Diary in America, Series One

by Frederick Marryat

Right glad was I when we turned into the stream of the Ohio, and I found myself on its purer waters. The Ohio is a splendid river, running westward from the chain of Alleghany mountains into the Mississippi, dividing the States of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio on its northern bank from Kentucky, and Virginia on its south; the northern being free, and the southern slave States. We stopped at the month of the Cumberland river, where we took in passengers. Among others were a slave-dealer and a runaway negro whom he had captured. He was secured by a heavy chain, and followed his master, who, as soon as he arrived on the upper deck, made him fast with a large padlock to one of the stancheons.

Here he remained looking wistfully at the northern shore, where every one was free, but occasionally glancing his eye on the southern, which had condemned him to toil for others, I had never seen a slave-dealer, and scrutinised this one severely. His most remarkable feature was his eye; it was large but not projecting, clear as crystal, and eternally in motion. I could not help imagining, as he turned it right and left from one to the other of the passengers, that he was calculating what price he could obtain for them in the market. The negro had run away about seven months before, and not having a pass, he had been secured in goal until the return of his master, who had been on a journey with a string of slaves, to the State of Arkansas: he was about to be sold to pay expenses, when his master saw the advertisement and claimed him. As may be supposed, a strong feeling exists on the opposite shores of the river as to slavery and freedom. The Abolitionists used to assist the slaves to escape, and send them off to Canada; even now many do escape; but this has been rendered more difficult by a system which has latterly been put in practice by a set of miscreants living on the free side of the river. These would go to the slave states opposite, and persuade the negroes to run away, promising to conceal them until they could send them off to Canada; for a free state is bound to give up a slave when claimed. Instead of sending them away, they would wait until the reward was offered by the masters for the apprehension of the slaves, and then return them, receiving their infamous guerdon. The slaves, aware of this practice, now seldom attempt to escape.

Louisville is the largest city in Kentucky; the country about is very rich, and every thing vegetable springs up with a luxuriance which is surprising. It is situated at the falls of the Ohio, which are only navigable during the freshets; there is no river in America which has such a rise and fall as the Ohio, sometimes rising to sixty feet in the spring; but this is very rare, the general average being about forty feet. The French named it La Belle Riviere: it is a very grand stream, running through hills covered with fine timber and underwood; but a very small portion is as yet cleared by the settlers. At the time that I was at Louisville the water was lower than it had been remembered for years, and you could walk for miles over the bed of the river, a calcareous deposite full of interesting fossils; but the mineralogist and geologist have as much to perform in America as the agriculturist.

Arrived at Cincinnati. How rapid has been the advance of this western country. In 1803, deer-skin at the value of forty cents per pound, were a legal tender; and if offered instead of money could not be refused—even by a lawyer. Not fifty years ago, the woods which towered where Cincinnati is now built, resounded only to the cry of the wild animals of the forest, or the rifle of the Shawnee Indian; now Cincinnati contains a population of 40,000 inhabitants. It is a beautiful, well built, clean town, reminding you more of Philadelphia than any other city in the Union. Situated on a hill on the banks of the Ohio, it is surrounded by a circular phalanx of other hills; so that look up and down the streets, whichever way you will, your eye reposes upon verdure and forest trees in the distance. The streets have a row of trees on each side, near the curb-stone; and most of the houses have a small frontage, filled with luxuriant flowering shrubs, of which the Althea Frutex is the most abundant. It is, properly speaking, a Yankee city, the majority of its inhabitants coming from the East; but they have intermarried, and blended with the Kentuckians of the opposite shore, a circumstance which is advantageous to the character of both.

There are, however, a large number of Dutch and German settlers here; they say 10,000. They are not much liked by the Americans but have great influence, as may be conceived when it is stated that, when a motion was brought forward, in the Municipal Court, for the city regulations to be printed in German as well as English, it was lost by one vote only.

I was told a singular fact, which will prove how rapidly the value of land rises in this country as it becomes peopled. Fifty-six years ago, the major part of the land upon which the city of Cincinnati stands, and which is now worth many millions of dollars, was swapped away by the owner of it for a pony!! The man who made this unfortunate bargain is now alive, and living in or near Cincinnati.

Cincinnati is the pork-shop of the Union; and in the autumnal, and early winter months, the way they kill pigs here is, to use a Yankee phrase, quite a caution. Almost all the hogs fed in the oak forests of Ohio, Kentucky, and Western Virginia, are driven into this city, and some establishments kill as many as fifteen hundred a day; at least so I am told. They are despatched in a way quite surprising; and a pig is killed upon the same principle as a pin is made,—by division, or, more properly speaking, by combination of labour. The hogs confined in a large pen are driven into a smaller one; one man knocks them on the head with a sledge hammer, and then cuts their throats; two more pull away the carcase, when it is raised by two others, who tumble it into a tub of scalding water. His bristles are removed in about a minute and a half by another party; when the next duty is to fix a stretcher between his legs. It is then hoisted up by two other people, cut open, and disembowelled; and in three minutes and a half from the time that the hog was grunting in his obesity, he has only to get cold before he is again packed up, and reunited in a barrel to travel all over the world. By the by, we laugh at the notion of pork and molasses. In the first place, the American pork is far superior to any that we ever have salted down; and, in the next, it eats uncommonly well with molasses. I have tasted it, and “it is a fact.” After all, why should we eat currant jelly with venison, and not allow the Americans the humble imitation of pork and molasses?

Mrs Trollope’s bazaar raises its head in a very imposing manner: it is composed of many varieties of architecture; but I think the order under which it must be classed is the preposterous. They call it Trollope’s folly; and it is remarkable how a shrewd woman like Mrs Trollope should have committed such an error. A bazaar like an English bazaar is only to be supported in a city which has arrived at the acme of luxury; where there are hundreds of people willing to be employed for a trifle; hundreds who will work at trifles, for want of better employment; and thousands who will spend money on trifles, merely to pass away their time. Now, in America, in the first place, there is no one who makes trifles; no one who will devote their time, as sellers of the articles unless well compensated; and no one who will be induced, either by fashion or idleness, to give a halfpenny more for a thing than it is worth. In consequence, nothing was sent to Mrs Trollope’s bazaar. She had to furnish it from the shops, and had to pay very high salaries to the young women who attended; and the people of Cincinnati, aware that the same articles were to be purchased at the stores for less money, preferred going to the stores. No wonder then that it was a failure. It is now used as a dancing academy, and occasionally as an assembly-room.

Whatever the society of Cincinnati may have been at the time that Mrs Trollope resided there, I cannot pretend to say; probably some change may have taken place in it; but at present it is as good as any in the Union, and infinitely more agreeable than in some other cities, as in it there is a mixture of the southern frankness of character. A lady, who had long resided at Cincinnati, told me that they were not angry with Mrs Trollope for having described the society which she saw, but for having asserted that that was the best society; and she further remarked,—“It is fair to us that it should be understood that when Mrs Trollope came here, she was quite unknown, except inasmuch as that she was a married woman, travelling without her husband. In a small society, as ours was, it was not surprising, therefore, that we should be cautious about receiving a lady who, in our opinion was offending against les bienséances. Observe, we do not accuse Mrs Trollope of any impropriety; but you must be aware how necessary it is, in this country, to be regardful of appearances, and how afraid every one is of their neighbour. Mrs Trollope then took a cottage on the hill, and used to come down to the city to market, and attend to the erection of her bazaar. I have now told you all that we know about her, and the reason why she did not receive those attentions, the omission of which caused her indignation.” I think it but fair that the lady’s explanation should be given, as Mrs Trollope is considered to have been very severe and very unjust by the inhabitants of Cincinnati.

The fact is, that Mrs Trollope’s representation of the manners and custom of Cincinnati, at the period when she wrote, was probably more correct than the present inhabitants of the city will allow: that it would be a libel upon the Cincinnatians of the present day is certain; whether it was one at the time she wrote, and the city was, comparatively speaking, in its infancy, is quite another affair. However, one thing is certain, which is, that the Americans have quite forgiven Mrs Trollope, and if she were again to cross the water, I think she would be well received. Her book made them laugh, though at their own expense; and the Americans, although appearances are certainly very much against it, are really, at the bottom, a very good tempered people.