Some reader may at once be inclined to say that the Southerners whom he has met are unquestionably better bred people than are common at the North, and that they state as their experience that they do not find that hospitality, that honesty, that guilelessness of dealing one with another among the people of the North, to which they are accustomed at home. It would remain a question, whether the Southerners whom the reader has met are of a common or an exceptional class; whether it is to slavery, or to some other circumstance, they owe their breeding; whether this other circumstance is dependent on slavery, or whether it may exist (and, if so, whether, when it does exist, it produces the same fruit) quite independently of slavery. It cannot be said that there are no gentlemen and gentlewomen of first water in free countries. A comparison, then, must be a comparison of numbers. I shall, by-and-by, offer the reader some assistance in making a comparison of this kind. And if, as we hear, free-labour society is still an experiment, and one of the results of that experiment is to be found in the low condition of portions of our community, and it is by comparing this result with the condition of the whites of the South that we must judge of the success of the experiment; it may again be a question of numbers. As to experience of hospitality, that is not a question of quantity or of quality merely. I should wish to ask the reader’s Southern authorities, “Where and with whom has your experience been, North and South?” And if with a similar class and in similar circumstances, I should wish to ask further, “What do you mean by hospitality?”
I think that the error which prevails in the South, with regard to the general condition of our working people, is much strengthened by the fact, that a different standard of comfort is used by most persons at the South from that known at the North, and that used by Northern writers. People at the South are content and happy with a condition which few accept at the North unless with great complaint, or with expressions of resignation such as are the peculiar property of slaves at the South. If, reader, you had been travelling all day through a country of the highest agricultural capability, settled more than twenty years ago, and toward nightfall should be advised by a considerate stranger to ride five miles further, in order to reach the residence of Mr. Brown, because Mr. Brown, being a well-to-do man, and a right good fellow, had built an uncommonly good house, and got it well furnished, had a score of servants, and being at a distance from neighbours, was always glad to entertain a respectable stranger—after hearing this, as you continued your ride somewhat impatiently in the evening chill, what consolations would your imagination find in the prospect before you? My New England and New York experience would not forbid the hope of a private room, where I could, in the first place, wash off the dust of the road, and make some change of clothing before being admitted to a family apartment. This family room would be curtained and carpeted, and glowing softly with the light of sperm candles or a shaded lamp. When I entered it, I could expect that a couch or an arm-chair, and a fragrant cup of tea, with refined sugar, and wholesome bread of wheaten flour, leavened, would be offered me. I should think it likely that I could then have the snatch of Tannhäuser or Trovatore, which had been running faintly in my head all day, fingered clearly out to my entire satisfaction upon a pianoforte. I should then look with perfect confidence to being able to refer to Shakespeare, or Longfellow, or Dickens, if anything I had seen or thought during the day had haply led me to wish to do so. I should expect, as a matter of course, a clean, sweet bed, where I could sleep alone and undisturbed, “until possibly in the morning a jug of hot water should be placed at my door, to aid the removal of a traveller’s rigid beard. I should expect to draw a curtain from before a window, to lift the sash without effort, to look into a garden and fill my lungs with fragrant air; and I should be certain when I came down of a royal breakfast. A man of these circumstances in this rich country, he will be asking my opinion of his fruits. A man of his disposition cannot exist in the country without ladies, and ladies cannot exist in the country without flowers; and might I not hope for the refinement which decks even the table with them? and that the breakfast would be a meal as well as a feed—an institution of mental and moral sustenance as well as of palatable nourishment to the body? My horse I need hardly look after, if he be a sound brute;—good stables, litter, oats, hay, and water, grooming, and discretion in their use, will never be wanting in such a man’s house in the country.”
In what civilized region, after such advice, would such thoughts be preposterous, unless in the Slave States? Not but that such men and such houses, such family and home comforts may be found in the South. I have found them a dozen of them, delightful homes. But then in a hundred cases where I received such advice, and heard houses and men so described, I did not find one of the things imagined above, nor anything ranging with them. In my last journey of nearly three months between the Mississippi and the Upper James River, I saw not only none of those things, received none of those attentions, but I saw and met nothing of the kind. Nine times out of ten, at least, after such a promise, I slept in a room with others, in a bed which stank, supplied with but one sheet, if with any; I washed with utensils common to the whole household; I found no garden, no flowers, no fruit, no tea, no cream, no sugar, no bread; (for corn pone—let me assert, in parenthesis, though possibly, as tastes differ, a very good thing of its kind for ostriches—is not bread: neither does even flour, salt, fat, and water, stirred together and warmed, constitute bread;) no curtains, no lifting windows (three times out of four absolutely no windows), no couch—if one reclined in the family room it was on the bare floor—for there were no carpets or mats. For all that, the house swarmed with vermin. There was no hay, no straw, no oats (but mouldy corn and leaves of maize), no discretion, no care, no honesty, at the —— there was no stable, but a log-pen; and besides this, no other out-house but a smoke-house, a corn-house, and a range of nigger houses.
In nine-tenths of the houses south of Virginia, in which I was obliged, making all reasonable endeavour to find the best, to spend the night, there were none of these things. And most of these had been recommended to me by disinterested persons on the road as being better than ordinary—houses where they “sot up for travellers and had things.” From the banks of the Mississippi to the banks of James, I did not (that I remember) see, except perhaps in one or two towns, a thermometer, nor a book of Shakespeare, nor a pianoforte or sheet of music; nor the light of a carcel or other good centre-table or reading-lamp, nor an engraving or copy of any kind, of a work of art of the slightest merit. I am not speaking of what are commonly called “poor whites;” a large majority of all these houses were the residences of shareholders, a considerable proportion cotton-planters.
Those who watch the enormous export of cotton from the South, and who are accustomed to reckon up its value, as it goes forward, million on million, hundred million on hundred million, year after year, say that it is incomprehensible, if it be not incredible, that the people of the South are not rich and living in luxury unknown elsewhere. It is asking too much that such statements as I have made should be received without any explanation. I have found this to be so, and so far as the explanation appears in the attendant social phenomena of the country, I shall endeavour to set it forth, sustaining the accuracy of my report by the evidence of competent Southern witnesses.
William H. Gregg, Esq., a distinguished citizen of Charleston, South Carolina, in a report to the directors of the Graniteville Manufacturing Company of that State, describes at length the condition of the operatives of the company, whom he states to have been drawn originally “from the poor of Edgefield, Barnwell and Lexington districts.” These are cotton-growing districts of South Carolina, better supplied than usual with the ordinary advantages of civilized communities. For instance, by reference to the census returns, I find that they are provided with public schools at the rate of one to less than thirty square miles, while within the State, inclusive of its several towns, there is but one public school, on an average, to every forty square miles. There are churches within these districts, one to about seventeen square miles; throughout the State, including Charleston and its other cities, one to every twenty-five square miles. In Georgia the average is one to thirty-two square miles. With the condition of the newer cotton States, in these respects, that of Edgefield, Barnwell, and Lexington, would be found to compare still more favourably for the poor. In Lexington there is even a theological seminary. What, nevertheless, there is not generally available to the people at large, Mr. Gregg indicates by his statement of what advantages they possess who have come to Graniteville.
“When they were first brought together, the seventy-nine out of a hundred grown girls who could neither read nor write were a by-word around the country; that reproach has long since been removed. We have night, Sunday, and week-day schools. Singing-masters, music-teachers, writing-masters, and itinerant lecturers all find patronage in Graniteville where the people can easily earn all the necessaries of life, and are in the enjoyment of the usual luxuries of country life.” * * *
“To get a steady supply of workmen, a population must be collected which will regard themselves as a community; and two essential elements are necessary to the building up, moral growth, and stability of such a collection of people, namely, a church and a school-house.” * * *
“I can safely say that it is only necessary to make comfortable homes in order to procure families, that will afford labourers of the best kind. A large manufacturing establishment located anywhere in the State, away from a town and in a healthy situation, will soon collect around it a population who, however poor, with proper moral restraints thrown around them, will soon develope all the elements of good society. Self-respect and attachment to the place will soon find their way into the minds of such, while intelligence, morality, and well directed industry, will not fail to acquire position.”
What the poor people of Edgefield, Barnwell, and Lexington districts needed was, in the first place, to be led “to regard themselves as a community;” for this purpose the nuclei of “a church and a schoolhouse” are declared to be essential, to which must be added, such other stimulants to improvement as “singing and writing schools, itinerant lecturers,” etc., etc. In short, the power of obtaining, as the result of their labour, “the necessaries of life,” “the usual luxuries of country life,” or, in two words, which cover and include church, school, music and lecture, as well as bread, cleanliness, luxuries and necessities, “comfortable homes.” It was simply by making possible to them what before had not been possible, the essential conditions of a comfortable civilized home, that Mr. Gregg was enabled in a few years to announce, as he did, that, “from extreme poverty and want, they have become a thrifty, happy, and contented people.”