CHAPTER VIII.
FIRST SIGHT OF A COTTON FIELD—SPANISH MOSS—A NIGHT ON THE RAILS—MANY KINDS OF SAMENESS IN AMERICA—MAIZE—ORDER OF SUCCESSION IN THE FOREST—ITS EXTENT—EVERGREENS IN THE SOUTHERN FOREST—POOR LAND IN THE SOUTH MAY BE MORE PROFITABLE THAN RICH LAND IN THE WEST—DEADNESS OF CHARLESTON—ITS HOTELS—A CHARLESTON SAM-WELLER—THE NAPLES OF THE UNITED STATES—FEW ENGLISH TRAVELLERS—SUFFERINGS OF SOUTHERN FAMILIES—WANT OF SCHOOLS—HOW THE DEFICIENCY IS BEING SUPPLIED—BLACKS SHOULD BE PUT ON SAME FOOTING AS WHITES—DIALOGUE WITH BLACK MEMBER OF CONVENTION—ANOTHER CONVENTION—ABLE BLACK MEMBER—SOUTH CAROLINA ORPHAN ASYLUM.
FIRST SIGHT OF A COTTON FIELD—SPANISH MOSS—A NIGHT ON THE RAILS—MANY KINDS OF SAMENESS IN AMERICA—MAIZE—ORDER OF SUCCESSION IN THE FOREST—ITS EXTENT—EVERGREENS IN THE SOUTHERN FOREST—POOR LAND IN THE SOUTH MAY BE MORE PROFITABLE THAN RICH LAND IN THE WEST—DEADNESS OF CHARLESTON—ITS HOTELS—A CHARLESTON SAM-WELLER—THE NAPLES OF THE UNITED STATES—FEW ENGLISH TRAVELLERS—SUFFERINGS OF SOUTHERN FAMILIES—WANT OF SCHOOLS—HOW THE DEFICIENCY IS BEING SUPPLIED—BLACKS SHOULD BE PUT ON SAME FOOTING AS WHITES—DIALOGUE WITH BLACK MEMBER OF CONVENTION—ANOTHER CONVENTION—ABLE BLACK MEMBER—SOUTH CAROLINA ORPHAN ASYLUM.
First Sight of a Cotton Field.
One cannot behold for the first time what one has heard and read about all one’s life without some little emotion. I felt this when I saw for the first time a field of cotton. It was between Petersburg and Weldon. There is not much to attract attention in the sight itself as seen in winter, when there is nothing to look at but a large enclosure of dead bushes, each about the size of an ordinary gooseberry-bush, only with fewer branches, and every branch leafless, straight, and black, with every here and there a pod of cotton, that was missed at the time of harvesting, showing its white wool, with which the whole field is spotted, ‘This insignificant plant, then,’ I said to myself, ‘is cotton; and this is the way in which it is cultivated. The plant which has created so much wealth, and caused so much bloodshed; which was the mainsupport of slavery, and so the main cause of the late war; which clothes so large a portion of mankind; which has built so many ships and factories; upon which so much of the prosperity of England is founded; and which has affected so largely the commerce of the world; and the influence of which is now felt in every quarter of the globe.
The traveller has pleasure in recalling moments of this kind. I shall not easily forget the delight I felt at the first sight of the Spanish moss. It was in the first gray of the morning, and I was looking out from the railway car, shading off with my hands the light of the lamps that were still burning, that I might be the better able to see through the window, when I beheld for the first time this curious parasite, of which one had seen such frequent mention, hanging in slender streamers of three or four feet in length from the boughs of the trees. I immediately left my seat, and went to the outside of the car. I found we were passing through a cedar swamp on a tressle-bridge of many miles in length. We passed through several such swamps in the course of that day, and wherever this was the case, the trees, of which the swamps were just as full as the dry land, were always covered with this moss. Old trees were entirely enveloped in it to the extremities of their branches. As you approach the Gulf, the trees on the dry land as well as those in swamps are shrouded in it. Its streamers are occasionally two yards long near the coast. It is of a pale ashy colour, and gives you the idea of the accumulated cobwebs of a thousand years.
A Night on the Rails.
American ladies having been well broken in to the publicity of their system of railway travelling,make the best of it, and seem quite unconcerned about what would appear to those unused to it its disagreeable incidents. Never but with one exception did I pass a night on an American railway without finding a sleeping-car attached to the train. It was in the South, and there happened to be about forty people in the car, of whom eight or ten were married ladies travelling with their husbands: like everybody one sees in America, they were young, and of course, as all American young ladies are, were better-looking than the generality of the fair sex. English ladies would probably, under circumstances of so much publicity, have unnecessarily and unwisely endeavoured to keep awake. But their American sisters passed the night as comfortably as might be, each laying her head on her husband’s shoulder for a pillow, and with their arms round each other, or with their hands locked together. In the morning, when the train stopped an hour for breakfast, they made theirtoilettein the carriage, there being generally abundance of water in a railway car, with a mug to drink from, and a basin to wash in. They appeared all to have with them brushes and combs, and towels and soap.
In travelling in the United States one is very much struck with the great amount of sameness that is met with in many things. In outward nature this is very observable. You go from New York to Charleston on what appears to be one level. Throughout these nine hundred miles you have no cuttings or embankments; at all events I do not recollect having had to go through or to go round a single hill. Again, you may go up the valley of the Mississippi on another longer level; and if you start from Chicago to cross thePrairie and Plains, you cross another thousand miles of level ground. Again, throughout all these long levels, adding to them the space between Charleston and New Orleans, there is in the soil a great sameness of colour. Except in the black soil of the Prairies, and occasionally in the river bottoms—of which latter you see little in railway travelling—yellow, of slightly varying tints, is almost universal, whether the soil be sandy or clayey. And then the forest which clothes this soil of the same colour and of the same level, is also everywhere itself the same. The predominant trees are fortunately the unfailing pine, and almost equally unfailing oak. Sameness, too, but not quite to the same extent, characterises the Great Lake region. There are glorious exceptions to this general sameness in the Alleghanies, the Rocky Mountains, and California; but these are not the situations in which the great masses of the population have formed their homes. De Tocqueville and others have observed a similar sameness in the ideas and customs of the Americans themselves; and this they attribute to the completeness with which the principles of democracy have been carried out both in their polity and social arrangements. I have already noticed the extraordinary sameness of their language, which, throughout the whole continent, admits of no dialectical difference and, in passing, how great are the changes this single fact implies have taken place in the conditions of human life, when we recollect that in that little plat of ground of ancient Greece every little town had a dialect of its own. The universality with which any form of expression, any social practice, or even any state of feeling, is abandoned or adopted throughout the vast Union, is to those who observe thesematters a very interesting fact in American civilisation. The extent to which they are readers of newspapers is not the cause of this, though of course it somewhat contributes to it. The real cause is the urgent and uncontrollable desire in every American to talk, and think, and live, and dress, and feel, and to do everything just in the same way as other people; as we say here, to be in the fashion, only that they apply the idea of fashion to everything. Changes of this kind are wrought in America almost as if by magic. There is in this a great balance of good, although it is so great a check upon individuality, because it keeps the whole people advancing together as one man.
Maize.
In the agricultural reports of the United States maize is set down for so many million bushels as almost to transcend the power of belief on this side the water. How can so much be grown? how can so much be used? are questions which occur to us. But after one has seen something of America the feeling is changed into one of wonder at the inexhaustible merits of this grain, and of its incalculable utility to man; and one ceases to be surprised at finding it grown everywhere throughout the Union on so large a scale. It is quite impossible that America could have risen to her present greatness without it. While the hardy pioneer of civilisation was subduing the forest, which reached from the Atlantic to the valley of the Mississippi, there was nothing that could have met his wants as maize did. As soon as he had felled the trees for his log cabin, before the ground was cleared, or prepared sufficiently for any other crop, he would put in his seed for a crop of maize,which would be ready in a few months, perhaps before his log house was finished, and would supply with food his family, and pigs, and any other stock that he might have, till the next harvest. And when ripe, it did not, like wheat and other grain, require immediate harvesting; for nature had provided it with a thick strong stem to support it against the wind, and with a sheath which kept it effectually from the rain. And its yield, as it thus grew among the stumps of these forest clearings, was very great. And now that the land has been cleared, it still holds its ground as the chief crop almost everywhere, and apparently as almost the only grain crop in many districts. It is everywhere largely used as human food in a great variety of ways. It is the winter food of the cattle, horses, and mules, which latter do all the heavy work from Kentucky to New Orleans. The pork crop, too, of the United States, which is one of its largest items of produce, is only a certain portion of the maize crop in another form. The same may be said of the enormous quantity of poultry produced everywhere throughout the country. It is only transformed maize. Of all grains it is the easiest to grow, the easiest to harvest, the easiest to keep, the easiest to transport. It is good for man and for beast. It will grow on any soil, and will yield in the rich bottoms of Ohio and Illinois a hundred bushels an acre—and on some of these lands it has been grown for twenty years in succession—and on the poor sands of South Carolina will yield between twenty and thirty bushels, a quantity that is highly remunerative, where the land costs nothing, and an old negro and an old mule are all that are required for its culture.In America a head of maize should be the national emblem.
The Forest.
It did not strike me that the succession of trees in clearing forest land was quite so regular as is commonly stated. I saw, for instance, a different succession on the two sides of the same fence. The original forest on both sides had been exclusively pine. Where the forest had been entirely cleared off, the succession was again pine. But where the large trees only had been removed the succession was oak. This went some way towards showing that the amount of light and air decided which was to come up.
In the Carolinas the forest is, along the railway, everywhere more or less continuous: still it is all owned, as appears from the fencing. The better trees are everywhere being cut for building, or fencing, or firing; and the larger pines have all been tapped for turpentine. One is surprised, at first, to see so little land cultivated along the line of railway. The reason however is that, as a general rule, the good land is along the banks of the streams which run from the Alleghanies to the sea, that is, from west to east, while the railway runs from north to south, so that in travelling along it you only get occasional glimpses of the way in which culture is in these parts beginning, for it is hardly more, to encroach on the forest.
In these latitudes the forest becomes a little diversified by the appearance of several evergreens. One of the commonest is the evergreen or live-oak. I frequently saw from the cars a small tree having very much the appearance of our bay. There is an occasional magnolia. There are several evergreen shrubs,and some creepers. In swampy places there are long reaches of cane-brake. This is the Bambusa gracilis, which we sometimes see in this country in gardens, in spots where moisture and shelter can be combined. These cane- or bamboo-brakes are evergreen impervious jungles about twenty feet high. But the most interesting form to Northern eyes is that of the little palmetto palm. Its fan-like leaf, however, is all that can be seen of it, for its trunk scarcely rises above the ground. In some of the swamps around New Orleans it and a kind of iris are the most conspicuous plants.
The question of the colonisation or resettlement of the South by the North is simply one of £.s.d.Will it be more profitable for a Northern man to grow cotton in the South, or wheat, pork, beef, &c. in the West? People say Northern emigrants will never go to the poor lands of the South till all the good land of the West is taken up. This is quite a wrong way of putting the case between the two. A man would not go to the South to grow wheat, beef, and pork. That can be done cheaper in the fertile West. But it is not impossible that an equal amount of capital and labour embarked in the cotton culture of the South might produce a greater return. In that case the poor soils of the South might be preferred to the rich soils of the West.
One infers how much more completely the fabric of society rested on slavery in South Carolina than it did in Virginia, by the fact that three fourths of the devastation caused by the great fire at Richmond have been already repaired, while nothing had been done to repair the damages done by the great fire atCharleston, which destroyed the whole of the centre of the city. Literally not one single brick has yet been laid upon another for this purpose. There stand the blackened remains of churches, residences, and stores, just as if it were a city of the dead.
A Charleston Sam Weller.
Still, even here I was surprised at the number and magnitude of the hotels. I had taken up my quarters at the Mills House, where I suppose there were three hundred guests. I saw another, the Pavilion, quite as large; and I was told of a third, the Charleston Hotel, which was described to me as being much larger than either of the two just mentioned.
Before I reached Charleston there had been some wet weather, and the streets were muddy. I therefore used two pair of boots the first day I was in the place. The next morning the Sam Weller of the hotel refused to clean, or as he called it, to shine, more than one pair. I remonstrated with him, but it was to no purpose, as he was quite persuaded of the force of his own argument, ‘that if everyone in the house was to wear two pair of boots a-day his work would be doubled.’ Boots was a Paddy, and, since his naturalisation in the land of freedom, had become sure that he had as much right to form opinions for himself, express them, and act upon them, as the President himself. I carried my grievance to the manager. He promised redress, but the boots were not cleaned, that is to say, not in the hotel. I mention this as it was the only instance ofinsubordinationI met with in this class in my tour through the United States.
Nature has done much for Charleston. Its fine harbour is formed by the junction of two large navigablerivers, the Ashley and the Cooper. It is free from yellow fever, the scourge of Mobile and New Orleans. The orange and oleander grow in the spaces between its streets and its houses. Hitherto it has been the chief winter resort of those in the Northern States who were unable to bear the severity of their own climate, and of those from the West Indies who were unable to bear the heat of theirs. Thus the victims both of heat and of cold met in Charleston, and each found in its delightfully tempered atmosphere exactly what he sought. And the society of these visitors, combined with that of the rich proprietors of the State who had their residences here, made it a very gay and pleasant place. Of course America, hard-worked and consumption-scourged above all other nations, ought to have its Naples; and it will be equally a matter of course that the Naples of America should temper gaiety with trade, and combine work with idleness, and should not be entirely a population of do-nothings, of Lazaroni, and of pleasure-seekers. Still, the feeling that came over one at Charleston was, How far off this place is from the world! It was not the distance that caused this feeling, for it is only nine hundred miles from New York, while Chicago, where one has no feelings of this kind, is three hundred miles further off. Perhaps fifty years hence, when probably a busy white population will be cultivating the land around it, there will be nothing in the place to suggest the thought that, when there, one is out of the world.
Few English Travellers.
I was surprised at finding how few Englishmen had, at all events of late, been travelling in the Southern States. At Charleston, in a dozen folio pages of namesin the guest-book of the hotel, which I looked at for this purpose, I could only see one entry from England. At Richmond I only found two English names in forty folio pages, and the address appended to these two names was Manchester. In the North I heard that Lord Morley, and Lord Camperdown, and Mr. Cowper—I do not know whether the Right Hon. W. Cowper was meant—had lately been through that part of the country inspecting the common schools. But during my tour through the United States, I did not fall in with a single English traveller, nor did I fall in with one either on my outward or homeward voyage. All my fellow-passengers on both occasions were Americans. Of course in the summer—though it may be questioned whether that is, so decidedly as most people suppose, the best season for travelling in the United States—I might not have found my countrymen so conspicuous by their absence. And yet there is no part of the world which Englishmen ought to find so instructive and interesting. What is there in the world more worthy of investigation than the existing condition of things, and the events that are now taking place, upon this great continent, which contains within itself everything that is necessary for the well-being of man, which is indeed a world in itself, and which stands in the same relation towards the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that this little island does towards the Irish and North seas; and which, whatever else may befall, will at all events be thoroughly Anglo-Saxon?
Wherever one went in the South, one heard instances of the hardships, the deadliness, and the evils of the late war. Of the family of which I saw most atRichmond, the three sons had been sent to the army. Of these three one was killed, and another maimed for life. These were men who were no longer young, and many a day in their long marches, and when before the enemy, their commissariat having been utterly exhausted, they had had nothing to eat but a few handfuls of horse corn. There were regiments that did not bring home one fourth of the number with which they originally went out; the rest having died of disease, or fallen in battle. In the family of which I saw most at Charleston there were two sons, the eldest only eighteen years of age. They both enlisted in Hampton’s cavalry, for all above the age of sixteen had to go. And so again at New Orleans the gentleman to whom I was especially consigned, and who had held the commission of colonel in the Confederate army, and had been a rich merchant of the place, told me that he and his whole regiment were frequently without shoes, and that on one occasion he went barefooted for six weeks continuously.
Who are now Schoolmasters in the South.
One of the most lamentable results of the great cataclysm that ensued on the close of the war, has been that almost a complete end has been put to the education of Southern children. Formerly many were sent to the North, but now parents have neither the inclination nor the means to continue this practice. In the South itself schools did not abound; and of those which existed before the war the greater number have followed the fate of so many other Southern things. Some effort is being made to remedy this. In one of the Southern cities I had been advised to call on a gentleman who would be able to give me information on these matters. I found him at last,after some trouble, teaching a private school of his own. He was engaged in giving a French lesson. I remember him as a remarkably handsome and well-mannered man. On my saying something which implied astonishment at finding him so employed, he replied that his profession was that of a lawyer; but that since the war he had not been allowed to practise, because he was unable to take the oaths which the North had imposed on all who had held any office in the South during the war. But he added, ‘I am not in bad company, for many of the best men in the South, beginning with General Lee, are employed in teaching.’
While I was in the South the conventions were sitting. These were assemblies elected under the new system of universal suffrage, including the blacks, for the purpose of drawing up new constitutions for their several States. Of course where the negroes were numerically in the ascendant, the majority of the convention were either negroes or negro nominees. I felt a repugnance to witness this degradation of the whites; still it would have been foolish to have let pass the opportunity for seeing what indications the blacks gave of fitness for equal political power; and, as the governor of the State I was then in offered to take me to the convention and introduce me to some of the members, I accepted the offer. We had been talking on the irrepressible subject of the negro, and I had said I thought the blacks ought to be put on exactly the same footing as the whites. He had assented to this idea, as it sounded very much like what he was there to maintain. But I am not quite sure that he altogether approved of my explanation,when I went on to say that what I meant was, ‘that the negro should be left to work or starve, just as the white man was in New York, in England, and everywhere else; that I did not at all see why the negro should be petted, and patted on the back, and have soup given to him, while he was doing nothing, and have expectations raised in his mind that something would soon be done for him, which treatment could not in the end be of any advantage at all to him, while it was very costly to the whites.’ His reply to this was the offer I just mentioned to take me to the convention and introduce me to some of the members who were among the leading partisans of the negro race in the State.
I was present for two hours in this convention; during that time no speeches were made; I was therefore unable to judge in this manner of the intelligence andanimusof the black members. I did not, however, leave the convention without a short conversation with one of them. He was a man of unmixed African blood, and, seeing me conversing with the white whom he regarded as the head of his party, he left his place in the house, and came up to me and held out his hand. I extended mine in return. On taking hold of it, he accosted me with the words,
‘Sir, you then believe that the franchise is a God-given right.’
I said ‘that was not my belief.’
‘Why?’ he asked, rather astonished.
‘Because,’ I said, ‘it was given to you by Mr. Lincoln and the North.’
‘No, sir,’ he replied, ‘it is a God-given right.’
The Southern Conventions.
‘If it is a God-given right,’ I rejoined, ‘how does it come to pass that so few of mankind have ever possessed it?’
He then inquired what limitation I would put to the ‘right.’ I told him that I did not think it wise or just that those who had no property should possess the power of imposing taxes on those who had property, and deciding how the proceeds of the taxes were to be disposed of; and that the argument would be strengthened, if these persons without property were also without the knowledge requisite for enabling them to read the constitution of their State. Instead of replying to this, he returned to his seat.
I give the above dialogue as a specimen of what are a negro’s ideas on the great subject of the day in that part of the world. I afterwards heard that the gentleman who had been speaking to me was the most prominent negro in the State.
In the convention I have just spoken of there was nothing remarkable in the appearance of the members of either race. In another convention, however, where I spent a morning, this was not the case; for I did not see a single white who had at all the air of a legislator, or even the appearance of a respectable member of society. Here I heard a man who was black, or as nearly black as one could be, make several speeches. He assumed a kind of leadership, or at all events of authority in the assembly, to which, as far as I could judge, he was most fully entitled. He certainly was the best speaker I heard in the United States, or, indeed, ever heard anywhere else, as far as his knowledge went. He spoke with perfect ease, and complete confidence in himself, andat the same time quite in good taste. He said nothing but what appeared to be most reasonable, proper, and fair to both races. He was for putting an end at once to all ideas and hopes of confiscation on the part of the blacks, and to the fears of the whites on the subject, by some authoritative declaration; for he believed that these hopes and fears were giving false expectations to his own race, and causing much uncertainty in the minds of the whites, which prevented their setting about the re-establishment of cultivation on their estates. He had a good musical voice, and he could vary its tones at his pleasure. His thoughts were clearly conceived and clearly put. I must not, however, omit to mention that, though the traces of white blood were so slight in the colour of his skin, he had most completely the head and features of the European—a high forehead, a thin straight nose, and a small chin and month. His hair was woolly in the extreme. I afterwards understood that the whites in this convention, who were so greatly his inferiors in debate, were almost all Northern adventurers and ‘mean whites’; the whole of the upper class having declined to take any part in forming the new constitution.
South Carolina Orphan Asylum.
I was taken over the South Carolina Orphan Asylum. It is a large fine building in the town of Charleston, with well-kept and extensive grounds around it for the children to play in. The number of children who are within the walls is two hundred. They are fed, clothed, educated, and placed out in life by the institution. The expenses were formerly divided between the State, a numerous body of subscribers, and the interest that accrued from somevery considerable bequests. But during the war these investments went the way of all other investments in the South. They were placed in Confederate bonds, which are now worth nothing. Pretty nearly, therefore, the whole of the burden of maintaining the asylum has since been met by the State alone, in its present condition of extreme impoverishment. All the children from the different class rooms were summoned together for my inspection, into a large room somewhat resembling a theatre, in which they are taught music and some other subjects collectively. Small and great, they all appeared to be very well under control. They seemed also to be happy and healthy, but with more (which in those who lived all the year at Charleston could hardly have been otherwise) of the Southern lily than of the Northern rose in their complexions. As might have been expected, there was not the animation and zeal one sees in Northern schools, worked at the highest of high pressures. But it is a noble institution: in it Mr. Memminger, the first Secretary of the Confederate Treasury, was brought up.