Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

One cannot behold for the first time what one has heard and read about all one’s life without some little emotion. I felt this when I saw for the first time a field of cotton. It was between Petersburg and Weldon. There is not much to attract attention in the sight itself as seen in winter, when there is nothing to look at but a large enclosure of dead bushes, each about the size of an ordinary gooseberry-bush, only with fewer branches, and every branch leafless, straight, and black, with every here and there a pod of cotton, that was missed at the time of harvesting, showing its white wool, with which the whole field is spotted, ‘This insignificant plant, then,’ I said to myself, ‘is cotton; and this is the way in which it is cultivated. The plant which has created so much wealth, and caused so much bloodshed; which was the main support of slavery, and so the main cause of the late war; which clothes so large a portion of mankind; which has built so many ships and factories; upon which so much of the prosperity of England is founded; and which has affected so largely the commerce of the world; and the influence of which is now felt in every quarter of the globe.

The traveller has pleasure in recalling moments of this kind. I shall not easily forget the delight I felt at the first sight of the Spanish moss. It was in the first gray of the morning, and I was looking out from the railway car, shading off with my hands the light of the lamps that were still burning, that I might be the better able to see through the window, when I beheld for the first time this curious parasite, of which one had seen such frequent mention, hanging in slender streamers of three or four feet in length from the boughs of the trees. I immediately left my seat, and went to the outside of the car. I found we were passing through a cedar swamp on a tressle-bridge of many miles in length. We passed through several such swamps in the course of that day, and wherever this was the case, the trees, of which the swamps were just as full as the dry land, were always covered with this moss. Old trees were entirely enveloped in it to the extremities of their branches. As you approach the Gulf, the trees on the dry land as well as those in swamps are shrouded in it. Its streamers are occasionally two yards long near the coast. It is of a pale ashy colour, and gives you the idea of the accumulated cobwebs of a thousand years.

A Night on the Rails.

American ladies having been well broken in to the publicity of their system of railway travelling, make the best of it, and seem quite unconcerned about what would appear to those unused to it its disagreeable incidents. Never but with one exception did I pass a night on an American railway without finding a sleeping-car attached to the train. It was in the South, and there happened to be about forty people in the car, of whom eight or ten were married ladies travelling with their husbands: like everybody one sees in America, they were young, and of course, as all American young ladies are, were better-looking than the generality of the fair sex. English ladies would probably, under circumstances of so much publicity, have unnecessarily and unwisely endeavoured to keep awake. But their American sisters passed the night as comfortably as might be, each laying her head on her husband’s shoulder for a pillow, and with their arms round each other, or with their hands locked together. In the morning, when the train stopped an hour for breakfast, they made their toilette in the carriage, there being generally abundance of water in a railway car, with a mug to drink from, and a basin to wash in. They appeared all to have with them brushes and combs, and towels and soap.

In travelling in the United States one is very much struck with the great amount of sameness that is met with in many things. In outward nature this is very observable. You go from New York to Charleston on what appears to be one level. Throughout these nine hundred miles you have no cuttings or embankments; at all events I do not recollect having had to go through or to go round a single hill. Again, you may go up the valley of the Mississippi on another longer level; and if you start from Chicago to cross the Prairie and Plains, you cross another thousand miles of level ground. Again, throughout all these long levels, adding to them the space between Charleston and New Orleans, there is in the soil a great sameness of colour. Except in the black soil of the Prairies, and occasionally in the river bottoms—of which latter you see little in railway travelling—yellow, of slightly varying tints, is almost universal, whether the soil be sandy or clayey. And then the forest which clothes this soil of the same colour and of the same level, is also everywhere itself the same. The predominant trees are fortunately the unfailing pine, and almost equally unfailing oak. Sameness, too, but not quite to the same extent, characterises the Great Lake region. There are glorious exceptions to this general sameness in the Alleghanies, the Rocky Mountains, and California; but these are not the situations in which the great masses of the population have formed their homes. De Tocqueville and others have observed a similar sameness in the ideas and customs of the Americans themselves; and this they attribute to the completeness with which the principles of democracy have been carried out both in their polity and social arrangements. I have already noticed the extraordinary sameness of their language, which, throughout the whole continent, admits of no dialectical difference and, in passing, how great are the changes this single fact implies have taken place in the conditions of human life, when we recollect that in that little plat of ground of ancient Greece every little town had a dialect of its own. The universality with which any form of expression, any social practice, or even any state of feeling, is abandoned or adopted throughout the vast Union, is to those who observe these matters a very interesting fact in American civilisation. The extent to which they are readers of newspapers is not the cause of this, though of course it somewhat contributes to it. The real cause is the urgent and uncontrollable desire in every American to talk, and think, and live, and dress, and feel, and to do everything just in the same way as other people; as we say here, to be in the fashion, only that they apply the idea of fashion to everything. Changes of this kind are wrought in America almost as if by magic. There is in this a great balance of good, although it is so great a check upon individuality, because it keeps the whole people advancing together as one man.

Maize.

In the agricultural reports of the United States maize is set down for so many million bushels as almost to transcend the power of belief on this side the water. How can so much be grown? how can so much be used? are questions which occur to us. But after one has seen something of America the feeling is changed into one of wonder at the inexhaustible merits of this grain, and of its incalculable utility to man; and one ceases to be surprised at finding it grown everywhere throughout the Union on so large a scale. It is quite impossible that America could have risen to her present greatness without it. While the hardy pioneer of civilisation was subduing the forest, which reached from the Atlantic to the valley of the Mississippi, there was nothing that could have met his wants as maize did. As soon as he had felled the trees for his log cabin, before the ground was cleared, or prepared sufficiently for any other crop, he would put in his seed for a crop of maize, which would be ready in a few months, perhaps before his log house was finished, and would supply with food his family, and pigs, and any other stock that he might have, till the next harvest. And when ripe, it did not, like wheat and other grain, require immediate harvesting; for nature had provided it with a thick strong stem to support it against the wind, and with a sheath which kept it effectually from the rain. And its yield, as it thus grew among the stumps of these forest clearings, was very great. And now that the land has been cleared, it still holds its ground as the chief crop almost everywhere, and apparently as almost the only grain crop in many districts. It is everywhere largely used as human food in a great variety of ways. It is the winter food of the cattle, horses, and mules, which latter do all the heavy work from Kentucky to New Orleans. The pork crop, too, of the United States, which is one of its largest items of produce, is only a certain portion of the maize crop in another form. The same may be said of the enormous quantity of poultry produced everywhere throughout the country. It is only transformed maize. Of all grains it is the easiest to grow, the easiest to harvest, the easiest to keep, the easiest to transport. It is good for man and for beast. It will grow on any soil, and will yield in the rich bottoms of Ohio and Illinois a hundred bushels an acre—and on some of these lands it has been grown for twenty years in succession—and on the poor sands of South Carolina will yield between twenty and thirty bushels, a quantity that is highly remunerative, where the land costs nothing, and an old negro and an old mule are all that are required for its culture. In America a head of maize should be the national emblem.

The Forest.

It did not strike me that the succession of trees in clearing forest land was quite so regular as is commonly stated. I saw, for instance, a different succession on the two sides of the same fence. The original forest on both sides had been exclusively pine. Where the forest had been entirely cleared off, the succession was again pine. But where the large trees only had been removed the succession was oak. This went some way towards showing that the amount of light and air decided which was to come up.

In the Carolinas the forest is, along the railway, everywhere more or less continuous: still it is all owned, as appears from the fencing. The better trees are everywhere being cut for building, or fencing, or firing; and the larger pines have all been tapped for turpentine. One is surprised, at first, to see so little land cultivated along the line of railway. The reason however is that, as a general rule, the good land is along the banks of the streams which run from the Alleghanies to the sea, that is, from west to east, while the railway runs from north to south, so that in travelling along it you only get occasional glimpses of the way in which culture is in these parts beginning, for it is hardly more, to encroach on the forest.