IMPRESSIONS OF ALABAMA IN 1846[26]
The trip of Lafayette through this country in the twenties was more or
less spectacular, and the places he visited are to-day pointed out as
historic, yet only twenty years later Lyell, whose name will go down
the ages linked with Goethe, Lamarck, and Darwin, covered much the
same ground, and it is only in scientific works that one is reminded
of the fact. In recent reading, after meeting with several references
to his stay in Alabama, I became interested, and it was with intense
delight that I was carried back and saw our own section through the
eyes of that wonderful observer and thinker. All awe of Charles Lyell,
scientist and arch-destroyer of the anthropocentric idea which for so
many centuries fettered the world of thought, was at once dispelled,
for there was that in his charming geniality that makes the “whole
world kin”--even a Charles Lyell and the pine-woods squatter, whose
hospitality he often accepted when on geologic excursions.
Lyell made two trips to the United States--the first in 1841-42, which
furnished material for his _Travels in North America_. He came as far
south as Savannah. His _Travels in the United States_ is the record of
his second visit, when Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana
formed a part of his itinerary. Aside from the geologic importance of
these two works, there could scarcely be a more faithful portrayal
of American manners, customs, and peculiarities. They were largely
instrumental in ameliorating British animosity by giving the English a
better and kindlier understanding of Americans. At the time of their
publication, they naturally found in this country a circulation only
among the few, and are now rare books. His observations on the social
conditions that made the South unique and that have been obliterated
during the lapse of a half century are deeply interesting to the
student of to-day.
[Illustration: Kazoola.]
On January 15, 1846, we find Lyell and his wife entering Macon,
Georgia, by train. His eye was immediately attracted by “a wooden
edifice of very peculiar structure and picturesque form, crowning one
of the hills.” Learning that it was a blockhouse that had been in real
service as a fort against Indians only twenty-five years before, when
this frontier knew not the white man’s habitat, it was with a mixed
feeling of amusement and incongruity that he received the information
that a conspicuous building nearby was a “female seminary, lately
established by the Methodists, where all young ladies take degrees.”
From Macon to Columbus, Georgia, he had his first experience in a
Southern stage-coach which, while novel, must have proved far from
comfortable, for he did not forget to record the jolts caused by
miserable roads and reckless driving. Leaving Columbus he was soon
in the undulating pine-lands of Alabama, the monotony of which was
frequently broken by swamps of palmetto and magnolia. The spirit of
the pines must have sung to him, too, for the “sound of the wind in
the boughs of the long-leaved pine” always reminded him of the “waves
breaking on a distant shore, and it was agreeable to hear it swelling
gradually, then dying away as the breeze rose and fell.” Near Chehaw,
the stage stopped at a log cabin in the woods for the passengers to
dine. It did not look promising, and Lyell was ready to “put up with
bad fare,” but on entering found on the table “a wild turkey roasted,
venison steaks, and a partridge-pie, all the product of the neighboring
forest.” Noticing the stumps of many pines, he counted the rings of
annual growth to ascertain how long it would take to replace such a
forest. The oldest tree that he examined measured four feet in diameter
at three feet above the base, and showed three hundred and twenty
rings. He also found the ravines that are common throughout Southern
Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to be of recent formation and caused
by deforestation, showing the tertiary regions and also part of the
cretaceous strata which have “always been as destructible as now” to
have been from the beginning covered with dense forests. Where the
trees have been cut, the sun’s heat on the clay often causes cracks,
and when the rains come in semi-tropical torrents these deepen until
such ravines as are familiar to Mobilians about Spring Hill are the
result--only they are of more rapid growth.
At Chehaw they took train for Montgomery. Even at that early time,
and in a region “where the schoolmaster has not been much abroad,” we
meet the prototype of the newsboy of to-day; Lyell’s picture of him
unconcernedly jumping on and off moving trains is the “butcher-boy” we
all know. One boy was calling out in the midst of a pine-barren, “a
novel by Paul de Kock--the Bulwer of France--all the go!--more popular
than the Wandering Jew.” Lyell, having bought newspapers promiscuously
throughout the many States he visited, found our press to be in every
way on an equal with that of Great Britain. A large portion of the
papers was “devoted to literary extracts, to novels, travels, tales,
and often more serious subjects.”
Reaching Montgomery, he remained there a few days examining the
geologic formations and remains of that region. It was his intention
to go directly to Tuscaloosa, only one hundred miles distant by land,
but every one advised him that he would at that season save both time
and money by taking an eight hundred mile trip down the Alabama River
by boat to Mobile, and up again on the Tombigbee. The _Amaranth_ was
scheduled to leave at ten o’clock, January 28, 1846. Accustomed to
Northern punctuality, they went down on time, and learned with some
annoyance that she might not sail until the next day. It was his first
sight of our “magnificent Southern river boats.” He and Mrs. Lyell made
up their minds to look on it as “their inn and read and write there”
and were soon enjoying “its luxuries which Southern manners and a hot
climate require.” He describes very fully the peculiar construction
which adapts the boats to rivers which rise and fall rapidly. When
recording that some of them could float in two feet of water, he adds,
“but they cannot quite realize the boast of a western captain, that he
could sail wherever it was damp.”
It would be too much to write in detail of all the things which
interested Lyell, for nothing seems to have escaped him. At each
landing, however, he collected many cretaceous fossils, so concluded
to stop a few days at Claiborne, whose bluff had long been known to
geologists as “classic ground,” having already yielded four hundred
species of tertiary shells, belonging to the Eocene formation. He
notes, too, the finding of a fossil zeuglodon in the same cliff by
Mr. Hale of Mobile. “The morning after our arrival, January 29th, the
thermometer stood at eighty degrees F. in the shade, and the air was
as balmy as an English summer day. Before the house stood a row of
Pride-of-India trees ladened with bunches of yellow berries. I had
often been told by the negroes that the American robin ‘got drunk’ on
this fruit, and we now had an opportunity of witnessing its narcotic
properties; for we saw some children playing with one of these birds
before the house, having caught it after it had eaten freely of these
berries. My wife, seeing that the robin was in no small danger of
perishing, bought it of the children for some sugar-plums, and it
soon revived in our room, and flew out of the window. In the evening
we enjoyed a sight of one of those glorious sunsets, the beauty of
which in these latitudes is so striking, when the clouds and sky are
lighted up with streaks of brilliant yellow, red, and green, which, if
a painter should represent faithfully, might seem as exaggerated and
gaudy as the colors of an American forest in autumn when compared with
European woods.”
He crossed the river to visit the Blounts at Woodlawn. Leaving his wife
with Mrs. Blount, he went with Mr. Blount by carriage to Clarksville,
where the enormous fossil zeuglodons had been found. “The district we
passed through was situated in the fork of the Alabama and Tombeckbee
rivers, where the aboriginal forest was only broken here and there by a
few clearings. At Macon my attention was forcibly called to the newness
of things by my friend’s pointing out to me the ground where there had
been a bloody fight with the Choctaws and Chickasaws, and how the clerk
of the Circuit Court was the last survivor of those who had won the
battle.” The Indian paths, still tractable through the forests near
Tuscaloosa, awakened the same feeling. On his return he and his wife
crossed to Claiborne to await the Mobile steamer, and he expresses his
pleasure at finding it, the _Amaranth_, commanded by his “old friend
Captain Bragdon.”
Reaching Mobile, the Tuscaloosa steamer was ready to start, so they
were soon northward bound on the Tombeckbee, then so high “that the
trees of both banks seemed to be growing in a lake.” Arriving at
Tuscaloosa where there was a “flourishing college” he was met by Mr.
Brumley, the professor of chemistry who at once conducted him to the
outlying coal-fields. He found the coal, even of the strata exposed to
the surface to be “excellent quality and highly bituminous.” Here there
is a bit of justification in Huxley’s criticism of Lyell’s aversion
“to look beyond the veil of stratified rocks,” for while he notes
with seeming satisfaction the imprints of the fossil plants in the
black shale to be exactly the same as those existing in the “ancient
coal-measures of Europe and America,” there is no foreshadowing of
the explanation given by recent geology and astronomy, that even as
late as the early carboniferous era, there were no seasons, the earth
being wrapped in a uniform, vaporous warmth greater than the heat now
existing in the tropics; a heat which came not from the sun, but the
earth itself. One proof lies in the fact that irrespective of latitude,
the same organic remains are found--their nearest of kin of to-day
living only in the tropics; also that there are no rings of annual
growth in carboniferous tree-life.
Lyell and Professor Brumley extending their wanderings, “entered about
thirty-three miles northeast of Tuscaloosa a region called Rooke’s
Valley, where rich beds of iron-stone and lime-stone bid fair, by
their proximity to the coal, to become one day a source of great
mineral wealth.” He was not only indebted to Professor Brumley for
much scientific information, but also to Mr. Bernard, the teacher of
astronomy, who showed him some “double stars and constellations not
visible in England,”--the telescope a recent acquisition from London.
Mrs. Lyell also made many friends in Tuscaloosa, among them two ladies
who were reading as a “pastime Goethe and Schiller in the original.”
From Tuscaloosa to Mobile Lyell had splendid chances of studying the
geological character of the country, and he frequently expresses
appreciation of the courtesy and assistance always given him throughout
Alabama, contrasting it with the “ignorant wonder” the fossil hunter
inspires in unfrequented districts of England, France, and Italy.
He was anxious to examine the calcareous bluff at St. Stephen’s. Night
fell before they reached it, but Captain Lavargy stopped, said he could
take on wood, gave him a boat and two negroes bearing pine torches,
thus making it possible for him to thoroughly explore the whole cliff
and find many fossils.
[Illustration: Zooma, the Last Tarkbar.]
Mobile again claims him on February 21, 1846, and flaunts her spring
forwardness by touches of green on the cypress and cotton trees, and
scarlet seed-vessels on the rubra. “In the gardens there were jonquils
and snow-drops in flower, and for the first time, we saw that beautiful
evergreen, the yellow-jessamine, in full bloom, trailed along the wall
of Dr. Hamilton’s house.” Anxious for his first sight of the Gulf of
Mexico, he drove with Dr. Hamilton, the Presbyterian minister, to the
light-house (situated on Choctaw Point and washed away by the storm
of 1852), and, from the tower had a “splendid view of the city to
the North, and to the South the noble bay of Mobile, fourteen miles
across.” He then went to the bay which lay “smooth and unruffled,
the woods coming down everywhere to its edge.” He noted the immense
amount of driftwood, dug up bivalve-shelled gnathodons that live in our
mud-banks, and that will in future ages indicate the position of our
rivers. He found Mobile to be built upon a deposit of these shells,
the stratification of which proved that it had been thrown up by the
waves. Our delta, in the soft mud of which cattle are frequently mired
and which receives carcasses washed down by the rivers and thrown up
by the sea, exemplifies the formation of such regions as the Fayûm of
Egypt--the elephant’s ancestral home--now covered by desert sands, but
which is each day yielding priceless treasure to the paleontologist.
On February 23d, the _James L. Day_, bound for New Orleans, “sailed out
of the beautiful bay of Mobile in the evening,” carrying aboard Charles
Lyell and his wife.
At the time of Lyell’s visit, Alabama lay struggling in the grasp of
that spirit of unrest which from the most remote antiquity as often
obsessed people of the Aryan race, calling them ever westwards towards
the setting sun. Everywhere he met “movers”--Texas masking as the
Promised Land, beckoning to the cultured as to the ignorant. Adventure
prompted many, others knew not why they were going, some were “eaten
out by their negroes,” and one informant said: “If we remain here, we
are reduced to the alternative of high taxes to pay the interest of
money so improvidently borrowed from England, or to suffer the disgrace
of repudiation, which would be doubly shameful, because the money was
received in hard cash, and lent out, often rashly by the State to
farmers for agricultural improvements. Besides, all the expenses of the
Government were in reality defrayed during several years by borrowed
money and the burthen of the debt thrown on posterity. The facility
with which your English capitalists, in 1821, lent their cash to a
State from which the Indians were not yet expelled without reflecting
on the migratory nature of the white population is astonishing. The
planters, who got the grants of your money and spent it, have nearly
all of them moved off and settled beyond the Mississippi.” But Lyell
had faith in Alabama’s natural resources, which he felt were so great
that only a moderate amount of economy would be necessary to surmount
all embarrassments.
Texas and the probability of war with England over the Oregon Question
were topics discussed on every hand. Lyell would hear the English
adversely criticized and such boasts as “we have whipped them twice,
and should whip them a third time,” but where his nationality was
known, he says, “never once were any speeches, uncourteous in their
tone towards my country, uttered in my hearing.”
On his geologizing trips, which would have oftentimes been hard on
any one not riding his own hobby, he was forced to stop where night
overtook him, so that even the habits of the “crackers” became familiar
to him. “In many houses I hesitated to ask for water or towels, for
fear of giving offense ... nor could I venture to ask any one to rub a
thick coat of mud off my trousers, lest I should be thought to reflect
on members of the family, who had no idea of indulging in such luxuries
themselves. I felt the want of a private bed-room, but very soon came
to regard it as a privilege to be allowed even a bed to myself.”
In his wanderings, he also met “clay-eaters”[27]--a people curious
in their cravings for certain kinds of clay. Their peculiar green
complexion indicating anemia, which usually terminates in dropsy, was
formerly considered a sequence to the gratification of this abnormal
appetite, but is now supposed to be a result of a pathogenic parasite
found in the small intestine.[28] The type is still a most familiar one
in the hill-country just west of Mobile.
When dubious about safety from highwaymen, Lyell was assured that in
the South this class was unknown; the working class being the slave
class there was no poor made desperate by want. And that the Texas wars
had relieved the different communities of their dare-devil spirits.
Lyell was often amused and astonished at the Southerner’s loyal support
of an ultra-Democratic notion of white equality, which in practice must
have been thoroughly uncongenial to all classes concerned. He visited
a lawyer at his country home--the family a cultivated one, used to the
best society of a large city--but the host regarded it as an obligation
to invite Lyell’s driver, who was half Indian, to sit down to the table
with them. Perhaps a consciousness that this boasted equality was
more or less fictitious may have been responsible for the vindictive
envy which flourished in the midst of this “aristocratic democracy.”
A jealousy so intense that a gentleman growing rich and settling in
a quiet part of the country was apt to have his fences pulled down,
cattle turned out to roam, and other indignities perpetrated. Many
anecdotes of the genuineness and prevalence of this feeling were told
to Lyell. The daughter of a member of the Legislature visited Mobile,
had a dress made with flounces according to the latest fashion, and
on her return home wore it to a ball. At the next election her father
was defeated, and on asking a former supporter the cause received the
reply, “Do you think they would vote for you, after your daughter came
to the ball in them fixings?”
Lyell found drunkenness very common, yet heard many speak of the great
temperance reform, it being no longer considered an insult to refuse
to drink with one’s host. While he saw no cruelty to slaves, he felt
that when drunkenness was so general among the owners their power might
often be an abusive one. He states that it was not the object of his
visit to study slavery, but his interesting observations would fill a
chapter and are characterized by a keenness and fairness which make
them very valuable. The stories told him by disgruntled and misinformed
Northerners had prepared him for blood-curdling atrocities, but
throughout Alabama he saw the negro in many phases: in his churches,
about his pleasures, and at his occupations that ranged from farmhand
to mechanic; in the slave-market, as the indulged domestic, and as
the faithful and cheerful follower of his master into new and unknown
regions; and on no occasion had he reason to suspect maltreatment.
When speaking to a Northern man of his favorable impressions, he was
told that “great pains had been taken by the planters to conceal the
true state of things”--that he had been “propitiated by hospitable
attentions.” Lyell found his own experience corroborated in a
_Tradesman’s Journal_, written by William Thompson, a Scotch weaver,
who supported himself by his trade as he journeyed through the South.
After seeing what contact with the whites had done for the negro, Lyell
entertained very sanguine hopes of the race’s intellectual and moral
possibilities, and was impatient of what seemed to him unjust laws
which restricted the black educationally and politically. His two-sided
attitude is a bit disarming, but is explained by himself. “We are often
thrown into opposite states of mind and feeling, according as the
interest of the white or negro happens, for the moment, to claim our
sympathy.” But the following words embody an unbiased and a beautiful
tribute to the influence of the Southerners: “In spite of prejudice
and fear, and in defiance of stringent laws enacted against education,
three million of a more enlightened and progressive race are brought
into contact with an equal number of laborers lately in a savage state,
and taken from a continent where the natives have proved themselves,
for many thousand years, to be singularly unprogressive. Already their
taskmasters have taught them to speak, with more or less accuracy,
one of the noblest of languages, to shake off many old superstitions,
to acquire higher ideals of morality, and habits of neatness and
cleanliness, and have converted thousands of them to Christianity. Many
they have emancipated, and the rest are gradually approaching to the
condition of the ancient serfs of Europe half a century or more before
their bondage died out.
“All this has been done at an enormous sacrifice of time and money;
an expense, indeed, which all the Governments of Europe and all the
Christian missionaries, whether Romanist or Protestant, could never
have effected in five centuries. Even in the few States which I have
already visited since I crossed the Potomac, several hundred thousand
whites of all ages, among whom the children are playing by no means
the least effective part, are devoting themselves with greater or less
activity to these involuntary educational exertions.”
THE END
[1] _Reprinted from “South Atlantic Quarterly,” July, 1908._
[2] Smith’s _Historie of Virginia_.
[3] “Their features are recorded by their ancient enemies, never by
themselves, Egyptian kings, who from earliest times of antiquity,
came often into collision with the blacks, and had them figured as
defeated enemies, as prisoners of war, and as subject nations bringing
tribute. Their grotesque features, so much differing from the Egyptian
type, made them a favorite subject for sculptural supports of thrones,
chairs, vases, etc.; or painted under the soles of sandals, of which
instances abound in museums as well as in the larger works on Egypt....
The other artistical nations of antiquity knew little of the negro
race. They did not come before Solomon’s epoch into immediate and
constant contact with it. We see soon after, however, a negro in an
Assyrian battle scene of the time of Sargon, at Korsabad. He might
have been exported from Memphis by Phœnician slave-dealers to Asia,
where he fell fighting for his master against the Assyrians.... On the
remarkable relief of the tomb of Darius Hystaspes, at Persepolis, we
have the negro as a representative of Africa. The Greeks seldom drew
the blacks; still, on beautiful vases of the British Museum, we meet
with the well known negro features in a battle scene. Another such vase
with the representation of Hercules slaying negroes has been published
by Mecali. Etruscan potters, who liked to draw Oriental types, molded
vases in the shape of a negro head and coupled it sometimes with the
head of white males or females. The British Museum contains several of
these very characteristic utensils.... We possess effigies of negroes
drawn by six different nations of antiquity: Egyptians, Assyrians,
Persians, Greeks, Etruscans and Romans, from about the eighteenth
century B.C. to the first centuries of our era, which all speak for the
unalterable constancy of the negro type such as in our day.”--Nott and
Gliddon’s _Indigenous Races of the Earth_.
[4] Lecky, _Rationalism in Europe_.
[5] Ranke, _History of the Popes_.
[6] Dean Farrar.
[7] Heylyn’s _Cosmographie_, 1657.
[8] “You may observe, by my proclamation, that I offer freedom to
the blacks of all rebels that join me, in consequence of which there
are between two and three hundred already come in, and those I form
into corps as fast as they come in, giving them white officers and
non-commissions in proportion.”--Letter from Lord Dunmore to General
Howe, dated Williamsburg, Va., Nov. 30, 1775.
[9] _Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson._
[10] Jefferson’s observations to Meunier.
[11] Hamilton’s _Colonial Mobile_.
[12] United States Statutes at Large.
[13] “The Reverend Mr. Coffin of New England who is now here soliciting
donations for a college in Green County, in Tennessee, tells me that
when he first determined to engage in this enterprise, he wrote a
paper recommendatory of the enterprise, which he meant to get signed
by clergymen, and a similar one for persons in a civil character,
at the head of which he wished Mr. Adams to put his name, he being
then President, and the application going only for his name and not a
donation. Mr. Adams, after reading the paper and considering, said,
He saw no possibility of continuing the union of the States; that
their dissolution must necessarily take place; that he therefore saw
no propriety in recommending to New England men to promote a literary
institution in the South; that it was in fact giving strength to those
who were to be their enemies; and therefore he would have nothing to do
with it.”--Thomas Jefferson, _The Anas_, Dec. 13, 1803.
[14] United States Statutes at Large.
[15] _North American Review_, February, 1824.
[16] Right of Search, Daniel Webster.
[17] _Journal de Commercio_, Rio, May 26, 1856.
[18] _Mobile Register_, December, 1858.
[19] Heylyn’s _Cosmographie_, 1657.
[20] _Narrative of Kazoola._
[21] The _R. B. Tainey_ was owned by the Meahers, and is described in
advertisements of that time as a “new, elegant, and light-weight summer
packet; Captain Jim Meaher. Side-wheeler, drawing eight inches of water
with elegant and spacious staterooms and large well-ventilated cabins,
carrying one hundred and fifty passengers.” She had been named for
Chief Justice Tainey who had handed down the famous Dred Scott decision.
[22] These meetings probably account for the reports which have been
recurrent that the Tarkars met secretly and practiced barbaric rites.
[23] Charlee too has recently passed away, 1914.
[24] Mount Vernon is some miles beyond Plateau.
[25] When Albiné first came to America she was very fat and refused
to eat except just enough to keep her alive. When she grew to have
confidence in the whites, she confided to Mrs. Foster, “Albiné not eat
when she first come to America, because Albiné know she fat an’ did not
want white people to eat her.”
[26] Reprinted from _South Atlantic Quarterly_, July, 1908.
[27] There is very little literature about this class which is found in
many parts of the world, and even that consists mostly of references to
them by travelers and ethnologists. The fullest account with which I
am familiar is an article by my uncle, the late Frank L. James, Ph.D.,
M.D., “The Geophagi, or Dirt Eaters,” which appeared in the _National
Druggist_, of March, 1900. Microscopic examinations made by him of the
“dirt” used by our Alabama, Georgia, and Carolina geophagians showed
it to be a ferruginous argilla about ten per cent. diatomaceous. The
“dirt eaters” of the various countries do not eat any kind of clay, but
uniformly affect an argillaceous substance, containing more or less
infusorial matter.
[28] Since the first publication of this article, hookworm
investigations and treatment have become common in all infected
districts of the South.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Illustrations Index: “Eko, Budigree, Abaché, Whydah”
changed to “Eko, Budigree, Adaché, Whydah”
Illustrations Index: Description of “Zooma, The Last Tarkbar”
moved to “Map Drawn by Kazoola”
Page 16: “with that bruitishness which” changed to
“with that brutishness which”
Page 35: “Whereever there was a priest” changed to
“Wherever there was a priest”
Page 69: “drop from us at the table” changed to
“drop from us at the table.”
Page 75: “prowess to the Turkish Janizaries” changed to
“prowess to the Turkish Janizaries.”
Page 123: “root of one interwined with” changed to
“root of one intertwined with”
Page 124: “Six of Abache’s upper front” changed to
“Six of Abaché’s upper front”