“Somewhat further on, the parties rest for the night. ‘For this the charge was $1.25 each person, including breakfast and horse-feed.’ At the end of every page or two our tourist repeats these growlings over the enormous exactions. It is the refrain from one cover of the book to the other. What a series of martyrdoms. Could such a journey by any possibility be made ‘to pay?’ Perhaps, friend traveller, you have heard of the lavish hospitality of the South, and imagined that people there moved out upon the high road for the sole purpose of sharing the society which gentlemen, like yourself, could furnish, believing every arrival to be an act of special providence! When you offered to pay the woman on Red River, and ‘feared she was offended by your offering her money for her hospitality,’ you paid the highest compliment to the South; for heaven knows you would have had no such apprehension on the banks of the Connecticut.”
I cannot but be gratified that so much importance should have been attached to my earlier volumes as to induce the Superintendent of the Census to devote to their consideration a leading article in the first economico-political review of the country; and I can feel nothing but regret that he should be obliged to attribute to an unworthy motive even those of my labours the result of which he does me the honour to designate as valuable and trustworthy. I have often had occasion to refer to Mr. De Bow, and, I believe, have always done so in a manner consistent with the respect which I feel for the class of men among whom he has had the honourable ambition to rank himself. That a man, while occupying a position which properly belongs to the most able and just-minded statistician in the country, should think it proper to write under his own name in the manner of which the above extracts are a sample, about a work which assumes to relate calmly and methodically, the result of a personal study of the condition of the people of a certain State, is a note-worthy circumstance in illustration of the present political history of our country. I cite them now, however, chiefly to show what need there is for a discussion upon which I propose to enter, myself, little further than is necessary to enable me to clearly set forth certain facts in their more important significance, the right of publishing which can hardly be denied me, in view of the insinuations made by Mr. De Bow, who in this follows what has got to be a general custom of Southern reviewers and journalists towards travellers with whose expressed judgments upon any matter observed within the slave States they differ. There are numerous homes in the South the memory of which I cherish tenderly. There are numbers of men in the South for whom I have a warm admiration, to whom I feel grateful, whose respect I wish not to lose. There are others for whom I have a quite different feeling. Of a single individual of neither class have I spoken in these two volumes, I believe, by his true name, or in such a manner that he could be recognized, or his home pointed out by any one who had not been previously familiar with it and with him, being, as a rule, careful to so far differ from the actual order of the events of my journey in narrating them, that facts of private life could not be readily localized. From this rule I do not intend now to depart further than is necessary to exhibit the whole truth of the facts to which I have referred, but since the charge of ingratitude and indelicacy is publicly made against me, as it has frequently been of late against better men on similar grounds, I propose to examine those grounds in the light of certain actual experiences of myself and others, and let it be judged whether there must always exist a peculiar moral obligation upon travellers to be mealy-mouthed as to the habits of the people of the South, either on account of hospitality or in reciprocation of the delicate reserve which, from the tenor of Mr. De Bow’s remarks, it might be supposed was habitually exercised in the South with regard to the habits of their own people. These experiences shall be both special and general. What immediately follows is of the former class, but, in the end, it will be found to have a general significance.
On a hot morning in July a Northern traveller left the town of Lynchburg, the chief market-town of Virginia tobacco, and rode eastwardly towards Farmville. Suddenly taken severely ill, and no house being in sight, he turned from the road into the shade of the wood, dismounted, reclined against a sturdy trunk, took an anodyne, which he fortunately had with him, and at length found relief in sleep. Late in the day he awoke, somewhat recovered, but with a sharp headache and much debilitated. He managed, however, to mount, and rode slowly on to find a shelter for the night. In half an hour the welcome sight of an old plantation mansion greeted his eyes. There was a large court, with shade trees and shrubbery between the road and the house, and in the corner of this court, facing the road, a small warehouse or barn, in and around which were a number of negroes moving casks of tobacco. A white man, evidently their owner, was superintending their labour, and to him the traveller applied for lodging for the night.
“We don’t take in strangers.”
The traveller informed the planter of his illness and inability to ride further.
“You’ll have to try to ride as far as the next house, sir; we don’t take in travellers here,” was the reply.
“Really I don’t feel able. I should not like to put you to inconvenience, sir, but I am weak and faint. My horse, too, has eaten nothing since early in the morning.”
“Sorry for you, but we have no accommodation for travellers here,” was the only reply, and the planter stepped to the other side of a tobacco cask.
The traveller rode on. About half an hour afterwards he came in sight of another house. It was at a distance from the road, and to reach it he was obliged to let down and put up again three different sets of fence-bars. The owner was not at home, and his wife said that they were not accustomed to take in strangers. “It was not far to the next house,” she added, as the traveller hesitated.
He reached, at length, the next house, which proved to be the residence of another large tobacco planter, who sat smoking in its verandah, as the traveller rode near and made his petition.