“There’s another house a little better than three quarters of a mile further on.”
To this house I proceeded—a cabin of one room and a loft, with a kitchen in a separate cabin. The owner said he never turned anybody away, and I was welcome. He did not say that he had no corn, until after supper, when I asked for it to feed my horse. The family were good-natured, intelligent people, but very ignorant. The man and his wife and the daughters slept below, the boy and I in the cock-loft. Supper and breakfast were eaten in the detached kitchen. Yet they were by no means poor people. The man told me that he had over a thousand acres of rich tillable land, besides a large extent of mountain range, the most of which latter he had bought from time to time as he was able, to prevent the settlement of squatters near his valley-land. “There were people who would be bad neighbours, I knew,” he said, “that would settle on most any kind of place, and everybody wants to keep such as far away from them as they can.” (When I took my bridle off, I hung it up by the stable-door; he took it down and said he’d hang it in a safer place. “He’d never had anything stolen from here, and he didn’t mean to have—it was just as well not to put temptation before people,” and he took it into the house and put it under his bed.)
Besides this large tract of land here, he owned another tract of two hundred acres with a house upon it, rented for one-third the produce, and another smaller farm, similarly rented; he also owned a grist mill, which he rented to a miller for half the tolls. He told me that he had thought a good deal formerly of moving to new countries, but he had been doing pretty well and had stayed here now so long, he didn’t much think he should ever budge. He reckoned he’d got enough to make him a living for the rest of his life, and he didn’t know any use a man had for more’n that.
I did not see a single book in the house, nor do I think that any of the family could read. He said that many people here were talking about Iowa and Indiana; “was Iowa (Hiaway) beyond the Texies?” I opened my map to show him where it was, but he said he “wasn’t scollar’d enough” to understand it, and I could not induce him to look at it. I asked him if the people here preferred Iowa and Indiana to Missouri at all because they were Free States. “I reckon,” he replied, “they don’t have no allusion to that. Slavery is a great cuss, though, I think, the greatest there is in these United States. There ain’t no account of slaves up here in the west, but down in the east part of this State about Fayetteville there’s as many as there is in South Carolina. That’s the reason the West and the East don’t agree in this State; people out here hates the Eastern people.”
“Why is that?”
“Why you see they vote on the slave basis, and there’s some of them nigger counties where there ain’t more’n four or five hundred white folks, that has just as much power in the Legislature as any of our mountain counties where there’ll be some thousand voters.”
He made further remarks against slavery and against slaveholders. When I told him that I entirely agreed with him, and said further, that poor white people were usually far better off in the Free than in the Slave States, he seemed a little surprised and said, “New York ain’t a Free State, is it?”
Labourers’ wages here, he stated, were from fifty cents to one dollar a day, or eight dollars a month. “How much by the year?” “They’s never lured by the year.”
“Would it be $75 a year?”
“’Twouldn’t be over that, anyhow, but ’tain’t general for people to hire here only for harvest time; fact is, a man couldn’t earn his board, let alone his wages, for six months in the year.”