Ride through the maize-fields--Sugar plantation; negroes at
work--Use of the lash--Feeling towards France--Silence of the
country--Negroes and dogs--Theory of slavery--Physical formation
of the negro--The defence of slavery--The masses for negro
souls--Convent of the Sacré Cœur--Ferry-house--A large landowner.
_June 3rd._ At five o’clock this morning, having been awakened an
hour earlier by a wonderful chorus of riotous mocking-birds, my old
negro attendant brought in my bath of Mississippi water, which,
Nile like, casts down a strong deposit, and becomes as clear,
if not so sweet, after standing. “Le seigneur vous attend;” and
already I saw, outside my window, the Governor mounted on a stout
cob, and a nice chestnut horse waiting, led by a slave. Early as
it was, the sun felt excessively hot, and I envied the Governor
his slouched hat as we rode through the fields, crisp with dew.
In a few minutes our horses were traversing narrow alleys between
the tall fields of maize, which rose far above our heads. This
corn, as it is called, is the principal food of the negroes; and
every planter lays down a sufficient quantity to afford him, on
an average, a supply all the year round. Outside this spread vast
fields, hedge-less, wall-less, and unfenced, where the green cane
was just learning to wave its long shoots in the wind--a lake of
bright green sugar-sprouts, along the margin of which, in the
distance, rose an unbroken boundary of forest, two miles in depth,
up to the swampy morass, all to be cleared and turned into arable
land in process of time. From the river front to this forest, the
fields of rich loam, unfathomable, and yielding from one to one and
a half hogsheads of sugar per acre under cultivation, extend for a
mile and a half in depth. In the midst of this expanse white dots
were visible like Sowars seen on the early march, in Indian fields,
many a time and oft. Those are the gangs of hands at work--we
will see what they are at presently. This little reminiscence of
Indian life was further heightened by the negroes who ran beside
us to whisk flies from the horses, and to open the gates in the
plantation boundary. When the Indian corn is not good, peas are
sowed, alternately, between the stalks, and are considered to be of
much benefit; and when the cane is bad, corn is sowed with it, for
the same object. Before we came up to the gangs we passed a cart on
the road containing a large cask, a bucket full of molasses, a pail
of hominy, or boiled Indian corn, and a quantity of tin pannikins.
The cask contained water for the negroes, and the other vessels
held the materials for their breakfast; in addition to which, they
generally have each a dried fish. The food was ample, and looked
wholesome; such as any labouring man would be well content with.
Passing along through maize on one side, and cane at another, we
arrived at last at a patch of ground where thirty-six men and women
were hoeing.
Three gangs of negroes were at work: one gang of men, with twenty
mules and ploughs, was engaged in running through the furrows
between the canes, cutting up the weeds and clearing away the
grass, which is the enemy of the growing shoot. The mules are of a
fine, large, good-tempered kind, and understand their work almost
as well as the drivers, who are usually the more intelligent hands
on the plantation. The overseer, a sharp-looking creole, on a
lanky pony, whip in hand, superintended their labours, and, after
a salutation to the Governor, to whom he made some remarks on the
condition of the crops, rode off to another part of the farm. With
the exception of crying to their mules, the negroes kept silence at
their work.
Another gang consisted of forty men, who were hoeing out the
grass in Indian corn. The third gang, of thirty-six women, were
engaged in hoeing out cane. Their clothing seemed heavy for the
climate; their shoes, ponderous and ill-made, had worn away the
feet of their thick stockings, which hung in fringes over the
upper leathers. Coarse straw hats and bright cotton handkerchiefs
protected their heads from the sun. The silence which I have
already alluded to, prevailed among these gangs also--not a sound
could be heard but the blows of the hoe on the heavy clods. In the
rear of each gang stood a black overseer, with a heavy-thonged
whip over his shoulder. If “Alcíbíade” or “Pompée” were called
out, he came with outstretched hand to ask “How do you do,” and
then returned to his labour; but the ladies were coy, and scarcely
looked up from under their flapping _chapeaux de paille_ at their
visitors.
Those who are mothers leave their children in the charge of certain
old women, unfit for anything else, and “suckers,” as they are
called, are permitted to go home, at appointed periods in the
day, to give the infants the breast. The overseers have power
to give ten lashes; but heavier punishment ought to be reported
to the Governor; however, it is not likely a good overseer would
be checked, in any way, by his master. The anxieties attending
the cultivation of sugar are great, and so much depends upon
the judicious employment of labour, it is scarcely possible to
exaggerate the importance of experience in directing it, and of
power to insist on its application. When the frost comes, the
cane is rendered worthless--one touch destroys the sugar. But
if frost is the enemy of the white planter, the sun is scarcely
the friend of the black man. The sun condemns him to slavery,
because it is the heat which is the barrier to the white man’s
labour. The Governor told me that, in August, when the crops are
close, thick-set, and high, and the vertical sun beats down on the
labourers, nothing but a black skin and head covered with wool can
enable a man to walk out in the open and live.
We returned to the house in time for breakfast, for which our early
cup of coffee and biscuit and the ride had been good preparation.
Here was old France again. One might imagine a lord of the
seventeenth century in his hall, but for the black faces of the
servitors and the strange dishes of tropical origin. There was the
old French abundance, the numerous dishes and efflorescence of
napkins, and the long-necked bottles of Bordeaux, with a steady
current of pleasant small talk. I saw some numbers of a paper
called _La Misachibée_, which was the primitive Indian name of the
grand river, not improved by the addition of sibilant Anglo-Saxon
syllables.
The Americans, not unmindful of the aid to which, at the end of the
War of Independence, their efforts were merely auxiliary, delight,
even in the North, to exalt France above her ancient rival; but,
as if to show the innate dissimilarity of the two races, the
French creoles exhibit towards the New Englanders and the North an
animosity, mingled with contempt, which argues badly for a future
amalgamation or reunion. As the South Carolinians declare, they
would rather return to their allegiance under the English monarchy,
so the Louisianans, although they have no sentiment in common with
the people of republican and imperial France, assert they would far
sooner seek a connection with the old country than submit to the
yoke of the Yankees.
After breakfast, the Governor drove out by the ever-silent levée
for some miles, passing estate after estate, where grove nodded to
grove, each alley saw its brother. One could form no idea, from the
small limited frontage of these plantations, that the proprietors
were men of many thousands a year, because the estates extend
on an average for three or four miles back to the forest. The
absence of human beings on the road was a feature which impressed
one more and more. But for the tall chimneys of the factories and
the sugar-houses, one might believe that these villas had been
erected by some pleasure-loving people who had all fled from the
river banks for fear of pestilence. The gangs of negroes at work
were hidden in the deep corn, and their quarters were silent and
deserted. We met but one planter, in his gig, until we arrived
at the estate of Monsieur Potier, the Governor’s brother-in-law.
The proprietor was at home, and received us very kindly, though
suffering from the effects of a recent domestic calamity. He is a
grave, earnest man, with a face like Jerome Bonaparte, and a most
devout Catholic; and any man more unfit to live in any sort of
community with New England Puritans one cannot well conceive; for
equal intensity of purpose and sincerity of conviction on their
part could only lead them to mortal strife. His house was like a
French château erected under tropical influences, and he led us
through a handsome garden laid out with hothouses, conservatories,
orange-trees, and date-palms, and ponds full of the magnificent
Victoria Regia in flower. We visited his refining factories and
mills, but the heat from the boilers, which seemed too much even
for the all-but-naked negroes who were at work, did not tempt us to
make a very long sojourn inside. The ebony faces and polished black
backs of the slaves were streaming with perspiration as they toiled
over boilers, vat, and centrifugal driers. The good refiner was not
gaining much money at present, for sugar has been rapidly falling
in New Orleans, and the 300,000 barrels produced annually in the
South will fall short in the yield of profits, which on an average
may be taken at 11_l._ a hogshead, without counting the molasses
for the planter. With a most perfect faith in States Rights, he
seemed to combine either indifference or ignorance in respect to
the power and determination of the North to resist secession to the
last. All the planters hereabouts have sown an unusual quantity
of Indian corn, to have food for the negroes if the war lasts,
without any distress from inland or sea blockade. The absurdity of
supposing that a blockade can injure them in the way of supply is a
favourite theme to descant upon. They may find out, however, that
it is no contemptible means of warfare.
At night, there are regular patrols and watchmen, who look after
the levée and the negroes. A number of dogs are also loosed, but
I am assured that the creatures do not tear the negroes; they
are taught “merely” to catch and mumble them, to treat them as a
well-broken retriever uses a wounded wild duck.
At six A.M., Moïse came to ask me if I should like a glass of
absinthe, or anything stomachic. At breakfast was Doctor Laporte,
formerly a member of the Legislative Assembly of France, who was
exiled by Louis Napoleon; in other words, he was ordered to give in
his adhesion to the new _régime_, or to take a passport for abroad.
He preferred the latter course, and now, true Frenchman, finding
the Emperor has aggrandised France and added to her military
reputation, he admires the man on whom but a few years ago he
lavished the bitterest hate.
The carriage is ready, and the word farewell is spoken at last. M.
Alfred Roman, my companion, has travelled in Europe, and learned
philosophy; is not so orthodox as many of the gentlemen I have met
who indulge in ingenious hypotheses to comfort the consciences
of the anthropoproprietors. The negro skull won’t hold as many
ounces of shot as the white man’s. Potent proof that the white man
has a right to sell and to own the creature! He is plantigrade,
and carved as to the tibia! Cogent demonstration that he was made
expressly to work for the arch-footed, straight-tibiaed Caucasian.
He has a _rete mucosum_ and a coloured pigment! Surely he cannot
have a soul of the same colour as that of an Italian or a Spaniard,
far less of a flaxen-haired Saxon! See these peculiarities in
the frontal sinus--in sinciput or occiput! Can you doubt that
the being with a head of that shape was made only to till, hoe,
and dig for another race? Besides, the Bible says that he is a
son of Ham, and prophecy must be carried out in the rice-swamps,
sugar-canes, and maize-fields of the Southern Confederation. It is
flat blasphemy to set yourself against it. Our Saviour sanctions
slavery because he does not say a word against it, and it is very
likely that St. Paul was a slave-owner. Had cotton and sugar been
known, the apostle might have been a planter! Furthermore, the
negro is civilised by being carried away from Africa and set to
work, instead of idling in native inutility. What hope is there
of Christianising the African races, except by the agency of the
apostles from New Orleans, Mobile, or Charleston, who sing the
sweet songs of Zion with, such vehemence, and clamour so fervently
for baptism in the waters of the “Jawdam?”
If these high physical, metaphysical, moral and religious
reasonings do not satisfy you, and you are bold enough to venture
still to be unconvinced and to say so, then I advise you not to
come within reach of a mass meeting of our citizens, who may be
able to find a rope and a tree in the neighbourhood.
As we jog along in an easy rolling carriage drawn by a pair of
stout horses, a number of white people meet us coming from the
Catholic chapel of the parish, where they had been attending the
service for the repose of the soul of a lady much beloved in the
neighbourhood. The black people must be supposed to have very
happy souls, or to be as utterly lost as Mr. Shandy’s homunculus
was under certain circumstances, for I have failed to find that
any such services are ever considered necessary in their case,
although they may have been very good--or, where the service would
be most desirable--very bad Catholics. The dead, leaden uniformity
of the scenery forced one to converse, in order to escape profound
melancholy: the levée on the right hand, above which nothing was
visible but the sky; on the left plantations with cypress fences,
whitewashed and pointed wooden gates leading to the planters’
houses, and rugged gardens surrounded with shrubs, through which
could be seen the slave quarters. Men making eighty or ninety
hogsheads of sugar in a year lived in most wretched tumble-down
wooden houses not much larger than ox sheds.
As we drove on the storm gathered overhead, and the rain fell in
torrents--the Mississippi flowed lifelessly by--not a boat on its
broad surface.
At last we reached Governor Manning’s place, and went to the house
of the overseer, a large heavy-eyed old man.
“This rain will do good to the corn,” said the overseer. “The
niggers has had sceerce nothin’ to do leetly, as they ’eve clearied
out the fields pretty well.”
At the ferry-house I was attended by one stout young slave, who
was to row me over. Two flat-bottomed skiffs lay on the bank. The
negro groped under the shed, and pulled out a piece of wood like
a large spatula, some four feet long, and a small round pole a
little longer. “What are those?” quoth I. “Dem’s oars, Massa,” was
my sable ferryman’s brisk reply. “I’m very sure they are not; if
they were spliced they might make an oar between them.” “Golly,
and dat’s the trute, Massa.” “Then go and get oars, will you?”
While he was hunting about we entered the shed at the ferry
for shelter from the rain. We found “a solitary woman sitting”
smoking a pipe by the ashes on the hearth, blear-eyed, low-browed
and morose--young as she was. She never said a word nor moved as
we came in, sat and smoked, and looked through her gummy eyes at
chickens about the size of sparrows, and at a cat not larger than
a rat which ran about on the dirty floor. A little girl, some four
years of age, not over-dressed--indeed, half-naked, “not to put too
fine a point upon it”--crawled out from under the bed, where she
had hid on our approach. As she seemed incapable of appreciating
the use of a small piece of silver presented to her--having no
precise ideas in coinage or toffy--her parent took the obolus in
charge, with unmistakeable decision; but still the lady would not
stir a step to aid our guide, who now insisted on the “key ov de
oar-house.” The little thing sidled off and hunted it out from the
top of the bedstead, and when it was found, and the boat was ready,
I was not sorry to quit the company of the silent woman in black.
The boatman pushed his skiff, in shape a snuffer-dish, some ten
feet long and a foot deep, into the water--there was a good deal
of rain in it. I got in too, and the conscious waters immediately
began vigorously spurting through the cotton wadding wherewith the
craft was caulked. Had we gone out into the stream we should have
had a swim for it, and they do say that the Mississippi is the most
dangerous river in the known world, for that healthful exercise.
“Why! deuce take you” (I said at least that, in my wrath), “don’t
you see the boat is leaky?” “See it now for true, Massa. Nobody
able to tell dat till Massa get in though.” Another skiff proved
to be more staunch. I bade good-bye to my friend Roman, and sat
down in my boat, which was forced by the negro against the stream
close to the bank, in order to get a good start across to the other
side. The view from my lonely position was curious, but not at all
picturesque. The world was bounded on both sides by a high bank,
which constricted the broad river, just as if one were sailing down
an open sewer of enormous length and breadth. Above the bank rose
the tops of tall trees and the chimneys of sugar-houses, and that
was all to be seen save the sky.
A quarter of an hour brought us to the levée on the other side. I
ascended the bank, and across the road, directly in front appeared
a carriage gateway and wickets of wood, painted white, in a line
of park palings of the same material, which extended up and down
the road far as the eye could see, and guarded wide-spread fields
of maize and sugar-cane. An avenue lined with trees, with branches
close set, drooping and overarching a walk paved with red brick,
led to the house, the porch of which was visible at the extremity
of the lawn, with clustering flowers, rose, jessamine, and creepers
clinging to the pillars supporting the verandah. The view from the
belvedere on the roof was one of the most striking of its kind in
the world.
If an English agriculturist could see six thousand acres of the
finest land in one field, unbroken by hedge or boundary, and
covered with the most magnificent crops of tasseling Indian corn
and sprouting sugar-cane, as level as a billiard-table, he would
surely doubt his senses. But here is literally such a sight--six
thousand acres, better tilled than the finest patch in all the
Lothians, green as Meath pastures, which can be turned up for
a hundred years to come without requiring manure, of depth
practically unlimited, and yielding an average profit on what is
sold off it of at least 20_l._ an acre, at the old prices and
usual yield of sugar. Rising up in the midst of the verdure are
the white lines of the negro cottages and the plantation offices
and sugar-houses, which look like large public edifices in the
distance. My host was not ostentatiously proud in telling me that,
in the year 1857, he had purchased this estate for 300,000_l._ and
an adjacent property, of 8000 acres, for 150,000_l._, and that he
had left Belfast in early youth, poor and unfriended, to seek his
fortune, and indeed scarcely knowing what fortune meant, in the
New World. In fact, he had invested in these purchases the greater
part, but not all, of the profits arising from the business in New
Orleans, which he inherited from his master; of which there still
remained a solid nucleus in the shape of a great woollen magazine
and country house. He is not yet fifty years of age, and his
confidence in the great future of sugar induced him to embark this
enormous fortune in an estate which the blockade has stricken with
paralysis.
I cannot doubt, however, that he regrets he did not invest his
money in a certain great estate in the North of Ireland, which he
had nearly decided on buying; and, had he done so, he would now
be in the position to which his unaffected good sense, modesty,
kindliness, and benevolence, always adding the rental, entitle him.
Six thousand acres on this one estate all covered with sugar-cane,
and 16,000 acres more of Indian corn, to feed the slaves;--these
were great possessions, but not less than 18,000 acres still
remained, covered with brake and forest and swampy, to be reclaimed
and turned into gold. As easy to persuade the owner of such wealth
that slavery is indefensible as to have convinced the Norman baron
that the Saxon churl who tilled his lands ought to be his equal.
I found Mr. Ward and a few merchants from New Orleans in possession
of the bachelor’s house. The service was performed by slaves,
and the order and regularity of the attendants were worthy of a
well-regulated English mansion. In Southern houses along the coast,
as the Mississippi above New Orleans is termed, beef and mutton
are rarely met with, and the more seldom the better. Fish, also,
is scarce, but turkeys, geese, poultry, and preparations of pig,
excellent vegetables, and wine of the best quality, render the
absence of the accustomed dishes little to be regretted.
The silence which struck me at Governor Roman’s is not broken at
Mr. Burnside’s; and when the last thrill of the mocking-bird’s song
has died out through the grove, a stillness of Avernian profundity
settles on hut, field, and river.