June 17th.—The country continues hilly, and is well populated by farmers, living in log huts, while every mile or two, on the more level and fertile land, there is a larger farm, with ten or twenty negroes at work. A few whites are usually working near them, in the same field, generally ploughing while the negroes hoe.
About noon, my attention was attracted towards a person upon a ledge, a little above the road, who was throwing up earth and stone with a shovel. I stopped to see what the purpose of this work might be, and perceived that the shoveller was a woman, who, presently discovering me, stopped and called to others behind her, and immediately a stout girl and two younger children, with a man, came to the edge and looked at me. The woman was bareheaded, and otherwise half-naked, as perhaps needed to be, for her work would have been thought hard by our stoutest labourers, and it was the hottest weather of the summer, in the latitude of Charleston, and on a hill-side in the full face of the noon sun. I pushed my horse up the hill until I reached them, when another man appeared, and in answer to my inquiries told me that they were getting out iron ore. One was picking in a vein, having excavated a short adit; the other man picked looser ore exterior to the vein. The women and children shovelled out the ore and piled it on kilns of timber, where they roasted it to make it crumble. It was then carted to a forge, and they were paid for it by the load. They were all clothed very meanly and scantily. The women worked, so far as I could see, as hard as the men. The children, too, even to the youngest—a boy of eight or ten—were carrying large lumps of ore, and heaving them into the kiln, and shovelling the finer into a screen to separate the earth from it.
Immediately after leaving them I found a good spot for nooning. I roped my horse out to graze, and spread my blanket in a deep shade. I noticed that the noise of their work had ceased, and about fifteen minutes afterwards, Jude suddenly barking, I saw one of the men peering at me through the trees, several rods distant. I called to him to come up. He approached rather slowly and timidly, examined the rope with which my horse was fastened, eyed me vigilantly, and at length asked if I was resting myself. I replied that I was; and he said that he did not know but I might be sick, and had come to see me. I thanked him, and offered him a seat upon my blanket, which he declined. Presently he took up a newspaper that I had been reading, looked at it for a moment, then he told me he couldn’t read. “Folks don’t care much for edication round here; it would be better for ’em, I expect, if they did.” He began then to question me closely about my circumstances—where I came from, whither I was going, etc.
When his curiosity was partially appeased he suddenly laughed in a silly manner, and said that the people he had been working with had watched me after I left them; they saw me ride up the hill and stop, ride on again, and finally take off my saddle, turn my horse loose and tote my saddle away, and they were much frightened, thinking I must be crazy at least. When he started to come toward me they told him he wouldn’t dare to go to me, but he saw how it was, well enough—I was just resting myself.
“If I should run down hill now,” said he, “they’d start right off and wouldn’t stop for ten mile, reckoning you was arter me. That would be fun; oh, we have some good fun here sometimes with these green folks. There’s an amazin’ ignorant set round here.”
I asked if they were foreigners.
“Oh, no; they are common, no account people; they used to live over the hill, here; they come right nigh starvin’ thar, I expect.”
They had not been able to get any work to do, and had been “powerful poor,” until he got them to come here. They had taken an old cabin, worked with him, and were doing right well now. He didn’t let them work in the vein—he kept that for himself—but they worked all around, and some days they made a dollar and a half—the man, woman, and children together. They had one other girl, but she had to stay at home to take care of the baby and keep cattle and hogs out of their “gardien.” He had known the woman when she was a girl; “she was always a good one to work. She’d got a voice like a bull, and she was as smart as a wild cat; but the man warn’t no account.”
He had himself followed this business (mining) since he was a young man, and could earn three dollars a day by it if he tried; he had a large family and owned a small farm: never laid up anything, always kept himself a little in debt at the store.
He asked if I had not found the people “more friendly like” up in this country to what they were down below, and assured me that I would find them grow more friendly as I went further North, so at least he had heard, and he knew where he first came from (Tennessee) the people were more friendly than they were here. “The richer a man is,” he continued, pursuing a natural association of ideas, “and the more niggers he’s got, the poorer he seems to live. If you want to fare well in this country you stop to poor folks’ housen; they try to enjoy what they’ve got, while they ken, but these yer big planters they don’ care for nothing but to save. Now, I never calculate to save anything; I tell my wife I work hard, and I mean to enjoy what I earn as fast as it comes.”