I afterwards met one of the company in Fayetteville. Their night’s adventure after I left them, and the continued cruelty to the horses, were most distressing. The driver once got off the box, and struck the poor, miserable, sick “Rock” with a rail, and actually knocked him down in the road. At another time, after having got fresh horses, when they, too, were “stalled,” he took them out of the harness and turned them loose, and, refusing to give any answer tothe inquiries of the passengers, looked about for a dry place, and laid down and went to sleep on the ground. One of the passengers had then walked on to Mrs. Barclay’s, and obtained a pair of mules, with which the coach was finally brought to the house. The remainder kindled a fire, and tried to rest themselves by it. They were sixteen hours in coming thirty miles, suffering much from cold, and without food.The next day I spent in visiting turpentine and rosin works, piny-wood farms, etc., under the obliging guidance of Mrs. Barclay’s son-in-law, and in the evening again took the coach. The horses were better than on the previous stage: upon my remarking this to the driver, he said that the reason was, that they took care of this team themselves (the drivers); on the last stage the horses were left to negroes, who would not feed them regularly, nor take any decent care of them. “Why, what do you think?” said he; “when I got to Banks’s, this morning, I found my team hadn’t been fed all day; they hadn’t been rubbed nor cleaned, nary durned thing done to ’em, and thar the cussed darkey was, fast asleep. Reckon I didn’t gin him a wakin’ up!”“You don’t mean the horses that you drove up?”“Yes, I do, and they hadn’t a cussed thing to eat till they got back to Barclay’s!”“How was it possible for you to drive them back?”“Why, I don’t suppose I could ha’ done it if I’d had any passengers: (youSuze!) shall lose a mail again to-night, if this mare don’t travel better, (durn ye, yer ugly, I believe). She’s a good mare—a heap of go in her, but it takes right smart of work to get it out.Suze!”So we toiled on, with incessant shouting, and many strange piny-wood oaths, and horrid belabouring of the poor horses’ backs, with the butt-end of a hickory whip-stalk, till I really thought their spinal-columns must break. The country, thesame undulating pine forest, the track tortuous among the trees, which frequently stood so close that it required some care to work between them. Often we made detours from the original road, to avoid a fallen tree, or a mire-hole, and all the time we were bouncing over protruding roots and small stumps. There was but little mud, the soil being sand, but now and then a deep slough. In one of these we found a waggon, heavily laden, stuck fast, and six mules and five negroes tugging at it. With our help it was got out of the way, and we passed on. Soon afterwards we met the return coach, apparently in a similar predicament; but one of the passengers, whom I questioned, replied: “No, not stalled, exactly, but somehowthe horses won’t draw. We have been more than three hours coming about four miles.”“How is it you have so many balky horses?” I asked the driver.“The old man buys ’em up cheap, ’cause nobody else can do anything with ’em.”“I should not think you could do much with them, either—except to kill them.”“Well, that’s what the old man says he buys ’em for. He was blowing me up for losing the mail t’other night; I told him, says I, ‘You have to a’most kill them horses, ’fore you can make ’em draw a bit,’ says I. ‘Kill ’em, damn ’em, kill em, then; that’s what I buy ’em for,’ says he. ‘I buy ’em a purpose to kill; that’s all they are good for, ain’t it?’ says he. ‘Don’t s’pose they’re going to last for ever, do ye?’ says he.”We stopped once, nearly half an hour, for some unexplained reason, before a house on the road. The door of the house was open, an enormous fire was burning in it, and, at the suggestion of the driver, I went in to warm myself. It was a large log-cabin, of two rooms, with beds in each room, and with an apartment overhead, to which access was had by aladder. Among the inmates were two women; one of them sat in the chimney-corner smoking a pipe, and rocking a cradle; the other sat directly before the fire, and full ten feet distant. She was apparently young, but her face was as dry and impassive as a dead man’s. She was doing nothing, and said but little; but, once in about a minute, would suddenly throw up her chin, and spit with perfect precision into the hottest embers of the fire. The furniture of the house was more scanty and rude than I ever saw before in any house, with women living in it, in the United States. Yet these people were not so poor but that they had a negro woman cutting and bringing wood for their fire.It must be remembered that this is a long-settled country, having been occupied by Anglo-Saxons as early as any part of the Free States, and that it is the main road between the capital of North Carolina and its chief sea-port.There is nothing that is more closely connected, both as cause and effect, with the prosperity and wealth of a country, than its means and modes of travelling, and of transportation of the necessities and luxuries of life. I saw this day, as I shall hereafter describe, three thousand barrels of resin, worth a dollar and a half a barrel in New York, thrown away, a mere heap of useless offal, because it would cost more to transport it than it would be worth. There was a single waggon, with a ton or two of sugar, and flour, and tea, and axes, and cotton cloths, unable to move, with six mules, and five negroes at work upon it. Raleigh is a large distributing post-office, getting a very heavy mail from the North; here was all that is sent by one of its main radii, travelling one day two miles an hour, the next four miles, and on each occasion failing to connect with the conveyances which we pay to scatter further the intelligence and wealth transmitted by it. Barbarous is too mild a term to apply to themanner in which even this was done. The improvidence, if not the cruelty, no sensible barbarian could have been guilty of.Afterwards, merely to satisfy my mind (for there is a satisfaction in seeing even scoundrelism consistently carried out, if attempted at all in a business), I called on the agent of the line at Fayetteville, stated the case, and asked if any part of what I had paid for my passage would be returned me, on account of the disappointment and delay which I had suffered from the inability of the proprietor to carry out his contract with me. The impudence of the suggestion, of course, only created amusement; and I was smilingly informed that the business was not so “lucky” that the proprietor could afford to pay back money that he had once got into his hands. What I had seen was regarded by no one, apparently, as at all unusual.At one of the stations for changing horses, an old coloured man was taken into the coach. I ascertained from him that he was a blacksmith, and had been up the line to shoe the horses at the different stables. Probably he belonged (poor fellow!) to the man who bought horses to be killed in doing his work. After answering my inquiries, he lay down in the bottom of the coach, and slept until we reached Fayetteville. The next time we changed, the new driver inquired of the old one what passengers he had. “Only one gentleman, and old man Ned.”“Oh! is old man along—that’s good—if we should turn over, or break down, or anything, reckon he could nigh about pray us up—he’s right smart at prayin’.”“Well, I tell you, now, ole man can trot out as smart a prayer, when he’s a mind to go in for’t, as any man I ever heerd, durned if he can’t.”The last ten miles we came over rapidly, smoothly, andquietly, by a plank-road, reaching Fayetteville about twelve, of a fine, clear, frosty night.Entering the office or bar-room of the stage-house, at which I had been advised to stay while in Fayetteville, I found it occupied by a group of old soakers, among whom was one of perhaps sixteen years of age. This lad, without removing the cigar which he had in his mouth, went to the bar, whither I followed him, and, without saying a word, placed an empty tumbler before me.“I don’t wish anything to drink,” said I; “I am cold and tired, and I would like to go to a room. I intend to stay here some days, and I should be glad if you could give me a private room with a fire in it.”“Room with a fire in it?” he inquired, as he handed me the registry-book.“Yes; and I will thank you to have it made immediately, and let my baggage be taken up.”He closed the book, after I had written my name, and returned to his seat at the stove, leaving me standing, and immediately engaged in conversation, without paying any attention to my request. I waited some time, during which a negro came into the room, and went out again. I then repeated my request, necessarily aloud, and in such a way as to be understood, not only by the boy, but by all the company. Immediately all conversation ceased, and every head was turned to look at me. The lad paused a moment, spit upon the stove, and then—“Want a room to yourself?”“Yes, if convenient.”No answer and no movement, all the company staring at me as if at a detected burglar.“Perhaps you can’t accommodate me?”“Want a fire made in your room?”“Why, yes, if convenient; but I should like to go to my room, at any rate; I am very tired.”After puffing and spitting for a moment, he rose and pulled a bell; then took his seat again. In about five minutes a negro came in, and during all this time there was silence.“What’ll you drink, Baker?” said the lad, rising and going to the bar, and taking no notice of the negro’s entrance. A boozy man followed him, and made some reply; the lad turned out two glasses of spirits, added water to one, and drank it in a gulp.[26]“Can this boy show me to my room?” I asked.“Anybody in number eleven, Peter?”“Not as I knows on, sar.”“Take this man’s baggage up there.”I followed the negro up to number eleven, which was a large back room in the upper story, with four beds in it.“Peter,” said I, “I want a fire made here.”“Want a fire, sar?”“Yes, I want you to make a fire.”“Want a fire, master, this time o’ night?”“Why, yes; I want a fire. Where are you going with the lamp?”“Want a lamp, massa?”“Want a lamp? Certainly, I do.”After about ten minutes, I heard a man splitting wood in the yard, and, in ten more, Peter brought in three sticks of green wood, and some chips; then, the little bed-lamp having burned out, he went into an adjoining room, where I heard him talking to some one, evidently awakened by his entranceto get a match; that failing, he went for another. By one o’clock, my fire was made.“Peter,” said I, “are you going to wait on me, while I stay here?”“Yes, sar; I ’tends to dis room.”“Very well; take this, and, when I leave, I’ll give you another, if you take good care of me. Now, I want you to get me some water.”“I’ll get you some water in de morning, sar.”“I want some to-night—some water and some towels; don’t you think you can get them for me?”“I reckon so, massa, if you wants ’em. Want ’em ’fore you go to bed?”“Yes; and get another lamp.”“Want a lamp?”“Yes, of course.”“Won’t the fire do you?”“No; bring a lamp. That one won’t burn without filling; you need not try it.”The water and the lamp came, after a long time.In the morning, early, I was awakened by a knock at the door.“Who’s there?”“Me, massa; I wants your boots to black.”I got up, opened the door, and returned to bed. Falling asleep, I was soon again awakened by Peter throwing down an armful of wood upon the floor. Slept again, and was again awakened, by Peter’s throwing up the window, to empty out the contents of the wash bowl, etc. The room was filled with smoke of the fat light wood: Peter had already made a fire for me to dress by; but I again fell asleep, and, when I next awoke, the breakfast bell was ringing. Peter had gone off, and left the window and door open, andthe fire had burned out. My boots had been taken away, and the bell-wire was broken. I dressed, and walking to the bar-room, asked the bar-keeper—a complaisant, full-grown man—for my boots. He did not know where they were, and rang the bell for Peter. Peter came, was reprimanded for his forgetfulness, and departed. Ten minutes elapsed, and he did not return. I again requested that he should be called; and this time he brought my boots. He had had to stop to black them; having, he said, been too busy to do it before breakfast.The following evening, as it grew too cold to write in my room, I went down, and found Peter, and told him I wanted a fire again, and that he might get me a couple of candles. When he came up, he brought one of the little bed-lamps, with a capacity of oil for fifteen minutes’ use. I sent him down again to the office, with a request to the proprietor that I might be furnished with candles. He returned, and reported that there were no candles in the house.“Then, get me a larger lamp.”“Aint no larger lamps, nuther, sar;—none to spare.”“Then go out, and see if you can’t buy me some candles, somewhere.”“Aint no stores open, Sunday, massa, and I don’t know where I can buy ’em.”“Then go down, and tell the bar-keeper, with my compliments, that I wish to write in my room, and I would be obliged to him if he would send me a light, of some sort; something that will last longer, and give more light, than these little lamps.”“He won’t give you none, massa—not if you hab a fire. Can’t you see by da light of da fire? When a gentlemen hab a fire in his room, dey don’t count he wants no more light ’n dat.”“Well, make the fire, and I’ll go down and see about it.”As I reached the foot of the stairs, the bell rang, and I went in to tea. The tea table was moderately well lighted with candles. I waited till the company had generally left it, and then said to one of the waiters—“Here are two dimes: I want you to bring me, as soon as you can, two of these candles to number eleven; do you understand?”“Yes, sar; I’ll fotch ’em, sar.”And he did.About eight o’clock, there was an alarm of fire. Going into the street, I was surprised to observe how leisurely the people were walking toward the house in flames, standing very prominently, as it did, upon a hill, at one end of the town. As I passed a church, the congregation was coming out; but very few quickened their step above a strolling pace. Arrived near the house, I was still more astonished to see how few, of the crowd assembled, were occupied in restraining the progress of the fire, or in saving the furniture, and at the prevailing stupidity, confusion, and want of system and concert of action, in the labour for this purpose. A large majority of those engaged were negroes. As I returned toward the hotel, a gentleman, walking, with a lady, before me, on the side walk, accosted a negro whom he met:“What! Moses! That you? Why were you not here sooner?”“Why, Mass Richard, I was singing, an’ I didn’ her de bells and——I see twant in our ward, sar, and so I didn’ see as dar was zactly ’casion for me to hurry myself to def. Ef eed a been in our ward, Mass Richard, I’d a rallied, you knows I would. Mose would ha rallied, ef eed a been in our ward—ha! ha! ha!—you knows it, Mass Richard!”And he passed on, laughing comically, without farther reproof.Fayetteville.—The negroes employed in the turpentine business, to which during the last week I have been giving some examination, seem to me to be unusually intelligent and cheerful, decidedly more so than most of the white people inhabiting the turpentine forest. Among the latter there is a large number, I should think a majority, of entirely uneducated, poverty-stricken vagabonds. I mean by vagabonds, simply, people without habitual, definite occupation or reliable means of livelihood. They are poor, having almost no property but their own bodies; and the use of these, that is, their labour, they are not accustomed to hire out statedly and regularly, so as to obtain capital by wages, but only occasionally by the day or job, when driven to it by necessity. A family of these people will commonly hire, or “squat” and build, a little log cabin, so made that it is only a shelter from rain, the sides not being chinked, and having no more furniture or pretension to comfort than is commonly provided a criminal in the cell of a prison. They will cultivate a little corn, and possibly a few roods of potatoes, cow-peas, and coleworts. They will own a few swine, that find their living in the forest; and pretty certainly, also, a rifle and dogs; and the men, ostensibly, occupy most of their time in hunting. I am, mainly, repeating the statements of one of the turpentine distillers, but it was confirmed by others, and by my own observation, so far as it went.A gentleman of Fayetteville told me that he had, several times, appraised, under oath, the whole household property of families of this class at less than $20. If they have need of money to purchase clothing, etc., they obtain it by selling their game or meal. If they have none of this to spare, or an insufficiency, they will work for a neighbouring farmer for afew days, and they usually get for their labour fifty cents a day,finding themselves. The farmers and distillers say, that they do not like to employ them, because they cannot be relied upon to finish what they undertake, or to work according to directions; and because, being white men, they cannot “drive” them. That is to say, their labour is even more inefficient and unmanageable than that of slaves.That I have not formed an exaggerated estimate of the proportion of such a class, will appear to the reader more probable from the testimony of a pious colporteur, given before a public meeting in Charleston, in February, 1855. I quote from a Charleston paper’s report. The colporteur had been stationed at —— county, N.C.:—“The larger portionof the inhabitants seemed to be totally given up to a species of mental hallucination, which carried them captive at its will. They nearly all believed implicitly in witchcraft, and attributed everything that happened, good or bad, to the agency of persons whom they supposed possessed of evil spirits.”The majority of what I have termed turpentine-farmers—meaning the small proprietors of the long-leafed pine forest land—are people but a grade superior, in character or condition, to these vagabonds. They have habitations more like houses—log-cabins, commonly, sometimes chinked, oftener not—without windows of glass, but with a few pieces of substantial old-fashioned heir-loom furniture; a vegetable garden, in which, however, you will find no vegetable but what they call “collards” (colewort) for “greens;” fewer dogs, more swine, and larger clearings for maize, but no better crops than the poorer class. Their property is, nevertheless, often of considerable money value, consisting mainly of negroes, who, associating intimately with their masters, are of superior intelligence to the slaves of the wealthier classes.Some of the larger proprietors, who are also often cottonplanters, cultivating the richer low lands, are said to be gentlemen of good estate—intelligent, cultivated, and hospitable.North Carolina has a proverbial reputation for the ignorance and torpidity of her people; being, in this respect, at the head of the Slave States. I do not find the reason of this in any innate quality of the popular mind; but, rather, in the circumstances under which it finds its development. Owing to the general poverty of the soil in the Eastern part of the State, and to the almost exclusive employment of slave labour on the soils productive of cotton; owing, also, to the difficulty and expense of reaching market with bulky produce from the interior and western districts, population and wealth is more divided than in the other Atlantic States; industry is almost entirely rural, and there is but little communication or concert of action among the small and scattered proprietors of capital. For the same reason, the advantages of education are more difficult to be enjoyed, the distance at which families reside apart preventing children from coming together in such numbers as to give remunerative employment to a teacher. The teachers are, generally, totally unfitted for their business; young men, as a clergyman informed me, themselves not only unadvanced beyond the lowest knowledge of the elements of primary school learning, but often coarse, vulgar, and profane in their language and behaviour, who take up teaching as a temporary business, to supply the demand of a neighbourhood of people as ignorant and uncultivated as themselves.The native white population of North Carolina is550,267The whole white population under 20 years, is301,106Leaving white adults over 20249,161Of these there are natives who cannot read and write73,226[27]Being more than one-fourth of the native white adults.But the aspect of North Carolina with regard to slavery, is, in some respects, less lamentable than that of Virginia. There is not only less bigotry upon the subject, and more freedom of conversation, but I saw here, in the institution, more of patriarchal character than in any other State. The slave more frequently appears as a family servant—a member of his master’s family, interested with him in his fortune, good or bad. This is a result of the less concentration of wealth in families or individuals, occasioned by the circumstances I have described. Slavery thus loses much of its inhumanity. It is still questionable, however, if, as the subject race approaches civilization, the dominant race is not proportionately detained in its onward progress. One is forced often to question, too, in viewing slavery in this aspect, whether humanity and the accumulation of wealth, the prosperity of the master, and the happiness and improvement of the subject, are not in some degree incompatible.These later observations are made after having twice again passed through the State, once in a leisurely way on horseback. In some of the Western and Northern central parts of the State, there is much more enterprise, thrift, and comfort than in the Eastern part, where I had my first impressions.I left Fayetteville in a steamboat (advertised for 8 o’clock, left at 8.45) bound down Cape Fear River to Wilmington. A description of the river, with incidents of the passage, will serve to show the character of most of the navigable streams of the cotton States, flowing into the Atlantic and the Gulf, and of the manner of their navigation.The water was eighteen feet above its lowest summer stages; the banks steep, thirty feet high from the present water surface—from fifty to one hundred feet apart—and covered with large trees and luxuriant vegetation; the course crooked; thecurrent very rapid; the trees overhanging the banks, and frequently falling into the channel—making the navigation hazardous. The river is subject to very rapid rising. The master told me that he had sometimes left his boat aground at night, and, on returning in the morning, found it floating in twenty-five feet water, over the same spot. The difference between the extremes of low stages and floods is as much as seventy feet. In summer, there are sometimes but eighteen inches of water on the bars: the boat I was in drew but fourteen inches, light. She was a stern-wheel craft—the boiler and engine (high pressure) being placed at opposite ends, to balance weights. Her burden was three hundred barrels, or sixty tons measurement. This is the character of most of the boats navigating the river—of which there are now twelve. Larger boats are almost useless in summer, from their liability to ground; and even the smaller ones, at low stages of water, carry no freight, but are employed to tow up “flats” or shallow barges. At this season of the year, however, the steamboats are loaded close to the water’s edge.The bulk of our freight was turpentine; and the close proximity of this to the furnaces suggested a danger fully equal to that from snags or grounding. On calling the attention of a fellow-passenger to it, he told me that a friend of his was once awakened from sleep, while lying in a berth on one of these boats, by a sudden, confused sound. Thinking the boiler had burst, he drew the bed-clothing over his head, and laid quiet, to avoid breathing the steam; until, feeling the boat ground, he ran out, and discovered that she was on fire near the furnace. Having some valuable freight near by, which he was desirous to save, and seeing no immediate danger, though left alone on the boat, he snatched a bucket, and, drawing water from alongside, applied it with such skill and rapidity as soon to quench the flames, and eventually to entirely extinguishthe fire. Upon the return of the crew, a few repairs were made, steam was got up again, and the boat proceeded to her destination in safety. He afterwards ascertained that three hundred kegs of gunpowder were stowed beneath the deck that had been on fire—a circumstance which sufficiently accounted for the panic-flight of the crew.Soon after leaving, we passed the Zephyr, wooding up: an hour later, our own boat was run to the bank, men jumped from her fore and aft, and fastened head and stern lines to the trees, and we also commenced wooding.The trees had been cut away so as to leave a clear space to the top of the bank, which was some fifty feet from the boat, and moderately steep. Wood, cut, split, and piled in ranks, stood at the top of it, and a shoot of plank, two feet wide and thirty long, conveyed it nearly to the water. The crew rushed to the wood-piles—master, passengers, and all, but the engineer and chambermaid, deserting the boat—and the wood was first passed down, as many as could, throwing into the shoot, and others forming a line, and tossing it, from one to another, down the bank. From the water’s edge it was passed, in the same way, to its place on board, with great rapidity—the crew exciting themselves with yells. They were all blacks, but one.On a tree, near the top of the bank, a little box was nailed, on which a piece of paper was tacked, with this inscription:“Notic“to all ‘persons takin wood from thislandin pleas to leav a ticket payable tothe subscriber, at $1,75 a cord asheretofore.“Amos Sikes.”and the master—just before the wood was all on board—hastily filled a blank order (torn from a book, like a check-book, leaving a memorandum of the amount, etc.) on the owner of the boat for payment, to Mr. Sikes, for two cords of pine-wood, at $1 75, and two cords of light-wood, at $2—and left it in the box. The wood used had been measured in the ranks with a rod, carried for the purpose, by the master, at the moment he reached the bank.Before, with all possible haste, we had finished wooding, the Zephyr passed us; and, during the rest of the day, she kept out of our sight. As often as we met a steamboat, or passed any flats or rafts, our men were calling out to know how far ahead of us she was; and when the answer came back each time, in an increasing number of miles, they told us that our boat was more than usually sluggish, owing to an uncommonly heavy freight; but still, for some time, they were ready to make bets that we should get first to Wilmington.Several times we were hailed from the shore, to take on a passenger, or some light freight; and these requests, as long as it was possible, were promptly complied with—the boat being run up, so as to rest her bow upon the bank, and then shouldered off by the men, as if she had been a skiff.There were but three through-passengers, besides myself. Among them, was a glue-manufacturer, of Baltimore—getting orders from the turpentine-distillers,—and a turpentine-farmer and distiller. The glue-manufacturer said that, in his factory, they had formerly employed slaves; had since used Irishmen, and now employed Germans. Their operations were carried on night and day, and one gang of the men had to relieve another. The slaves they had employed never would beon hand, when the hour for relieving came. It was also necessary to be careful that certain operationsshould be performed at a certain time, and some judgment and watchfulness was necessary, to fix this time: the slaves never could be made to care enough for the matter, to be depended upon for discretion, in this respect; and great injury was frequently done in consequence. Some of the operations were disagreeable, and they would put one another up to thinking and saying that they ought not to be required to do such dirty work—and try to have their owners get them away from it.Irishmen, he said, worked very well, and to a certain extent faithfully, and, for a time, they liked them very much; but they found that, in about a fortnight, an Irishman always thought he knew more than his master, and would exercise his discretion a little too much, as well as often directly disregard his orders. Irishmen were, he said, “toofaithful”—that is, self-confident and officious.At length, at a hurried time, they had employed one or two Germans. The Irishmen, of course, soon quarrelled with them, and threatened to leave, if they were kept. Whereupon, they were, themselves, all discharged, and a full crew of Germans, at much less wages, taken; and they proved excellent hands—steady, plodding, reliable, though they never pretended to know anything, and said nothing about what they could do. They were easily instructed, obeyed orders faithfully, and worked fairly for their wages, without boasting or grumbling.The turpentine-distiller gave a good account of some of his men; but said he was sure they never performed half as much work as he himself could; and they sometimes would, of their own accord, do twice as much in a day, as could usually be got out of them. He employed a Scotchman at the “still;” but he never would have white people at ordinary work, because he couldn’t drive them. He added, withthe utmost simplicity—and I do not think any one present saw, at the time, how much the remark expressed more than it was intended to—“I never can drive a white man, for I know I could never bear to be driven, myself, by anybody.”The other passenger was “a North of England man,” as I suspected from the first words I heard from him—though he had been in this country for about twenty years. He was a mechanic, and employed several slaves; but testified strongly of the expensive character of their labour; and declared, without any reserve, that the system was ruinous in its effects upon the character and value of all classes of working men.The country on the river-bank was nearly all wooded, with, occasionally, a field of corn, which, even in the low alluvial meadows, sometimes overflowed by the river, and enriched by its deposit, had evidently yielded but a very meagre crop—the stalks standing singly, at great distances, and very small. The greater part, even of these once rich low lands, that had been in cultivation, were now “turned out,” and covered either with pines or broom-sedge and brushwood.At some seventy or eighty miles, I should think, below Fayetteville, the banks became lower, and there was much swamp land, in which the ground was often covered with a confusion of logs and sawn lumber, mingled with other rubbish, left by floods of the river. The standing timber was very large, and many of the trees were hung with the long, waving drapery of the tylandria, or Spanish moss, which, as well as the mistletoe, I here first saw in profusion. There was also a thick network among the trees, of beautiful climbing plants. I observed some very large grape-vines, and many trees of greater size than I ever saw of their species before. I infer that this soil, properly reclaimed, and protectedfrom floods of the river, might be most profitably used in the culture of the various half-tropical trees and shrubs, of whose fruits we now import so large and costly an amount. The fig, I have been informed, grows and bears luxuriantly at Wilmington, seldom or never suffering in its wood, though a crop of fruit may be occasionally injured by a severe late spring frost. The almond, doubtless, would succeed equally well, so also the olive; but of none of these is there the slightest commercial value produced in North Carolina, or in all our country.In the evening we passed many boats and rafts, blazing with great fires, made upon a thick bed of clay, and their crews singing at their sweeps. Twenty miles above Wilmington, the shores became marshy, the river wide, and the woody screen that had hitherto, in a great degree, hid the nakedness of the land, was withdrawn, leaving open to view only broad, reedy savannahs, on either side.We reached Wilmington, the port at the mouth of the river, at half-past nine. Taking a carriage, I was driven first to one hotel and afterwards to another. They were both so crowded with guests, and excessive business duties so prevented the clerks from being tolerably civil to me, that I feared if I remained in either of them I should have another Norfolk experience. While I was endeavouring to ascertain if there was a third public-house, in which I might, perhaps, obtain a private room, my eye fell upon an advertisement of a new railroad line of passage to Charleston. A boat, to take passengers to the railroad, was to start every night, from Wilmington, at ten-o’clock. It was already something past ten; but being pretty sure that she would not get off punctually, and having a strong resisting impulse to being packed away in a close room, with any chance stranger the clerk of the house might choose to couple me with, I shouldered mybaggage and ran for the wharves. At half-past ten I was looking at Wilmington over the stern of another little wheel-barrow-steamboat, pushing back up the river. When or how I was to be taken to Charleston, I had not yet been able to ascertain. The captain assured me it was all right, and demanded twenty dollars. Being in his power I gave it to him, and received in return a pocketful of tickets, guaranteeing the bearer passage from place to place; of not one of which places had I ever heard before, except Charleston.The cabin was small, dirty, crowded, close, and smoky. Finding a warm spot in the deck, over the furnace, and to leeward of the chimney, I pillowed myself on my luggage and went to sleep.The ringing of the boat’s bell awoke me, after no great lapse of time, and I found we were in a small creek, heading southward. Presently we reached a wharf, near which stood a locomotive and train. A long, narrow plank having been run out, half a dozen white men, including myself, went on shore. Then followed as many negroes, who appeared to be a recent purchase of their owner. Owing, probably, to an unusually low tide, there was a steep ascent from the boat to the wharf, and I was amused to see the anxiety of this gentleman for the safe landing of his property, and especially to hear him curse them for their carelessness, as if their lives were of much greater value to him than to themselves. One was a woman. All carried over their shoulders some little baggage, probably all their personal effects, slung in a blanket; and one had a dog, whose safe landing caused him nearly as much anxiety as his own didhisowner.“Gib me da dog, now,” said the dog’s owner, standing half way up the plank.“Damn the dog,” said the negro’s owner; “give me yourhand up here. Let go of the dog; d’ye hear! Let him take care of himself.”But the negro hugged the dog and brought him safely on shore.After a short delay the train started: the single passenger car was a fine one (made at Wilmington, Delaware), and just sufficiently warmed. I should have slept again if it had not been that two of the six inmates were drunk—one of them uproariously.Passing through long stretches of cypress swamps, with occasional intervals of either pine-barrens, or clear water ponds, in about two hours we came, in the midst of the woods, to the end of the rails. In the vicinity could be seen a small tent, a shanty of loose boards, and a large, subdued fire, around which, upon the ground, a considerable number of men were stretched out asleep. This was the camp of the hands engaged in laying the rails, and who were thus daily extending the distance which the locomotive could run.The conductor told me that there was here a break of about eighty miles in the rail, over which I should be transferred by a stage coach, which would come as soon as possible after the driver knew that the train had arrived. To inform him of this, the locomotive trumpeted loud and long.The negro property, which had been brought up in a freight car, was immediately let out on the stoppage of the train. As it stepped on to the platform, the owner asked, “Are you all here?”“Yes, massa, we is all heah,” answered one. “Do dysef no harm, for we’s all heah,” added another, in an under tone.The negroes immediately gathered some wood, and taking a brand from the railroad hands, made a fire for themselves; then, all but the woman, opening their bundles, wrappedthemselves in their blankets and went to sleep. The woman, bare-headed, and very inadequately clothed as she was, stood for a long time alone, erect and statue-like, her head bowed, gazing in the fire. She had taken no part in the light chat of the others, and had given them no assistance in making the fire. Her dress too was not the usual plantation apparel. It was all sadly suggestive.The principal other freight of the train was one hundred and twenty bales of Northern hay. It belonged, as the conductor told me, to a planter who lived some twenty miles beyond here, and who had bought it in Wilmington at a dollar and a half a hundred weight, to feed his mules. Including the steamboat and railroad freight, and all the labour of getting it to his stables, its entire cost to him would not be much less than two dollars a hundred, or at least four times as much as it would have cost to raise and make it in the interior of New York or New England. There are not only several forage crops which can be raised in South Carolina, that cannot be grown on account of the severity of the winter in the Free States, but, on a farm near Fayetteville, a few days before, I had seen a crop of natural grass growing in half-cultivated land, dead upon the ground; which, I think, would have made, if it had been cut and well treated in the summer, three tons of hay to the acre. The owner of the land said that there was no better hay than it would have made, but he hadn’t had time to attend to it. He had as much as his hands could do of other work at the period of the year when it should have been made.Probably the case was similar with the planter who had bought this Northern hay at a price four times that which it would have cost a Northern farmer to make it. He had preferred to employ his slaves at other business.The inference must be, either that there was most improbably-foolish, bad management, or that the slaves were more profitably employed in cultivating cotton, than they could have been in cultivating maize, or other forage crops.I put the case, some days afterwards, to an English merchant, who had had good opportunities, and made it a part of his business to study such matters.“I have no doubt,” said he, “that if hay cannot be obtained here, other valuable forage can, with less labour than anywhere at the North; and all the Southern agricultural journals sustain this opinion, and declare it to be purely bad management that neglects these crops, and devotes labour to cotton, so exclusively. Probably, it is so—at the present cost of forage. Nevertheless, the fact is also true, as the planters assert, that they cannot afford to apply their labour to anything else but cotton. And yet, they complain that the price of cotton is so low that there is no profit in growing it, which is evidently false. You see that they prefer buying hay to raising it at, to say the least, three times what it costs your Northern farmers to raise it. Of course, if cotton could be grown in New York and Ohio, it could be afforded at one-third the cost it is here—say at three cents per pound. And that is my solution of the slavery question. Bring cotton down to three cents a pound, and there would be more abolitionists in South Carolina than in Massachusetts. If that can be brought about, in any way—and it is not impossible that we may live to see it, as our railways are extended in India, and the French enlarge their free-labour plantations in Algiers—there will be an end of slavery.”It was just one o’clock when the stage-coach came for us. There was but one passenger beside myself—a Philadelphia gentleman, going to Columbia. We proceeded very slowly for about three miles, across a swamp, upon a “corduroyroad;” then more rapidly, over rough ground, being tossed about in the coach most severely, for six or eight miles further. Besides the driver, there was on the box the agent or superintendent of the coach line, who now opened the doors, and we found ourselves before a log stable, in the midst of a forest of large pines. The driver took out a horse, and, mounting him, rode off, and we collected wood, splitting it with a hatchet that was carried on the coach, and, lighting it from the coach lamp, made a fire. It was very cold, ice half an inch thick, and a heavy hoar frost. We complained to the agent that there was no straw in the coach bottom, while there were large holes bored in it, that kept our feet excessively cold. He said there was no straw to be had in the country. They were obliged to bed their horses with pine leaves, which were damp, and would be of no service to us. The necessity for the holes he did not immediately explain, and we, in the exercise of our Yankee privilege, resolved that they were made with reference to the habit of expectoration, which we had observed in the car to be very general and excessive.In about half an hour the driver of the new stage came to us on the horse that the first had ridden away. A new set of horses was brought out and attached to the coach, and we were driven on again. An hour later, the sun rose; we were still in pine-barrens, once in several miles passing through a clearing, with a log farm-house, and a few negro huts about it; often through cypress swamps, and long pools of water. At the end of ten miles we breakfasted, and changed horses and drivers at a steam saw-mill. A few miles further on, we were asked to get on the top of the coach, while it was driven through a swamp, in which the water was over the road, for a quarter of a mile, to such a depth that it covered the foot-board. The horses really groaned, as theypushed the thin ice away with their necks, and were very near swimming. The holes in the coach bottom, the agent now told us, were to allow the water that would here enter the body to flow out. At the end of these ten miles we changed again, at a cotton planter’s house—a very neat, well-built house, having pine trees about it, but very poor, old, negro quarters.Since the long ford we had kept the top, the inside of the coach being wet, and I had been greatly pleased with the driving—the coachman, a steady-going sort of a fellow, saying but little to his horses, and doing what swearing he thought necessary in English; driving, too, with great judgment and skill. The coach was a fine, roomy, old-fashioned, fragrant, leathery affair, and the horses the best I had seen this side of Virginia. I could not resist expressing my pleasure with the whole establishment. The new team was admirable; four sleek, well-governed, eager, sorrel cobs, and the driver, a staid, bronzed-faced man, keeping them tight in hand, drove quietly and neatly, his whip in the socket. After about fifteen minutes, during which he had been engaged in hushing down their too great impetuosity, he took out a large silver hunting-watch, and asked what time it was.“Quarter past eleven,” said the agent.“Twelve minutes past,” said the Philadelphian.“Well, fourteen, only, I am,” said the agent.“Thirteen,” said I.“Just thirteen, I am,” said the driver, slipping back his watch to its place, and then, to the agent, “ha’an’t touched a hand of her since I left old Lancaster.”Suddenly guessing the meaning of what had been for some time astonishing me—“You are from the North?” I asked.“Yes, sir.”“And you, too, Mr. Agent?”“Yes, sir.”“And the coach, and the cattle, and all?”“All from Pennsylvania.”“How long have you been here?”“We have been here about a fortnight, stocking the road. We commenced regular trips yesterday. You are the first passenger through, sir.”It was, in fact, merely a transfer from one of the old National Road lines, complete. After a little further conversation, I asked, “How do you like the country, here?”“Very nice country,” said the agent.“It’s the cussedest poor country God ever created,” napped out the driver.“You have to keep your horses on——”“Shucks![28]damn it.”The character of the scenery was novel to me, the surface very flat, the soil a fine-grained, silvery white sand, shaded by a continuous forest of large pines, which had shed their lower branches, so that we could see from the coach-top, to the distance of a quarter of a mile, everything upon the ground. In the swamps, which were frequent and extensive, and on their borders, the pines gave place to cypresses, with great pedestal trunks, and protuberant roots, throwing up an awkward dwarf progeny of shrub, cypress, and curious bulbous-like stumps, called “cypress-knees.” Mingled with these were a few of our common deciduous trees, the white-shafted sycamore, the gray beech, and the shrubby black-jack oak, with broad leaves, brown and dead, yet glossy, and reflecting the sunbeams. Somewhat rarely, the red cedar,and more frequently than any other except the cypress, the beautiful American holly. Added to these, there was often a thick undergrowth of evergreen shrubs. Vines and creepers of various kinds grew to the tops of the tallest trees and dangled beneath and between their branches, in intricate net-work. The tylandria hung in festoons, sometimes several feet in length, and often completely clothed the trunks, and every branch of the trees in the low ground. It is like a fringe of tangled hair, of a light gray pearly colour, and sometimes produces exquisite effects when slightly veiling the dark green, purple, and scarlet of the cedar, and the holly with their berries. The mistletoe also grew in large, vivid, green tufts, on the ends of the branches of the oldest and largest trees. A small fine and wiry dead grass, hardly perceptible, even in the most open ground, from the coach-tops, was the only sign of herbage. Large black buzzards were constantly in sight, sailing slowly, high above the tree-tops. Flocks of larks, quails, and robins were common, as were also doves, swiftly flying in small companies. The red-headed woodpecker could at any time be heard hammering the old tree-trunks, and would sometimes show himself, after his rat-tat, cocking his head archly, and listening to hear if the worm moved under the bark. The drivers told me that they had on previous days, as they went over the road, seen deer, turkeys, and wild hogs.At every tenth mile, or thereabout, we changed horses; and, generally, were allowed half an hour to stroll in the neighbourhood of the stable—the agent observing that we could reach the end of the staging some hours before the cars should leave to take us further; and, as there were no good accommodations for sleeping there, we would pass the time quite as pleasantly on the road. We dined at “MarionCounty House,” a pleasant little village (and the only village we saw during the day), with a fine pine-grove, a broad street, a court-house, a church or two, a school-house, and a dozen or twenty dwellings. Towards night, we crossed the Great Pedee of the maps, theBigPedee of the natives, in a flat boat. A large quantity of cotton, in bales, was upon the bank, ready for loading into a steamboat—when one should arrive—for Charleston.The country was very thinly peopled; lone houses often being several miles apart. The large majority of the dwellings were of logs, and even those of the white people were often without glass windows. In the better class of cabins, the roof is usually built with a curve, so as to project eight or ten feet beyond the log-wall; and a part of this space, exterior to the logs, is enclosed with boards, making an additional small room—the remainder forms an open porch. The whole cabin is often elevated on four corner-posts, two or three feet from the ground, so that the air may circulate under it. The fire-place is built at the end of the house, of sticks and clay, and the chimney is carried up outside, and often detached from the log-walls; but the roof is extended at the gable, until in a line with its outer side. The porch has a railing in front, and a wide shelf at the end, on which a bucket of water, a gourd, and hand-basin, are usually placed. There are chairs, or benches, in the porch, and you often see women sitting at work in it, as in Germany.The logs are usually hewn but little; and, of course, as they are laid up, there will be wide interstices between them—which are increased by subsequent shrinking. These, very commonly, are not “chinked,” or filled up in any way; nor is the wall lined on the inside. Through the chinks, as you pass along the road, you may often see all that is going on inthe house; and, at night, the light of the fire shines brightly out on all sides.Cabins, of this class, would almost always be flanked by two or three negro huts. The cabins of the poor whites, much the largest in number, were of a meaner sort—being mere square pens of logs, roofed over, provided with a chimney, and usually with a shed of boards, supported by rough posts, before the door.Occasionally, where, near the banks of a water-course, the silvery sand was darkened by a considerable intermixture of mould, there would be a large plantation, with negro-quarters, and a cotton-press and gin-house. We passed half a dozen of these, perhaps, during the day. Where the owners resided in them, they would have comfortable-looking residences, not unlike the better class of New England farm-houses. On the largest, however, there was no residence for the owner, at all, only a small cottage, or whitewashed cabin, for the overseer. The negro-cabins, here, were the smallest I had seen—I thought not more than twelve feet square, inside. They stood in two rows, with a wide street between them. They were built of logs, with no windows—no opening at all, except the doorway, with a chimney of sticks and mud; with no trees about them, no porches, or shades, of any kind. Except for the chimney—the purpose of which I should not readily have guessed if I had seen one of them in New England—I should have conjectured that it had been built for a powder-house, or perhaps an ice-house—never for an animal to sleep in.We stopped, for some time, on this plantation, near where some thirty men and women were at work, repairing the road. The women were in majority, and were engaged at exactly the same labour as the men; driving the carts, loading them with dirt, and dumping them upon the road; cutting downtrees, and drawing wood by hand, to lay across the miry places; hoeing, and shovelling. They were dressed in coarse gray gowns, generally very much burned, and very dirty; which, for greater convenience of working in the mud, were reefed up with a cord drawn tightly around the body, a little above the hips—the spare amount of skirt bagging out between this and the waist-proper. On their legs were loose leggins, or pieces of blanket or bagging wrapped about, and lashed with thongs; and they wore very heavy shoes. Most of them had handkerchiefs, only, tied around their heads, some wore men’s caps, or old slouched hats, and several were bareheaded.The overseer rode about among them, on a horse, carrying in his hand a raw-hide whip, constantly directing and encouraging them; but, as my companion and I, both, several times noticed, as often as he visited one end of the line of operations, the hands at the other end would discontinue their labour, until he turned to ride towards them again. Clumsy, awkward, gross, elephantine in all their movements; pouting, grinning, and leering at us; sly, sensual, and shameless, in all their expressions and demeanour; I never before had witnessed, I thought, anything more revolting than the whole scene.At length, the overseer dismounted from his horse, and, giving him to a boy to take to the stables, got upon the coach, and rode with us several miles. From the conversation I had with him, as well as from what I saw of his conduct in the field, I judged that he was an uncommonly fit man for his duties; at least ordinarily amiable in disposition, and not passionate; but deliberate, watchful, and efficient. I thought he would be not only a good economist, but a firm and considerate officer or master.If these women, and their children after them, were alwaysnaturally and necessarily to remain of the character and capacity stamped on their faces—as is probably the opinion of their owner, in common with most wealthy South Carolina planters—I don’t know that they could be much less miserably situated, or guided more for their own good and that of the world, than they were. They were fat enough, and didn’t look as if they were at all overworked, or harassed by cares, or oppressed by a consciousness of their degradation. If that is all—as some think.Afterwards, while we were changing at a house near a crossing of roads, strolling off in the woods for a short distance, I came upon two small white-topped waggons, each with a pair of horses feeding at its pole; near them was a dull camp fire, with a bake-kettle and coffee-pot, some blankets and a chest upon the ground, and an old negro sitting with his head bowed down over a meal sack, while a negro boy was combing his wool with a common horse-card. “Good evening, uncle,” said I, approaching them. “Good evening, sar,” he answered, without looking up.“Where are you going?”“Well, we ain’t gwine nower, master; we’s peddlin’ tobacco roun.”“Where did you come from?”“From Rockingham County, Norf Car’lina, master.”“How long have you been coming from there?”“’Twill be seven weeks, to-morrow, sar, sin we leff home.”“Have you most sold out?”“We had a hundred and seventy-five boxes in both waggons, and we’s sold all but sixty. Want to buy some tobacco, master?” (Looking up.)“No, thank you; I am only waiting here, while the coach changes. How much tobacco is there in a box?”“Seventy-five pound.”“Are these the boxes?”“No, them is our provision boxes, master. Show de gemman some of der tobacco, dah.” (To the boy.)A couple of negroes here passed along near us; the old man hailed them:“Ho dah, boys! Doan you want to buy some backey?”“No.” (Decidedly.)“Well, I’m sorry for it.” (Reproachfully.)“Are you bound homeward, now?” I asked.“No, master; wish me was; got to sell all our backey fuss; you don’t want none, master, does you? Doan you tink it pretty fair tobacco, sar? Juss try it: it’s right sweet, reckon you’ll find.”“I don’t wish any, thank you; I never use it. Is your master with you?”“No, sar; he’s gone across to Marion, to-day.”“Do you like to be travelling about, in this way?”“Yes, master; I likes it very well.”“Better than staying at home, eh?”“Well, I likes my country better dan dis; must say dat, master; likes my country better dan dis. I’se a free nigger in my country, master.”“Oh, you are a free man, are you! North Carolina is a better country than this, for free men, I suppose.”“Yes, master, I likes my country de best; I gets five dollar a month for dat boy.” (Hastily, to change the subject.)“He is your son, is he?”“Yes, sar; he drives dat waggon, I drives dis; and I haant seen him fore, master, for six weeks, till dis mornin’.”“How were you separated?”“We separated six weeks ago, sar, and we agreed to meet here, last night. We didn’, dough, till dis mornin’.”The old man’s tone softened, and he regarded his son with earnestness.“’Pears, dough, we was bofe heah, last night; but I couldn’t find um till dis mornin’. Dis mornin’ some niggars tole me dar war a niggar camped off yander in de wood; and I knew ’twas him, and I went an’ found him right off.”“And what wages do you get for yourself?”“Ten dollars a month, master.”“That’s pretty good wages.”“Yes, master, any niggar can get good wages if he’s a mind to be industrious, no matter wedder he’s slave or free.”“So you don’t like this country as well as North Carolina?”“No, master. Fac is, master, ’pears like wite folks doan’ ginerally like niggars in dis country; day doan’ ginerally talk so to niggars like as do in my country; de niggars ain’t so happy heah; ’pears like de wite folks was kind o’ different, somehow. I doan’ like dis country so well; my country suits me very well.”“Well, I’ve been thinking, myself, the niggars did not look so well here as they did in North Carolina and Virginia; they are not so well clothed, and they don’t appear so bright as they do there.”“Well, master, Sundays dey is mighty well clothed, dis country; ’pears like dere an’t nobody looks better Sundays dan dey do. But Lord! workin’ days, seems like dey haden no close dey could keep on ’um at all, master. Dey is a’mos’ naked, wen deys at work, some on ’em. Why, master, up in our country, de wite folks—why, some on ’em has ten or twelve niggars; dey doan’ hev no real big plantation, like dey has heah, but some on ’em has ten or twelve niggars, may be, and dey juss lives and talks along wid ’em; and dey treats ’um most as if dem was dar own chile. Dey doan’keep no niggars dey can’t treat so; dey won’t keep ’em, won’t be bodered wid ’em. If dey gets a niggar and he doan behave himself, day won’t keep him; dey juss tell him, sar, he must look up anudder master, and if he doan’ find hisself one, I tell ’ou, when de trader cum along, dey sells him, and he totes him away. Dey allers sell off all de bad niggars out of our country; dat’s de way all de bad niggar and all dem no-account niggar keep a cumin’ down heah; dat’s de way on’t, master.”“Yes, that’s the way of it, I suppose; these big plantations are not just the best thing for niggers, I see that plainly.”“Master, you wan’t raise in dis country, was ’ou?”“No; I came from the North.”“I tort so, sar; I knew ’ou wan’t one of dis country people; ’peared like ’ou was one o’ my country people, way ’ou talks; and I loves dem kine of people. Won’t you take some whisky, sar? Heah, you boy! bring dat jug of whisky dah, out o’ my waggon; in dah,—in dat box under dem foddar.”“No, don’t trouble yourself, I am very much obliged to you; but I don’t like to drink whisky.”“Like to have you drink some, master, if you’d like it. You’s right welcome to it. ’Pears like I knew you was one of my country people. Ever been in Greensboro,’ master? dat’s in Guilford.”“No, I never was there. I came from New York, further North than your country.”“New York, did ’ou, master? I heerd New York was what dey calls a Free State; all de niggars free dah.”“Yes, that is so.”“Not no slaves at all; well, I expec dat’s a good ting, for all de niggars to be free. Greensboro’ is a right comely town; tain’t like dese heah Souf Car’lina towns.”“I have heard it spoken of as a beautiful town, and there are some fine people there.”“Yes, dere’s Mr. —— ——, I knows him—he’s a mighty good man.”“Do you know Mr. ——?”“O yes, sar, he’s a mighty fine man, he is, master; ain’t no better kind of man dan him.”“Well, I must go, or the coach will be kept waiting for me. Good-bye to you.”“Far’well, master, far’well; ’pears like it’s done me good to see a man dat’s cum out of my country again. Far’well, master.”We took supper at a neat log-cabin, standing a short distance off the road, with a beautiful evergreen oak, the first I had observed, in front of it. There was no glass in the windows, but drapery of white muslin restrained the currents of air, and during the day would let in sufficient light, while a blazing wood-fire both warmed and lighted the room by night. A rifle and powder-horn hung near the fire-place, and the master of the house, a fine, hearty, companionable fellow, said that he had lately shot three deer, and that there were plenty of cats, and foxes, as well as turkeys, hares, squirrels, and other small game in the vicinity. It was a perfectly charming little backwoods farm-house—good wife, supper, and all; but one disagreeable blot darkened the otherwise most agreeable picture of rustic civilization—we were waited upon at table by two excessively dirty, slovenly-dressed, negro girls. In the rear of the cabin were two hovels, each lighted by large fires, and apparently crowded with other slaves belonging to the family.Between nine and ten at night, we reached the end of the completed railroad, coming up in search for that we had leftthe previous night. There was another camp and fire of the workmen, and in a little white frame-house we found a company of engineers. There were two trains and locomotives on the track, and a gang of negroes was loading cotton into one of them.I strolled off until I reached an opening in the woods, in which was a cotton-field and some negro-cabins, and beyond it large girdled trees, among which were two negroes with dogs, barking, yelping, hacking, shouting, and whistling, after ’coons and ’possums. Returning to the railroad, I found a comfortable, warm passenger-car, and, wrapped in my blanket, went to sleep. At midnight I was awakened by loud laughter, and, looking out, saw that the gang of negroes had made a fire, and were enjoying a right merry repast. Suddenly, one raised such a sound as I never heard before; a long, loud, musical shout, rising and falling, and breaking into falsetto, his voice ringing through the woods in the clear, frosty night air, like a bugle-call. As he finished, the melody was caught up by another, and then another, and then by several in chorus. When there was silence again, one of them cried out, as if bursting with amusement: “Did yer see de dog?—when I began eeohing, he turn roun’ an’ look me straight into der face; ha! ha! ha!” and the whole party broke into the loudest peals of laughter, as if it was the very best joke they had ever heard.After a few minutes I could hear one urging the rest to come to work again, and soon he stepped towards the cotton bales, saying, “Come, brederen, come; let’s go at it; come now, eoho! roll away! eeoho-eeoho-weeioho-i!”—and the rest taking it up as before, in a few moments they all had their shoulders to a bale of cotton, and were rolling it up the embankment.About half-past three, I was awakened again by the whistleof the locomotive, answering, I suppose, the horn of a stagecoach, which in a few minutes drove up, bringing a mail. A negro man and woman who had been sleeping near me, replenished the fire; two other passengers came in, and we started.In the woods I saw a negro by a fire, while it was still night, shaving shingles very industriously. He did not even stop to look at the train. No doubt he was a slave, working by task, and of his own accord at night, that he might have the more daylight for his own purposes.The negroes enjoy fine blazing fires in the open air, and make them at every opportunity. The train on this road was provided with a man and maid-servant to attend to the fire and wait on the passengers—a very good arrangement, by the way, yet to be adopted on our own long passenger trains. When we arrived at a junction where we were to change cars, as soon as all the passengers had left the train, they also left; but instead of going into the station-house with us, they immediately collected some pine branches and chips, and getting a brand from the locomotive, made a fire upon the ground, and seated themselves by it. Other negroes soon began to join them, and as they approached were called to: “Doan’ yer cum widout som’ wood! Doan’ yer cum widout som’ wood!” and every one had to make his contribution. At another place, near a cotton plantation, I found a woman collecting pine leaves into heaps, to be carted to the cattle-pens. She, too, had a fire near her. “What are you doing with a fire, aunty?” “Oh, jus’ to warm my hans wen dey gits cold, massa.” The weather was then almost uncomfortably warm.We were running during the forenoon, for a hundred miles, or more, in a southerly direction, on nearly a straight course, through about the middle of the State of South Carolina. The greater part of this distance, the flat, sandy pine barrenscontinued, scarcely a foot of grading, for many miles at a time, having been required in the construction of the railroad. As the swamps, which were still frequent, were crossed on piles and tressel-work, the roads must have been built very cheaply—the land damages being nothing. We passed from the track of one company to that of another, several times during the day—the speed was from fifteen to twenty miles an hour, with long stoppages at the stations. A conductor said they could easily run forty miles, and had done it, including stoppages; but they were forbidden now to make fast time, from the injury it did the road—the superstructure being much more shaken and liable to displacement in these light sands than on our Northern roads. The locomotives that I saw were all made in Philadelphia; the cars were all from the Hartford, Conn., and Worcester, Mass., manufactories, and invariably, elegant and comfortable. The roads seemed to be doing a heavy freighting business with cotton. We passed at the turn-outs half a dozen trains, with nearly a thousand bales on each, but the number of passengers was always small. A slave country can never, it is evident, furnish a passenger traffic of much value. A majority of the passenger trains, which I saw used in the South, were not paying for the fuel and wages expended in running them.
I afterwards met one of the company in Fayetteville. Their night’s adventure after I left them, and the continued cruelty to the horses, were most distressing. The driver once got off the box, and struck the poor, miserable, sick “Rock” with a rail, and actually knocked him down in the road. At another time, after having got fresh horses, when they, too, were “stalled,” he took them out of the harness and turned them loose, and, refusing to give any answer tothe inquiries of the passengers, looked about for a dry place, and laid down and went to sleep on the ground. One of the passengers had then walked on to Mrs. Barclay’s, and obtained a pair of mules, with which the coach was finally brought to the house. The remainder kindled a fire, and tried to rest themselves by it. They were sixteen hours in coming thirty miles, suffering much from cold, and without food.
The next day I spent in visiting turpentine and rosin works, piny-wood farms, etc., under the obliging guidance of Mrs. Barclay’s son-in-law, and in the evening again took the coach. The horses were better than on the previous stage: upon my remarking this to the driver, he said that the reason was, that they took care of this team themselves (the drivers); on the last stage the horses were left to negroes, who would not feed them regularly, nor take any decent care of them. “Why, what do you think?” said he; “when I got to Banks’s, this morning, I found my team hadn’t been fed all day; they hadn’t been rubbed nor cleaned, nary durned thing done to ’em, and thar the cussed darkey was, fast asleep. Reckon I didn’t gin him a wakin’ up!”
“You don’t mean the horses that you drove up?”
“Yes, I do, and they hadn’t a cussed thing to eat till they got back to Barclay’s!”
“How was it possible for you to drive them back?”
“Why, I don’t suppose I could ha’ done it if I’d had any passengers: (youSuze!) shall lose a mail again to-night, if this mare don’t travel better, (durn ye, yer ugly, I believe). She’s a good mare—a heap of go in her, but it takes right smart of work to get it out.Suze!”
So we toiled on, with incessant shouting, and many strange piny-wood oaths, and horrid belabouring of the poor horses’ backs, with the butt-end of a hickory whip-stalk, till I really thought their spinal-columns must break. The country, thesame undulating pine forest, the track tortuous among the trees, which frequently stood so close that it required some care to work between them. Often we made detours from the original road, to avoid a fallen tree, or a mire-hole, and all the time we were bouncing over protruding roots and small stumps. There was but little mud, the soil being sand, but now and then a deep slough. In one of these we found a waggon, heavily laden, stuck fast, and six mules and five negroes tugging at it. With our help it was got out of the way, and we passed on. Soon afterwards we met the return coach, apparently in a similar predicament; but one of the passengers, whom I questioned, replied: “No, not stalled, exactly, but somehowthe horses won’t draw. We have been more than three hours coming about four miles.”
“How is it you have so many balky horses?” I asked the driver.
“The old man buys ’em up cheap, ’cause nobody else can do anything with ’em.”
“I should not think you could do much with them, either—except to kill them.”
“Well, that’s what the old man says he buys ’em for. He was blowing me up for losing the mail t’other night; I told him, says I, ‘You have to a’most kill them horses, ’fore you can make ’em draw a bit,’ says I. ‘Kill ’em, damn ’em, kill em, then; that’s what I buy ’em for,’ says he. ‘I buy ’em a purpose to kill; that’s all they are good for, ain’t it?’ says he. ‘Don’t s’pose they’re going to last for ever, do ye?’ says he.”
We stopped once, nearly half an hour, for some unexplained reason, before a house on the road. The door of the house was open, an enormous fire was burning in it, and, at the suggestion of the driver, I went in to warm myself. It was a large log-cabin, of two rooms, with beds in each room, and with an apartment overhead, to which access was had by aladder. Among the inmates were two women; one of them sat in the chimney-corner smoking a pipe, and rocking a cradle; the other sat directly before the fire, and full ten feet distant. She was apparently young, but her face was as dry and impassive as a dead man’s. She was doing nothing, and said but little; but, once in about a minute, would suddenly throw up her chin, and spit with perfect precision into the hottest embers of the fire. The furniture of the house was more scanty and rude than I ever saw before in any house, with women living in it, in the United States. Yet these people were not so poor but that they had a negro woman cutting and bringing wood for their fire.
It must be remembered that this is a long-settled country, having been occupied by Anglo-Saxons as early as any part of the Free States, and that it is the main road between the capital of North Carolina and its chief sea-port.
There is nothing that is more closely connected, both as cause and effect, with the prosperity and wealth of a country, than its means and modes of travelling, and of transportation of the necessities and luxuries of life. I saw this day, as I shall hereafter describe, three thousand barrels of resin, worth a dollar and a half a barrel in New York, thrown away, a mere heap of useless offal, because it would cost more to transport it than it would be worth. There was a single waggon, with a ton or two of sugar, and flour, and tea, and axes, and cotton cloths, unable to move, with six mules, and five negroes at work upon it. Raleigh is a large distributing post-office, getting a very heavy mail from the North; here was all that is sent by one of its main radii, travelling one day two miles an hour, the next four miles, and on each occasion failing to connect with the conveyances which we pay to scatter further the intelligence and wealth transmitted by it. Barbarous is too mild a term to apply to themanner in which even this was done. The improvidence, if not the cruelty, no sensible barbarian could have been guilty of.
Afterwards, merely to satisfy my mind (for there is a satisfaction in seeing even scoundrelism consistently carried out, if attempted at all in a business), I called on the agent of the line at Fayetteville, stated the case, and asked if any part of what I had paid for my passage would be returned me, on account of the disappointment and delay which I had suffered from the inability of the proprietor to carry out his contract with me. The impudence of the suggestion, of course, only created amusement; and I was smilingly informed that the business was not so “lucky” that the proprietor could afford to pay back money that he had once got into his hands. What I had seen was regarded by no one, apparently, as at all unusual.
At one of the stations for changing horses, an old coloured man was taken into the coach. I ascertained from him that he was a blacksmith, and had been up the line to shoe the horses at the different stables. Probably he belonged (poor fellow!) to the man who bought horses to be killed in doing his work. After answering my inquiries, he lay down in the bottom of the coach, and slept until we reached Fayetteville. The next time we changed, the new driver inquired of the old one what passengers he had. “Only one gentleman, and old man Ned.”
“Oh! is old man along—that’s good—if we should turn over, or break down, or anything, reckon he could nigh about pray us up—he’s right smart at prayin’.”
“Well, I tell you, now, ole man can trot out as smart a prayer, when he’s a mind to go in for’t, as any man I ever heerd, durned if he can’t.”
The last ten miles we came over rapidly, smoothly, andquietly, by a plank-road, reaching Fayetteville about twelve, of a fine, clear, frosty night.
Entering the office or bar-room of the stage-house, at which I had been advised to stay while in Fayetteville, I found it occupied by a group of old soakers, among whom was one of perhaps sixteen years of age. This lad, without removing the cigar which he had in his mouth, went to the bar, whither I followed him, and, without saying a word, placed an empty tumbler before me.
“I don’t wish anything to drink,” said I; “I am cold and tired, and I would like to go to a room. I intend to stay here some days, and I should be glad if you could give me a private room with a fire in it.”
“Room with a fire in it?” he inquired, as he handed me the registry-book.
“Yes; and I will thank you to have it made immediately, and let my baggage be taken up.”
He closed the book, after I had written my name, and returned to his seat at the stove, leaving me standing, and immediately engaged in conversation, without paying any attention to my request. I waited some time, during which a negro came into the room, and went out again. I then repeated my request, necessarily aloud, and in such a way as to be understood, not only by the boy, but by all the company. Immediately all conversation ceased, and every head was turned to look at me. The lad paused a moment, spit upon the stove, and then—
“Want a room to yourself?”
“Yes, if convenient.”
No answer and no movement, all the company staring at me as if at a detected burglar.
“Perhaps you can’t accommodate me?”
“Want a fire made in your room?”
“Why, yes, if convenient; but I should like to go to my room, at any rate; I am very tired.”
After puffing and spitting for a moment, he rose and pulled a bell; then took his seat again. In about five minutes a negro came in, and during all this time there was silence.
“What’ll you drink, Baker?” said the lad, rising and going to the bar, and taking no notice of the negro’s entrance. A boozy man followed him, and made some reply; the lad turned out two glasses of spirits, added water to one, and drank it in a gulp.[26]
“Can this boy show me to my room?” I asked.
“Anybody in number eleven, Peter?”
“Not as I knows on, sar.”
“Take this man’s baggage up there.”
I followed the negro up to number eleven, which was a large back room in the upper story, with four beds in it.
“Peter,” said I, “I want a fire made here.”
“Want a fire, sar?”
“Yes, I want you to make a fire.”
“Want a fire, master, this time o’ night?”
“Why, yes; I want a fire. Where are you going with the lamp?”
“Want a lamp, massa?”
“Want a lamp? Certainly, I do.”
After about ten minutes, I heard a man splitting wood in the yard, and, in ten more, Peter brought in three sticks of green wood, and some chips; then, the little bed-lamp having burned out, he went into an adjoining room, where I heard him talking to some one, evidently awakened by his entranceto get a match; that failing, he went for another. By one o’clock, my fire was made.
“Peter,” said I, “are you going to wait on me, while I stay here?”
“Yes, sar; I ’tends to dis room.”
“Very well; take this, and, when I leave, I’ll give you another, if you take good care of me. Now, I want you to get me some water.”
“I’ll get you some water in de morning, sar.”
“I want some to-night—some water and some towels; don’t you think you can get them for me?”
“I reckon so, massa, if you wants ’em. Want ’em ’fore you go to bed?”
“Yes; and get another lamp.”
“Want a lamp?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Won’t the fire do you?”
“No; bring a lamp. That one won’t burn without filling; you need not try it.”
The water and the lamp came, after a long time.
In the morning, early, I was awakened by a knock at the door.
“Who’s there?”
“Me, massa; I wants your boots to black.”
I got up, opened the door, and returned to bed. Falling asleep, I was soon again awakened by Peter throwing down an armful of wood upon the floor. Slept again, and was again awakened, by Peter’s throwing up the window, to empty out the contents of the wash bowl, etc. The room was filled with smoke of the fat light wood: Peter had already made a fire for me to dress by; but I again fell asleep, and, when I next awoke, the breakfast bell was ringing. Peter had gone off, and left the window and door open, andthe fire had burned out. My boots had been taken away, and the bell-wire was broken. I dressed, and walking to the bar-room, asked the bar-keeper—a complaisant, full-grown man—for my boots. He did not know where they were, and rang the bell for Peter. Peter came, was reprimanded for his forgetfulness, and departed. Ten minutes elapsed, and he did not return. I again requested that he should be called; and this time he brought my boots. He had had to stop to black them; having, he said, been too busy to do it before breakfast.
The following evening, as it grew too cold to write in my room, I went down, and found Peter, and told him I wanted a fire again, and that he might get me a couple of candles. When he came up, he brought one of the little bed-lamps, with a capacity of oil for fifteen minutes’ use. I sent him down again to the office, with a request to the proprietor that I might be furnished with candles. He returned, and reported that there were no candles in the house.
“Then, get me a larger lamp.”
“Aint no larger lamps, nuther, sar;—none to spare.”
“Then go out, and see if you can’t buy me some candles, somewhere.”
“Aint no stores open, Sunday, massa, and I don’t know where I can buy ’em.”
“Then go down, and tell the bar-keeper, with my compliments, that I wish to write in my room, and I would be obliged to him if he would send me a light, of some sort; something that will last longer, and give more light, than these little lamps.”
“He won’t give you none, massa—not if you hab a fire. Can’t you see by da light of da fire? When a gentlemen hab a fire in his room, dey don’t count he wants no more light ’n dat.”
“Well, make the fire, and I’ll go down and see about it.”
As I reached the foot of the stairs, the bell rang, and I went in to tea. The tea table was moderately well lighted with candles. I waited till the company had generally left it, and then said to one of the waiters—
“Here are two dimes: I want you to bring me, as soon as you can, two of these candles to number eleven; do you understand?”
“Yes, sar; I’ll fotch ’em, sar.”
And he did.
About eight o’clock, there was an alarm of fire. Going into the street, I was surprised to observe how leisurely the people were walking toward the house in flames, standing very prominently, as it did, upon a hill, at one end of the town. As I passed a church, the congregation was coming out; but very few quickened their step above a strolling pace. Arrived near the house, I was still more astonished to see how few, of the crowd assembled, were occupied in restraining the progress of the fire, or in saving the furniture, and at the prevailing stupidity, confusion, and want of system and concert of action, in the labour for this purpose. A large majority of those engaged were negroes. As I returned toward the hotel, a gentleman, walking, with a lady, before me, on the side walk, accosted a negro whom he met:
“What! Moses! That you? Why were you not here sooner?”
“Why, Mass Richard, I was singing, an’ I didn’ her de bells and——I see twant in our ward, sar, and so I didn’ see as dar was zactly ’casion for me to hurry myself to def. Ef eed a been in our ward, Mass Richard, I’d a rallied, you knows I would. Mose would ha rallied, ef eed a been in our ward—ha! ha! ha!—you knows it, Mass Richard!”
And he passed on, laughing comically, without farther reproof.
Fayetteville.—The negroes employed in the turpentine business, to which during the last week I have been giving some examination, seem to me to be unusually intelligent and cheerful, decidedly more so than most of the white people inhabiting the turpentine forest. Among the latter there is a large number, I should think a majority, of entirely uneducated, poverty-stricken vagabonds. I mean by vagabonds, simply, people without habitual, definite occupation or reliable means of livelihood. They are poor, having almost no property but their own bodies; and the use of these, that is, their labour, they are not accustomed to hire out statedly and regularly, so as to obtain capital by wages, but only occasionally by the day or job, when driven to it by necessity. A family of these people will commonly hire, or “squat” and build, a little log cabin, so made that it is only a shelter from rain, the sides not being chinked, and having no more furniture or pretension to comfort than is commonly provided a criminal in the cell of a prison. They will cultivate a little corn, and possibly a few roods of potatoes, cow-peas, and coleworts. They will own a few swine, that find their living in the forest; and pretty certainly, also, a rifle and dogs; and the men, ostensibly, occupy most of their time in hunting. I am, mainly, repeating the statements of one of the turpentine distillers, but it was confirmed by others, and by my own observation, so far as it went.
A gentleman of Fayetteville told me that he had, several times, appraised, under oath, the whole household property of families of this class at less than $20. If they have need of money to purchase clothing, etc., they obtain it by selling their game or meal. If they have none of this to spare, or an insufficiency, they will work for a neighbouring farmer for afew days, and they usually get for their labour fifty cents a day,finding themselves. The farmers and distillers say, that they do not like to employ them, because they cannot be relied upon to finish what they undertake, or to work according to directions; and because, being white men, they cannot “drive” them. That is to say, their labour is even more inefficient and unmanageable than that of slaves.
That I have not formed an exaggerated estimate of the proportion of such a class, will appear to the reader more probable from the testimony of a pious colporteur, given before a public meeting in Charleston, in February, 1855. I quote from a Charleston paper’s report. The colporteur had been stationed at —— county, N.C.:—“The larger portionof the inhabitants seemed to be totally given up to a species of mental hallucination, which carried them captive at its will. They nearly all believed implicitly in witchcraft, and attributed everything that happened, good or bad, to the agency of persons whom they supposed possessed of evil spirits.”
The majority of what I have termed turpentine-farmers—meaning the small proprietors of the long-leafed pine forest land—are people but a grade superior, in character or condition, to these vagabonds. They have habitations more like houses—log-cabins, commonly, sometimes chinked, oftener not—without windows of glass, but with a few pieces of substantial old-fashioned heir-loom furniture; a vegetable garden, in which, however, you will find no vegetable but what they call “collards” (colewort) for “greens;” fewer dogs, more swine, and larger clearings for maize, but no better crops than the poorer class. Their property is, nevertheless, often of considerable money value, consisting mainly of negroes, who, associating intimately with their masters, are of superior intelligence to the slaves of the wealthier classes.
Some of the larger proprietors, who are also often cottonplanters, cultivating the richer low lands, are said to be gentlemen of good estate—intelligent, cultivated, and hospitable.
North Carolina has a proverbial reputation for the ignorance and torpidity of her people; being, in this respect, at the head of the Slave States. I do not find the reason of this in any innate quality of the popular mind; but, rather, in the circumstances under which it finds its development. Owing to the general poverty of the soil in the Eastern part of the State, and to the almost exclusive employment of slave labour on the soils productive of cotton; owing, also, to the difficulty and expense of reaching market with bulky produce from the interior and western districts, population and wealth is more divided than in the other Atlantic States; industry is almost entirely rural, and there is but little communication or concert of action among the small and scattered proprietors of capital. For the same reason, the advantages of education are more difficult to be enjoyed, the distance at which families reside apart preventing children from coming together in such numbers as to give remunerative employment to a teacher. The teachers are, generally, totally unfitted for their business; young men, as a clergyman informed me, themselves not only unadvanced beyond the lowest knowledge of the elements of primary school learning, but often coarse, vulgar, and profane in their language and behaviour, who take up teaching as a temporary business, to supply the demand of a neighbourhood of people as ignorant and uncultivated as themselves.
Being more than one-fourth of the native white adults.
But the aspect of North Carolina with regard to slavery, is, in some respects, less lamentable than that of Virginia. There is not only less bigotry upon the subject, and more freedom of conversation, but I saw here, in the institution, more of patriarchal character than in any other State. The slave more frequently appears as a family servant—a member of his master’s family, interested with him in his fortune, good or bad. This is a result of the less concentration of wealth in families or individuals, occasioned by the circumstances I have described. Slavery thus loses much of its inhumanity. It is still questionable, however, if, as the subject race approaches civilization, the dominant race is not proportionately detained in its onward progress. One is forced often to question, too, in viewing slavery in this aspect, whether humanity and the accumulation of wealth, the prosperity of the master, and the happiness and improvement of the subject, are not in some degree incompatible.
These later observations are made after having twice again passed through the State, once in a leisurely way on horseback. In some of the Western and Northern central parts of the State, there is much more enterprise, thrift, and comfort than in the Eastern part, where I had my first impressions.
I left Fayetteville in a steamboat (advertised for 8 o’clock, left at 8.45) bound down Cape Fear River to Wilmington. A description of the river, with incidents of the passage, will serve to show the character of most of the navigable streams of the cotton States, flowing into the Atlantic and the Gulf, and of the manner of their navigation.
The water was eighteen feet above its lowest summer stages; the banks steep, thirty feet high from the present water surface—from fifty to one hundred feet apart—and covered with large trees and luxuriant vegetation; the course crooked; thecurrent very rapid; the trees overhanging the banks, and frequently falling into the channel—making the navigation hazardous. The river is subject to very rapid rising. The master told me that he had sometimes left his boat aground at night, and, on returning in the morning, found it floating in twenty-five feet water, over the same spot. The difference between the extremes of low stages and floods is as much as seventy feet. In summer, there are sometimes but eighteen inches of water on the bars: the boat I was in drew but fourteen inches, light. She was a stern-wheel craft—the boiler and engine (high pressure) being placed at opposite ends, to balance weights. Her burden was three hundred barrels, or sixty tons measurement. This is the character of most of the boats navigating the river—of which there are now twelve. Larger boats are almost useless in summer, from their liability to ground; and even the smaller ones, at low stages of water, carry no freight, but are employed to tow up “flats” or shallow barges. At this season of the year, however, the steamboats are loaded close to the water’s edge.
The bulk of our freight was turpentine; and the close proximity of this to the furnaces suggested a danger fully equal to that from snags or grounding. On calling the attention of a fellow-passenger to it, he told me that a friend of his was once awakened from sleep, while lying in a berth on one of these boats, by a sudden, confused sound. Thinking the boiler had burst, he drew the bed-clothing over his head, and laid quiet, to avoid breathing the steam; until, feeling the boat ground, he ran out, and discovered that she was on fire near the furnace. Having some valuable freight near by, which he was desirous to save, and seeing no immediate danger, though left alone on the boat, he snatched a bucket, and, drawing water from alongside, applied it with such skill and rapidity as soon to quench the flames, and eventually to entirely extinguishthe fire. Upon the return of the crew, a few repairs were made, steam was got up again, and the boat proceeded to her destination in safety. He afterwards ascertained that three hundred kegs of gunpowder were stowed beneath the deck that had been on fire—a circumstance which sufficiently accounted for the panic-flight of the crew.
Soon after leaving, we passed the Zephyr, wooding up: an hour later, our own boat was run to the bank, men jumped from her fore and aft, and fastened head and stern lines to the trees, and we also commenced wooding.
The trees had been cut away so as to leave a clear space to the top of the bank, which was some fifty feet from the boat, and moderately steep. Wood, cut, split, and piled in ranks, stood at the top of it, and a shoot of plank, two feet wide and thirty long, conveyed it nearly to the water. The crew rushed to the wood-piles—master, passengers, and all, but the engineer and chambermaid, deserting the boat—and the wood was first passed down, as many as could, throwing into the shoot, and others forming a line, and tossing it, from one to another, down the bank. From the water’s edge it was passed, in the same way, to its place on board, with great rapidity—the crew exciting themselves with yells. They were all blacks, but one.
On a tree, near the top of the bank, a little box was nailed, on which a piece of paper was tacked, with this inscription:
“Notic“to all ‘persons takin wood from thislandin pleas to leav a ticket payable tothe subscriber, at $1,75 a cord asheretofore.“Amos Sikes.”
“Notic“to all ‘persons takin wood from thislandin pleas to leav a ticket payable tothe subscriber, at $1,75 a cord asheretofore.“Amos Sikes.”
“Notic“to all ‘persons takin wood from thislandin pleas to leav a ticket payable tothe subscriber, at $1,75 a cord asheretofore.“Amos Sikes.”
“Notic“to all ‘persons takin wood from thislandin pleas to leav a ticket payable tothe subscriber, at $1,75 a cord asheretofore.“Amos Sikes.”
“Notic
“to all ‘persons takin wood from this
landin pleas to leav a ticket payable to
the subscriber, at $1,75 a cord as
heretofore.“Amos Sikes.”
and the master—just before the wood was all on board—hastily filled a blank order (torn from a book, like a check-book, leaving a memorandum of the amount, etc.) on the owner of the boat for payment, to Mr. Sikes, for two cords of pine-wood, at $1 75, and two cords of light-wood, at $2—and left it in the box. The wood used had been measured in the ranks with a rod, carried for the purpose, by the master, at the moment he reached the bank.
Before, with all possible haste, we had finished wooding, the Zephyr passed us; and, during the rest of the day, she kept out of our sight. As often as we met a steamboat, or passed any flats or rafts, our men were calling out to know how far ahead of us she was; and when the answer came back each time, in an increasing number of miles, they told us that our boat was more than usually sluggish, owing to an uncommonly heavy freight; but still, for some time, they were ready to make bets that we should get first to Wilmington.
Several times we were hailed from the shore, to take on a passenger, or some light freight; and these requests, as long as it was possible, were promptly complied with—the boat being run up, so as to rest her bow upon the bank, and then shouldered off by the men, as if she had been a skiff.
There were but three through-passengers, besides myself. Among them, was a glue-manufacturer, of Baltimore—getting orders from the turpentine-distillers,—and a turpentine-farmer and distiller. The glue-manufacturer said that, in his factory, they had formerly employed slaves; had since used Irishmen, and now employed Germans. Their operations were carried on night and day, and one gang of the men had to relieve another. The slaves they had employed never would beon hand, when the hour for relieving came. It was also necessary to be careful that certain operationsshould be performed at a certain time, and some judgment and watchfulness was necessary, to fix this time: the slaves never could be made to care enough for the matter, to be depended upon for discretion, in this respect; and great injury was frequently done in consequence. Some of the operations were disagreeable, and they would put one another up to thinking and saying that they ought not to be required to do such dirty work—and try to have their owners get them away from it.
Irishmen, he said, worked very well, and to a certain extent faithfully, and, for a time, they liked them very much; but they found that, in about a fortnight, an Irishman always thought he knew more than his master, and would exercise his discretion a little too much, as well as often directly disregard his orders. Irishmen were, he said, “toofaithful”—that is, self-confident and officious.
At length, at a hurried time, they had employed one or two Germans. The Irishmen, of course, soon quarrelled with them, and threatened to leave, if they were kept. Whereupon, they were, themselves, all discharged, and a full crew of Germans, at much less wages, taken; and they proved excellent hands—steady, plodding, reliable, though they never pretended to know anything, and said nothing about what they could do. They were easily instructed, obeyed orders faithfully, and worked fairly for their wages, without boasting or grumbling.
The turpentine-distiller gave a good account of some of his men; but said he was sure they never performed half as much work as he himself could; and they sometimes would, of their own accord, do twice as much in a day, as could usually be got out of them. He employed a Scotchman at the “still;” but he never would have white people at ordinary work, because he couldn’t drive them. He added, withthe utmost simplicity—and I do not think any one present saw, at the time, how much the remark expressed more than it was intended to—“I never can drive a white man, for I know I could never bear to be driven, myself, by anybody.”
The other passenger was “a North of England man,” as I suspected from the first words I heard from him—though he had been in this country for about twenty years. He was a mechanic, and employed several slaves; but testified strongly of the expensive character of their labour; and declared, without any reserve, that the system was ruinous in its effects upon the character and value of all classes of working men.
The country on the river-bank was nearly all wooded, with, occasionally, a field of corn, which, even in the low alluvial meadows, sometimes overflowed by the river, and enriched by its deposit, had evidently yielded but a very meagre crop—the stalks standing singly, at great distances, and very small. The greater part, even of these once rich low lands, that had been in cultivation, were now “turned out,” and covered either with pines or broom-sedge and brushwood.
At some seventy or eighty miles, I should think, below Fayetteville, the banks became lower, and there was much swamp land, in which the ground was often covered with a confusion of logs and sawn lumber, mingled with other rubbish, left by floods of the river. The standing timber was very large, and many of the trees were hung with the long, waving drapery of the tylandria, or Spanish moss, which, as well as the mistletoe, I here first saw in profusion. There was also a thick network among the trees, of beautiful climbing plants. I observed some very large grape-vines, and many trees of greater size than I ever saw of their species before. I infer that this soil, properly reclaimed, and protectedfrom floods of the river, might be most profitably used in the culture of the various half-tropical trees and shrubs, of whose fruits we now import so large and costly an amount. The fig, I have been informed, grows and bears luxuriantly at Wilmington, seldom or never suffering in its wood, though a crop of fruit may be occasionally injured by a severe late spring frost. The almond, doubtless, would succeed equally well, so also the olive; but of none of these is there the slightest commercial value produced in North Carolina, or in all our country.
In the evening we passed many boats and rafts, blazing with great fires, made upon a thick bed of clay, and their crews singing at their sweeps. Twenty miles above Wilmington, the shores became marshy, the river wide, and the woody screen that had hitherto, in a great degree, hid the nakedness of the land, was withdrawn, leaving open to view only broad, reedy savannahs, on either side.
We reached Wilmington, the port at the mouth of the river, at half-past nine. Taking a carriage, I was driven first to one hotel and afterwards to another. They were both so crowded with guests, and excessive business duties so prevented the clerks from being tolerably civil to me, that I feared if I remained in either of them I should have another Norfolk experience. While I was endeavouring to ascertain if there was a third public-house, in which I might, perhaps, obtain a private room, my eye fell upon an advertisement of a new railroad line of passage to Charleston. A boat, to take passengers to the railroad, was to start every night, from Wilmington, at ten-o’clock. It was already something past ten; but being pretty sure that she would not get off punctually, and having a strong resisting impulse to being packed away in a close room, with any chance stranger the clerk of the house might choose to couple me with, I shouldered mybaggage and ran for the wharves. At half-past ten I was looking at Wilmington over the stern of another little wheel-barrow-steamboat, pushing back up the river. When or how I was to be taken to Charleston, I had not yet been able to ascertain. The captain assured me it was all right, and demanded twenty dollars. Being in his power I gave it to him, and received in return a pocketful of tickets, guaranteeing the bearer passage from place to place; of not one of which places had I ever heard before, except Charleston.
The cabin was small, dirty, crowded, close, and smoky. Finding a warm spot in the deck, over the furnace, and to leeward of the chimney, I pillowed myself on my luggage and went to sleep.
The ringing of the boat’s bell awoke me, after no great lapse of time, and I found we were in a small creek, heading southward. Presently we reached a wharf, near which stood a locomotive and train. A long, narrow plank having been run out, half a dozen white men, including myself, went on shore. Then followed as many negroes, who appeared to be a recent purchase of their owner. Owing, probably, to an unusually low tide, there was a steep ascent from the boat to the wharf, and I was amused to see the anxiety of this gentleman for the safe landing of his property, and especially to hear him curse them for their carelessness, as if their lives were of much greater value to him than to themselves. One was a woman. All carried over their shoulders some little baggage, probably all their personal effects, slung in a blanket; and one had a dog, whose safe landing caused him nearly as much anxiety as his own didhisowner.
“Gib me da dog, now,” said the dog’s owner, standing half way up the plank.
“Damn the dog,” said the negro’s owner; “give me yourhand up here. Let go of the dog; d’ye hear! Let him take care of himself.”
But the negro hugged the dog and brought him safely on shore.
After a short delay the train started: the single passenger car was a fine one (made at Wilmington, Delaware), and just sufficiently warmed. I should have slept again if it had not been that two of the six inmates were drunk—one of them uproariously.
Passing through long stretches of cypress swamps, with occasional intervals of either pine-barrens, or clear water ponds, in about two hours we came, in the midst of the woods, to the end of the rails. In the vicinity could be seen a small tent, a shanty of loose boards, and a large, subdued fire, around which, upon the ground, a considerable number of men were stretched out asleep. This was the camp of the hands engaged in laying the rails, and who were thus daily extending the distance which the locomotive could run.
The conductor told me that there was here a break of about eighty miles in the rail, over which I should be transferred by a stage coach, which would come as soon as possible after the driver knew that the train had arrived. To inform him of this, the locomotive trumpeted loud and long.
The negro property, which had been brought up in a freight car, was immediately let out on the stoppage of the train. As it stepped on to the platform, the owner asked, “Are you all here?”
“Yes, massa, we is all heah,” answered one. “Do dysef no harm, for we’s all heah,” added another, in an under tone.
The negroes immediately gathered some wood, and taking a brand from the railroad hands, made a fire for themselves; then, all but the woman, opening their bundles, wrappedthemselves in their blankets and went to sleep. The woman, bare-headed, and very inadequately clothed as she was, stood for a long time alone, erect and statue-like, her head bowed, gazing in the fire. She had taken no part in the light chat of the others, and had given them no assistance in making the fire. Her dress too was not the usual plantation apparel. It was all sadly suggestive.
The principal other freight of the train was one hundred and twenty bales of Northern hay. It belonged, as the conductor told me, to a planter who lived some twenty miles beyond here, and who had bought it in Wilmington at a dollar and a half a hundred weight, to feed his mules. Including the steamboat and railroad freight, and all the labour of getting it to his stables, its entire cost to him would not be much less than two dollars a hundred, or at least four times as much as it would have cost to raise and make it in the interior of New York or New England. There are not only several forage crops which can be raised in South Carolina, that cannot be grown on account of the severity of the winter in the Free States, but, on a farm near Fayetteville, a few days before, I had seen a crop of natural grass growing in half-cultivated land, dead upon the ground; which, I think, would have made, if it had been cut and well treated in the summer, three tons of hay to the acre. The owner of the land said that there was no better hay than it would have made, but he hadn’t had time to attend to it. He had as much as his hands could do of other work at the period of the year when it should have been made.
Probably the case was similar with the planter who had bought this Northern hay at a price four times that which it would have cost a Northern farmer to make it. He had preferred to employ his slaves at other business.
The inference must be, either that there was most improbably-foolish, bad management, or that the slaves were more profitably employed in cultivating cotton, than they could have been in cultivating maize, or other forage crops.
I put the case, some days afterwards, to an English merchant, who had had good opportunities, and made it a part of his business to study such matters.
“I have no doubt,” said he, “that if hay cannot be obtained here, other valuable forage can, with less labour than anywhere at the North; and all the Southern agricultural journals sustain this opinion, and declare it to be purely bad management that neglects these crops, and devotes labour to cotton, so exclusively. Probably, it is so—at the present cost of forage. Nevertheless, the fact is also true, as the planters assert, that they cannot afford to apply their labour to anything else but cotton. And yet, they complain that the price of cotton is so low that there is no profit in growing it, which is evidently false. You see that they prefer buying hay to raising it at, to say the least, three times what it costs your Northern farmers to raise it. Of course, if cotton could be grown in New York and Ohio, it could be afforded at one-third the cost it is here—say at three cents per pound. And that is my solution of the slavery question. Bring cotton down to three cents a pound, and there would be more abolitionists in South Carolina than in Massachusetts. If that can be brought about, in any way—and it is not impossible that we may live to see it, as our railways are extended in India, and the French enlarge their free-labour plantations in Algiers—there will be an end of slavery.”
It was just one o’clock when the stage-coach came for us. There was but one passenger beside myself—a Philadelphia gentleman, going to Columbia. We proceeded very slowly for about three miles, across a swamp, upon a “corduroyroad;” then more rapidly, over rough ground, being tossed about in the coach most severely, for six or eight miles further. Besides the driver, there was on the box the agent or superintendent of the coach line, who now opened the doors, and we found ourselves before a log stable, in the midst of a forest of large pines. The driver took out a horse, and, mounting him, rode off, and we collected wood, splitting it with a hatchet that was carried on the coach, and, lighting it from the coach lamp, made a fire. It was very cold, ice half an inch thick, and a heavy hoar frost. We complained to the agent that there was no straw in the coach bottom, while there were large holes bored in it, that kept our feet excessively cold. He said there was no straw to be had in the country. They were obliged to bed their horses with pine leaves, which were damp, and would be of no service to us. The necessity for the holes he did not immediately explain, and we, in the exercise of our Yankee privilege, resolved that they were made with reference to the habit of expectoration, which we had observed in the car to be very general and excessive.
In about half an hour the driver of the new stage came to us on the horse that the first had ridden away. A new set of horses was brought out and attached to the coach, and we were driven on again. An hour later, the sun rose; we were still in pine-barrens, once in several miles passing through a clearing, with a log farm-house, and a few negro huts about it; often through cypress swamps, and long pools of water. At the end of ten miles we breakfasted, and changed horses and drivers at a steam saw-mill. A few miles further on, we were asked to get on the top of the coach, while it was driven through a swamp, in which the water was over the road, for a quarter of a mile, to such a depth that it covered the foot-board. The horses really groaned, as theypushed the thin ice away with their necks, and were very near swimming. The holes in the coach bottom, the agent now told us, were to allow the water that would here enter the body to flow out. At the end of these ten miles we changed again, at a cotton planter’s house—a very neat, well-built house, having pine trees about it, but very poor, old, negro quarters.
Since the long ford we had kept the top, the inside of the coach being wet, and I had been greatly pleased with the driving—the coachman, a steady-going sort of a fellow, saying but little to his horses, and doing what swearing he thought necessary in English; driving, too, with great judgment and skill. The coach was a fine, roomy, old-fashioned, fragrant, leathery affair, and the horses the best I had seen this side of Virginia. I could not resist expressing my pleasure with the whole establishment. The new team was admirable; four sleek, well-governed, eager, sorrel cobs, and the driver, a staid, bronzed-faced man, keeping them tight in hand, drove quietly and neatly, his whip in the socket. After about fifteen minutes, during which he had been engaged in hushing down their too great impetuosity, he took out a large silver hunting-watch, and asked what time it was.
“Quarter past eleven,” said the agent.
“Twelve minutes past,” said the Philadelphian.
“Well, fourteen, only, I am,” said the agent.
“Thirteen,” said I.
“Just thirteen, I am,” said the driver, slipping back his watch to its place, and then, to the agent, “ha’an’t touched a hand of her since I left old Lancaster.”
Suddenly guessing the meaning of what had been for some time astonishing me—“You are from the North?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“And you, too, Mr. Agent?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the coach, and the cattle, and all?”
“All from Pennsylvania.”
“How long have you been here?”
“We have been here about a fortnight, stocking the road. We commenced regular trips yesterday. You are the first passenger through, sir.”
It was, in fact, merely a transfer from one of the old National Road lines, complete. After a little further conversation, I asked, “How do you like the country, here?”
“Very nice country,” said the agent.
“It’s the cussedest poor country God ever created,” napped out the driver.
“You have to keep your horses on——”
“Shucks![28]damn it.”
The character of the scenery was novel to me, the surface very flat, the soil a fine-grained, silvery white sand, shaded by a continuous forest of large pines, which had shed their lower branches, so that we could see from the coach-top, to the distance of a quarter of a mile, everything upon the ground. In the swamps, which were frequent and extensive, and on their borders, the pines gave place to cypresses, with great pedestal trunks, and protuberant roots, throwing up an awkward dwarf progeny of shrub, cypress, and curious bulbous-like stumps, called “cypress-knees.” Mingled with these were a few of our common deciduous trees, the white-shafted sycamore, the gray beech, and the shrubby black-jack oak, with broad leaves, brown and dead, yet glossy, and reflecting the sunbeams. Somewhat rarely, the red cedar,and more frequently than any other except the cypress, the beautiful American holly. Added to these, there was often a thick undergrowth of evergreen shrubs. Vines and creepers of various kinds grew to the tops of the tallest trees and dangled beneath and between their branches, in intricate net-work. The tylandria hung in festoons, sometimes several feet in length, and often completely clothed the trunks, and every branch of the trees in the low ground. It is like a fringe of tangled hair, of a light gray pearly colour, and sometimes produces exquisite effects when slightly veiling the dark green, purple, and scarlet of the cedar, and the holly with their berries. The mistletoe also grew in large, vivid, green tufts, on the ends of the branches of the oldest and largest trees. A small fine and wiry dead grass, hardly perceptible, even in the most open ground, from the coach-tops, was the only sign of herbage. Large black buzzards were constantly in sight, sailing slowly, high above the tree-tops. Flocks of larks, quails, and robins were common, as were also doves, swiftly flying in small companies. The red-headed woodpecker could at any time be heard hammering the old tree-trunks, and would sometimes show himself, after his rat-tat, cocking his head archly, and listening to hear if the worm moved under the bark. The drivers told me that they had on previous days, as they went over the road, seen deer, turkeys, and wild hogs.
At every tenth mile, or thereabout, we changed horses; and, generally, were allowed half an hour to stroll in the neighbourhood of the stable—the agent observing that we could reach the end of the staging some hours before the cars should leave to take us further; and, as there were no good accommodations for sleeping there, we would pass the time quite as pleasantly on the road. We dined at “MarionCounty House,” a pleasant little village (and the only village we saw during the day), with a fine pine-grove, a broad street, a court-house, a church or two, a school-house, and a dozen or twenty dwellings. Towards night, we crossed the Great Pedee of the maps, theBigPedee of the natives, in a flat boat. A large quantity of cotton, in bales, was upon the bank, ready for loading into a steamboat—when one should arrive—for Charleston.
The country was very thinly peopled; lone houses often being several miles apart. The large majority of the dwellings were of logs, and even those of the white people were often without glass windows. In the better class of cabins, the roof is usually built with a curve, so as to project eight or ten feet beyond the log-wall; and a part of this space, exterior to the logs, is enclosed with boards, making an additional small room—the remainder forms an open porch. The whole cabin is often elevated on four corner-posts, two or three feet from the ground, so that the air may circulate under it. The fire-place is built at the end of the house, of sticks and clay, and the chimney is carried up outside, and often detached from the log-walls; but the roof is extended at the gable, until in a line with its outer side. The porch has a railing in front, and a wide shelf at the end, on which a bucket of water, a gourd, and hand-basin, are usually placed. There are chairs, or benches, in the porch, and you often see women sitting at work in it, as in Germany.
The logs are usually hewn but little; and, of course, as they are laid up, there will be wide interstices between them—which are increased by subsequent shrinking. These, very commonly, are not “chinked,” or filled up in any way; nor is the wall lined on the inside. Through the chinks, as you pass along the road, you may often see all that is going on inthe house; and, at night, the light of the fire shines brightly out on all sides.
Cabins, of this class, would almost always be flanked by two or three negro huts. The cabins of the poor whites, much the largest in number, were of a meaner sort—being mere square pens of logs, roofed over, provided with a chimney, and usually with a shed of boards, supported by rough posts, before the door.
Occasionally, where, near the banks of a water-course, the silvery sand was darkened by a considerable intermixture of mould, there would be a large plantation, with negro-quarters, and a cotton-press and gin-house. We passed half a dozen of these, perhaps, during the day. Where the owners resided in them, they would have comfortable-looking residences, not unlike the better class of New England farm-houses. On the largest, however, there was no residence for the owner, at all, only a small cottage, or whitewashed cabin, for the overseer. The negro-cabins, here, were the smallest I had seen—I thought not more than twelve feet square, inside. They stood in two rows, with a wide street between them. They were built of logs, with no windows—no opening at all, except the doorway, with a chimney of sticks and mud; with no trees about them, no porches, or shades, of any kind. Except for the chimney—the purpose of which I should not readily have guessed if I had seen one of them in New England—I should have conjectured that it had been built for a powder-house, or perhaps an ice-house—never for an animal to sleep in.
We stopped, for some time, on this plantation, near where some thirty men and women were at work, repairing the road. The women were in majority, and were engaged at exactly the same labour as the men; driving the carts, loading them with dirt, and dumping them upon the road; cutting downtrees, and drawing wood by hand, to lay across the miry places; hoeing, and shovelling. They were dressed in coarse gray gowns, generally very much burned, and very dirty; which, for greater convenience of working in the mud, were reefed up with a cord drawn tightly around the body, a little above the hips—the spare amount of skirt bagging out between this and the waist-proper. On their legs were loose leggins, or pieces of blanket or bagging wrapped about, and lashed with thongs; and they wore very heavy shoes. Most of them had handkerchiefs, only, tied around their heads, some wore men’s caps, or old slouched hats, and several were bareheaded.
The overseer rode about among them, on a horse, carrying in his hand a raw-hide whip, constantly directing and encouraging them; but, as my companion and I, both, several times noticed, as often as he visited one end of the line of operations, the hands at the other end would discontinue their labour, until he turned to ride towards them again. Clumsy, awkward, gross, elephantine in all their movements; pouting, grinning, and leering at us; sly, sensual, and shameless, in all their expressions and demeanour; I never before had witnessed, I thought, anything more revolting than the whole scene.
At length, the overseer dismounted from his horse, and, giving him to a boy to take to the stables, got upon the coach, and rode with us several miles. From the conversation I had with him, as well as from what I saw of his conduct in the field, I judged that he was an uncommonly fit man for his duties; at least ordinarily amiable in disposition, and not passionate; but deliberate, watchful, and efficient. I thought he would be not only a good economist, but a firm and considerate officer or master.
If these women, and their children after them, were alwaysnaturally and necessarily to remain of the character and capacity stamped on their faces—as is probably the opinion of their owner, in common with most wealthy South Carolina planters—I don’t know that they could be much less miserably situated, or guided more for their own good and that of the world, than they were. They were fat enough, and didn’t look as if they were at all overworked, or harassed by cares, or oppressed by a consciousness of their degradation. If that is all—as some think.
Afterwards, while we were changing at a house near a crossing of roads, strolling off in the woods for a short distance, I came upon two small white-topped waggons, each with a pair of horses feeding at its pole; near them was a dull camp fire, with a bake-kettle and coffee-pot, some blankets and a chest upon the ground, and an old negro sitting with his head bowed down over a meal sack, while a negro boy was combing his wool with a common horse-card. “Good evening, uncle,” said I, approaching them. “Good evening, sar,” he answered, without looking up.
“Where are you going?”
“Well, we ain’t gwine nower, master; we’s peddlin’ tobacco roun.”
“Where did you come from?”
“From Rockingham County, Norf Car’lina, master.”
“How long have you been coming from there?”
“’Twill be seven weeks, to-morrow, sar, sin we leff home.”
“Have you most sold out?”
“We had a hundred and seventy-five boxes in both waggons, and we’s sold all but sixty. Want to buy some tobacco, master?” (Looking up.)
“No, thank you; I am only waiting here, while the coach changes. How much tobacco is there in a box?”
“Seventy-five pound.”
“Are these the boxes?”
“No, them is our provision boxes, master. Show de gemman some of der tobacco, dah.” (To the boy.)
A couple of negroes here passed along near us; the old man hailed them:
“Ho dah, boys! Doan you want to buy some backey?”
“No.” (Decidedly.)
“Well, I’m sorry for it.” (Reproachfully.)
“Are you bound homeward, now?” I asked.
“No, master; wish me was; got to sell all our backey fuss; you don’t want none, master, does you? Doan you tink it pretty fair tobacco, sar? Juss try it: it’s right sweet, reckon you’ll find.”
“I don’t wish any, thank you; I never use it. Is your master with you?”
“No, sar; he’s gone across to Marion, to-day.”
“Do you like to be travelling about, in this way?”
“Yes, master; I likes it very well.”
“Better than staying at home, eh?”
“Well, I likes my country better dan dis; must say dat, master; likes my country better dan dis. I’se a free nigger in my country, master.”
“Oh, you are a free man, are you! North Carolina is a better country than this, for free men, I suppose.”
“Yes, master, I likes my country de best; I gets five dollar a month for dat boy.” (Hastily, to change the subject.)
“He is your son, is he?”
“Yes, sar; he drives dat waggon, I drives dis; and I haant seen him fore, master, for six weeks, till dis mornin’.”
“How were you separated?”
“We separated six weeks ago, sar, and we agreed to meet here, last night. We didn’, dough, till dis mornin’.”
The old man’s tone softened, and he regarded his son with earnestness.
“’Pears, dough, we was bofe heah, last night; but I couldn’t find um till dis mornin’. Dis mornin’ some niggars tole me dar war a niggar camped off yander in de wood; and I knew ’twas him, and I went an’ found him right off.”
“And what wages do you get for yourself?”
“Ten dollars a month, master.”
“That’s pretty good wages.”
“Yes, master, any niggar can get good wages if he’s a mind to be industrious, no matter wedder he’s slave or free.”
“So you don’t like this country as well as North Carolina?”
“No, master. Fac is, master, ’pears like wite folks doan’ ginerally like niggars in dis country; day doan’ ginerally talk so to niggars like as do in my country; de niggars ain’t so happy heah; ’pears like de wite folks was kind o’ different, somehow. I doan’ like dis country so well; my country suits me very well.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking, myself, the niggars did not look so well here as they did in North Carolina and Virginia; they are not so well clothed, and they don’t appear so bright as they do there.”
“Well, master, Sundays dey is mighty well clothed, dis country; ’pears like dere an’t nobody looks better Sundays dan dey do. But Lord! workin’ days, seems like dey haden no close dey could keep on ’um at all, master. Dey is a’mos’ naked, wen deys at work, some on ’em. Why, master, up in our country, de wite folks—why, some on ’em has ten or twelve niggars; dey doan’ hev no real big plantation, like dey has heah, but some on ’em has ten or twelve niggars, may be, and dey juss lives and talks along wid ’em; and dey treats ’um most as if dem was dar own chile. Dey doan’keep no niggars dey can’t treat so; dey won’t keep ’em, won’t be bodered wid ’em. If dey gets a niggar and he doan behave himself, day won’t keep him; dey juss tell him, sar, he must look up anudder master, and if he doan’ find hisself one, I tell ’ou, when de trader cum along, dey sells him, and he totes him away. Dey allers sell off all de bad niggars out of our country; dat’s de way all de bad niggar and all dem no-account niggar keep a cumin’ down heah; dat’s de way on’t, master.”
“Yes, that’s the way of it, I suppose; these big plantations are not just the best thing for niggers, I see that plainly.”
“Master, you wan’t raise in dis country, was ’ou?”
“No; I came from the North.”
“I tort so, sar; I knew ’ou wan’t one of dis country people; ’peared like ’ou was one o’ my country people, way ’ou talks; and I loves dem kine of people. Won’t you take some whisky, sar? Heah, you boy! bring dat jug of whisky dah, out o’ my waggon; in dah,—in dat box under dem foddar.”
“No, don’t trouble yourself, I am very much obliged to you; but I don’t like to drink whisky.”
“Like to have you drink some, master, if you’d like it. You’s right welcome to it. ’Pears like I knew you was one of my country people. Ever been in Greensboro,’ master? dat’s in Guilford.”
“No, I never was there. I came from New York, further North than your country.”
“New York, did ’ou, master? I heerd New York was what dey calls a Free State; all de niggars free dah.”
“Yes, that is so.”
“Not no slaves at all; well, I expec dat’s a good ting, for all de niggars to be free. Greensboro’ is a right comely town; tain’t like dese heah Souf Car’lina towns.”
“I have heard it spoken of as a beautiful town, and there are some fine people there.”
“Yes, dere’s Mr. —— ——, I knows him—he’s a mighty good man.”
“Do you know Mr. ——?”
“O yes, sar, he’s a mighty fine man, he is, master; ain’t no better kind of man dan him.”
“Well, I must go, or the coach will be kept waiting for me. Good-bye to you.”
“Far’well, master, far’well; ’pears like it’s done me good to see a man dat’s cum out of my country again. Far’well, master.”
We took supper at a neat log-cabin, standing a short distance off the road, with a beautiful evergreen oak, the first I had observed, in front of it. There was no glass in the windows, but drapery of white muslin restrained the currents of air, and during the day would let in sufficient light, while a blazing wood-fire both warmed and lighted the room by night. A rifle and powder-horn hung near the fire-place, and the master of the house, a fine, hearty, companionable fellow, said that he had lately shot three deer, and that there were plenty of cats, and foxes, as well as turkeys, hares, squirrels, and other small game in the vicinity. It was a perfectly charming little backwoods farm-house—good wife, supper, and all; but one disagreeable blot darkened the otherwise most agreeable picture of rustic civilization—we were waited upon at table by two excessively dirty, slovenly-dressed, negro girls. In the rear of the cabin were two hovels, each lighted by large fires, and apparently crowded with other slaves belonging to the family.
Between nine and ten at night, we reached the end of the completed railroad, coming up in search for that we had leftthe previous night. There was another camp and fire of the workmen, and in a little white frame-house we found a company of engineers. There were two trains and locomotives on the track, and a gang of negroes was loading cotton into one of them.
I strolled off until I reached an opening in the woods, in which was a cotton-field and some negro-cabins, and beyond it large girdled trees, among which were two negroes with dogs, barking, yelping, hacking, shouting, and whistling, after ’coons and ’possums. Returning to the railroad, I found a comfortable, warm passenger-car, and, wrapped in my blanket, went to sleep. At midnight I was awakened by loud laughter, and, looking out, saw that the gang of negroes had made a fire, and were enjoying a right merry repast. Suddenly, one raised such a sound as I never heard before; a long, loud, musical shout, rising and falling, and breaking into falsetto, his voice ringing through the woods in the clear, frosty night air, like a bugle-call. As he finished, the melody was caught up by another, and then another, and then by several in chorus. When there was silence again, one of them cried out, as if bursting with amusement: “Did yer see de dog?—when I began eeohing, he turn roun’ an’ look me straight into der face; ha! ha! ha!” and the whole party broke into the loudest peals of laughter, as if it was the very best joke they had ever heard.
After a few minutes I could hear one urging the rest to come to work again, and soon he stepped towards the cotton bales, saying, “Come, brederen, come; let’s go at it; come now, eoho! roll away! eeoho-eeoho-weeioho-i!”—and the rest taking it up as before, in a few moments they all had their shoulders to a bale of cotton, and were rolling it up the embankment.
About half-past three, I was awakened again by the whistleof the locomotive, answering, I suppose, the horn of a stagecoach, which in a few minutes drove up, bringing a mail. A negro man and woman who had been sleeping near me, replenished the fire; two other passengers came in, and we started.
In the woods I saw a negro by a fire, while it was still night, shaving shingles very industriously. He did not even stop to look at the train. No doubt he was a slave, working by task, and of his own accord at night, that he might have the more daylight for his own purposes.
The negroes enjoy fine blazing fires in the open air, and make them at every opportunity. The train on this road was provided with a man and maid-servant to attend to the fire and wait on the passengers—a very good arrangement, by the way, yet to be adopted on our own long passenger trains. When we arrived at a junction where we were to change cars, as soon as all the passengers had left the train, they also left; but instead of going into the station-house with us, they immediately collected some pine branches and chips, and getting a brand from the locomotive, made a fire upon the ground, and seated themselves by it. Other negroes soon began to join them, and as they approached were called to: “Doan’ yer cum widout som’ wood! Doan’ yer cum widout som’ wood!” and every one had to make his contribution. At another place, near a cotton plantation, I found a woman collecting pine leaves into heaps, to be carted to the cattle-pens. She, too, had a fire near her. “What are you doing with a fire, aunty?” “Oh, jus’ to warm my hans wen dey gits cold, massa.” The weather was then almost uncomfortably warm.
We were running during the forenoon, for a hundred miles, or more, in a southerly direction, on nearly a straight course, through about the middle of the State of South Carolina. The greater part of this distance, the flat, sandy pine barrenscontinued, scarcely a foot of grading, for many miles at a time, having been required in the construction of the railroad. As the swamps, which were still frequent, were crossed on piles and tressel-work, the roads must have been built very cheaply—the land damages being nothing. We passed from the track of one company to that of another, several times during the day—the speed was from fifteen to twenty miles an hour, with long stoppages at the stations. A conductor said they could easily run forty miles, and had done it, including stoppages; but they were forbidden now to make fast time, from the injury it did the road—the superstructure being much more shaken and liable to displacement in these light sands than on our Northern roads. The locomotives that I saw were all made in Philadelphia; the cars were all from the Hartford, Conn., and Worcester, Mass., manufactories, and invariably, elegant and comfortable. The roads seemed to be doing a heavy freighting business with cotton. We passed at the turn-outs half a dozen trains, with nearly a thousand bales on each, but the number of passengers was always small. A slave country can never, it is evident, furnish a passenger traffic of much value. A majority of the passenger trains, which I saw used in the South, were not paying for the fuel and wages expended in running them.