States, the appearance of things forms a great contrast to that
in similar districts in the Free States. During two days’ sail on
the Alabama river from Mobile to Montgomery, I did not see so many
houses standing together in any one spot as could be dignified
with the appellation of village:[61] but I may possibly have
passed some at night. There were many places where cotton was
shipped and provisions were landed, still there were no signs of
enterprise to indicate that we were in the heart of a rich cotton
region. * * * The planters supply themselves directly through
agents in the large towns, and comparatively little of the money
drawn for the cotton crop is spent in the Southern States. Many of
the planters spend their incomes by travelling with their families
in the Northern States or in Europe during the summer, and a large
sum is required to pay the hog-raiser in Ohio, the mule-breeder in
Kentucky, and, above all, the Northern capitalists who have vast
sums of money on mortgage over the estates. _Dr. Cloud, the editor
of the Cotton Plant_ [Alabama], assured me that after all these
items are paid out of the money received for the whole cotton crop
and sugar crops of the South, there did not remain one-fourth
part of it to be spent in the Southern States. Hence, the Slave
States soon obtain a comparatively stationary condition, and,
further, the progress they make is in proportion to the increase
of freemen, whose labour is rendered comparatively unproductive,
seeing that the most fertile land is occupied by slaveholders.”[62]
I questioned the agent of a large land speculation in Mississippi, a
Southerner by birth, with regard to the success of small farmers. In
reply he made the following statement, allowing me to take notes of it,
understanding they were for publication:—
“The majority of our purchasers have been men without capital.
To such we usually sell one hundred and sixty acres of land, at
from two to three dollars an acre, the agreement being to pay
in one, two, and three years, with six per cent. interest. It
is very rare that the payments are made when due, and much the
largest proportion of this class fail even to pay their interest
punctually. Many fail altogether, and quit their farms in about
ten years. When crops are generally good, and planters in the same
neighbourhood make seven bales to a hand, poor people will not
make over two bales, with their whole family. There is —— ——, in
—— county, for instance. We sold him one hundred and sixty acres
of land in 1843. He has a family of good-sized boys—young men now.
For ten years he was never able to pay his interest. He sold from
two to four bales a year, but he did not get much for it, and
after taking out the cost of bagging and rope, and ginning and
pressing, he scarcely ever had two hundred dollars a year coming
to him, of which he had to pay his store bills, chiefly for coffee
and molasses, sometimes a little clothing—some years none at all.
They made their own cloth mostly in the house, but bought sheeting
sometimes. He has made one payment on the principal, from a sale
of hogs. Almost the only poor people who have kept up to their
agreement have been some near ——, since the cotton factory was
started there. It is wonderful what a difference that has made,
though it’s but a picayune affair. People who have no negroes in
this country generally raise corn enough to bread them through
the year, and have hogs enough ranging in the swamps to supply
them with bacon. They do not often buy anything except coffee and
molasses and tobacco. They are not generally drunkards, but the
men will spend all the money they may have and get gloriously
drunk once or twice a year, at elections or at court time, when
they go to the county town. I think that two bales of cotton a
year is as much as is generally made by people who do not own
negroes. They are doing well if they net over fifty dollars a year
from their labour, besides supplying themselves with corn. A real
smart man, who tends his crop well, and who knows how it ought to
be managed, can make five bales, almost always. Five bales are
worth two hundred and fifty dollars, but it’s very rare that a
white man makes that. They have not got the right kind of tools,
and they don’t know how. Their crops are never half tended. If
folks generally tended their crops as some do, there would be more
than twice as much cotton raised as there is.”
With regard to the enlargement of estates by successful planters,
having stated what were my impressions, the same gentleman replied
that I was entirely right, and gave an instance, as follows, from his
personal knowledge:—
“J. B. moved into —— county within my recollection. He has bought
out, one after another, and mainly since 1850, more than twenty
small landowners, some of them small slaveholders, and they have
moved away from the vicinity. I do not know how many negroes he
has now, but several hundred, certainly. His surplus must have
averaged twenty thousand dollars a year for several years, and,
as far as I know, the whole is expended in purchasing negroes or
land. He spends no money for anything else in the county, I am
sure. It is a common thing to hear a man say, ‘J. B. has bought up
next to me, and I shall have to quit soon.’ He never gets the land
alongside of a man that within two years he does not buy him out.
In the last ten years I know of but one exception, and that is a
man who has shot two of B.’s niggers who were stealing his corn.
This man swears he won’t sell at any price, and that he will shoot
any of J. B.’s niggers whom he catches coming on his place. B.’s
niggers are afraid of him, and let him alone. J. B. will pay more
for land than its worth to anybody else, and his negroes are such
thieves that nobody can live in comfort on any place adjoining one
of his. There are two other men in the county who are constantly
buying up the land around there. The white population of the
county is diminishing, and the trade of the place [the county
town] is not so good as it was ten years ago.”
The following is an extract from a letter written by a worthy farmer of
Illinois, whose name and address is in my possession, and who is deemed
by those who have known him for many years a sound trustworthy man:—
“What might be made of this country if the people were free, and
the labourer everywhere owned the land, one may speculate upon;
and when he sees the homes of Yankees who go thither often with
small means, and make old worn-out places blossom and bloom, he
begins to suspect that there is something in men as well as in
climate.
“I now come to speak of the wealth of the people of the
South-western Slave States, and, for fear I may be thought to
exaggerate, I here say I will not tell the whole truth. I’ll keep
some back for another time. Now, men who go through on boats and
cars, and stop in cities and large hotels, know nothing to what
I do—I who have gone among the people of every class, I who have
stayed with them hundreds of nights, Sundays and all, and gone
to meetings and frolics, and travelled hours in the woods, where
sometimes there was a road, and sometimes not, trying to find a
place to stay over night—and, having visited more than a thousand
plantations, and slept and eat in I know not how many hovels, and
talked with them all, and, if I choose, can talk precisely as they
do, and they wouldn’t suspect I was born up North—I say, I think I
ought to know something about them.
“The impression which one gets on going South is the general
dilapidation or carelessness which appears, even upon some of the
best plantations. The nice white houses so common at the North,
even in the remotest agricultural districts, with green blinds,
with clean door-yards, and well kept shrubbery, snug barns, green
meadows, and corner school-houses, are nowhere seen. The furniture
of the houses is of the commonest description; and to make short
work with it, I estimate that there are not decent chairs enough
in the whole South to give half a set to each family. For there
are to-day, and there have been for every day for more than ten
years past, more than 30,000 people in Tennessee alone, who have
not a foot of land or a bit of work to do. I am speaking of
whites, and not of negroes at all. A bushel of corn-meal, a side
of bacon, and a little coffee, will be all that a family of this
class can ever expect to get beforehand, and it is often they
get neither coffee nor bacon. If they have a cow, and she ‘comes
up,’ they may have milk, but as for butter, some have heard of
it, some have seen it, few have eaten it. And the fact is, many,
yes, many who own from two to five slaves, are little better off.
I stayed with a man who had fifteen slaves and 400 acres of land,
where he had lived forty years, and his house was not worth fifty
cents; what my fare was you may guess. I have seen hundreds of
families living in log cabins, ten or twelve feet square, where
the children run around as naked as ever they were born, and a
bedstead or chair was not in the house, and never will be. I have
seen the children eat wheat and grass, growing in the field. I
have seen them eat dirt. I saw children here on my own place,
in Southern Illinois, last year, eat dirt, they were so hungry.
Southern Illinois has been a city of refuge for the poor people
of the Slave States. Folks thought Humboldt told a big story when
he gave an account of the clay-eating Indians of South America.
Of course where poverty is so general, and where the slaves are
few, the slaves cannot fare much worse than their masters. It is
generally said by the people of the Slave States that they prefer
corn bread, but, place the two kinds before them, and you will
see which they like best. No class of people like corn bread, and
no people, as a general thing, are worth much who can get nothing
else.
“For the most part, the people of these regions manufacture all
their every-day clothing, and their garments look as though they
were made for no other purpose than to keep them warm and to cover
their nakedness; beauty of colouring and propriety in fitting
are little regarded. Every man who is not rich is a shoemaker.
Blacksmith-shops are innumerable, and yet I have sent a boy over
eighty miles from shop to shop, and then did not get a horse shod.
Men call themselves gunsmiths, but they only stock guns. There
are carpenters, and cabinet-makers, and chair-makers, and all
this working badly with poor tools. The sum is, there is no real
discipline of mind among them, no real ingenuity, no education,
no comfortable houses, no good victuals, nor do they know how to
cook; and when I go among them, what troubles me most is, they
have _no grass, no clover, no hay_.
“And yet, as fine and well-disposed men, and as anxious to
improve, are to be found in the South-western States as are to be
found anywhere. They are as honest as men ever are, and they will
treat a stranger the best they know how. The trouble is, the large
slaveholders have got all the good land. There can be no schools,
and if the son of a poor man rises above his condition there is
no earthly chance for him. He can only hope to be a slave-driver,
for an office is not his, or he must leave and go to a Free State.
_Were there no Free States, the white people of the South would
to-day be slaves._”
I will here call upon just one more witness, whose evidence I cite at
this point, not merely because, in very few words, having reference to
the very heart of the planter’s prosperity, it practically endorses all
I have said, but for another reason which will presently appear.
First as to the non-slaveholders:—
“I am not aware that the relative number of these two classes has
ever been ascertained in any of the States, but I am satisfied
that the non-slaveholders far outnumber the slaveholders, perhaps
by three to one.[63] In the more southern portion of this region
[‘the South-west,’ of which Mississippi is the centre], the
non-slaveholders possess generally but very small means, and the
land which they possess is almost universally poor, and so sterile
that a scanty subsistence is all that can be derived from its
cultivation, and the more fertile soil, being in the hands of the
slaveholders, must ever remain out of the power of those who have
none. * * * And I lament to say that I have observed of late years
that an evident deterioration is taking place in this part of the
population, the younger portion of it being less educated, less
industrious, and. in every point of view, less respectable than
their ancestors.”—J. O. B. DE BOW, _Resources of the South and
West_, vol. ii. p. 106.
Again as to the cotton-planters and slaveholders:—
“If one unacquainted with the condition of the South-west were
told that the cotton-growing district alone had sold the crop for
fifty million dollars for the last twenty years he would naturally
conclude that this must be the richest community in the world.
* * * But what would be his surprise when told that so far from
living in palaces, many of these planters dwell in habitations
of the most primitive construction, and these so inartificially
built as to be incapable of defending the inmates from the winds
and rains of heaven. That instead of any artistical improvement,
this rude dwelling was surrounded by cotton fields, or probably by
fields exhausted, washed into gullies, and abandoned; that instead
of canals, the navigable streams remain unimproved, to the great
detriment of transportation; that the common roads of the country
were scarcely passable; that the edifices erected for the purposes
of learning and religion were frequently built of logs and covered
[roofed] with boards.”—J. O. B. DE BOW, _Resources of the South_,
vol. ii. p. 113.
Do a majority of Northern working men dwell in habitations having
no more elements of comfort, even taking difference of climate into
consideration, than Mr. De Bow ascribes to the residences of the
slaves’ owners? No Northern man can for a moment hold such an opinion.
What, then, becomes of the theory by which the planters justify slavery
to themselves and recommend it to us? If the ennobling luxuries
which the institution of slavery secures to the “superior class,”
and by which it is supposed to be “qualified for the higher duties
of citizenship,” are, at the most, sugar, instead of molasses, in
its coffee; butter, with its pone; cabbage, with its bacon, and two
sheets to its bed—and the traveller who goes where I travelled, month
after month, with the same experience, cannot help learning to regard
these as luxuries indeed,—if “freedom from sordid and petty cares,”
and “leisure for intellectual pursuits,” means a condition approaching
in comfort that of the keeper of a lightship on an outer bar, what
is the exact value of such words as “hospitality,” “generosity,” and
“gallantry?” What is to be understood from phrases in such common use
as “high toned,” “well bred,” “generous,” “hospitable,” and soon, when
used in argument to prove the beneficence of slavery and to advocate
its extension?
_From De Bow’s Review._
“Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, after signalizing himself by two very
wordy volumes, abounding in bitterness and prejudice of every
sort, and misrepresentations upon the ‘Seaboard Slave States,’
finding how profitable such literature is in a pecuniary point of
view, and what a run is being made upon it thoughout the entire
limits of abolitiondom, vouchsafes us now another volume, entitled
a ‘Journey through Texas, or a Saddle-trip on the South-western
Frontier.’ Here, again, the opportunity is too tempting to be
resisted to revile and abuse the men and the society whose open
hospitality he undoubtedly enjoyed, and whom we have no doubt,
like every other of his tribe travelling at the South, he found it
convenient at the time to flatter and approve. We have now grown
accustomed to this, and it is not at all surprising that here and
there it is producing its effect in some violent exhibition of
feeling like that displayed by our worthy old friend Dr. Brewer,
of Montgomery county, Maryland, who persistently refuses, on all
occasions, to allow a Yankee even to cross his fields, or like
that of John Randolph, who said in the House, ‘Mr. Speaker, I
would not allow one of my servants to buy as much as a toot-horn
from one of these people.’ * * *
“Somewhat further on, the parties rest for the night. ‘For
this the charge was $1.25 each person, including breakfast
and horse-feed.’ At the end of every page or two our tourist
repeats these growlings over the enormous exactions. It is the
refrain from one cover of the book to the other. What a series
of martyrdoms. Could such a journey by any possibility be made
‘to pay?’ Perhaps, friend traveller, you have heard of the lavish
hospitality of the South, and imagined that people there moved out
upon the high road for the sole purpose of sharing the society
which gentlemen, like yourself, could furnish, believing every
arrival to be an act of special providence! When you offered to
pay the woman on Red River, and ‘feared she was offended by your
offering her money for her hospitality,’ you paid the highest
compliment to the South; for heaven knows you would have had no
such apprehension on the banks of the Connecticut.”
I cannot but be gratified that so much importance should have been
attached to my earlier volumes as to induce the Superintendent of the
Census to devote to their consideration a leading article in the first
economico-political review of the country; and I can feel nothing but
regret that he should be obliged to attribute to an unworthy motive
even those of my labours the result of which he does me the honour
to designate as valuable and trustworthy. I have often had occasion
to refer to Mr. De Bow, and, I believe, have always done so in a
manner consistent with the respect which I feel for the class of men
among whom he has had the honourable ambition to rank himself. That
a man, while occupying a position which properly belongs to the most
able and just-minded statistician in the country, should think it
proper to write under his own name in the manner of which the above
extracts are a sample, about a work which assumes to relate calmly
and methodically, the result of a personal study of the condition
of the people of a certain State, is a note-worthy circumstance in
illustration of the present political history of our country. I cite
them now, however, chiefly to show what need there is for a discussion
upon which I propose to enter, myself, little further than is necessary
to enable me to clearly set forth certain facts in their more important
significance, the right of publishing which can hardly be denied me, in
view of the insinuations made by Mr. De Bow, who in this follows what
has got to be a general custom of Southern reviewers and journalists
towards travellers with whose expressed judgments upon any matter
observed within the slave States they differ. There are numerous homes
in the South the memory of which I cherish tenderly. There are numbers
of men in the South for whom I have a warm admiration, to whom I feel
grateful, whose respect I wish not to lose. There are others for whom
I have a quite different feeling. Of a single individual of neither
class have I spoken in these two volumes, I believe, by his true name,
or in such a manner that he could be recognized, or his home pointed
out by any one who had not been previously familiar with it and with
him, being, as a rule, careful to so far differ from the actual order
of the events of my journey in narrating them, that facts of private
life could not be readily localized. From this rule I do not intend now
to depart further than is necessary to exhibit the whole truth of the
facts to which I have referred, but since the charge of ingratitude
and indelicacy is publicly made against me, as it has frequently been
of late against better men on similar grounds, I propose to examine
those grounds in the light of certain actual experiences of myself and
others, and let it be judged whether there must always exist a peculiar
moral obligation upon travellers to be mealy-mouthed as to the habits
of the people of the South, either on account of hospitality or in
reciprocation of the delicate reserve which, from the tenor of Mr. De
Bow’s remarks, it might be supposed was habitually exercised in the
South with regard to the habits of their own people. These experiences
shall be both special and general. What immediately follows is of the
former class, but, in the end, it will be found to have a general
significance.
On a hot morning in July a Northern traveller left the town of
Lynchburg, the chief market-town of Virginia tobacco, and rode
eastwardly towards Farmville. Suddenly taken severely ill, and no house
being in sight, he turned from the road into the shade of the wood,
dismounted, reclined against a sturdy trunk, took an anodyne, which he
fortunately had with him, and at length found relief in sleep. Late in
the day he awoke, somewhat recovered, but with a sharp headache and
much debilitated. He managed, however, to mount, and rode slowly on to
find a shelter for the night. In half an hour the welcome sight of an
old plantation mansion greeted his eyes. There was a large court, with
shade trees and shrubbery between the road and the house, and in the
corner of this court, facing the road, a small warehouse or barn, in
and around which were a number of negroes moving casks of tobacco. A
white man, evidently their owner, was superintending their labour, and
to him the traveller applied for lodging for the night.
“We don’t take in strangers.”
The traveller informed the planter of his illness and inability to ride
further.
“You’ll have to try to ride as far as the next house, sir; we don’t
take in travellers here,” was the reply.
“Really I don’t feel able. I should not like to put you to
inconvenience, sir, but I am weak and faint. My horse, too, has eaten
nothing since early in the morning.”
“Sorry for you, but we have no accommodation for travellers here,” was
the only reply, and the planter stepped to the other side of a tobacco
cask.
The traveller rode on. About half an hour afterwards he came in sight
of another house. It was at a distance from the road, and to reach it
he was obliged to let down and put up again three different sets of
fence-bars. The owner was not at home, and his wife said that they
were not accustomed to take in strangers. “It was not far to the next
house,” she added, as the traveller hesitated.
He reached, at length, the next house, which proved to be the residence
of another large tobacco planter, who sat smoking in its verandah, as
the traveller rode near and made his petition.
“We don’t take in travellers,” was again his answer.
The sick man stated his special claims to kindness, and the planter
good-naturedly inquired the particulars, asked how far he had ridden,
where he got his horse and his dog, whither he was bound, and so
on (did not ask where he was born or what were his politics). The
traveller again stated that he was ill, unable to ride further, and
begged permission to remain for the night under the planter’s roof,
and again the planter carelessly replied that they didn’t take in
travellers; anon, asked how crops were looking further west, and talked
of guano, the war news, and the prospect for peaches. It became dusk
while the traveller lingered, and the negroes came in with their hoes
over their shoulders from the fields across the road, but the planter
continued chatting and smoking, not even offering the traveller a
cigar, till at length the latter said, “If you really cannot keep me
to-night, I must go on, sir; I cannot keep my horse much longer, I
fear.”
“It is not far to the next house.”
“But I have already called at three houses to-night, sir.”
“Well, you see, since the railroad was done, people here don’t reckon
to take in travellers as they once did. So few come along they don’t
find their account in being ready for them.”
The traveller asked for a drink of water, which a negro brought in
a calabash, bade good night to the planter, and rode on through the
woods. Night presently set in; the road crossed a swamp and was
difficult to follow, and for more than an hour he rode on—seeing no
house—without stopping. Then crossing water, he deliberated whether
he should not bivouac for the night where he was. He had with him a
few biscuits and some dried figs. He had not eaten hitherto, hoping
constantly to come to a habitation where it might happen he could get
a cup of tea, of which he felt more particularly in need. He stopped,
took some nourishment, the first he had tasted in fifteen hours, and
taking also a little brandy, gained strength and courage to continue
his journey. A bright light soon cheered him, and after a time he made
his way to a large white house, in the rear of which was an old negro
woman stirring the contents of a caldron which stood over the fire, by
which he had been guided. The old woman had the appearance of a house
servant, and he requested her to ask her master if he would favour him
with lodging for the night.
“Her master did not take in travellers,” she said, “besides, he was
gone to bed;” and she stirred on, hardly looking at the traveller till
he put his hand in his pocket, and, holding forth silver, said—
“Now, aunty, mind what I tell you. Do you go in to your master, and
say to him, ‘There is a gentleman outside who says he is sick, and
that his horse is tired and has had nothing to eat to-day; that he is
a stranger and has been benighted, don’t know the roads, is not well
enough to ride further, and wants to know if you won’t be so kind as to
let him stay here to-night.’”
“Yes, massa, I’ll tell him; ’twon’t do no good, though, and he’ll be
almighty cross.”
She went in, returned after a few minutes, seized her paddle, and began
stirring before she uttered the words—
“Says yer ken go on to de store, he reckon.”
It was after ten o’clock when the traveller reached the next house. It
stood close upon the road, and the voice of a woman answered a knock
upon the door, and, in reply to the demand, said it was not far to the
store, and she reckoned they accommodated travellers there.
Finally, at the store, the traveller succeeded in getting admittance,
was comfortably lodged and well entertained by an amiable family.
Their kindness was of such a character that he felt, in the position
of an invited guest, unable to demand and unwilling to suggest any
unvolunteered service. There was no indication that the house was an
inn, yet the traveller’s experience left him little room to hesitate to
offer money, nor was there the slightest hesitation on the part of the
storekeeper in naming the amount due for the entertainment he had, or
in taking it.
If the reader will accept the traveller’s judgment of himself, he
will assume that there was nothing in his countenance, his dress, his
language, or his bearing, by which he could readily be distinguished
from a gentleman of Southern birth and education, and that he was not
imagined to be anything else, certainly not on his first inquiry, at
any one of the plantations where he was thus refused shelter.
So far as this inhospitality (for this is, I think, what even the
Southern reader will be inclined to call it) needed explanation, it
was supposed to be sufficiently given in the fact that the region had,
by the recent construction of a railroad through it, approximated the
condition of a well-settled and organized community, in which the
movements of travellers are so systematized, that the business of
providing for their wants, as a matter of pecuniary profit, can no
longer be made a mere supplement of another business, but becomes a
distinct occupation.
This, then, but a small part of the whole land being thus affected by
railroads, was an exception in the South. True; but what is the rule to
which this is the exception?
Mr. De Bow says, that the traveller would have had no apprehension that
the offer of money for chance entertainment for the night furnished
him at a house on the banks of the Connecticut, would give offence;
yet in the Connecticut valley, among people having no servants, and
not a tithe of the nominal wealth of the Red River planter, or of one
of these Virginia planters, such has been a frequent experience of the
same traveller. Nor has he ever, when calling benighted at a house,
anywhere in the State of Connecticut, far from a public-house, escaped
being invited with cordial frankness to enjoy such accommodation as
it afforded; and this, he is fully convinced, without any thought in
the majority of cases of pecuniary remuneration. In several instances
a remuneration in money has been refused in a manner which conveyed a
reproof of the offer of it as indelicate; and it thus happens that it
was a common experience of that, of the possibility of which Mr. De Bow
is unable to conceive, that led in no small degree to the hesitation
upon which this very comment was made.
This simple faith in the meanness of the people of the North, and
especially of New England, is no eccentricity of Mr. De Bow’s. It is in
accordance with the general tone of literature and of conversation at
the South, that penuriousness, disingenuousness, knavish cunning, cant,
cowardice, and hypocrisy are assumed to be the prevailing traits by
which they are distinguished from the people of the South—not the poor
people of New England from the planters of the South, but the people
generally from the people generally. Not the tone of the political
literature and of the lower class of the South, but of its wealthy
class, very generally, really of its “better class.” Mr. De Bow is
himself the associate of gentlemen as well informed and as free from
narrow prejudices as any at the South. No New England man, who has
travelled at the South, would be surprised, indeed, if, at a table at
which he were a guest, such an assumption as that of Mr. De Bow should
be apparent in all the conversation, and that the gist of it should be
supposed to be so well understood and generally conceded, that he could
not be annoyed thereat.
I need hardly say that this reference to Mr. De Bow is continued, not
for the purpose of vindicating the North any more than myself from a
mistaken criticism. I wish only to demonstrate how necessary it must
soon be to find other means for saving the Union than these commonplace
flatteries of Southern conceit and apologies for Southern folly, to
which we have not only become so accustomed ourselves, as to hardly
believe our eyes when we are obliged to meet the facts (as was my own
case), but by which we have so successfully imposed upon our friends,
that a man like Mr. De Bow actually supposes that the common planters
of the teeming and sunny South, are, as a rule, a more open-handed,
liberal, and hospitable class than the hard-working farmers of the
bleak and sterile hills of New England; so much so, that he feels
warranted not merely in stating facts within his personal knowledge,
illustrating the character of the latter and arguing the causes, but in
incidentally referring to their penuriousness as a matter of proverbial
contempt. Against this mistake, which, I doubt not, is accomplishing
constant mischief to our nation, I merely oppose the facts of actual
experience. I wish to do so with true respect for the good sense of the
South.
* * * * *
Presenting myself, and known only in the character of a chance
traveller, most likely to be in search of health, entertainment, and
information; usually taken for and treated as a Southerner, until I
stated that I was not one, I journeyed nearly six months at one time
(my second journey) through the South. During all this journey, I came
not oftener than once a week, on an average, to public-houses, and was
thus generally forced to seek lodging and sustenance at private houses.
Often it was refused me; not unfrequently rudely refused. But once did
I meet with what Northern readers could suppose Mr. De Bow to mean by
the term (used in the same article), “free road-side hospitality.”
Not once with the slightest appearance of what Noah Webster defines
hospitality—the “practice of receiving or entertaining strangers
without reward.”
Only twice, in a journey of four thousand miles, made independently of
public conveyances, did I receive a night’s lodging or a repast from a
native Southerner, without having the exact price in money which I was
expected to pay for it stated to me by those at whose hands I received
it.
* * * * *
If what I have just narrated had been reported to me before I
travelled in the manner I did in my second journey at the South, I
should have had serious doubts of either the honesty or the sanity
of the reporter. I know, therefore, to what I subject myself in now
giving my own name to it. I could not but hesitate to do this, as
one would be cautious in acknowledging that he believed himself to
have seen the sea-serpent, or had discovered a new motive power. By
drawing out the confidence of other travellers, who had chanced to
move through the South in a manner at all similar, however, I have
had the satisfaction of finding that I am not altogether solitary in
my experience. Even this day I met one fresh from the South-west, to
whom, after due approach, I gave the article which is the text of these
observations, asking to be told how he had found it in New England and
in Mississippi. He replied.
“During four winters, I have travelled for a business purpose
two months each winter in Mississippi. I have generally spent
the night at houses with whose inmates I had some previous
acquaintance. Where I had business transactions, especially
where debts were due to me, which could not be paid, I sometimes
neglected to offer payment for my night’s lodging, but in no
other case, and never in a single instance, so far as I can
now recollect, where I had offered payment, has there been any
hesitation in taking it. A planter might refrain from asking
payment of a traveller, but it is universally expected. In New
England, as far as my limited experience goes, it is not so.
I have known New England farmers’ wives take a small gratuity
after lodging travellers, but always with apparent hesitation. I
have known New England farmers refuse to do so. I have had some
experience in Iowa; money is there usually (not always) taken for
lodging travellers. The principal difference between the custom at
private houses there and in Alabama and Mississippi being, that
in Iowa the farmer seems to carefully reckon the exact value of
the produce you have consumed, and to charge for it at what has
often seemed to me an absurdly low rate; while in Mississippi,
I have usually paid from four to six times as much as in Iowa,
for similar accommodations. I consider the usual charges of
planters to travellers extortionate, and the custom the reverse of
hospitable. I knew of a Kentucky gentleman travelling from Eutaw
to Greensboro’ [twenty miles] in his own conveyance. He was taken
sick at the crossing of the Warrior River. It was nine o’clock
at night. He averred to me that he called at every plantation on
the road, and stated that he was a Kentuckian, and sick, but was
refused lodging at each of them.”
This the richest county of Alabama, and the road is lined with valuable
plantations!
The following is an extract from a letter dated Columbus, Mississippi,
November 24, 1856, published in the London _Daily News_. It is written
by an Englishman travelling for commercial purposes, and tells what he
has learned by experience of the custom of the country:
“It is customary in travelling through this country, where towns
are few and taverns scarce and vile, to stop at the planters’
houses along the road, and pay for your bed and board in the
morning just as if you had stayed at an inn. The custom is rather
repugnant to our Old World notions of hospitality, but it appears
to me an excellent one for both the host and his guest. The one
feels less bored by demands upon his kindness, as soon as it
ceases to be merely a kindness to comply with them, and the other
has no fear about intruding or being troublesome when he knows he
will have to pay for his entertainment. It is rarely, however,
that the _entrée_ can be obtained into the houses of wealthy
planters in this way. They will not be bothered by your visits,
and, if you apply to them, have no hesitation in politely passing
you on to such of their neighbours as have less money or more
generosity.”
The same writer afterwards relates the following experience:—
“About nineteen miles from Canton, I sought lodging at nightfall
at a snug house on the roadside, inhabited by an old gentleman
and his two daughters, who possessed no slaves and grew no
cotton, and whose two sons had been killed in the Mexican war,
and who, with the loudest professions of hospitality, cautiously
refrained from giving himself any personal trouble in support of
them. He informed me that there was corn in the husk in an almost
inaccessible loft, there was fodder in an un-get-at-able sort of a
cage in the yard, water in a certain pond about half a mile off,
and a currycomb in a certain hole in the wall. Having furnished me
with this intelligence, he left me to draw my own conclusions as
to what my conduct ought to be under the circumstances.”
A naturalist, the author of a well-known standard work, who has made
several tours of observation in the Slave States, lately confided to
me that he believed that the popular report of Southern hospitality
must be a popular romance, for never, during all his travels in the
South, had he chanced to be entertained for a single night, except
by gentlemen to whom he was formally presented by letter, or who had
previously been under obligations to him, without paying for it in
money, and to an amount quite equal to the value received. By the
wealthier, a night’s entertainment had been frequently refused him,
under circumstances which, as must have been evident to them, rendered
his further progress seriously inconvenient. Once, while in company
with a foreign naturalist—a titled man—he had been dining at the inn
of a small county-town, when a certain locally distinguished judge had
seen fit to be eloquent at the dinner-table upon the advantages of
slavery in maintaining a class of “high-toned gentlemen,” referring
especially to the proverbial hospitality of Southern plantations,
which he described as quite a bewilderment to strangers, and nothing
like which was to be found in any country unblessed with slavery,
or institutions equivalent to it. It so happened that the following
night the travellers, on approaching a plantation mansion in quest of
lodging, were surprised to find that they had fallen upon the residence
of this same judge, who recognized them, and welcomed them and bade
them be at home. Embarrassed by a recollection of his discourse of
hospitality, it was with some difficulty that one of them, when they
were taking leave next morning, brought himself to inquire what he
might pay for the entertainment they had received. He was at once
relieved by the judge’s prompt response, “Dollar and a quarter apiece,
I reckon.”
It is very true that the general custom of the South which leads a
traveller to ask for a lodging at any private house he may chance to
reach near nightfall, and to receive a favourable answer not merely
as a favour but as a matter of business, is a convenient one, is
one indeed almost necessary in a country so destitute of villages,
and where, off certain thoroughfares of our merchants, there are so
few travellers. It is a perfectly respectable and entirely sensible
custom, but it is not, as is commonly represented to be, a custom
of hospitality, and it is not at all calculated to induce customs
of hospitality with the mass of citizens. It is calculated to make
inhospitality of habit and inhospitality of character the general
rule; hospitality of habit and of character the exception. Yet the
common misapplication of the word to this custom is, so far as I
can ascertain, the only foundation of the arrogant assumption of
superiority of character in this respect of the Southerners over
ourselves—the only ground of the claim that slavery breeds a race of
more generous and hospitable citizens than freedom.
* * * * *
The difficulty of giving anything like an intelligent and exact
estimate of the breeding of any people or of any class of people is
almost insurmountable, owing to the vagueness of the terms which must
be used, or rather to the quite different ideas which different readers
will attach to these terms. The very word which I have employed to
designate my present subject has itself such a varied signification
that it needs to be defined at the outset. I mean to employ it in
that sense wherein, according to Webster, it covers the ground of
“nurture, instruction, and the formation of manners.” It is something
more than “manners and customs,” then, and includes, or may include,
qualities which, if not congenital, are equally an essential part of
character with those qualities which are literally in-bred of a man.
Such qualities are mainly the result of a class of circumstances, of
the influence of which upon his character and manners a man, or a child
growing to a man, is usually unconscious, and of which he cannot be
independent if he would.
The general difficulty is increased in dealing with the people of
the Slave States, because among themselves all terms defining social
rank and social characteristics are applied in a manner which can
be understood only after considerable experience; and also because
the general terms of classification, always incomplete in their
significance, fail entirely with a large class of Southerners, whose
manners have some characteristics which would elsewhere be thought
“high bred,” if they had not other which are elsewhere universally
esteemed low and ruffianly.
There are undoubted advantages resulting from the effects of slavery
upon the manners of some persons. Somewhat similar advantages I have
thought that I perceived to have resulted in the Free States, where
a family has been educated under favourable influences in a frontier
community. There is boldness, directness, largeness, confidence,
with the effect of the habitual sense of superiority to most of the
community; not superiority of wealth, and power from wealth merely,
but of a mind well stocked and refined by such advantages of education
as only very unusual wealth, or very unusual individual energy,
rightly directed, can procure in a scattered and frontier community.
When to this is added the effect of visits to the cultivated society
of denser communities; when refined and polished manners are grafted
on a natural, easy abandon; when there is high culture without
effeminacy either of body or mind, as not unfrequently happens, we
find a peculiarly respectable and agreeable sort of men and women.
They are the result of frontier training under the most favourable
circumstances. In the class furthest removed from this on the
frontier—people who have grown up without civilized social restraints
or encouragements and always under what in a well-conditioned community
would be esteemed great privations—happens, on the other hand, the most
disagreeable specimen of mankind that the world breeds; men of a sort
almost peculiar to America and Australia; border ruffians, of whom the
“rowdies” of our eastern towns are tame reflections. Cooper has well
described the first class in many instances. I know of no picture of
the latter which represents them as detestable as I have found them.
The whole South is maintained in a frontier condition by the system
which is apologized for on the ground that it favours good breeding.
This system, at the same time, tends to concentrate wealth in a
few hands. If there is wisdom and great care in the education of a
family thus favoured, the result which we see at the North, under the
circumstances I have described, is frequently reproduced. There are
many more such fruits of frontier life at the South than the North,
because there is more frontier life. There is also vastly more of the
other sort, and there is everything between, which degrees of wealth
and degrees of good fortune in education would be expected to occasion.
The bad breed of the frontier, at the South, however, is probably far
worse than that of the North, because the frontier condition of the
South is everywhere permanent. The child born to-day on the Northern
frontier, in most cases, before it is ten years old, will be living
in a well organized and tolerably well provided community; schools,
churches, libraries, lecture and concert halls, daily mails and
printing presses, shops and machines in variety, having arrived within
at least a day’s journey of it; being always within an influencing
distance of it. There are improvements, and communities loosely and
gradually cohering in various parts of the South, but so slowly, so
feebly, so irregularly, that men’s minds and habits are knit firm quite
independently of this class of social influences.
There is one other characteristic of the Southerner, which is far
more decided than the difference of climate merely would warrant, and
which is to be attributed not only to the absence of the ordinary
restraints and means of discipline of more compact communities in his
education, but unquestionably also to the readiness and safety with
which, by reason of slavery, certain passions and impulses may be
indulged. Every white Southerner is a person of importance; must be
treated with deference. Every wish of the Southerner is imperative;
every belief undoubted; every hate, vengeful; every love, fiery. Hence,
for instance, the scandalous fiend-like street fights of the South.
If a young man feels offended with another, he does not incline to a
ring and a fair stand-up set-to, like a young Englishman; he will not
attempt to overcome his opponent by logic; he will not be content to
vituperate, or to cast ridicule upon him; he is impelled straightway
to strike him down with the readiest deadly weapon at hand, with as
little ceremony and pretence of fair combat as the loose organization
of the people against violence will allow. He seems crazy for blood.
Intensity of personal pride—pride in anything a man has, or which
connects itself with him, is more commonly evident. Hence, intense
local pride and prejudice; hence intense partisanship; hence rashness
and over-confidence; hence visionary ambition; hence assurance in
debate; hence assurance in society. As self-appreciation is equally
with deference a part of what we call good breeding, and as the
expression of deference is much more easily reduced to a matter of
manners and forms, in the commonplace intercourse of society, than
self-appreciation, this characteristic quality of the Southerner needs
to be borne in mind in considering the port and manners he commonly
has, and judging from them of the effects of slavery.
It must be also considered that the ordinary occupations and
amusements of people of moderate wealth at the North are seldom
resorted to at the South, that public entertainments of any kind, for
instance, are impracticable to a sparse population; consequently that
where men of wealth are socially disposed, all intercourse with others
is highly valued, prepared for, and made the most of. Hence, with
these, the act of social intercourse is more highly esteemed, and is
much more frequently carried to a nice perfection of manner than it
usually is with men otherwise of corresponding education, and habits at
the North.
In a Northern community a man who is not greatly occupied with private
business is sure to become interested in social enterprises and to
undertake duties in them which will demand a great deal of time and
strength. School, road, cemetery, asylum, and church corporations;
bridge, ferry, and water companies; literary, scientific, art,
mechanical, agricultural and benevolent societies; all these things
are managed chiefly by the unpaid services of gentlemen during hours
which they can spare from their private interests. In the successful
operations of such enterprises they find much of the satisfaction of
their life. So, too, our young men, who are not obliged to devote
their thoughts chiefly to business success, are members and managers
of reading rooms, public libraries, gymnasiums, game clubs, boat
clubs, ball clubs, and all sorts of clubs, Bible classes, debating
societies, military companies; they are planting road-side trees,
or damming streams for skating ponds, or rigging diving-boards,
or getting up firework displays, or private theatricals; they are
always doing something, not conversing for the entertainment of the
moment. Planters, the details of whose business fall into the hands
of overseers, and young men of fortune, at the South, have, when at
home on the plantation, none of these occupations. Their talents all
turn into two channels, politics and sociality; the very paucity of
society making it the more esteemed and the more carefully used.
Social intercourse at the North is a relaxation from the ordinary
bent of men’s talents; at the South, it is that to which mainly their
talents are bent. Hence, with men who are otherwise on a par, in
respect of natural advantages and education, the Southerner will have
a higher standard of manners than the Northerner, because, with him,
social intercourse is the grand resource to which all other possible
occupations of his mind become subordinate. The Northerner, being
troubled by no monotony, unquestionably too much neglects at present
this, the highest and final art of every type of civilization. In
making this comparison, however, it must not be forgotten that it is
made between men who are supposed to be equal in all respects, except
in the possession of this advantage, and who are equally at leisure
from any necessary habitual occupation for a livelihood.
Having conceded to the South certain elements of advantage in this
respect, for a single class, it still remains to inquire where is the
greatest weight of advantage for this class, and for all classes of
our citizens. In attempting to make such a general comparison, I shall
begin at the bottom of the social ladder, and return to the class who
can in a great degree choose how they will be occupied.
In the North at the Revolution we scarcely had a distinct class
corresponding to the lowest white class of Virginia, as described
by Jefferson, our labourers being less ignorant and coarse in their
habits, and associating much more familiarly with their betters. We
have now a class more nearly corresponding to it furnished by the
European peasant immigration. It is, however, a transient class,
somewhat seldom including two generations, and, on an average, I trust,
not one. It is therefore practically not an additional class, but,
overlooking the aged and diseased, a supplement to our lowest normal
class. Out of twenty Irish emigrants, landing in New York, perfectly
destitute, of whose history I have been intimately cognizant, only
two, both of whom were over fifty years of age, have lived out five
years here without beginning to acquire wealth and becoming superior
in their ambition and habits to the lowest order, which I believe to
include a majority of the whites in the plantation districts of the
South.[64] Our lowest class, therefore, has a higher standard than
the lowest class of the Slave States. This, I understand, is made
very evident where the two come together at the West, as in southern
Illinois. The very poorest and lowest New England women who go there
are frequently offended by the inconsiderate rudeness and coarseness of
the women immigrating from the South, and shocked by their “shiftless,”
comfortless, vagrant habits, so much so that families have often
removed, after having been once established, to escape being bored and
annoyed by their Southern-born neighbours.
Referring to the lowest class, North and South, as the fourth, I class
as third, the lowest rank in society, North or South, in which regard
is had by its members to the quality of their associates from other
than moral motives, or the prejudices of locality, race, sectarianism,
and politics. In other words, that in which there is a distinct
social selectiveness and pride. I think that everywhere in the Free
States men of this class would almost universally feel their position
damaged—be a little ashamed—if obliged to confess that they did not
take a newspaper, or were unable to read it with a clear understanding
of the intelligence it was intended to communicate. Allusions to the
main facts of American history, to any clause of the Bible, to the
provisions of the Constitution, and the more important laws, State and
National, would be understood in most cases by those whom I refer to
as the third class in Northern society. In few families of this class
would you fail to find some volumes of the English poets, or some works
of great novelists or renowned travellers. Nothing like this would you
find, however, in a grade of society distinctly superior to the lowest
at the South.
The ratio of the number of the citizens who cannot read at all to the
whole, appears, by the census returns, to be only three times larger
at the South than at the North. I believe it to be much greater at the
South than these returns indicate.[65] The comparative education of the
third class “North” and of the third class “South,” however, cannot
be at all judged from these statistics, supposing them correct. Those
who can read and who do not read, or whose reading is confined within
extremely narrow limits, are a much larger number at the South than
at the North, owing to the much poorer supply of books and newspapers
which commerce can afford to put within the reach of the former. The
census returns two million newspapers, for instance, printed annually
in Virginia, one hundred and fifteen million in New York. There is
a post-office to every fourteen square miles in New York, one to
forty-seven square miles in Virginia; over five hundred publishers and
booksellers in New York, but forty in Virginia. Thirty thousand volumes
in public libraries in Virginia, eight hundred thousand in New York.
The area occupied by the population of Virginia being much the largest,
it may be inferred that with the disposition and the ability to read
anything in particular, the Virginian of the third class will have to
travel more than thirty times as far as the New Yorker to procure it.
The same proposition will hold good in regard to most other means of
cultivation, and the third class of the South generally has seemed
to me to be as much more narrow-minded, rude, coarse, “dangerous,”
and miserable, than the third class of the Free States, as the most
sanguine friend of popular education could anticipate from these facts.
The great difference in character between the third class of the South
and that of the North, as indicated by their respective manners,
is found in the much less curiosity and ready intelligent interest
in matters which have not an immediate personal bearing in that of
the South. Apathetic carelessness rather than simple indifference,
or reckless incivility as to your comfort, is what makes the low
Southerner a disagreeable companion. It is his impertinent shrewdness
which makes you wish to keep the Yankee at a distance. The first seems
without object, spiritless; the latter keen to better himself, if with
nothing else, with information which he can draw from you, and by
gaining your good opinion.
The next or second class would include, both North and South, those
with whose habits and character I am most familiar, and of whom I
can speak with the best right to confidence. It would include in New
England and New York the better educated farmers—these owning, I
should say, half the agricultural land—the permanently established
manufacturers and merchants of moderate capital; most of the
shopkeepers and the better-educated master mechanics and artisan
foremen; most of the preachers, physicians, and lawyers (some ranking
higher). It would correspond most nearly to what in England would
be called the lower-middle class, but any higher grade being very
ill-defined, existing distinctly but in few localities, and rarely
recognized as existing at all, it is in a great measure free from the
peculiar vulgarity of its English parallel.
The number of those at the South who correspond in education and
refinement of manners and habits to the average of this class of the
North, it will be evident, from a similar mode of reasoning to that
before employed, must be very much smaller relatively, either to the
territory or the whole white population of their respective regions.
In the comparison commonly made by Southern writers between the
condition of the people of a sparsely-settled country and another,
it is usually assumed that the advantages of the latter are confined
exclusively to towns, and to large and crowded towns. By contrasting
the evils which concentrate in such towns with the favourable
circumstances of localities where at least wood, water, and air are
abundant, and corn enough to support life can usually be got by any one
with a little occasional labour, an argument of some force to ignorant
people is easily presented. The advantages possessed by a people living
in moderately well-occupied rural districts, who are even more free
from the evils of great towns than their own people, are entirely
overlooked by most Southern writers. Such is the condition, however, of
more white people in the Free States than the whole white population
of the Slave States. A majority of our farmers’ daughters can walk
from their dwellings to schools of a quality such as at the South can
be maintained not twice in five hundred square miles. These schools
are practically a part of their homes. Probably, in more than half the
families of the South, the children of which are instructed to the
least degree which would be considered “respectable,” among this second
class of the North, private governesses are obliged to be employed,
or the children must be for many years at boarding-schools. We all
know that the young women who go to the South, to meet the demand thus
occasioned for home education, are not generally, though they may be in
cases, our own most esteemed and successful instructresses; and we also
know from their report that their skill and labour has necessarily to
be long chiefly employed in laying those simple foundation habits of
_instructability_, which our Northern children acquire imperceptibly
from association with those of the neighbourhood slightly in advance of
them. Churches and the various sub-organizations centreing in them, in
which class distinctions are much lost sight of, to the great advantage
of the manners of the lower classes, and little chance of injury to
the higher; libraries; literary societies; lecture arrangements;
dramatic and musical, art and scientific entertainments, and also
highly educated professional men, with whom, for various purposes, many
persons are brought often in contact, are correspondingly more frequent
at the North, correspondingly more accessible; in other words, the
advantages to be derived from them are cheaper, and so more influential
on the manners of the people at large.
The common opinion has been that the Southerners or planters of the
class now under consideration, are more social, more generous, more
heartily kind and genial than Northerners. According to my experience,
the reverse of all this is true, as a general rule. Families live so
isolatedly at the South, that any social contact, out of the family, is
of course much more eventful and stimulating than it is ordinarily at
the North, and this accounts for the common opinion. I could not but
think, however, that most persons at the South looked to the voluntary
good offices and conversation of others, both within and without their
families, for their enjoyment of the world, much less than most at the
North. It may be that when in towns they attach a greater value to, and
are more careful to make use of the opportunities for social gathering
afforded by towns, than are Northerners. In towns they attach more
consequence to forms, are more scrupulous in matters of etiquette, more
lavish in expenditure for dress, and for certain other things which are
the signs of luxury rather than luxury itself, such as plate and fancy
brands of wines. They make less show of fine art and less pretence of
artistic judgment; more of respect and regard for their associates, and
of indifference or superiority to all others.
As to manner or deportment simply, with the same impulse and intention,
that of the Southerner will habitually, under ordinary circumstances,
be best, more true, more composed, more dignified. I have said that
the second class at the North is without the pervading vulgarity of
the class to which it most nearly corresponds in England, the reason
being that those which constitute it seldom wish or attempt to appear
to belong to a superior class, not clearly recognizing a superior
class. Individuals, however, very generally have a strong desire to
be thought better informed, more ingenious, more witty, as well as
more successful in their enterprises than they are, and this stamps
them with a peculiar quality of manners vulgarly called “smartness,”
the absence of which makes Southern men and women generally much more
agreeable companions than Northerners of the same degree of education
and accomplishments in other respects. Not but that snobs abound; of
these it will be more convenient to speak under the next division,
however.
The traditional “old family,” stately but condescending, haughty
but jovial, keeping open house for all comers on the plantations of
Virginia or South Carolina, is not wholly a myth.
There really was something which, with some sort of propriety, could
be termed a gentry in Carolina and Virginia in their colony days; yet
of the names which are now thought to have belonged to it, as descended
of brave, loyal, and adventurous cavaliers, some I once saw in London
upon an old freight-list of a ship outward bound for Virginia, with the
addition of tinker and tailor, poacher and pickpocket, all to be sold
for life, or a term of years, to the highest bidder when they should
arrive. A large majority of the fathers of Virginia were unquestionably
of this class.
What was properly to be termed the gentry in Virginia and South
Carolina previous to the Revolution, was very small in number. A large
proportion of the families who composed it, and who remained after the
Revolution in the country (for many were Tories) have since passed in
all their branches through a poverty-stricken period, very dissipating
in its influence upon hereditary breeding, novelists and dramatic
old servants to the contrary notwithstanding. Many of those who have
retained wealth and family pride in succession to the present time,
have undeniably, from various causes, degenerated wofully in breeding.
Coarse tastes and brutal dispositions cannot be disguised under a
cavalier address, and the most assured readiness in the established
forms of polite society. Of the real “old families” which remain at all
“well bred” in their qualities, habits, and manners, by reason of their
lineage, I think it will be difficult for most readers who have not
studied the matter at all to form a sufficiently small estimate; call
them a dozen or a hundred, what does it matter in a region much larger
than the old German empire? Associating with these are a few hundred
more new or recuperated families, in which there is also the best
breeding, and in certain few parts or districts of the South, to be
defined and numbered without difficulty, there is a wealthy, distinct,
generous, hospitable, refined, and accomplished first class, clinging
with some pertinacity, although with too evident an effort, to the
traditional manners and customs of an established gentry.
There was a gentry in the North as well as in Virginia and Carolina
in the colony period, though a less important and numerous one. As the
North has been much more prosperous, as the value of its property has
much more rapidly increased than that of the South, the advantages
of wealth have, I believe, been more generally retained in families,
and probably the number of those who could trace their breeding in
an uninterrupted parental influence from the colonial gentry, is now
larger at the North than the South.
Including new families, in whose habits and manners and conversation
the best bred people of Europe would find nothing more offensive and
inharmonious with themselves than might be ascribed to local fashion
or a desire to avoid appearances which, though perfectly proper in
an aristocratic society, would be snobbish in a republic, there is
unquestionably at this time a very much larger number of thoroughly
well-bred people in the Free than in the Slave States. It is equally
certain that the proportion of such people to the whole population of
whites is larger at the North than the South.
The great majority of wealthy planters who at the present day assume
for themselves a special social respectability and superiority to
the class I have defined as the second, are, as a general rule, not
only distinguished for all those qualities which our satirists and
dramatists are accustomed to assume to be the especial property of the
newly rich of the Fifth Avenue, but, as far as I have had opportunity
to observe both classes, are far more generally and ridiculously so
than the would-be fashionable people of New York, or of any other
part of the United States. It is a part of the _rôle_ they undertake
to act, to be hospitable and generous, as it was lately that of our
fops to be sleepy and critical. They are not hospitable and generous,
however; they know not the meaning of these terms. They are absurdly
ostentatious in entertainment, and extravagant in the purchase of
notoriety; possibly they have more tact in this than our Potiphars, but
such has not been my personal observation.