In doing this I am aware that I shall be under the suspicion of
having received kindness and hospitality, and of forming opinions upon a
brief sojourn. Both these facts must be confessed, and allowed their due
weight in discrediting what I have to say. A month of my short visit
was given to New Orleans in the spring, during the Exposition, and these
impressions are mainly of Louisiana.
The first general impression made was that the war is over in spirit as
well as in deed. The thoughts of the people are not upon the war, not
much upon the past at all, except as their losses remind them of it, but
upon the future, upon business, a revival of trade, upon education, and
adjustment to the new state of things. The thoughts are not much upon
politics either, or upon offices; certainly they are not turned more
in this direction than the thoughts of people at the North are. When
we read a despatch which declares that there is immense dissatisfaction
throughout Arkansas because offices are not dealt out more liberally
to it, we may know that the case is exactly what it is in, say,
Wisconsin—that a few political managers are grumbling, and that the
great body of the people are indifferent, perhaps too indifferent, to
the distribution of offices.
Undoubtedly immense satisfaction was felt at the election of Mr.
Cleveland, and elation of triumph in the belief that now the party which
had been largely a non-participant in Federal affairs would have a large
share and weight in the administration. With this went, however, a new
feeling of responsibility, of a stake in the country, that manifested
itself at once in attachment to the Union as the common possession of
all sections. I feel sure that Louisiana, for instance, was never in its
whole history, from the day of the Jefferson purchase, so consciously
loyal to the United States as it is to-day. I have believed that for the
past ten years there has been growing in this country a stronger feeling
of nationality—a distinct American historic consciousness—and nowhere
else has it developed so rapidly of late as at the South. I am convinced
that this is a genuine development of attachment to the Union and of
pride in the nation, and not in any respect a political movement for
unworthy purposes. I am sorry that it is necessary, for the sake of
any lingering prejudice at the North, to say this. But it is time
that sober, thoughtful, patriotic people at the North should quit
representing the desire for office at the South as a desire to get into
the Government saddle and ride again with a “rebel” impulse. It would
be, indeed, a discouraging fact if any considerable portion of the South
held aloof in sullenness from Federal affairs. Nor is it any just cause
either of reproach or of uneasiness that men who were prominent in the
war of the rebellion should be prominent now in official positions, for
with a few exceptions the worth and weight of the South went into the
war. It would be idle to discuss the question whether the masses of
the South were not dragooned into the war by the politicians; it is
sufficient to recognize the fact that it became practically, by one
means or another, a unanimous revolt.
One of the strongest impressions made upon a Northerner who visits the
extreme South now, having been familiar with it only by report, is the
extent to which it suffered in the war. Of course there was extravagance
and there were impending bankruptcies before the war, debt, and methods
of business inherently vicious, and no doubt the war is charged with
many losses which would have come without it, just as in every crisis
half the failures wrongfully accuse the crisis. Yet, with all allowance
for these things, the fact remains that the war practically wiped out
personal property and the means of livelihood. The completeness of
this loss and disaster never came home to me before. In some cases the
picture of the ante bellum civilization is more roseate in the minds of
those who lost everything than cool observation of it would justify.
But conceding this, the actual disaster needs no embellishment of the
imagination. It seems to me, in the reverse, that the Southern people do
not appreciate the sacrifices the North made for the Union. They do
not, I think, realize the fact that the North put into the war its
best blood, that every battle brought mourning into our households, and
filled our churches day by day and year by year with the black garments
of bereavement; nor did they ever understand the tearful enthusiasm for
the Union and the flag, and the unselfish devotion that underlay all the
self-sacrifice. Some time the Southern people will know that it was love
for the Union, and not hatred of the South, that made heroes of the men
and angels of renunciation of the women.
Yes, say our Southern friends, we can believe that you lost dear ones
and were in mourning; but, after all, the North was prosperous; you grew
rich; and when the war ended, life went on in the fulness of material
prosperity. We lost not only our friends and relatives, fathers, sons,
brothers, till there was scarcely a household that was not broken up, we
lost not only the cause on which we had set our hearts, and for which we
had suffered privation and hardship, were fugitives and wanderers, and
endured the bitterness of defeat at the end, but our property was gone,
we were stripped, with scarcely a home, and the whole of life had to
be begun over again, under all the disadvantage of a sudden social
revolution.
It is not necessary to dwell upon this or to heighten it, but it must
be borne in mind when we observe the temper of the South, and especially
when we are looking for remaining bitterness, and the wonder to me is
that after so short a space of time there is remaining so little of
resentment or of bitter feeling over loss and discomfiture. I believe
there is not in history any parallel to it. Every American must
take pride in the fact that Americans have so risen superior to
circumstances, and come out of trials that thoroughly threshed and
winnowed soul and body in a temper so gentle and a spirit so noble. It
is good stuff that can endure a test of this kind.
A lady, whose family sustained all the losses that were possible in
the war, said to me—and she said only what several others said in
substance—“We are going to get more out of this war than you at the
North, because we suffered more. We were drawn out of ourselves in
sacrifices, and were drawn together in a tenderer feeling of humanity; I
do believe we were chastened into a higher and purer spirit.”
Let me not be misunderstood. The people who thus recognize the moral
training of adversity and its effects upon character, and who are glad
that slavery is gone, and believe that a new and better era for the
South is at hand, would not for a moment put themselves in an attitude
of apology for the part they took in the war, nor confess that they
were wrong, nor join in any denunciation of the leaders they followed
to their sorrow. They simply put the past behind them, so far as the
conduct of the present life is concerned. They do not propose to stamp
upon memories that are tender and sacred, and they cherish certain
sentiments whieh are to them loyalty to their past and to the great
passionate experiences of their lives. When a woman, who enlisted by
the consent of Jeff Davis, whose name appeared for four years upon the
rolls, and who endured all the perils and hardships of the conflict as a
field-nurse, speaks of “President” Davis, what does it mean? It is
only a sentiment. This heroine of the war on the wrong side had in the
Exposition a tent, where the veterans of the Confederacy recorded their
names. On one side, at the back of the tent, was a table piled with
touching relics of the war, and above it a portrait of Robert E. Lee,
wreathed in immortelles. It was surely a harmless shrine.
On the other side was also a table, piled with fruit and cereals—not
relics, but signs of prosperity and peace—and above it a portrait of
Ulysses S. Grant. Here was the sentiment, cherished with an aching heart
maybe, and here was the fact of the Union and the future.
Another strong impression made upon the visitor is, as I said, that the
South has entirely put the past behind it, and is devoting itself to the
work of rebuilding on new foundations. There is no reluctance to talk
about the war, or to discuss its conduct and what might have been. But
all this is historic. It engenders no heat. The mind of the South to-day
is on the development of its resources, upon the rehabilitation of its
affairs. I think it is rather more concerned about national prosperity
than it is about the great problem of the negro—but I will refer to this
further on. There goes with this interest in material development the
same interest in the general prosperity of the country that exists at
the North—the anxiety that the country should prosper, acquit itself
well, and stand well with the other nations. There is, of course, a
sectional feeling—as to tariff, as to internal improvements—but I do
not think the Southern States are any more anxious to get things for
themselves out of the Federal Government than the Northern States are.
That the most extreme of Southern politicians have any sinister purpose
(any more than any of the Northern “rings” on either side have) in
wanting to “rule” the country, is, in my humble opinion, only a chimera
evoked to make political capital.
As to the absolute subsidence of hostile intention (this phrase I know
will sound queer in the South), and the laying aside of bitterness
for the past, are not necessary in the presence of a strong general
impression, but they might be given in great number. I note one that was
significant from its origin, remembering, what is well known, that women
and clergymen are always the last to experience subsidence of hostile
feeling after a civil war. On the Confederate Decoration Day in New
Orleans I was standing near the Confederate monument in one of the
cemeteries when the veterans marched in to decorate it. First came the
veterans of the Army of Virginia, last those of the Army of Tennessee,
and between them the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, Union
soldiers now living in Louisiana. I stood beside a lady whose name, if
I mentioned it, would be recognized as representative of a family which
was as conspicuous, and did as much and lost as much, as any other in
the war—a family that would be popularly supposed to cherish unrelenting
feelings. As the veterans, some of them on crutches, many of them with
empty sleeves, grouped themselves about the monument, we remarked upon
the sight as a touching one, and I said: “I see you have no address on
Decoration Day. At the North we still keep up the custom.”
“No,” she replied; “we have given it up. So many imprudent things were
said that we thought best to discontinue the address.” And then, after a
pause, she added, thoughtfully: “Each side did the best it could; it is
all over and done with, and let’s have an end of it.” In the mouth
of the lady who uttered it, the remark was very significant, but it
expresses, I am firmly convinced, the feeling of the South.
Of course the South will build monuments to its heroes, and weep over
their graves, and live upon the memory of their devotion and genius. In
Heaven’s name, why shouldn’t it? Is human nature itself to be changed in
twenty years?
A long chapter might be written upon the dis-likeness of North and
South, the difference in education, in training, in mental inheritances,
the misapprehensions, radical and very singular to us, of the
civilization of the North. We must recognize certain historic facts,
not only the effect of the institution of slavery, but other facts in
Southern development. Suppose we say that an unreasonable prejudice
exists, or did exist, about the people of the North. That prejudice is a
historic fact, of which the statesman must take account. It enters
into the question of the time needed to effect the revolution now in
progress. There are prejudices in the North about the South as well. We
admit their existence. But what impresses me is the rapidity with which
they are disappearing in the South. Knowing what human nature is, it
seems incredible that they could have subsided so rapidly. Enough remain
for national variety, and enough will remain for purposes of social
badinage, but common interests in the country and in making money are
melting them away very fast. So far as loyalty to the Government is
concerned, I am not authorized to say that it is as deeply rooted in the
South as in the North, but it is expressed as vividly, and felt with a
good deal of fresh enthusiasm. The “American” sentiment, pride in this
as the most glorious of all lands, is genuine, and amounts to enthusiasm
with many who would in an argument glory in their rebellion. “We had
more loyalty to our States than you had,” said one lady, “and we have
transferred it to the whole country.”
But the negro? Granting that the South is loyal enough, wishes never
another rebellion, and is satisfied to be rid of slavery, do not the
people intend to keep the negroes practically a servile class, slaves in
all but the name, and to defeat by chicanery or by force the legitimate
results of the war and of enfranchisement?
This is a very large question, and cannot be discussed in my limits. If
I were to say what my impression is, it would be about this: the South
is quite as much perplexed by the negro problem as the North is, and is
very much disposed to await developments, and to let time solve it. One
thing, however, must be admitted in all this discussion. The Southerners
will not permit such Legislatures as those assembled once in Louisiana
and South Carolina to rule them again. “Will you disfranchise the blacks
by management or by force?”
“Well, what would you do in Ohio or in Connecticut? Would you be ruled
by a lot of ignorant field-hands allied with a gang of plunderers?”
In looking at this question from a Northern point of view we have to
keep in mind two things: first, the Federal Government imposed colored
suffrage without any educational qualification—a hazardous experiment;
in the second place, it has handed over the control of the colored
people in each State to the State, under the Constitution, as completely
in Louisiana as in New York. The responsibility is on Louisiana. The
North cannot relieve her of it, and it cannot interfere, except by ways
provided in the Constitution. In the South, where fear of a legislative
domination has gone, the feeling between the two races is that of amity
and mutual help. This is, I think, especially true in Louisiana. The
Southerners never have forgotten the loyalty of the slaves during the
war, the security with which the white families dwelt in the midst of a
black population while all the white men were absent in the field; they
often refer to this. It touches with tenderness the new relation of the
races. I think there is generally in the South a feeling of good-will
towards the negroes, a desire that they should develop into true manhood
and womanhood. Undeniably there are indifference and neglect and
some remaining suspicion about the schools that Northern charity has
organized for the negroes. As to this neglect of the negro, two things
are to be said: the whole subject of education (as we have understood
it in the North) is comparatively new in the South; and the necessity of
earning a living since the war has distracted attention from it. But
the general development of education is quite as advanced as could be
expected. The thoughtful and the leaders of opinion are fully awake to
the fact that the mass of the people must be educated, and that the
only settlement of the negro problem is in the education of the negro,
intellectually and morally. They go further than this. They say that for
the South to hold its own—since the negro is there and will stay there,
and is the majority of the laboring class—it is necessary that the great
agricultural mass of unskilled labor should be transformed, to a great
extent, into a class of skilled labor, skilled on the farm, in shops, in
factories, and that the South must have a highly diversified industry.
To this end they want industrial as well as ordinary schools for the
colored people.
It is believed that, with this education and with diversified industry,
the social question will settle itself, as it does the world over.
Society cannot be made or unmade by legislation. In New Orleans the
street-ears are free to all colors; at the Exposition white and colored
people mingled freely, talking and looking at what was of common
interest.
We who live in States where hotel-keepers exclude Hebrews cannot say
much about the exclusion of negroes from Southern hotels. There are
prejudices remaining. There are cases of hardship on the railways, where
for the same charge perfectly respectable and nearly white women are
shut out of cars while there is no discrimination against dirty and
disagreeable white people. In time all this will doubtless rest upon
the basis it rests on at the North, and social life will take care of
itself. It is my impression that the negroes are no more desirous to
mingle socially with the whites than the whites are with the negroes.
Among the negroes there are social grades as distinctly marked as in
white society. What will be the final outcome of the juxtaposition
nobody can tell; meantime it must be recorded that good-will exists
between the races.
I had one day at the Exposition an interesting talk with the colored
woman in charge of the Alabama section of the exhibit of the colored
people. This exhibit, made by States, was suggested and promoted by
Major Burke in order to show the whites what the colored people could
do, and as a stimulus to the latter. There was not much time—only two or
three months—in which to prepare the exhibit, and it was hardly a fair
showing of the capacity of the colored people. The work was mainly
women’s work—embroidery, sewing, household stuffs, with a little of the
handiwork of artisans, and an exhibit of the progress in education; but
small as it was, it was wonderful as the result of only a few years of
freedom. The Alabama exhibit was largely from Mobile, and was due to the
energy, executive ability, and taste of the commissioner in charge. She
was a quadroon, a widow, a woman of character and uncommon mental
and moral quality. She talked exceedingly well, and with a practical
good-sense which would be notable in anybody. In the course of our
conversation the whole social and political question was gone over.
Herself a person of light color, and with a confirmed social prejudice
against black people, she thoroughly identified herself with the
colored race, and it was evident that her sympathies were with them. She
confirmed what I had heard of the social grades among colored people,
but her whole soul was in the elevation of her race as a race, inclining
always to their side, but with no trace of hostility to the whites. Many
of her best friends were whites, and perhaps the most valuable part of
her education was acquired in families of social distinction. “I can
illustrate,” she said, “the state of feeling between the two races in
Mobile by an incident last summer. There was an election coming off in
the City Government, and I knew that the reformers wanted and needed the
colored vote. I went, therefore, to some of the chief men, who knew me
and had confidence in me, for I had had business relations with many of
them [she had kept a fashionable boarding-house], and told them that I
wanted the Opera-house for the colored people to give an entertainment
and exhibition in. The request was extraordinary. Nobody but white
people had ever been admitted to the Opera-house. But, after some
hesitation and consultation, the request was granted. We gave the
exhibition, and the white people all attended. It was really a beautiful
affair, lovely tableaux, with gorgeous dresses, recitations, etc., and
everybody was astonished that the colored people had so much taste
and talent, and had got on so far in education. They said they were
delighted and surprised, and they liked it so well that they wanted the
entertainment repeated—it was given for one of our charities—but I was
too wise for that. I didn’t want to run the chance of destroying the
impression by repeating, and I said we would wait a while, and then
show them something better. Well, the election came off in August, and
everything went all right, and now the colored people in Mobile can have
anything they want. There is the best feeling between the races. I tell
you we should get on beautifully if the politicians would let us alone.
It is politics that has made all the trouble in Alabama and in Mobile.”
And I learned that in Mobile, as in many other places, the negroes were
put in minor official positions, the duties of which they were capable
of discharging, and had places in the police.
On “Louisiana Day” in the Exposition the colored citizens took their
full share of the parade and the honors. Their societies marched with
the others, and the races mingled on the grounds in unconscious equality
of privileges. Speeches were made, glorifying the State and its history,
by able speakers, the Governor among them; but it was the testimony of
Democrats of undoubted Southern orthodoxy that the honors of the day
were carried off by a colored clergyman, an educated man, who united
eloquence with excellent good-sense, and who spoke as a citizen of
Louisiana, proud of his native State, dwelling with richness of allusion
upon its history. It was a perfectly manly speech in the assertion of
the rights and the position of his race, and it breathed throughout the
same spirit of good-will and amity in a common hope of progress that
characterized the talk of the colored woman commissioner of Mobile. It
was warmly applauded, and accepted, so far as I heard, as a matter of
course.
No one, however, can see the mass of colored people in the cities and
on the plantations, the ignorant mass, slowly coming to moral
consciousness, without a recognition of the magnitude of the negro
problem. I am glad that my State has not the practical settlement of it,
and I cannot do less than express profound sympathy with the people who
have. They inherit the most difficult task now anywhere visible in human
progress. They will make mistakes, and they will do injustice now and
then; but one feels like turning away from these, and thanking God for
what they do well.
There are many encouraging things in the condition of the negro.
Good-will, generally, among the people where he lives is one thing;
their tolerance of his weaknesses and failings is another. He is
himself, here and there, making heroic sacrifices to obtain an
education. There are negro mothers earning money at the wash-tub to keep
their boys at school and in college. In the South-west there is such a
call for colored teachers that the Straight University in New Orleans,
which has about five hundred pupils, cannot begin to supply the demand,
although the teachers, male and female, are paid from thirty-five to
fifty dollars a month. A colored graduate of this school a year ago is
now superintendent of the colored schools in Memphis, at a salary of
$1200 a year.
Are these exceptional cases? Well, I suppose it is also exceptional to
see a colored clergyman in his surplice seated in the chancel of the
most important white Episcopal church in New Orleans, assisting in the
service; but it is significant. There are many good auguries to be drawn
from the improved condition of the negroes on the plantations, the more
rational and less emotional character of their religious services,
and the hold of the temperance movement on all classes in the country
places.
II.—SOCIETY IN THE NEW SOUTH.
The American Revolution made less social change in the South than in the
North. Under conservative influences the South developed her social life
with little alteration in form and spirit—allowing for the decay that
always attends conservatism—down to the Civil War. The social revolution
which was in fact accomplished contemporaneously with the political
severance from Great Britain, in the North, was not effected in the
South until Lee offered his sword to Grant, and Grant told him to
keep it and beat it into a ploughshare. The change had indeed been
inevitable, and ripening for four years, but it was at that moment
universally recognized. Impossible, of course, except by the removal of
slavery, it is not wholly accounted for by the removal of slavery; it
results also from an economical and political revolution, and from a
total alteration of the relations of the South to the rest of the world.
The story of this social change will be one of the most marvellous the
historian has to deal with.
Provincial is a comparative term. All England is provincial to the
Londoner, all America to the Englishman. Perhaps New York looks upon
Philadelphia as provincial; and if Chicago is forced to admit that
Boston resembles ancient Athens, then Athens, by the Chicago standard,
must have been a very provincial city. The root of provincialism is
localism, or a condition of being on one side and apart from the general
movement of contemporary life. In this sense, and compared with the
North in its absolute openness to every wind from all parts of the
globe, the South was provincial. Provincialism may have its decided
advantages, and it may nurture many superior virtues and produce a
social state that is as charming as it is interesting, but along with it
goes a certain self-appreciation, which ultracosmopolitan critics would
call Concord-like, that seems exaggerated to outsiders.
The South, and notably Virginia and South Carolina, cherished English
traditions long after the political relation was severed. But it kept
the traditions of the time of the separation, and did not share the
literary and political evolution of England. Slavery divided it from the
North in sympathy, and slavery, by excluding European emigration, shut
out the South from the influence of the new ideas germinating in
Europe. It was not exactly true to say that the library of the Southern
gentleman stopped with the publications current in the reign of George
the Third, but, well stocked as it was with the classics and with the
English literature become classic, it was not likely to contain much
of later date than the Reform Bill in England and the beginning of the
abolition movement in the North. The pages of De Bow’s Review attest the
ambition and direction of Southern scholarship—a scholarship not much
troubled by the new problems that were at the time rending England and
the North. The young men who still went abroad to be educated brought
back with them the traditions and flavor of the old England and not the
spirit of the new, the traditions of the universities and not the new
life of research and doubt in them. The conservatism of the Southern
life was so strong that the students at Northern colleges returned
unchanged by contact with a different civilization. The South met the
North in business and in politics, and in a limited social intercourse,
but from one cause and another for three-quarters of a century it was
practically isolated, and consequently developed a peculiar social life.
One result of this isolation was that the South was more homogeneous
than the North, and perhaps more distinctly American in its
characteristics. This was to be expected, since it had one common and
overmastering interest in slavery, had little foreign admixture, and
was removed from the currents of commerce and the disturbing ideas of
Reform. The South, so far as society was concerned, was an agricultural
aristocracy, based upon a perfectly defined lowest class in the slaves,
and holding all trade, commerce, and industrial and mechanical pursuits
in true mediæval contempt. Its literature was monarchical, tempered by
some Jeffersonian, doctrinaire notions of the rights of man, which were
satisfied, however, by an insistence upon the sovereignty of the States,
and by equal privileges to a certain social order in each State. Looked
at, then, from the outside, the South appeared to be homogeneous, but
from its own point of view, socially, it was not at all so. Social life
in these jealously independent States developed almost as freely and
variously as it did in the Middle Ages in the free cities of Italy.
Virginia was not at all like South Carolina (except in one common
interest), and Louisiana—especially in its centre, New Orleans—more
cosmopolitan than any other part of the South by reason of its foreign
elements, more closely always in sympathy with Paris than with New York
or Boston, was widely, in its social life, separated from its sisters.
Indeed, in early days, before the slavery agitation, there was, owing
to the heritage of English traditions, more in common between Boston and
Charleston than between New Orleans and Charleston. And later, there was
a marked social difference between towns and cities near together—as,
for instance, between agricultural Lexington and commercial Louisville,
in Kentucky.
The historian who writes the social life of the Southern States will be
embarrassed with romantic and picturesque material. Nowhere else in
this levelling age will he find a community developing so much of the
dramatic, so much splendor and such pathetic contrasts in the highest
social cultivation, as in the plantation and city life of South
Carolina. Already, in regarding it, it assumes an air of unreality,
and vanishes in its strong lights and heavy shades like a dream of
the chivalric age. An allusion to its character is sufficient for the
purposes of this paper. Persons are still alive who saw the prodigal
style of living and the reckless hospitality of the planters in
those days, when in the Charleston and Sea Island mansions the guests
constantly entertained were only outnumbered by the swarms of servants;
when it was not incongruous and scarcely ostentatious that the courtly
company, which had the fine and free manner of another age, should dine
off gold and silver plate; and when all that wealth and luxury could
suggest was lavished in a princely magnificence that was almost barbaric
in its profusion. The young men were educated in England; the young
women were reared like helpless princesses, with a servant for every
want and whim; it was a day of elegant accomplishments and deferential
manners, but the men gamed like Fox and drank like Sheridan, and the
duel was the ordinary arbiter of any difference of opinion or of any
point of honor. Not even slavery itself could support existence on such
a scale, and even before the war it began to give way to the conditions
of our modern life. And now that old peculiar civilization of South.
Carolina belongs to romance. It can never be repeated, even by the aid
of such gigantic fortunes as are now accumulating in the North.
The agricultural life of Virginia appeals with scarcely less attraction
to the imagination of the novelist. Mr. Thackeray caught the flavor of
it in his “Virginians” from an actual study of it in the old houses,
when it was becoming a faded memory. The vast estates—principalities in
size—with troops of slaves attached to each plantation; the hospitality,
less costly, but as free as that of South Carolina; the land in the
hands of a few people; politics and society controlled by a small number
of historic families, intermarried until all Virginians of a certain
grade were related—all this forms a picture as feudal-like and foreign
to this age as can be imagined. The writer recently read the will of
a country gentleman of the last century in Virginia, which raises a
distinct image of the landed aristocracy of the time. It devised
his plantation of six thousand acres with its slaves attached, his
plantation of eighteen hundred acres and slaves, his plantation of
twelve hundred acres and slaves, with other farms and outlying property;
it mentioned all the cattle, sheep, and hogs, the riding-horses in
stables, the racing-steeds, the several coaches with the six horses that
drew them (an acknowledgment of the wretched state of the roads), and
so on in all the details of a vast domain. All the slaves are called
by name, all the farming implements were enumerated, and all the homely
articles of furniture down to the beds and kitchen utensils. This whole
structure of a unique civilization is practically swept away now, and
with it the peculiar social life it produced. Let us pause a moment
upon a few details of it, as it had its highest development in Eastern
Virginia.
The family was the fetich. In this high social caste the estates were
entailed to the limit of the law, for one generation, and this entail
was commonly religiously renewed by the heir. It was not expected that
a widow would remarry; as a rule she did not, and it was almost a matter
of course that the will of the husband should make the enjoyment of even
the entailed estate dependent upon the non-marriage of the widow. These
prohibitions upon her freedom of choice were not considered singular or
cruel in a society whose chief gospel was the preservation of the family
name.
The planters lived more simply than the great seaboard planters of South
Carolina and Georgia, with not less pride, but with less ostentation
and show. The houses were of the accepted colonial pattern, square, with
four rooms on a floor, but with wide galleries (wherein they differed
from the colonial houses in New England), and sometimes with additions
in the way of offices and lodging-rooms. The furniture was very simple
and plain—a few hundred dollars would cover the cost of it in most
mansions. There were not in all Virginia more than two or three
magnificent houses. It was the taste of gentlemen to adorn the ground
in front of the house with evergreens, with the locust and acanthus, and
perhaps the maple-trees not native to the spot; while the oak, which is
nowhere more stately and noble than in Virginia, was never seen on the
lawn or the drive-way, but might be found about the “quarters,” or in
an adjacent forest park. As the interior of the houses was plain, so the
taste of the people was simple in the matter of ornament—jewellery was
very little worn; in fact, it is almost literally true that there were
in Virginia no family jewels.
So thoroughly did this society believe in itself and keep to its
traditions that the young gentleman of the house, educated in England,
brought on his return nothing foreign home with him—no foreign tastes,
no bric-à-brac for his home, and never a foreign wife. He came back
unchanged, and married the cousin he met at the first country dance he
went to.
The pride of the people, which was intense, did not manifest itself in
ways that are common elsewhere—it was sufficient to itself in its own
homespun independence. What would make one distinguished elsewhere
was powerless here. Literary talent, and even acquired wealth, gave no
distinction; aside from family and membership of the caste, nothing
gave it to any native or visitor. There was no lion-hunting, no desire
whatever to attract the attention of, or to pay any deference to, men of
letters. If a member of society happened to be distinguished in letters
or in scholarship, it made not the slightest difference in his social
appreciation. There was absolutely no encouragement for men of letters,
and consequently there was no literary class and little literature.
There was only one thing that gave a man any distinction in this
society, except a long pedigree, and that was the talent of oratory—that
was prized, for that was connected with prestige in the State and the
politics of the dominant class. The planters took few newspapers, and
read those few very little. They were a fox-hunting, convivial race,
generally Whig in politics, always orthodox in religion. The man of
cultivation was rare, and, if he was cultivated, it was usually only on
a single subject. But the planter might be an astute politician, and
a man of wide knowledge and influence in public affairs. There was one
thing, however, that was held in almost equal value with pedigree, and
that was female beauty. There was always the recognized “belle,” the
beauty of the day, who was the toast and the theme of talk, whose memory
was always green with her chivalrous contemporaries; the veterans liked
to recall over the old Madeira the wit and charms of the raving beauties
who had long gone the way of the famous vintages of the cellar.
The position of the clergyman in the Episcopal Church was very much what
his position was in England in the time of James II. He was patronized
and paid like any other adjunct of a well-ordered society. If he did not
satisfy his masters he was quietly informed that he could probably
be more useful elsewhere. If he was acceptable, one element of his
popularity was that he rode to hounds and could tell a good story over
the wine at dinner.
The pride of this society preserved itself in a certain high, chivalrous
state. If any of its members were poor, as most of them became after the
war, they took a certain pride in their poverty. They were too proud to
enter into a vulgar struggle to be otherwise, and they were too old to
learn the habit of labor. No such thing was known in it as scandal.
If any breach of morals occurred, it was apt to be acknowledged with
a Spartan regard for truth, and defiantly published by the families
affected, who announced that they accepted the humiliation of it.
Scandal there should be none. In that caste the character of women was
not even to be the subject of talk in private gossip and innuendo. No
breach of social caste was possible. The overseer, for instance, and
the descendants of the overseer, however rich, or well educated, or
accomplished they might become, could never marry into the select
class. An alliance of this sort doomed the offender to an absolute and
permanent loss of social position. This was the rule. Beauty could no
more gain entrance there than wealth.
This plantation life, of which so much has been written, was repeated
with variations all over the South. In Louisiana and lower Mississippi
it was more prodigal than in Virginia. To a great extent its tone was
determined by a relaxing climate, and it must be confessed that it had
in it an element of the irresponsible—of the “after us the deluge.”
The whole system wanted thrift and, to an English or Northern
visitor, certain conditions of comfort. Yet everybody acknowledged its
fascination; for there was nowhere else such a display of open-hearted
hospitality. An invitation to visit meant an invitation to stay
indefinitely. The longer the visit lasted, if it ran into months,
the better were the entertainers pleased. It was an uncalculating
hospitality, and possibly it went along with littleness and meanness, in
some directions, that were no more creditable than the alleged meanness
of the New England farmer. At any rate, it was not a systematized
generosity. The hospitality had somewhat the character of a new country
and of a society not crowded. Company was welcome on the vast, isolated
plantations. Society also was really small, composed of a few families,
and intercourse by long visits and profuse entertainments was natural
and even necessary.
This social aristocracy had the faults as well as the virtues of an
aristocracy so formed. One fault was an undue sense of superiority,
a sense nurtured by isolation from the intellectual contests and the
illusion-destroying tests of modern life. And this sense of superiority
diffused itself downward through the mass of the Southern population.
The slave of a great family was proud; he held himself very much above
the poor white, and he would not associate with the slave of the small
farmer; and the poor white never doubted his own superiority to the
Northern “mudsill”—as the phrase of the day was. The whole life was
somehow pitched to a romantic key, and often there was a queer contrast
between the Gascon-like pretension and the reality—all the more because
of a certain sincerity and single-mindedness that was unable to see the
anachronism of trying to live in the spirit of Scott’s romances in our
day and generation.
But with all allowance for this, there was a real basis for romance
in the impulsive, sun-nurtured people, in the conflict between the two
distinct races, and in the system of labor that was an anomaly in modern
life. With the downfall of this system it was inevitable that the social
state should radically change, and especially as this downfall
was sudden and by violence, and in a struggle that left the South
impoverished, and reduced to the rank of bread-winners those who had
always regarded labor as a thing impossible for themselves.
As a necessary effect of this change, the dignity of the agricultural
interest was lowered, and trade and industrial pursuits were elevated.
Labor itself was perforce dignified. To earn one’s living by actual
work, in the shop, with the needle, by the pen, in the counting-house or
school, in any honorable way, was a lot accepted with cheerful courage.
And it is to the credit of all concerned that reduced circumstances and
the necessity of work for daily bread have not thus far cost men and
women in Southern society their social position. Work was a necessity of
the situation, and the spirit in which the new life was taken up brought
out the solid qualities of the race. In a few trying years they had
to reverse the habits and traditions of a century. I think the honest
observer will acknowledge that they have accomplished this without loss
of that social elasticity and charm which were heretofore supposed to
depend very much upon the artificial state of slave labor. And they have
gained much. They have gained in losing a kind of suspicion that was
inevitable in the isolation of their peculiar institution. They have
gained freedom of thought and action in all the fields of modern
endeavor, in the industrial arts, in science, in literature. And the
fruits of this enlargement must add greatly to the industrial and
intellectual wealth of the world.
Society itself in the new South has cut loose from its old moorings, but
it is still in a transition state, and offers the most interesting study
of tendencies and possibilities. Its danger, of course, is that of the
North—a drift into materialism, into a mere struggle for wealth, undue
importance attached to money, and a loss of public spirit in the selfish
accumulation of property. Unfortunately, in the transition of twenty
years the higher education has been neglected. The young men of this
generation have not given even as much attention to intellectual
pursuits as their fathers gave. Neither in polite letters nor in
politics and political history have they had the same training. They
have been too busy in the hard struggle for a living. It is true at the
North that the young men in business are not so well educated, not
so well read, as the young women of their own rank in society. And I
suspect that this is still more true in the South. It is not uncommon
to find in this generation Southern young women who add to sincerity,
openness and frankness of manner; to the charm born of the wish to
please, the graces of cultivation; who know French like their native
tongue, who are well acquainted with the French and German literatures,
who are well read in the English classics—though perhaps guiltless of
much familiarity with our modern American literature. But taking the
South at large, the schools for either sex are far behind those of
the North both in discipline and range. And this is especially to
be regretted, since the higher education is an absolute necessity to
counteract the intellectual demoralization of the newly come industrial
spirit.
We have yet to study the compensations left to the South in their
century of isolation from this industrial spirit, and from the
absolutely free inquiry of our modern life. Shall we find something
sweet and sound there, that will yet be a powerful conservative
influence in the republic? Will it not be strange, said a distinguished
biblical scholar and an old-time antislavery radical, if we have to
depend, after all, upon the orthodox conservatism of the South? For it
is to be noted that the Southern pulpit holds still the traditions
of the old theology, and the mass of Southern Christians are still
undisturbed by doubts. They are no more troubled by agnosticism in
religion than by altruism in sociology. There remains a great mass of
sound and simple faith. We are not discussing either the advantage or
the danger of disturbing thought, or any question of morality or of the
conduct of life, nor the shield or the peril of ignorance—it is simply a
matter of fact that the South is comparatively free from what is called
modern doubt.
Another fact is noticeable. The South is not and never has been
disturbed by “isms” of any sort. “Spiritualism” or “Spiritism” has
absolutely no lodgement there. It has not even appealed in any way to
the excitable and superstitious colored race. Inquiry failed to discover
to the writer any trace of this delusion among whites or blacks. Society
has never been agitated on the important subjects of graham-bread or of
the divided skirt. The temperance question has forced itself upon the
attention of deeply drinking communities here and there. Usually it
has been treated in a very common-sense way, and not as a matter
of politics. Fanaticism may sometimes be a necessity against an
overwhelming evil; but the writer knows of communities in the South that
have effected a practical reform in liquor selling and drinking without
fanatical excitement. Bar-room drinking is a fearful curse in Southern
cities, as it is in Northern; it is an evil that the colored people fall
into easily, but it is beginning to be met in some Southern localities
in a resolute and sensible manner.