Presenting myself, and known only in the character of a chance traveller, most likely to be in search of health, entertainment, and information; usually taken for and treated as a Southerner, until I stated that I was not one, I journeyed nearly six months at one time (my second journey) through the South. During all this journey, I came not oftener than once a week, on an average, to public-houses, and was thus generally forced to seek lodging and sustenance at private houses. Often it was refused me; not unfrequently rudely refused. But once did I meet with what Northern readers could suppose Mr. De Bow to mean by the term (used in the same article), “free road-side hospitality.” Not once with the slightest appearance of what Noah Webster defines hospitality—the “practice of receiving or entertaining strangers without reward.”
Only twice, in a journey of four thousand miles, made independently of public conveyances, did I receive a night’s lodging or a repast from a native Southerner, without having the exact price in money which I was expected to pay for it stated to me by those at whose hands I received it.
If what I have just narrated had been reported to me before I travelled in the manner I did in my second journey at the South, I should have had serious doubts of either the honesty or the sanity of the reporter. I know, therefore, to what I subject myself in now giving my own name to it. I could not but hesitate to do this, as one would be cautious in acknowledging that he believed himself to have seen the sea-serpent, or had discovered a new motive power. By drawing out the confidence of other travellers, who had chanced to move through the South in a manner at all similar, however, I have had the satisfaction of finding that I am not altogether solitary in my experience. Even this day I met one fresh from the South-west, to whom, after due approach, I gave the article which is the text of these observations, asking to be told how he had found it in New England and in Mississippi. He replied.
“During four winters, I have travelled for a business purpose two months each winter in Mississippi. I have generally spent the night at houses with whose inmates I had some previous acquaintance. Where I had business transactions, especially where debts were due to me, which could not be paid, I sometimes neglected to offer payment for my night’s lodging, but in no other case, and never in a single instance, so far as I can now recollect, where I had offered payment, has there been any hesitation in taking it. A planter might refrain from asking payment of a traveller, but it is universally expected. In New England, as far as my limited experience goes, it is not so. I have known New England farmers’ wives take a small gratuity after lodging travellers, but always with apparent hesitation. I have known New England farmers refuse to do so. I have had some experience in Iowa; money is there usually (not always) taken for lodging travellers. The principal difference between the custom at private houses there and in Alabama and Mississippi being, that in Iowa the farmer seems to carefully reckon the exact value of the produce you have consumed, and to charge for it at what has often seemed to me an absurdly low rate; while in Mississippi, I have usually paid from four to six times as much as in Iowa, for similar accommodations. I consider the usual charges of planters to travellers extortionate, and the custom the reverse of hospitable. I knew of a Kentucky gentleman travelling from Eutaw to Greensboro’ [twenty miles] in his own conveyance. He was taken sick at the crossing of the Warrior River. It was nine o’clock at night. He averred to me that he called at every plantation on the road, and stated that he was a Kentuckian, and sick, but was refused lodging at each of them.”
This the richest county of Alabama, and the road is lined with valuable plantations!
The following is an extract from a letter dated Columbus, Mississippi, November 24, 1856, published in the London Daily News. It is written by an Englishman travelling for commercial purposes, and tells what he has learned by experience of the custom of the country:
“It is customary in travelling through this country, where towns are few and taverns scarce and vile, to stop at the planters’ houses along the road, and pay for your bed and board in the morning just as if you had stayed at an inn. The custom is rather repugnant to our Old World notions of hospitality, but it appears to me an excellent one for both the host and his guest. The one feels less bored by demands upon his kindness, as soon as it ceases to be merely a kindness to comply with them, and the other has no fear about intruding or being troublesome when he knows he will have to pay for his entertainment. It is rarely, however, that the entrée can be obtained into the houses of wealthy planters in this way. They will not be bothered by your visits, and, if you apply to them, have no hesitation in politely passing you on to such of their neighbours as have less money or more generosity.”
The same writer afterwards relates the following experience:—
“About nineteen miles from Canton, I sought lodging at nightfall at a snug house on the roadside, inhabited by an old gentleman and his two daughters, who possessed no slaves and grew no cotton, and whose two sons had been killed in the Mexican war, and who, with the loudest professions of hospitality, cautiously refrained from giving himself any personal trouble in support of them. He informed me that there was corn in the husk in an almost inaccessible loft, there was fodder in an un-get-at-able sort of a cage in the yard, water in a certain pond about half a mile off, and a currycomb in a certain hole in the wall. Having furnished me with this intelligence, he left me to draw my own conclusions as to what my conduct ought to be under the circumstances.”