the bayou, among cultivated fields, and made our first call on the
Thibodeaux. They had been expecting us, and Andonia came down to the
landing to welcome us, and with a formal, pretty courtesy led the way to
the house. Does the reader happen to remember, say in New England, say
fifty years ago, the sweetest maiden lady in the village, prim, staid,
full of kindness, the proportions of the figure never quite developed,
with a row of small corkscrew curls about her serene forehead, and all
the juices of life that might have overflowed into the life of others
somehow withered into the sweetness of her wistful face? Yes; a little
timid and appealing, and yet trustful, and in a scant, quaint gown?
Well, Andonia was never married, and she had such curls, and a
high-waisted gown, and a kerchief folded across her breast; and when she
spoke, it was in the language of France as it is rendered in Acadia.
The house, like all in this region, stands upon blocks of wood, is in
appearance a frame house, but the walls between timbers are of concrete
mixed with moss, and the same inside as out. It had no glass in tin
windows, which were closed with solid shutters. Upon the rough walls
were hung sacred pictures and other crudely colored prints. The
furniture was rude and apparently home-made, and the whole interior was
as painfully neat as a Dutch parlor. Even the beams overhead and ceiling
had been scrubbed. Andonia showed us with a blush of pride her neat
little sleeping-room, with its souvenirs of affection, and perhaps some
of the dried flowers of a possible romance, and the ladies admired the
finely woven white counterpane on the bed. Andonia’s married sister was
a large, handsome woman, smiling and prosperous. There were children
and, I think, a baby about, besides Mr. Thibodeaux. Nothing could exceed
the kindly manner of these people. Andonia showed us how they card,
weave, and spin the cotton out of which then-blankets and the jean for
their clothing are made. They use the old-fashioned hand-cards, spin
on a little wheel with a foot-treadle, have the most primitive
warping-bars, and weave most laboriously on a rude loom. But the cloth
they make will wear forever, and the colors they use are all fast. It
is a great pleasure, we might almost say shock, to encounter such honest
work in these times. The Acadians grow a yellow or nankeen sort of
cotton which, without requiring any dye, is woven into a handsome yellow
stuff. When we departed Andonia slipped into the door-yard, and returned
with a rose for each of us. I fancied she was loath to have us go, and
that the visit was an event in the monotony of her single life.
Embarking again on the placid stream, we moved along through a land
of peace. The houses of the Acadians are scattered along the bayou at
considerable distances apart. The voyager seems to be in an unoccupied
country, when suddenly the turn of the stream shows him a farm-house,
with its little landing-wharf, boats, and perhaps a schooner moored at
the bank, and behind it cultivated fields and a fringe of trees. In
the blossoming time of the year, when the birds are most active, these
scenes are idyllic. At a bend in the bayou, where a tree sent its
horizontal trunk half across it, we made our next call, at the house
of Mr Vallet, a large frame house, and evidently the abode of a man of
means. The house was ceiled outside and inside with native woods. As
usual in this region, the premises were not as orderly as those about
some Northern farm-houses, but the interior of the house was spotlessly
clean, and in its polish and barrenness of ornament and of appliances
of comfort suggested a Brittany home, while its openness and the broad
veranda spoke of a genial climate. Our call here was brief, for a sick
man, very ill, they said, lay in the front room—a stranger who had been
overtaken with fever, and was being cared for by these kind-hearted
people.
Other calls were made—this visiting by boat recalls Venice—but the end
of our voyage was the plantation of Simonette Le Blanc, a sturdy old
man, a sort of patriarch in this region, the centre of a very large
family of sons, daughters, and grandchildren. The residence, a rambling
story-and-a-half house, grown by accretions as more room was needed,
calls for no comment. It was all very plain, and contained no books,
nor any adornments except some family photographs, the poor work of a
travelling artist. But in front, on the bayou, Mr. Le Blanc had erected
a grand ballroom, which gave an air of distinction to the place. This
hall, which had benches along the wail, and at one end a high dais for
the fiddlers, and a little counter where the gombo filé (the common
refreshment) is served, had an air of gayety by reason of engravings
cut from the illustrated papers, and was shown with some pride. Here
neighborhood dances take place once in two weeks, and a grand ball was
to come off on Easter-Sunday night, to which we were urgently invited to
come.
Simonette Le Blanc, with several of his sons, had returned at midnight
from an expedition to Vermilion Bay, where they had been camping for
a couple of weeks, fishing and taking oysters. Working the schooner
through the bayou at night had been fatiguing, and then there was
supper, and all the news of the fortnight to be talked over, so that it
was four o’clock before the house was at rest, but neither the hale old
man nor his stalwart sons seemed the worse for the adventure. Such trips
are not uncommon, for these people seem to have leisure for enjoyment,
and vary the toil of the plantation with the pleasures of fishing
and lazy navigation. But to the women and the home-stayers this was
evidently an event. The men had been to the outer world, and brought
back with them the gossip of the bayous and the simple incidents of the
camping life on the coast. “There was a great deal to talk over that had
happened in a fortnight,” said Simonette—he and one of his sons spoke
English. I do not imagine that the talk was about politics, or any of
the events that seem important in other portions of the United States,
only the faintest echoes of which ever reach this secluded place. This
is a purely domestic and patriarchal community, where there are no books
to bring in agitating doubts, and few newspapers to disquiet the nerves.
The only matter of politics broached was in regard to an appropriation
by Congress to improve a cut-off between two bayous. So far as I could
learn, the most intelligent of these people had no other interest in
or concern about the Government. There is a neighborhood school where
English is taught, but no church nearer than Abbeville, six miles away.
I should not describe the population as fanatically religious, nor
a churchgoing one except on special clays. But by all accounts it is
moral, orderly, sociable, fond of dancing, thrifty, and conservative.
The Acadians are fond of their homes. It is not the fashion for the
young people to go away to better their condition. Few young men have
ever been as far from home as New Orleans; they marry young, and settle
down near the homestead. Mr. Le Blanc has a colony of his descendants
about him, within hail from his door. It must be large, and his race
must be prolific, judging by the number of small children who gathered
at the homestead to have a sly peep at the strangers. They took
small interest in the war, and it had few attractions for them. The
conscription carried away many of their young men, but I am told they
did not make very good soldiers, not because they were not stalwart and
brave, but because they were so intolerably homesick that they deserted
whenever they had a chance. The men whom we saw were most of them fine
athletic fellows, with honest, dark, sun-browned faces; some of the
children were very pretty, but the women usually showed the effects of
isolation and toil, and had the common plainness of French peasants.
They are a self-supporting community, raise their own cotton, corn, and
sugar, and for the most part manufacture their own clothes and
articles of household use. Some of the cotton jeans, striped with blue,
indigo-dyed, made into garments for men and women, and the blankets,
plain yellow (from the native nankeen cotton), curiously clouded, are
very pretty and serviceable. Further than that their habits of living
are simple, and their ways primitive, I saw few eccentricities. The
peculiarity of this community is in its freedom from all the hurry and
worry and information of our modern life. I have read that the gallants
train their little horses to prance and curvet and rear and fidget
about, and that these are called “courtin’ horses,” and are used when
a young man goes courting, to impress his mistress with his manly
horsemanship. I have seen these horses perform under the saddle, but I
was not so fortunate as to see any courting going on.
In their given as well as their family names these people are classical
and peculiar. I heard, of men, the names L’Odias, Peigneur, Niolas,
Elias, Homère, Lemaire, and of women, Emilite, Ségoura, Antoinette,
Clarise, Elia.
We were very hospitably entertained by the Le Blancs. On our arrival
tiny cups of black coffee were handed round, and later a drink of
syrup and water, which some of the party sipped with a sickly smile of
enjoyment. Before dinner we walked up to the bridge over the bayou
on the road leading to Abbeville, where there is a little cluster of
houses, a small country store, and a closed drug-shop—the owner of which
had put up his shutters and gone to a more unhealthy region. Here is a
fine grove of oaks, and from the bridge we had in view a grand sweep of
prairie, with trees, single and in masses, which made with the winding
silvery stream a very pleasing picture. We sat down to a dinner—the
women waiting on the table—of gombo file, fried oysters, eggs,
sweet-potatoes (the delicious saccharine, sticky sort), with syrup out
of a bottle served in little saucers, and afterwards black coffee. We
were sincerely welcome to whatever the house contained, and when we
departed the whole family, and indeed all the neighborhood, accompanied
us to our boats, and we went away down the stream with a chorus of
adieus and good wishes.
We were watching for a hail from the Thibodeaux. The doors and shutters
were closed, and the mansion seemed blank and forgetful. But as we
came opposite the landing, there stood Andonia, faithful, waving her
handkerchief. Ah me!
We went home gayly and more swiftly, current and tide with us, though a
little pensive, perhaps, with too much pleasure and the sunset effects
on the wide marshes through which we voyaged. Cattle wander at will
over these marshes, and are often stalled and lost. We saw some pitiful
sights. The cattle venturing too near the boggy edge to drink become
inextricably involved. We passed an ox sunken to his back, and dead; a
cow frantically struggling in the mire, almost exhausted, and a cow and
calf, the mother dead, the calf moaning beside her. On a cattle lookout
near by sat three black buzzards surveying the prospect with hungry
eyes.
When we landed and climbed the hill, and from the rose-embowered veranda
looked back over the strange land we had sailed through, away to Bayou
Tigre, where the red sun was setting, we felt that we had been in a
country that is not of this world.
VI.—THE SOUTH REVISITED, IN 1887.
In speaking again of the South in Harper’s Monthly, after an interval of
about two years, and as before at the request of the editor, I said,
I shrink a good deal from the appearance of forwardness which a second
paper may seem to give to observations which have the single purpose of
contributing my mite towards making the present spirit of the
Southern people, their progress in industries and in education, their
aspirations, better known. On the other hand, I have no desire to escape
the imputation of a warm interest in the South, and of a belief that its
development and prosperity are essential to the greatness and glory of
the nation. Indeed, no one can go through the South, with his eyes open,
without having his patriotic fervor quickened and broadened, and without
increased pride in the republic.
We are one people. Different traditions, different education or the lack
of it, the demoralizing curse of slavery, different prejudices, made
us look at life from irreconcilable points of view; but the prominent
common feature, after all, is our Americanism. In any assembly of
gentlemen from the two sections the resemblances are greater than the
differences. A score of times I have heard it said, “We look alike, talk
alike, feel alike; how strange it is we should have fought!” Personal
contact always tends to remove prejudices, and to bring into prominence
the national feeling, the race feeling, the human nature common to all
of us.
I wish to give as succinctly as I can the general impressions of a
recent six weeks’ tour, made by a company of artists and writers, which
became known as the “Harper party,” through a considerable portion
of the South, including the cities of Lynchburg, Richmond, Danville,
Atlanta, Augusta (with a brief call at Charleston and Columbia, for
it was not intended to take in the eastern seaboard on this trip),
Knoxville, Chattanooga, South Pittsburg, Nashville, Birmingham,
Montgomery, Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Vicksburg,
Memphis, Louisville. Points of great interest were necessarily omitted
in a tour which could only include representatives of the industrial and
educational development of the New South. Naturally we were thrown more
with business men and with educators than with others; that is, with
those who are actually making the New South; but we saw something of
social life, something of the homes and mode of living of every class,
and we had abundant opportunities of conversation with whites and blacks
of every social grade and political affinity. The Southern people
were anxious to show us what they were doing, and they expressed their
sentiments with entire frankness; if we were misled, it is our own
fault. It must be noted, however, in estimating the value of our
observations, that they were mainly made in cities and large villages,
and little in the country districts.
Inquiries in the South as to the feeling of the North show that there
is still left some misapprehension of the spirit in which the North sent
out its armies, though it is beginning to be widely understood that the
North was not animated by hatred of the South, but by intense love of
the Union. On the other hand, I have no doubt there still lingers in the
North a little misapprehension of the present feeling of the Southern
people about the Union. It arises from a confusion of two facts which it
is best to speak of plainly. Everybody knows that the South is heartily
glad that slavery is gone, and that a new era of freedom has set in.
Everybody who knows the South at all is aware that any idea of any
renewal of the strife, now or at any time, is nowhere entertained, even
as a speculation, and that to the women especially, who are said to
be first in war, last in peace, and first in the hearts of their
countrymen, the idea of war is a subject of utter loathing. The two
facts to which I refer are the loyalty of the Southern whites to the
Union, and their determination to rule in domestic affairs. Naturally
there are here and there soreness and some bitterness over personal loss
and ruin, life-long grief, maybe, over lost illusions—the observer
who remembers what human nature is wonders that so little of this is
left—but the great fact is that the South is politically loyal to the
Union of the States, that the sentiment for its symbol is growing into a
deep reality which would flame out in passion under any foreign insult,
and that nationality, pride in the republic, is everywhere strong
and prominent. It is hardly necessary to say this, but it needs to be
emphasized when the other fact is dwelt on, namely, the denial of free
suffrage to the colored man. These two things are confused, and this
confusion is the source of much political misunderstanding. Often when
a Southern election “outrage” is telegraphed, when intimidation or fraud
is revealed, it is said in print, “So that is Southern loyalty!” In
short, the political treatment of the negro is taken to be a sign of
surviving war feeling, if not of a renewed purpose of rebellion. In this
year of grace 1887 the two things have no isolation to each other. It
would be as true to say that election frauds and violence to individuals
and on the ballot-box in Cincinnati are signs of hatred of the Union and
of Union men, as that a suppressed negro vote at the South, by adroit
management or otherwise, is indication of remaining hostility to the
Union. In the South it is sometimes due to the same depraved party
spirit that causes frauds in the North—the determination of a party to
get or keep the upper-hand at all hazards; but it is, in its origin and
generally, simply the result of the resolution of the majority of the
brains and property of the South to govern the cities and the States,
and in the Southern mind this is perfectly consistent with entire
allegiance to the Government. I could name men who were abettors of
what is called the “shotgun policy” whose national patriotism is
beyond question, and who are warm promoters of negro education and the
improvement of the condition of the colored people.
We might as well go to the bottom of this state of things, and look it
squarely in the face. Under reconstruction, sometimes owing to a
tardy acceptance of the new conditions by the ruling class, the State
governments and the municipalities fell under the control of ignorant
colored people, guided by unscrupulous white adventurers. States and
cities were prostrate under the heel of ignorance and fraud, crushed
with taxes, and no improvements to show for them. It was ruin on the way
to universal bankruptcy. The regaining of power by the intelligent and
the property owners was a question of civilization. The situation was
intolerable. There is no Northern community that would have submitted
to it; if it could not have been changed by legal process, it would have
been upset by revolution, as it was at the South. Recognizing as we
must the existence of race prejudice and pride, it was nevertheless a
struggle for existence. The methods resorted to were often violent, and
being sweeping, carried injustice. To be a Republican, in the eyes of
those smarting under carpet-bag government and the rule of the ignorant
lately enfranchised, was to be identified with the detested carpetbag
government and with negro rule. The Southern Unionist and the Northern
emigrant, who justly regarded the name Republican as the proudest they
could bear, identified as it was with the preservation of the Union and
the national credit, could not show their Republican principles at the
polls without personal danger in the country and social ostracism in
the cities. Social ostracism on account of politics even outran social
ostracism on account of participation in the education of the negroes.
The very men who would say, “I respect a man who fought for the Union
more than a Northern Copperhead, and if I had lived North, no doubt I
should have gone with my section,” would at the same time say, or think,
“But you cannot be a Republican down here now, for to be that is to
identify yourself with the party here that is hostile to everything in
life that is dear to us.” This feeling was intensified by the memories
of the war, but it was in a measure distinct from the war feeling,
and it lived on when the latter grew weak, and it still survives in
communities perfectly loyal to the Union, glad that slavery is ended,
and sincerely desirous of the establishment and improvement of public
education for colored and white alike.
Any tampering with the freedom of the ballot-box in a republic, no
matter what the provocation, is dangerous; the methods used to regain
white ascendancy were speedily adopted for purely party purposes and
factional purposes; the chicanery, even the violence, employed to render
powerless the negro and “carpetbag” vote were freely used by partisans
in local elections against each other, and in time became means of
preserving party and ring ascendancy. Thoughtful men South as well as
North recognize the vital danger to popular government if voting and the
ballot-box are not sacredly protected. In a recent election in Texas, in
a district where, I am told, the majority of the inhabitants are white,
and the majority of the whites are Republicans, and the majority of
the colored voters voted the Republican ticket, and greatly the larger
proportion of the wealth and business of the district are in Republican
hands, there was an election row; ballot-boxes were destroyed in several
precincts, persons killed on both sides, and leading Republicans driven
out of the State. This is barbarism. If the case is substantiated as
stated, that in the district it was not a question of race ascendancy,
but of party ascendancy, no fair-minded man in the Sooth can do
otherwise than condemn it, for under such conditions not only is a
republican form of government impossible, but development and prosperity
are impossible.
For this reason, and because separation of voters on class lines is
always a peril, it is my decided impression that throughout the South,
though not by everybody, a breaking up of the solidarity of the South
would be welcome; that is to say, a breaking up of both the negro and
the white vote, and the reforming upon lines of national and economic
policy, as in the old days of Whig and Democrat, and liberty of free
action in all local affairs, without regard to color or previous party
relations. There are politicians who would preserve a solid South, or
as a counterpart a solid North, for party purposes. But the sense of the
country, the perception of business men North and South, is that this
condition of politics interferes with the free play of industrial
development, with emigration, investment of capital, and with that
untrammelled agitation and movement in society which are the life of
prosperous States.
Let us come a little closer to the subject, dealing altogether with
facts, and not with opinions. The Republicans of the North protest
against the injustice of an increased power in the Lower House and in
the Electoral College based upon a vote which is not represented. It is
a valid protest in law; there is no answer to it. What is the reply to
it? The substance of hundreds of replies to it is that “we dare not
let go so long as the negroes all vote together, regardless of local
considerations or any economic problems whatever; we are in danger of a
return to a rule of ignorance that was intolerable, and as long as you
wave the bloody shirt at the North, which means to us a return to that
rule, the South will be solid.” The remark made by one man of political
prominence was perhaps typical: “The waving of the bloody shirt suits me
exactly as a political game; we should have hard work to keep our State
Democratic if you did not wave it.” So the case stands. The Republican
party will always insist on freedom, not only of political opinion, but
of action, in every part of the Union; and the South will keep “solid”
so long as it fears, or so long as politicians can persuade it to fear,
the return of the late disastrous domination. And recognizing this fact,
and speaking in the interest of no party, but only in that of better
understanding and of the prosperity of the whole country, I cannot doubt
that the way out of most of our complications is in letting the past
drop absolutely, and addressing ourselves with sympathy and good-will
all around to the great economical problems and national issues. And I
believe that in this way also lies the speediest and most permanent good
to the colored as well as the white population of the South.
There has been a great change in the aspect of the South and in its
sentiment within two years; or perhaps it would be more correct to say
that the change maturing for fifteen years is more apparent in a period
of comparative rest from race or sectional agitation. The educational
development is not more marvellous than the industrial, and both are
unparalleled in history. Let us begin by an illustration.