By railway to Savannah--Description of the city--Rumours of the
last few days--State of affairs at Washington--Preparations
for war--Cemetery of Bonaventure--Road made of oyster
shells--Appropriate features of the Cemetery--The Tatnall
family--Dinner-party at Mr. Green’s--Feeling in Georgia against
the North.
_April 29th._--This morning up at 6 A.M., bade farewell to our
hostess and Barnwell Island, and proceeded with Trescot back
to the Pocotaligo station, which we reached at 12·20. On our
way Mr. Heyward and his son rode out of a field, looking very
like a couple of English country squires in all but hats and
saddles. The young gentleman was good enough to bring over a snake
hawk he had shot for me. At the station, to which the Heywards
accompanied us, were the Elliotts and others, who had come over
with invitations and adieux; and I beguiled the time to Savannah
reading the very interesting book by Mr. Elliott, senior, on the
Wild Sports of Carolina, which was taken up by some one when I left
the car-carriage for a moment and not returned to me. The country
through which we passed was flat and flooded as usual, and the rail
passed over dark deep rivers on lofty trestle-work, by pine wood
and dogwood tree, by the green plantation clearing, with mud bank,
dyke, and tiny canal mile by mile, the train stopping for the usual
freight of ladies, and negro nurses, and young planters, all very
much of the same class, till at 3 o’clock P.M., the cars rattled up
alongside a large shed, and we were told we had arrived at Savannah.
Here was waiting for me Mr. Charles Green, who had already claimed
me and my friend as his guests, and I found in his carriage the
young American designer, who had preceded me from Charleston, and
had informed Mr. Green of my coming.
The drive through such portion of Savannah as lay between the
terminus and Mr. Green’s house, soon satisfied my eyes that it
had two peculiarities. In the first place, it had the deepest
sand in the streets I have ever seen; and next, the streets were
composed of the most odd, quaint, green windowed, many coloured
little houses I ever beheld, with an odd population of lean,
sallow, ill-dressed unwholesome-looking whites, lounging about
the exchanges and corners, and a busy, well-clad, gaily-attired
race of negroes, working their way through piles of children,
under the shade of the trees which bordered all the streets. The
fringe of green, and the height attained by the live oak, Pride
of India, and magnolia, give a delicious freshness and novelty
to the streets of Savannah, which is increased by the great,
number of squares and openings covered with something like sward,
fenced round by white rail, and embellished with noble trees to
be seen at every few hundred yards. It is difficult to believe
you are in the midst of a city, and I was repeatedly reminded
of the environs of a large Indian cantonment--the same kind of
churches and detached houses, with their plantations and gardens
not unlike. The wealthier classes, however, have houses of the New
York Fifth Avenue character: one of the best of these, a handsome
mansion of rich red sandstone, belonged to my host, who coming
out from England many years ago, raised himself by industry and
intelligence to the position of one of the first merchants in
Savannah. Italian statuary graced the hall; finely carved tables
and furniture, stained glass, and pictures from Europe set forth
the sitting-rooms; and the luxury of bath-rooms and a supply of
cold fresh water, rendered it an exception to the general run of
Southern edifices. Mr. Green drove me through the town, which
impressed me more than ever with its peculiar character. We visited
Brigadier-General Lawton, who is charged with the defences of the
place against the expected Yankees, and found him just setting
out to inspect a band of volunteers, whose drums we heard in the
distance, and whose bayonets were gleaming through the clouds of
Savannah dust, close to the statue erected to the memory of one
Pulaski, a Pole, who was mortally wounded in the unsuccessful
defence of the city against the British in the War of Independence.
He turned back and led us into his house. The hall was filled with
little round rolls of flannel. “These,” said he, “are cartridges
for cannon of various calibres, made by the ladies of Mrs. Lawton’s
‘cartridge class.’” There were more cartridges in the back parlour,
so that the house was not quite a safe place to smoke a cigar in.
The General has been in the United States’ army, and has now come
forward to head the people of this State in their resistance to the
Yankees.
We took a stroll in the park, and I learned the news of the last
few days. The people of the South, I find, are delighted at a
snubbing which Mr. Seward has given to Governor Hicks of Maryland,
for recommending the arbitration of Lord Lyons, and he is stated
to have informed Governor Hicks that “our troubles could not be
referred to foreign arbitration, least of all to that of the
representative of a European monarchy.” The most terrible accounts
are given of the state of things in Washington. Mr. Lincoln
consoles himself for his miseries by drinking. Mr. Seward follows
suit. The White House and capital are full of drunken border
ruffians, headed by one Jim Lane of Kansas. But, on the other hand,
the Yankees, under one Butler, a Massachusetts lawyer, have arrived
at Annapolis, in Maryland, secured the “Constitution” man-of-war,
and are raising masses of men for the invasion of the South all
over the States. The most important thing, as it strikes me, is the
proclamation of the Governor of Georgia, forbidding citizens to pay
any money on account of debts due to Northerners, till the end of
the war. General Robert E. Lee has been named Commander-in-Chief of
the Forces of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and troops are flocking
to that State from Alabama and other States. Governor Ellis has
called out 30,000 volunteers in North Carolina, and Governor Rector
of Arkansas has seized the United States’ military stores at
Napoleon. There is a rumour that Fort Pickens has been taken also,
but it is very probably untrue. In Texas and Arkansas the United
States regulars have not made an attempt to defend any of the forts.
In the midst of all this warlike work, volunteers drilling, bands
playing, it was pleasant to walk in the shady park, with its cool
fountains, and to see the children playing about--many of them,
alas! “playing at soldiers”--in charge of their nurses. Returning,
sat in the verandah and smoked a cigar; but the musquitoes were
very keen and numerous. My host did not mind them, but my cuticle
will never be sting-proof.
_April 30th._--At 1·30 P.M. a small party started from Mr.
Green’s to visit the cemetery of Bonaventure, to which every
visitor to Savannah must pay his pilgrimage; _difficiles aditus
primos habet_--a deep sandy road which strains the horses and the
carriages; but at last “the shell road” is reached--a highway
several miles long, consisting of oyster shells--the pride of
Savannah, which eats as many oysters as it can to add to the length
of this wonderful road. There is no stone in the whole of the vast
alluvial ranges of South Carolina and Maritime Georgia, and the
only substance available for making a road is the oyster shell.
There is a toll gate at each end to aid the oyster shells. Remember
they are three times the size of any European crustacean of the
sort.
A pleasant drive through the shady hedgerows and bordering trees
lead to a dilapidated porter’s lodge and gateway, within which rose
in a towering mass of green one of the finest pieces of forest
architecture possible; nothing to be sure like Burnham Beeches, or
some of the forest glades of Windsor, but possessed, nevertheless,
of a character quite its own. What we gazed upon was, in fact,
the ruin of grand avenues of live oak, so well-disposed that
their peculiar mode of growth afforded an unusual development of
the “Gothic idea,” worked out and elaborated by a superabundant
fall from the overlacing arms and intertwined branches of the
tillandsia, or Spanish moss, a weeping, drooping, plumaceous
parasite, which does to the tree what its animal type, the yellow
fever--_vomito prieto_--does to man--clings to it everlastingly,
drying up sap, poisoning blood, killing the principle of life till
it dies. The only differ, as they say in Ireland, is, that the
tillandsia all the time looks very pretty, and that the process
lasts very long. Some there are who praise this tillandsia, hanging
like the tresses of a witch’s hair over an invisible face, but to
me it is a paltry parasite, destroying the grace and beauty of
that it preys upon, and letting fall its dull tendrils over the
fresh lovely green, as clouds drop over the face of some beautiful
landscape. Despite all this, Bonaventure is a scene of remarkable
interest; it seems to have been intended for a place of tombs.
The Turks would have filled it with turbaned white pillars, and
with warm ghosts at night. The French would have decorated it with
interlaced hands of stone, with tears of red and black on white
ground, with wreathes of immortelles. I am not sure that we would
have done much more than have got up a cemetery company, interested
Shillibeer, hired a beadle, and erected an iron paling. The
Savannah people not following any of these fashions, all of which
are adopted in Northern cities, have left everything to nature and
the gatekeeper, and to the owner of one of the hotels, who has got
up a grave yard in the ground. And there, scattered up and down
under the grand old trees, which drop tears of Spanish moss, and
weave wreathes of Spanish moss, and shake plumes of Spanish moss
over them, are a few monumental stones to certain citizens of
Savannah. There is a melancholy air about the place independently
of these emblems of our mortality, which might recommend it
specially for picnics. There never was before a cemetery where
nature seemed to aid the effect intended by man so thoroughly.
Everyone knows a weeping willow will cry over a wedding party if
they sit under it, as well as over a grave. But here the Spanish
moss looks like weepers wreathed by some fantastic hand out of the
crape of Dreamland. Lucian’s Ghostlander, the son of Skeleton of
the Tribe of the Juiceless, could tell us something of such weird
trappings. They are known indeed as the best bunting for yellow
fever to fight under. Wherever their flickering horsehair tresses
wave in the breeze, taper end downwards, Squire Black Jack is
bearing lance and sword. One great green oak says to the other,
“This fellow is killing me. Take his deadly robes off my limbs!”
“Alas! See how he is ruining me! I have no life to help you.” It
is, indeed, a strange and very ghastly place. Here are so many
_querci virentes_, old enough to be strong, and big, and great,
sapfull, lusty, wide armed, green-honoured--all dying out slowly
beneath tillandsia, as if they were so many monarchies perishing
of decay--or so many youthful republics dying of buncombe brag,
richness of blood, and other diseases fatal to overgrown bodies
politic.
The void left in the midst of all these designed walks and stately
avenues, by the absence of any suitable centre, increases the
seclusion and solitude. A house ought to be there somewhere you
feel--in fact there was once the mansion of the Tatnalls, a good
old English family, whose ancestors came from the old country, ere
the rights of man were talked of, and lived among the Oglethorpes,
and such men of the pigtail school, who would have been greatly
astonished at finding themselves in company with Benjamin Franklin
or his kind. I don’t know anything of old Tatnall. Indeed who
does? But he had a fine idea of planting trees, which he never
got in America, where he would have received scant praise for
anything but his power to plant cotton or sugar-cane just now. In
his knee-breeches, and top boots, I can fancy the old gentleman
reproducing some home scene, and boasting to himself, “I will make
it as fine as Lord Nihilo’s park.” Could he see it now?--A decaying
army of the dead. The mansion was burned down during a Christmas
merrymaking, and was never built again, and the young trees have
grown up despite the Spanish moss, and now they stand, as it were
in cathedral aisles, around the ruins of the departed house,
shading the ground, and enshrining its memories in an antiquity
which seems of the remotest, although it is not as ancient as that
of the youngest oak in the Squire’s park at home.
I have before oftentimes in my short voyages here, wondered greatly
at the reverence bestowed on a tree. In fact, it is because a
tree of any decent growth is sure to be older than anything else
around it; and although young America revels in her future, she is
becoming old enough to think about her past.
In the evening Mr. Green gave a dinner to some very agreeable
people, Mr. Ward, the Chinese Minister--(who tried, by-the-bye, to
make it appear that his wooden box was the Pekin State carriage for
distinguished foreigners)--Mr. Locke, the clever and intelligent
editor of the principal journal in Savannah, Brigadier Lawton, one
of the Judges, a Britisher, owner of the once renowned America
which, under the name of Camilla, was now lying in the river (not
perhaps without reference to a little speculation in running the
blockade, hourly expected), Mr. Ward and Commodore Tatnall, so
well known to us in England for his gallant conduct in the Peiho
affair, when he offered and gave our vessels aid, though a neutral,
and uttered the exclamation in doing so,--in his despatch at all
events,--“that blood was thicker than water.” Of our party was also
Mr. Hodgson, well known to most of our Mediterranean travellers
some years back, when he was United States’ Consul in the East. He
amuses his leisure still by inditing and reading monographs on the
languages of divers barbarous tribes in Numidia and Mauritania.
The Georgians are not quite so vehement as the South Carolinians
in their hate of the Northerners; but they are scarcely less
determined to fight President Lincoln and all his men. And that
is the test of this rebellion’s strength. I did not hear any
profession of a desire to become subject to England, or to borrow
a prince of us; but I have nowhere seen stronger determination to
resist any reunion with the New England States. “They can’t conquer
us, Sir” “If they try it, we’ll whip them.”