The part played by the Virginia springs in the political and social
life of "the States lately in rebellion," is to a traveller most
interesting. The attraction of these springs to Southerners has been
in times past, and is still, largely due to the fact that the South
has, properly speaking, no other watering-places. Seaside resorts
there are none worth mention, from Norfolk down to Mexico, and there
are but few points of the long, level, dull, and sandy coast-line
which are not more or less unhealthy. Suspicion on this point even
hangs around the places in Florida now frequented by Northerners for
the sake of the mild winter temperature. But oven if the sea-coast
were healthy, it is in summer too hot to be attractive, and offers
no relief to persons whose livers and kidneys have got out of order
in the lowlands. These naturally seek the hills for coolness, and
they go to the sulphur springs of Virginia because the sulphur
waters are very powerful and efficacious in their effects on people
afflicted with what the doctors call "hepatic troubles." But then
they never would or could have gone from the Southern seaboard to
places so far off if it had not been for the inestimable negro. The
extent to which he contributed to the rapid pushing out of the
scanty white population of the slave States to the Mississippi has
never, I think, received due attention. He robbed pioneering,
indeed, at the South of most of the hardship with which it is
associated in the Northern mind--I was going to say discomfort as
well as hardship, but this would be going too far. To the Southern
planter, however, who could go West with a party of stalwart negroes
to do the clearing, building, ploughing, and cooking and washing,
the wilderness had but few of the terrors it presented to the
Northern frontiersman. He was speedily provided with a very
tolerable home; not certainly the kind of home which the taste of a
man as well off at the North would be satisfied with, but a vastly
better one than any new settler in the Northwestern States ever had.
The springs in the Virginia mountains became popular a century ago,
and were greatly resorted to in much the same way. They were remote
and in the woods, but, owing to slavery, they swarmed from the very
first with servants who could not "give notice" if they did not like
the place, or felt lonesome.
The first accommodation at the springs consisted of a circle of
log-cabins with a dining-hall and ball-room in the centre, and this
constitutes the fundamental plan of a spring to this day. There is
now always a hotel in which a considerable number of the visitors
both sleep and eat, but the bulk of them, or a very large proportion
of them, still live in the long rows of one-storied wooden huts,
with galleries running along in front of the doors, which are
dignified with the name of "cottages," but are in reality simply the
log-cabin in the next stage of evolution; and the hotel has taken the
place of the original dining and ball-rooms to which all resorted.
In looking at the cottages, and thinking of the log-cabins which
preceded them, and seeing what rude places they are, one wonders
a little how people could ever have been, or can now be, induced to
leave comfortable homes for the purpose of spending long summers in
them. But this brings up one of the marked characteristics of Southern
life, namely, the extent to which nearly all Southern men and women
were led in the slavery days to associate comfort not with the
trimness and order of Northern or English homes, but with an
abundance of service. Well-to-do Northerners used to be surprised,
in fact, at the amount of what they would consider discomfort in the
way of rude or unfinished surroundings, hard beds, poor fare, want of
order of all sorts, which even Southerners in easy circumstances were
willing to put up with; but the explanation lay in the fact that
Southerners placed their luxury in having plenty of servants at
command. All the ladies had maids and the men "body servants"
wherever they went, and this saved them, even on the frontier, from
a great deal of drudgery and inconvenience. Even a log-cabin is not
a bad place to lodge in if you have a valet (who cannot leave you)
to dress you, and brush your boots and your clothes, and light your
fire, and bring you ice-water and juleps and cocktails, and anything
else you happen to think of, who sleeps comfortably in a blanket
across your door. In fact, without this the Virginia springs could
never have become a popular resort until railroads were opened.
People used to take twenty days in reaching them from the coast--
some in their own carriages with four horses, and a wagon for the
baggage and "darkies," and some in stages, sleeping in taverns on the
roadside; but nothing could have made this practicable or tolerable
but the band of negroes by whom they were always accompanied.
This, too, enabled them to make their plans with certainty for
staying at the springs all summer, which they could not have done
had they been unable to count on their servants. One gentleman,
a Charlestonian, telling me his reminiscences of these long journeys
to the springs taken with his parents in their own carriage, when
he was a boy, said his mother was very delicate and her health
required it. This at the North would have been a joke, as it would
have killed a delicate woman to go into the woods with hired "help"
or without any service at all.
Partly owing to the efficacy of the waters and partly to the absence
of other Southern watering-places, the springs became very early the
resort of every Southerner who could afford to leave home in the
summer, and they grew in favor owing to the peculiarities of
Southern society and the delicate state of Southern relations with
the North. In the first place, at the South people know each other,
and know about each other, in a way of which the inhabitants of a
denser and busier community have little idea. The number of persons
in Illinois, or Ohio, or Michigan that a New Yorker knows anything
about, or cares to see for social purposes, is exceedingly small. At
the South everybody with the means to travel has relatives or
friends or acquaintances of longer or shorter standing, in nearly
every Southern State, whom it is agreeable for him to meet, and he
knows that they will probably, at some part of the season or other,
appear at the springs. They will not go North because the North is
far away, is, in a certain sense, a strange community, and before
the war a hostile or critical one. Then, too, the South abounded or
abounds with local notables to a degree of which we have no idea at
the North, with persons of a certain weight and consequence in their
own State or county, and to whom this weight and consequence are so
agreeable and important that they cannot bear to part with them when
they go on a journey. They could always carry them with them to the
springs. There everybody was sure to know their standing, while if
they had gone up North they would be lost in the crowd and be
nobodies, and, before the war, have been deprived of the services of
their "body servants" or labored under constant anxiety about their
security.
The springs, too, became, very early, and are now, a great
marrying-place. The "desirable young men, all riding on horses," as
the prophet called the Assyrian swells, go there in search of wives,
and are pretty sure to find there all the marriageable young women
of the South who can be said in any sense to be in society. Widows
abound at the springs just now--by which I mean widows who would not
object to trying the chances of matrimony again. I have been told
that, since the war, it is not uncommon for families whose means are
small to make up a purse to send one attractive youth or maid or
forlorn widow to the springs, in the hope that during the season
they may find the unknown soul which is to complete their destiny,
somewhat like the "culture" donations made to promising people at
the North to enable them to visit Europe. Then, too, to that very
large proportion of the population at the South who lead during the
rest of the year absolutely solitary lives on plantations, the visit
to the springs gives the only society of any kind they ever see, and
the one chance of showing their clothes and seeing what the other
women wear. In short, I do not believe that any one place of summer
resort serves so many purposes to any community as the Virginia
springs serve to that of the South, and by the springs I mean that
circle of mineral waters of various kinds which lie round the White
Sulphur, and to which the White Sulphur acts as a kind of
distributing reservoir of visitors.
As regards the opinions of the very representative company at the
springs on the subject of slavery, it seemed, as well as I could
get at it, to be that about one per cent, of the white people
regretted the emancipation; but this was composed almost entirely of
old persons, who were unable to accommodate themselves to a new
order of things, and to whom it meant the loss of personal
attendance--perhaps the greatest inconvenience which elderly
persons who have been used to valets and maids can undergo. Many
such persons at the South were really killed by the social changes
produced by the war, as truly as if they had been struck on the
battle-field; the bewildered resignation of the survivors is
sometimes touching to witness, and the calamity was generally
embittered by the wholesale flight of the most trusted household
servants, who it was supposed would have despised freedom even if
offered in a gold box by Phillips, Garrison, and Greeley in person.
Telling one old gentleman who was mourning over the change that the
young men to whom I spoke did not agree with him, but thought it an
excellent thing, he replied "that those fellows never had known what
domestic comfort was"--meaning that their experience did not run
back beyond 1865.
The traditions of the old system are, however, unquestionably a
better basis for good hotel-keeping than anything we have at the
North. The first condition of excellence in all places of
entertainment for man and beast is exactingness on the part of the
public. To be well cared for you must expect it and be used to it,
and this condition the Southerners fulfil in a much higher degree
than we do. They look for more attention, and they therefore get it;
and the waiter world, partly from habit and partly, no doubt, from
race temperament, render it with a cheerfulness we are not familiar
with here. But the superiority of manners in all classes is very
striking. One rarely meets a man on a Virginia road who does not
raise or touch his hat, and this not in a servile way either, but
simply as politeness. The bearing of the men toward each other
generally, too, has the ineffable charm, which Northern manners are
so apt to want, of indicating a recognition of the fact that even if
you are no better than any other man, you are different, and that
your peculiarities are respectable, and that you are entitled to a
certain amount of deference for your private tastes and habits. At
the North, on the other hand, manners, even as taught to children,
are apt to concede nothing except that you have an immortal soul and
a middling chance of salvation, and to avoid anything which is
likely to lead you to forget that you are simply a human male.