into the middle of the river, we found ourselves in the way of a breeze
which enabled us to sit outside, and enjoy the luxury of vision to the
utmost. The sunny and shadowy hills, advancing and retiring, ribbed and
crested with belts and clumps of gigantic beech; the rich bottoms always
answering on the one shore to the group of hills on the other, a perfect
level, smooth, rich, and green, with little settlements sprinkled over
it; the shady creeks, very frequent between the hills, with sometimes a
boat and figures under the trees which meet over it; these were the
spectacles which succeeded each other before our untiring eyes.
We touched at a number of small places on the banks to put out and take
in passengers. I believe we were almost as impatient as the good captain
to get to Richmond, where his sick brother was lying, that the family
might be out of suspense about his fate. A letter was put into the
captain's hand from the shore which did not tend to raise his spirits.
It told him of the death, by cholera, of a lady whom he had just brought
up the river. The captain's brother, however, was better. We were all
committed to the charge of the clerk of the boat; and as we put out into
the stream again, we saw the captain helping his mother up the hill, and
looking a changed man within a few minutes!
The moral plagues consequent on pestilence are an old subject, but one
ever new to the spectator. The selfishness of survivers, the brutality
of the well to the sick in a time of plague, have been held up to the
detestation of the untried from the days of Defoe downward at least; but
it seems as if the full horror of such a paroxysm of society had been
left to be exhibited in America. Not that the ravages of the cholera
were or could be fiercer there than in the plague-seasons of the Old
World; but that, in a country so much more Christianized in a spirit of
helpfulness than any other, examples of selfish desertion show a more
ghastly aspect than elsewhere. The disease was met there, and its
inflictions sustained in the noblest spirit of charity, courage, and
wisdom. A thousand-and-one tales might be told of the devotion of the
clergy to their flocks, of masters to their slaves, of physicians to the
poor, of neighbours to each other; but, in fearful contrast to these,
stood out some of the gloomy facts which belong to such a time. In the
West the disease was particularly fatal, and the panic was not stilled
when I was there, two years after the most destructive season. In the
vicinity of Lexington, Kentucky, I saw a large white house, prettily
placed, and was told of the dismal end of its late occupier, a lady who
was beloved above everybody in the neighbourhood, and who, on account of
her benevolent deeds, would have been previously supposed the last
person likely to want for solace on her dying bed. In this house lived
Mrs. J., with her sister, Miss A. Miss A. died of cholera at nine in the
evening, and was buried in the garden during the night by the servants.
Mrs. J. was taken ill before the next evening, and there was no female
hand near to tend her. The physician, who knew how much he was wanted in
the town, felt it right to leave her when the case became entirely
hopeless. He told the men who were assisting that she could not survive
the night, and directed them to bury her immediately after her death. As
soon as the breath was out of her body, these men wrapped her in the
sheet on which she was lying, put her into a large box, and dug a hole
in the garden, where they laid her beside her sister. Forty-eight hours
before, the sisters had been apparently in perfect health, and busy
providing aid for their sick neighbours. Thus, and thus soon, were they
huddled into their graves.
From the time of our leaving Richmond the boat went on at good speed. We
ceased to wear round, to take in casks and deals at the beck of
everybody on shore. The dinner was remarkably disagreeable: tough beef,
skinny chickens, gray-looking potatoes, gigantic radishes, sour bread,
and muddy water in dirty tumblers. The only eatable thing on the table
was a saucerful of cranberries, and we had a bottle of claret with us.
It was already certain that we should not reach Cincinnati so as to have
a daylight view of it: our hopes were bounded to not being obliged to
sit down to another meal on board.
The western sky faded while we were watching the Hunter pursuing the
Coquette, two pretty little steamboats that were moving along under the
shadow of the banks. Some time after dark we came in sight of long rows
of yellow lights, with a flaring and smoking furnace here and there,
which seemed to occupy a space of nearly two miles from the wharf where
we at length stopped. I had little idea how beautiful this flaring
region would appear in sunshine.
After waiting some time in the boat for the arrival of a hack, we
proceeded up the steep pavement above the wharf to the Broadway Hotel
and Boarding-house. There we were requested to register our names, and
were then presented with the cards of some of the inhabitants who had
called to inquire for us. We were well and willingly served, and I went
to rest intensely thankful to be once more out of sight of slavery.
The next morning was bright, and I scarcely remember a pleasanter day
during all my travels than this 16th of June. We found ourselves in a
large boarding-house, managed by a singularly zealous and kindly master.
His care of us was highly amusing during the whole time of our stay. His
zeal may be judged of by a circumstance which happened one morning. At
breakfast he appeared heated and confused, and looked as if he had a bad
headache. He requested us to excuse any forgetfulness that we might
observe, and mentioned that he had, by mistake, taken a dangerous dose
of laudanum. We begged he would leave the table, and not trouble himself
about us, and hoped he had immediately taken measures to relieve himself
of the dose. He replied that he had had no time to attend to himself
till a few minutes ago. We found that he had actually put off taking an
emetic till he had gone to market and sent home all the provisions for
the day. He had not got over the consequences of the mistake the next
morning. The ladies at the breakfast-table looked somewhat vulgar; and
it is undeniable that the mustard was spilled, and that the relics of
the meal were left in some disorder by the gentlemen who were most in a
hurry to be off to business. But every one was obliging; and I saw at
that table a better thing than I saw at any other table in the United
States, a lady of colour breakfasting in the midst of us!
I looked out from our parlour window, and perceived that we were in a
wide, well-built street, with broad foot-pavements and handsome houses.
A house was at the moment going up the street; a rather arduous task, as
the ascent was pretty steep. There was an admirable apparatus of levers
and pulleys; and it moved on, almost imperceptibly, for several yards,
before our visiters began to arrive, and I had to give up watching its
march. When the long series of callers came to an end, the strolling
house was out of sight.
The first of our visiters was an English gentleman, who was settled in
business in Cincinnati. He immediately undertook a commission of
inquiry, with which I had been charged from England, about a family of
settlers, and sent me a pile of new books, and tickets for a concert
which was to be held in Mrs. Trollope's bazar the next evening but one.
He was followed by a gentleman of whom much will be told in my next
chapter; and by Dr. Drake, the first physician in the place; and Miss
Beecher, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Beecher, head of Lane Seminary, near
Cincinnati, then on his trial for heresy, and justly confident of
acquittal. Miss Beecher is a lady eminent for learning and talents, and
for her zeal in the cause of education. These were followed by several
merchants, with their ladies, sisters, and daughters. The impression
their visits left on our minds was of high respect for the society of
Cincinnati, if these were, in manners, dress, and conversation, fair
specimens. Dr. Drake and his daughter proposed to call for us for an
afternoon's drive, and take us home to tea with them; a plan to which we
gladly agreed.
After dinner, we first arranged ourselves in a parlour which was larger
and better furnished than the one we first occupied, and then walked
down to the river while waiting for Dr. Drake's carriage. The opposite
Kentucky shore looked rich and beautiful; and the bustle on the river,
covered with every kind of craft; the steamboats being moored six or
more abreast, gave us a highly respectful notion of the commerce of the
place.
Dr. Drake took us a delightful drive, the pleasure of which was much
enhanced by his very interesting conversation. He is a complete and
favourable specimen of a Westerner. He entered Ohio just forty-seven
years before this time, when there were not above a hundred white
persons in the state, and they all French, and when the shores were one
expanse of canebrake, infested by buffalo. He had seen the foundations
of the great city laid; he had watched its growth till he was now able
to point out to the stranger, not only the apparatus for the exportation
of 6,000,000 dollars' worth a year of produce and manufactures, but
things which he values far more: the ten or twelve edifices erected for
the use of the common schools, the new church of St. Paul, the two fine
banking-houses, and the hundred and fifty handsome private dwellings,
all the creations of the year 1835. He points to the periodicals, the
respectable monthlies, and the four daily and six weekly papers of the
city. He looks with a sort of paternal complacency on the 35,000
inhabitants, scarcely one of whom is without the comforts of life, the
means of education, and a bright prospect for the future. Though a true
Westerner, and devoutly believing the _buckeyes_ (natives of Ohio) to be
superior to all others of God's creatures, he hails every accession of
intelligent members to his darling society. He observed to me, with his
calm enthusiasm (the concomitant of a conviction which has grown out of
experience rather than books), on the good effects of emigration on the
posterity of emigrants; and told how, with the same apparent means of
education, they surpass the descendants of natives. They combine the
influences of two countries. Thus believing, he carries a cheerful face
into the homes of his Welsh, Irish, English, German, and Yankee
patients; he bids them welcome, and says, from the bottom of his heart,
that he is glad to see them. His knowledge of the case of the emigrant
enables him to alleviate, more or less, with the power which an honest
and friendly physician carries about with him, an evil which he
considers the worst that attends emigration. He told me that, unless the
head of the emigrant family be timely and judiciously warned, the peace
of the household is broken up by the pining of the wife. The husband
soon finds interests in his new abode; he becomes a citizen, a man of
business, a man of consequence, with brightening prospects; while the
poor wife, surrounded by difficulties or vexed with hardships at home,
provided with no compensation for what she has left behind, pines away,
and wonders that her husband can be so happy when she is so miserable.
When there is an end of congeniality, all is over; and a couple who
would in their own land have gone through life cheerily, hand in hand,
become uneasy yoke-fellows in the midst of a much-improved outward
condition or prospect.
Dr. Drake must be now much older than he looks. He appears vigorous as
ever, running beside his stout black gig-horse in difficult bits of
forest road, head uncovered and coat splashed, like any farmer making
his way to market. His figure is spare and active; his face is
expressive of shrewdness, humour, and kindliness. His conversation is of
a high order, though I dare say it never entered his head that
conversation is ever of any order at all. His sentences take whatever
form fate may determine; but they bear a rich burden of truth hard won
by experience, and are illumined by gleams of philosophy which shine up
from the depths of his own mind. A slight degree of western inflation
amuses the stranger; but there is something so much more loving than
vain in the magniloquence, that it is rather winning than displeasing to
strangers, not to Yankees, who resent it as sectional prejudice, and in
whose presence it might be as well forborne. The following
passage, extracted from an address delivered by Dr. Drake before the
Literary Convention of Kentucky, gives some idea of the spirit of the
man in one of its aspects, though it has none of the pithy character of
his conversation:--
"The relations between the upper and lower Mississippi States,
established by the collective waters of the whole valley, must for ever
continue unchanged. What the towering oak is to our climbing winter
grape, the 'Father of Waters' must ever be to the communities along its
trunk and countless tributary streams; an imperishable support, an
exhaust-less power of union. What is the composition of its lower coasts
and alluvial plains, but the soil of all the upper states and
territories, transported, commingled, and deposited by its waters?
Within her own limits Louisiana has, indeed, the rich mould of ten
sister states, which have thus contributed to the fertility of her
plantations. It might almost be said, that for ages this region has sent
thither a portion of its soil, where, in a milder climate, it might
produce the cotton, oranges, and sugar which, through the same channel,
we receive in exchange for the products of our cornfields, workshops,
and mines; facts which prepare the way, and invite to perpetual union
between the West and South.
"The state of Tennessee, separated from Alabama and Mississippi on the
south and Kentucky on the north by no natural barrier, has its southern
fields overspread with floating cotton, wafted from the first two by
every autumnal breeze; while the shade of its northern woods lies for
half the summer day on the borders of the last. The songs and uproar of
a Kentucky _husking_ are answered from Tennessee; and the midnight
racoon-hunt that follows, beginning in one state, is concluded in the
other. The Cumberland, on whose rocky banks the capital of Tennessee
rises in beauty, begins and terminates in Kentucky; thus bearing on its
bosom at the same moment the products of the two states descending to a
common market. Still farther, the fine river Tennessee drains the
eastern half of that state, dips into Alabama, recrosses the state in
which it arose, and traverses Kentucky to reach the Ohio river; thus
uniting the three into one natural and enduring commercial compact.
"Farther north, the cotton-trees, which fringe the borders of Missouri
and Illinois, throw their images towards each other in the waters of the
Mississippi: the toiling emigrant's axe in the depths of the leafless
woods, and the crash of the falling rail-tree on the frozen earth,
resound equally among the hills of both states; the clouds of smoke from
their burning prairies mingle in the air above, and crimson the setting
sun of Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio.
"The Pecan-tree sheds its fruit at the same moment among the people of
Indiana and Illinois, and the boys of the two states paddle their canoes
and fish together in the Wabash, or hail each other from opposite banks.
Even villages belong equally to Indiana and Ohio, and the children of
the two commonwealths trundle their hoops together in the same street.
"But the Ohio river forms the most interesting boundary among the
republics of the West. For a thousand miles its fertile bottoms are
cultivated by farmers who belong to the different states, while they
visit each other as friends or neighbours. As the schoolboy trips or
loiters along its shores, he greets his playmates across the stream, or
they sport away an idle hour in its summer waters. These are to be among
the future, perhaps the opposing statesmen of the different
commonwealths. When, at low water, we examine the rocks of the channel,
we find them the same on both sides. The plants which grow above drop
their seeds into the common current, which lodges them indiscriminately
on either shore. Thus the very trees and flowers emigrate from one
republic to another. When the bee sends out its swarms, they as often
seek a habitation beyond the stream as in their native woods. Throughout
its whole extent, the hills of Western Virginia and Kentucky cast their
morning shadows on the plains of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri.
The thunder-cloud pours down its showers on different commonwealths; and
the rainbow, resting its extremities on two sister states, presents a
beautiful arch, on which the spirits of peace may pass and repass in
harmony and love.
"Thus connected by nature in the great valley, we must live in the bonds
of companionship or imbrue our hands in each other's blood. We have no
middle destiny. To secure the former to our posterity, we should begin
while society is still tender and pliable. The saplings of the woods, if
intertwined, will adapt themselves to each other and grow together; the
little bird may hang its nest on the twigs of different trees, and the
dewdrop fall successively on leaves which are nourished by distinct
trunks. The tornado strikes harmless on such a bower, for the various
parts sustain each other; but the grown tree, sturdy and set in its way,
will not bend to its fellow, and, when uprooted by the tempest, is
dashed in violence against all within its reach.
"Communities, like forests, grow rigid by time. To be properly trained,
they must be moulded while young. Our duty, then, is quite obvious. All
who have moral power should exert it in concert. The germes of harmony
must be nourished, and the roots of present contrariety or future
discord torn up and cast into the fire. Measures should be taken to
mould a uniform system of manners and customs out of the diversified
elements which are scattered over the West. Literary meetings should be
held in the different states, and occasional conventions in the central
cities of the great valley be made to bring into friendly consultation
our enlightened and zealous teachers, professors, lawyers, physicians,
divines, and men of letters, from its remotest sections. In their
deliberations the literary and moral wants of the various regions might
be made known, and the means of supplying them devised. The whole should
successively lend a helping hand to all the parts on the great subject
of education, from the primary school to the university. Statistical
facts bearing on this absorbing interest should be brought forward and
collected; the systems of common school instruction should be compared,
and the merits of different schoolbooks, foreign and domestic, freely
canvassed. Plans of education, adapted to the natural, commercial, and
social condition of the interior, should be invented; a correspondence
instituted among all our higher seminaries of learning, and an
interchange established of all local publications on the subject of
education. In short, we should foster Western genius, encourage Western
writers, patronise Western publishers, augment the number of Western
readers, and create a Western heart.
"When these great objects shall come seriously to occupy our minds, the
union will be secure, for its centre will be sound, and its attraction
on the surrounding parts irresistible. Then will our state governments
emulate each other in works for the common good; the people of remote
places begin to feel as the members of one family; and our whole
intelligent and virtuous population unite, heart and hand, in one long,
concentrated, untiring effort to raise still higher the social
character, and perpetuate for ever the political harmony of the green
and growing West."
How strange is the feeling to the traveller in wild regions of having
his home associations unexpectedly connected with the scene before him!
Here, in this valley of the Mississippi, to my eye wild and luxuriant in
beauty as I fancy Ceylon or Juan Fernandez, Dr. Drake pointed out to me
two handsome dwellings with gardens, built by artisans from Birmingham,
and he presently alighted to visit a Welsh patient. What a vision of
brassfounding, teaurns, and dingy streets, and then of beaver hats and
mob caps, did these incidents call up! And again, when we were buried in
a beechen wood, where "a sunbeam that had lost its way" streaked the
stems and lighted up the wild vines, Dr. Drake, in telling me of the
cholera season in Cincinnati, praised a medical book on cholera which
happened to be by a brother-in-law of mine. It was an amusing incident.
The woods of Ohio are about the last place where the author would have
anticipated that I should hear accidental praises of his book.
The doctor had at present a patient in Dr. Beecher's house, so we
returned by the Theological Seminary. Dr. Beecher and his daughters were
not at home. We met them on the road in their cart, the ladies returning
from their school in the city, and we spent an evening there the next
week. The seminary (Presbyterian) was then in a depressed condition, in
consequence of the expulsion of most of the pupils for their refusal to
avoid discussion of the slavery question. These expelled youths have
since been founders and supporters of abolition societies; and the good
cause has gained even more than the seminary has lost by the absurd
tyranny practised against the students.
From this the Montgomery road there is a view of the city and
surrounding country which defies description. It was of that melting
beauty which dims the eyes and fills the heart--that magical combination
of all elements--of hill, wood, lawn, river, with a picturesque city
steeped in evening sunshine, the impression of which can never be lost
nor ever communicated. We ran up a knoll, and stood under a clump of
beeches to gaze; and went down, and returned again and again, with the
feeling that, if we lived upon the spot, we could never more see it look
so beautiful.
We soon entered a somewhat different scene, passing the slaughter-houses
on Deer Creek, the place where more thousands of hogs in a year than I
dare to specify are destined to breathe their last. Deer Creek, pretty
as its name is, is little more than the channel through which their
blood runs away. The division of labour is brought to as much perfection
in these slaughter-houses as in the pin-manufactories of Birmingham. So
I was told. Of course I did not verify the statement by attending the
process. In my childhood I was permitted, by the carelessness of a
nursemaid, to see the cutting up of the reeking carcass of an ox, and I
can bear witness that one such sight is enough for a lifetime. But--to
tell the story as it was told to me--these slaughter-houses are divided
into apartments communicating with each other: one man drives into one
pen or chamber the reluctant hogs, to be knocked on the head by another
whose mallet is for ever going. A third sticks the throats, after which
they are conveyed by some clever device to the cutting-up room, and
thence to the pickling, and thence to the packing and branding, a set of
agents being employed for every operation. The exportation of pickled
pork from Cincinnati is enormous. Besides supplying the American navy,
shiploads are sent to the West India Islands and many other parts of the
world. Dr. Drake showed me the dwelling and slaughter-house of an
Englishman who was his servant in 1818, who then turned pork-butcher,
and was, in a few years, worth ten thousand dollars.
The teatable was set out in the garden at Dr. Drake's. We were waited
upon, for the first time for many months, by a free servant. The long
grass grew thick under our feet; fireflies were flitting about us, and I
doubted whether I had ever heard more sense and eloquence at any Old
World teatable than we were entertained with as the twilight drew on.