"Very well: now we shall understand each other; for I must tell you that I think about slavery exactly as I did when I wrote that story. Nothing that I have seen shows me that I have anything to qualify of what is said there. So now you do know my opinions."
"Oh yes. I don't want to know anything more of your opinions. I want you to know mine."
"That is exactly what I want. When will you let me have them?"
We had engaged to dine with this gentleman the next week; it was now arranged that our party should go two hours earlier than the other guests, in order to hear this gentleman's exposition of slavery. He was well prepared, and his statement of facts and reasons was clear, ready, and entertaining. The fault was in the narrowness of his premises, for his whole argument was grounded on the supposition that human rights consist in sufficient subsistence in return for labour. Before he began I told him that I fully understood his wish not to argue the question, and that I came to hear his statement, not to controvert it; but that I must warn him not to take my silence for assent. Upon this understanding we proceeded, with some little irritability on his part when I asked questions, but with no danger of any quarrel. I never found the slightest difficulty in establishing a similar clear understanding with every slaveholder I met. In the drawing-room of the boarding-house at Richmond, Virginia, three gentlemen, two of whom were entire strangers, attacked me in the presence of a pretty large company one afternoon. This was a direct challenge, which I did not think fit to decline, and we had it all out. They were irritable at first, but softened as they went on; and when, at the end of three hours, we had exhausted the subject, we were better friends than when we began.
Some of the reports of my championship of the negroes arose from a circumstance which occurred the day after my arrival at Charleston. Our host proposed to take us up a church steeple, to obtain a view of the city and its environs. The key of the church was at the Guardhouse opposite, and our host said we might as well go for it ourselves, and thus get a sight of the Guardhouse. One of the city authorities showed us over it, and we stayed a few moments in a room where a lady was preferring a complaint against two negro boys for robbing a henroost. They were proved guilty, and sentenced to be flogged at the place of punishment at the other end of the city.
The view from the church steeple was very fine; and the whole, steeped in spring sunshine, had an oriental air which took me by surprise. The city was spread out beneath us in a fanlike form, in streets converging towards the harbour. The heat and moisture of the climate give to the buildings the hue of age, so as to leave nothing of the American air of spruceness in the aspect of the place. The sandy streets, the groups of mulattoes, the women with turbaned heads, surmounted with water-pots and baskets of fruit; the small panes of the house windows; the yucca bristling in the gardens below us, and the hot haze through which we saw the blue main and its islands, all looked so oriental as to strike us with wonder. We saw Ashley and Cooper rivers, bringing down produce to the main, and were taught the principal buildings—the churches and the Custom-house, built just before the Revolution—and the leading streets, Broad and Meeting streets intersecting, and affording access to all that we were to see. It would be wise in travellers to make it their first business in a foreign city to climb the loftiest point they can reach, so as to have the scene they are to explore laid out as in a living map beneath them. It is scarcely credible how much time is saved and confusion of ideas obviated by these means. I gained much by mounting the State House at Boston, Pennsylvania Hospital at Philadelphia, the new hotel at Baltimore, the Capitol at Washington, the high hills about Cincinnati, the college at Lexington, the hill where the Statehouse is to be at Nashville, the Cotton-press at New Orleans, and this church steeple at Charleston.
Another care of the traveller should be to glance at the local newspapers. This first morning I found a short newspaper article which told volumes. It was an ordinance for raising ways and means for the city. Charitable and religious institutions were left free from taxation, as were the salaries of the clergy and schoolmasters. There was a direct levy on real property, on slaves, and on carriages, and a special tax on free people of colour; a class who, being precluded from obtaining taxable property and luxuries, were yet made to pay by means of a polltax.
Our mornings were divided between receiving callers and drives about the city and in the country. The country is flat and sandy, and the only objects are planters' mansions, surrounded with evergreen woods, the gardens exhibiting the tropical yucca, and fenced with hedges of the Cherokee rose. From the lower part of the city glimpses of the main may be had; but the intervening space is very ugly, except at high tide; an expanse of reeking slime over which large flocks of buzzards are incessantly hovering. On the top of each of the long row of stakes discovered at low water sits a buzzard. A fine is imposed for killing one of these birds, the unsalaried scavengers of the moister districts of the city.
The houses which we visited in returning calls were generally handsome, with capacious piazzas, rich plants and bouquets, and good furniture. The political bias of the inhabitant was often discoverable from the books on the table, or the prints and casts on the walls. In no society in the world could the division of parties be more distinct, and their alienation more threatening than in Charleston at the time I was there. [15] The Union gentlemen and ladies were dispirited and timid. They asked one another's opinion whether there was not some mysterious stir among the nullifiers; whether they were not concerting measures for a new defiance of the general government. This anxious watchfulness contrasted strangely with the arrogant bearing of the leading nullifiers. During my stay Mr. Calhoun and his family arrived from Congress; and there was something very striking in the welcome he received, like that of a chief returned to the bosom of his clan. He stalked about like a monarch of the little domain; and there was certainly an air of mysterious understanding between him and his followers, whether there was really any great secret under it or not. One lady, who had contributed ample amounts of money to the nullification funds, and a catechism to nullification lore, amused while she grieved me by the strength of her political feelings. While calling on her one morning, the conversation turned on prints, and I asked an explanation of a strange-looking one which hung opposite my eye; the portrait of a gentleman, the top of the head and the dress visible, but the face obliterated or covered over. She was only too ready to explain. It was a portrait of President Jackson, which she had hung up in days when he enjoyed her favour. Since nullification she had covered over the face, to show how she hated him. A stranger hardly knows what to think of a cause whose leaders will flatter and cherish the perpetrators of a piece of petty spite like this; yet this lady is treated as if she were a main pillar of the nullification party.
Some of our mornings were spent in going with the Hayne and Calhoun families to the public library, to a panorama, and to the arsenal. The library is supported by private subscriptions, and is very creditable to the city, whose zeal about its books might well have been exhausted by the repeated destruction of the library by fire and in the war. We amused ourselves with files of newspapers which have survived all disasters; old London Gazettes and colonial papers extending as far back as 1678.