Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

I here saw an effect of frost, which, I suppose from differences in radiation and evaporation, is never seen in England. Everywhere along the railway embankments and cuttings, the ice appeared to have shot out in rays or spikes, three or four inches in length, and then to have bent over. When the rays were shorter they remained straight. I asked a gentleman how the people of the country explained the phenomenon. ‘Our explanation of it is,’ he replied, ‘that in these parts the land spues up the ice.’

A Southern man does not set the same value on time a Northern one does. The day, he thinks, will be long enough for all he has to do. I often saw trains stopped, not at a station, for the purpose of taking up or putting down a single passenger. I even saw this done that a parcel or letter might be taken from a person standing by the railway side. On one occasion an acquaintance with whom I was travelling that day, and myself, both happened to have had no dinner. We mentioned this to the conductor, and asked him if he could manage in any way to let us have some supper. ‘Oh, yes,’ he readily replied, ‘I will at eleven o’clock stop the train at a house in the forest, where I sometimes have had supper myself. I will give you twenty minutes.’ I suppose the other passengers, none of whom left their seats, imagined that we had stopped to repair some small damage, or to take in wood or water, for on returning to the car we heard no observations made on the delay.

Whenever I suggested to Americans the probability that their long range of Southern coast was well suited for the culture of the olive, the suggestion was met with merriment. ‘There is no one in this country,’ they would say, ‘who looks fifteen or twenty years ahead’ (the time it takes for an olive tree to come into profitable bearing). ‘Everybody here supposes that long before so many years have expired he shall have sold his land very advantageously, or that his business will have taken him to some other part of the country, or that he shall have made his fortune and retired from business.’

The same objection does not lie against the culture of tea, for which the uplands of Georgia appeared well adapted.

Atlanta I thought the most flourishing place in the South. I saw several manufactories there, and much building was going on. It has 34,000 inhabitants. ‘Sir,’ said an Atlantan gentleman to me, ‘this place is bound to become great and prosperous, because it is the most central town of the Southern States.’ I suppose he had not yet been able to divest his mind of the idea that the Southern States formed a political unit, and must have a central capital.

A Virginian’s Recollections of the War.

The cattle of the South must, during the winter, be among the most miserable of their kind. I saw nothing at all resembling what we call pastures; and if such institutions (in America everything is an institution, even the lift in an hotel) are known in the South, they can be of little use at that time of year, for every blade of grass in America is then withered and dry. The cattle appeared to be kept generally in the woods, and in the maize fields, where of course they could get nothing but the leaves that were hanging on the dead stems. In the North, where the dead grass is buried in snow, and the cattle therefore must be housed and kept on artificial food and grain, they are sufficiently well off; while their brethren in the South become the victims of a more beneficent climate.

I sometimes repeat the remarks of persons I casually met, without noticing whether I accept or disagree with the statements they contain, or the spirit which appears to animate them, because what I thought about the matter is of no consequence, while by reporting occasionally what I heard I enable others to form some idea of what passes in the minds of the people I came in contact with. For this purpose I will report what a fellow-passenger said to me one night on our way through the interminable forest in Alabama. I had several times during the day had some talk with this gentleman, and had been much struck with him and interested in what he said. He was a handsome man—a very noble-looking specimen of humanity; and his manners and ideas corresponded to his appearance. At night we were seated together talking about the war, and the prospects of the country, when he gave me the following account of himself. He was a Virginian, and before the war had possessed a good property. Though disliking the Yankees (I am giving his own words) and their interference with the internal affairs of the Southern States, he had at first opposed the war. But when his State had decided for it, he took up his rifle, and joined it unreservedly. Everything he had possessed had been lost in the war; but he was determined neither to complain, nor to be beholden to any man. It was not a pleasant thing, for one who had lived as a gentleman, to work for others; but that was what he was now doing, for he had become travelling clerk for a large mercantile house. The period of his agreement had nearly expired, and if it was not renewed, and he could get nothing better, he would drive a dray. He spoke bitterly of the Yankees, for their greed of plunder, and for their want of a sense of honour. When the South surrendered, they did it in perfect good faith; acknowledging that fortune had entirely decided against them, and determining to submit honestly to the award. But the Yankees would not believe in their good faith, and had sent into every Southern State a military dictator with an army, to oppress and insult the whites, and to keep them in subjection to the blacks. He had loved his country, and been proud of it: but now he had no country, no home, no prospects. He said the blacks fought with more desperation than the Yankees. He had been through the whole war, and had had plenty of opportunities for comparing them. He would rather meet three Yankees than two blacks. The black was easily wrought up into a state of enthusiasm, and would fight like a fanatic. The Yankee was always calculating chances, and taking care of himself. The West it was that decided the war; and he thought it should have arbitrated at first, and prevented the fighting. I lost sight of this fallen but brave-hearted Virginian on the steps of the St. Charles Hotel at New Orleans, to which he was so obliging as to guide me on our arrival at that city. He was then on his way to Texas.

Mobile.

The railway does not run into Mobile, but ends at a wharf, about twenty miles from the city, on the Tensas (pronounced Tensaw), a kind of loop branch of the Alabama, which it rejoins at Mobile. It is a fine broad piece of water, and its banks are clothed with the undisturbed primæval forest, which is always to the European a sight of great interest. On unloading the train I saw that we had picked up during the night a dozen fine bucks, which we were to take on to Mobile. I had observed in the early morning two or three small herds of wild deer feeding in the forest. They seem to have become accustomed to the locomotive. Even here it was freezing very sharply, and the buckets of water on board the steamer were thickly coated with ice. This frost, I found at Mobile, had killed all the young wood of the orange trees. The crew of the steamer were negroes, and I was surprised to see them on so cold a morning washing their woolly heads in buckets of water drawn from the river, and then leaving their wet hair and faces to be dried by the cold morning air. At the junction of the Tensas and Alabama there was a great deal of swampy land, partly covered with reeds, and much shallow water, upon which were large flocks of wild fowl. The river was here full of snags and sawyers, and its navigation was still further impeded by a fortification of piles the Confederates had driven across it during the war, to keep the enemy from getting up to the city. This approach to Mobile had more of the air of novelty about it than anything I had yet seen in America. It made me feel that I was really in a new world.