Climate of the Southern States--General Beauregard--Risks of the
post-office--Hatred of New England--By railway to Sea Island
plantation--Sporting in South Carolina--An hour on board a canoe
in the dark.
_April 24th._--In the morning we found ourselves in chopping little
sea-way for which the “Nina” was particularly unsuited, laden as
she was with provisions and produce. Eyes and glasses anxiously
straining seawards for any trace of the blockading vessels. Every
sail scrutinised, but no ‘stars and stripes’ visible.
Our captain--a good specimen of one of the inland-water navigators,
shrewd, intelligent, and active--told me a good deal about the
country. He laughed at the fears of the whites as regards the
climate. “Why, here am I,” said he, “going up the river, and down
the river all times of the year, and at times of day and night when
they reckon the air is most deadly, and I’ve done so for years
without any bad effects. The planters whose houses I pass all run
away in May, and go off to Europe, or to the piney wood, or to the
springs, or they think they’d all die. There’s Captain Buck, who
lives above here,--he comes from the State of Maine. He had only a
thousand dollars to begin with, but he sets to work and gets land
on the Waccamaw River at twenty cents an acre. It was death to go
nigh it, but it was first-rate rice land, and Captain Buck is now
worth a million of dollars. He lives on his estate all the year
round, and is as healthy a man as ever you seen.”
To such historiettes my planting friends turn a deaf ear. “I tell
you what,” said Pringle, “just to show you what kind our climate
is. I had an excellent overseer once, who would insist on staying
near the river, and wouldn’t go away. He fought against it for more
than five-and-twenty years, but he went down with fever at last.”
As the overseer was more than thirty years of age when he came to
the estate, he had not been cut off so very suddenly. I thought of
the quack’s advertisement of the “bad leg of sixty years standing.”
The captain says the negroes on the river plantations are very well
off. He can buy enough of pork from the slaves on one plantation to
last his ship’s crew for the whole winter. The money goes to them,
as the hogs are their own. One of the stewards on board had bought
himself and his family out of bondage with his earnings. The State
in general, however, does not approve of such practices.
At three o’clock P.M., ran into Charleston harbour, and landed soon
afterwards.
I saw General Beauregard in the evening; he was very lively and
in good spirits, though he admitted he was rather surprised by
the spirit displayed in the North. “A good deal of it is got up,
however,” he said, “and belongs to that washy sort of enthusiasm
which is promoted by their lecturing and spouting.” Beauregard is
very proud of his personal strength, which for his slight frame
is said to be very extraordinary, and he seemed to insist on it
that the Southern men had more physical strength, owing to their
mode of life and their education, than their Northern “brethren.”
In the evening held a sort of _tabaks consilium_ in the hotel,
where a number of officers--Manning, Lucas Chesnut, Calhoun,
&c.--discoursed of the affairs of the nation. All my friends,
except Trescot, I think were elated at the prospect of hostilities
with the North, and overjoyed that a South Carolinian regiment had
already set out for the frontiers of Virginia.
_April 25th._--Sent off my letters by an English gentleman,
who was taking despatches from Mr. Bunch to Lord Lyons, as the
post-office is becoming a dangerous institution. We hear of letters
being tampered with on both sides. Adams’s Express Company, which
acts as a sort of express post under certain conditions, is more
trustworthy; but it is doubtful how long communications will be
permitted to exist between the two hostile nations, as they may now
be considered.
Dined with Mr. Petigru, who had most kindly postponed his dinner
party till my return from the plantations, and met there General
Beauregard, Judge King, and others, among whom, distinguished
for their _esprit_ and accomplishments, were Mrs. King and Mrs.
Carson, daughters of my host. The dislike, which seems innate,
to New England is universal, and varies only in the form of its
expression. It is quite true Mr. Petigru is a decided Unionist,
but he is the sole specimen of the genus in Charleston, and he is
tolerated on account of his rarity. As the witty, pleasant old man
trots down the street, utterly unconscious of the world around
him, he is pointed out proudly by the Carolinians as an instance
of forbearance on their part, and as a proof at the same time of
popular unanimity of sentiment.
There are also people who regret the dissolution of the Union--such
as Mr. Huger, who shed tears in talking of it the other night; but
they regard the fact very much as they would the demolition of some
article which never can be restored and reunited, which was valued
for the uses it rendered and its antiquity.
General Beauregard is apprehensive of an attack by the Northern
“fanatics” before the South is prepared, and he considers they will
carry out coercive measures most rigorously. He dreads the cutting
of the levées, or high artificial works, raised along the whole
course of the Mississippi, for many hundreds of miles above New
Orleans, which the Federals may resort to in order to drown the
plantations and ruin the planters.
We had a good-humoured argument in the evening about the ethics
of burning the Norfolk navy yard. The Southerners consider the
appropriation of the arms, moneys, and stores of the United States
as rightful acts, inasmuch as they represent, according to them,
their contribution, or a portion of it, to the national stock in
trade. When a State goes out of the Union she should be permitted
to carry her forts, armaments, arsenals, &c., along with her, and
it was a burning shame for the Yankees to destroy the property of
Virginia at Norfolk. These ideas, and many like them, have the
merit of novelty to English people, who were accustomed to think
there were such things as the Union and the people of the United
States.
_April 26th._--Bade good-by to Charleston at 9·45 A.M. this day,
and proceeded by railway, in company with Mr. Ward, to visit Mr.
Trescot’s Sea Island Plantation. Crossed the river to the terminus
in a ferry steamer. No blockading vessels in sight yet. The water
alive with small silvery fish, like mullet, which sprang up and
leaped along the surface incessantly. An old gentleman, who was
fishing on the pier, combined the pursuit of sport with instruction
very ingeniously by means of a fork of bamboo in his rod, just
above the reel, into which he stuck his inevitable newspaper, and
read gravely in his cane-bottomed chair till he had a bite, when
the fork was unhitched and the fish was landed. The negroes are
very much addicted to the contemplative man’s recreation, and they
were fishing in all directions.
On the move again. Took our places in the Charleston and Savannah
Railway for Pocotaligo, which is the station for Barnwell Island.
Our fellow-passengers were all full of politics--the pretty women
being the fiercest of all--no! the least good-looking were the
most bitterly patriotic, as if they hoped to talk themselves into
husbands by the most unfeminine expressions towards the Yankees.
The country is a dead flat, perforated by rivers and water-courses,
over which the rail is carried on long and lofty trestle-work.
But for the fine trees, the magnolias and live oak, the landscape
would be unbearably hideous, for there are none of the quaint,
cleanly, delightful villages of Holland to relieve the monotonous
level of rice-swamps and wastes of land and water and mud. At the
humble little stations there were invariably groups of horsemen
waiting under the trees, and ladies with their black nurses and
servants who had driven over in the odd-looking old-fashioned
vehicles, which were drawn up in the shade. Those who were going
on a long journey, aware of the utter barrenness of the land,
took with them a viaticum and bottles of milk. The nurses and
slaves squatted down by their side in the train, on perfectly
well-understood terms. No one objected to their presence--on the
contrary, the passengers treated them with a certain sort of
special consideration, and they were on the happiest terms with
their charges, some of which were in the absorbent condition of
life, and dived their little white faces against the tawny bosom of
their nurses with anything but reluctance.
The train stopped, at 12·20, at Pocotaligo; and there we found Mr.
Trescot and a couple of neighbouring planters, famous as fishers
for “drum,” of which more by-and-bye. I had met old Mr. Elliot in
Charleston, and his account of this sport, and of the pursuit of
an enormous sea monster called the devil-fish, which he was one of
the first to kill in these waters, excited my curiosity very much.
Mr. Elliot has written a most agreeable account of the sports of
South Carolina, and I had hoped he would have been well enough to
have been my guide, philosopher, and friend in drum fishing in Port
Royal; but he sent over his son to say that he was too unwell to
come, and had therefore dispatched most excellent representatives
in two members of his family. It was arranged that they should row
down from their place and meet us to-morrow morning at Trescot’s
Island, which lies above Beaufort, in Port Royal Sound and river.
Got into Trescot’s gig, and plunged into a shady lane with wood on
each side, through which we drove for some distance. The country,
on each side and beyond, perfectly flat--all rice lands--few houses
visible--scarcely a human being on the road--drove six or seven
miles without meeting a soul. After a couple of hours or so, I
should think, the gig turned up by an open gateway on a path or
road made through a waste of rich black mud, “glorious for rice,”
and landed us at the door of a planter, Mr. Heyward, who came out
and gave us a most hearty welcome, in the true Southern style. His
house is charming, surrounded with trees, and covered with roses
and creepers, through which birds and butterflies are flying. Mr.
Heyward took it as a matter of course that we stopped to dinner,
which we were by no means disinclined to do, as the day was hot,
the road was dusty, and his reception frank and kindly. A fine
specimen of the planter man; and, minus his broad-brimmed straw hat
and loose clothing, not a bad representative of an English squire
at home.
Whilst we were sitting in the porch, a strange sort of booming
noise attracted my attention in one of the trees. “It is a
rain-crow,” said Mr. Heyward; “a bird which we believe to foretell
rain. I’ll shoot it for you.” And, going into the hall, he took
down a double-barreled fowling-piece, walked out, and fired into
the tree; whence the rain-crow, poor creature, fell fluttering to
the ground and died. It seemed to me a kind of cuckoo--the same
size, but of darker plumage. I could gather no facts to account for
the impression that its call is a token of rain.
My attention was also called to a curious kind of snake-killing
hawk, or falcon, which makes an extraordinary noise by putting its
wings point upwards, close together, above its back, so as to offer
no resistance to the air, and then, beginning to descend from a
great height, with fast-increasing rapidity, makes, by its rushing
through the air, a strange loud hum, till it is near the ground,
when the bird stops its downward swoop and flies in a curve over
the meadow. This I saw two of these birds doing repeatedly to-night.
After dinner, at which Mr. Heyward expressed some alarm lest
Secession would deprive the Southern States of “ice,” we continued
our journey towards the river. There is still a remarkable absence
of population or life along the road, and even the houses are
either hidden or lie too far off to be seen. The trees are much
admired by the people, though they would not be thought much of in
England.
At length, towards sundown, having taken to a track by a forest,
part of which was burning, we came to a broad muddy river, with
steep clay banks. A canoe was lying in a little harbour formed by
a slope in the bank, and four stout negroes, who were seated round
a burning log, engaged in smoking and eating oysters, rose as we
approached, and helped the party into the “dug-out,” or canoe, a
narrow, long, and heavy boat, with wall sides and a flat floor. A
row of one hour, the latter part of it in darkness, took us to the
verge of Mr. Trescot’s estate, Barnwell Island; and the oarsmen, as
they bent to their task, beguiled the way by singing in unison a
real negro melody, which was as unlike the works of the Ethiopian
Serenaders as anything in song could be unlike another. It was
a barbaric sort of madrigal, in which one singer beginning was
followed by the others in unison, repeating the refrain in chorus,
and full of quaint expression and melancholy:--
“Oh, your soul! oh, my soul! I’m going to the churchyard to lay
this body down;
Oh, my soul! oh, your soul! we’re going to the churchyard to lay
this nigger down.”
And then some appeal to the difficulty of passing “the Jawdam,”
constituted the whole of the song, which continued with unabated
energy through the whole of the little voyage. To me it was a
strange scene. The stream, dark as Lethe, flowing between the
silent, houseless, rugged banks, lighted up near the landing by the
fire in the woods, which reddened the sky--the wild strain, and the
unearthly adjurations to the singers’ souls, as though they were
palpable, put me in mind of the fancied voyage across the Styx.
“Here we are at last.” All I could see was a dark shadow of trees
and the tops of rushes by the river side. “Mind where you step, and
follow me close.” And so, groping along through a thick shrubbery
for a short space, I came out on a garden and enclosure, in the
midst of which the white outlines of a house were visible. Lights
in the drawing-room--a lady to receive and welcome us--a snug
library--tea, and to bed: but not without more talk about the
Southern Confederacy, in which Mrs. Trescot explained how easily
she could feed an army, from her experience in feeding her negroes.