Our drives about the plantation and neighbouring country were delicious. The inundations from the rivers are remarkable; a perfect Eden appears when they subside. At the landing place of this plantation, I saw a board nailed near the top of a lofty tree, and asked what it could be for. It was the high-water mark. The river, the Alabama, was now upwards of twenty feet higher than usual; and logs, corn-stalks, and green boughs were being carried down its rapid current, as often as we went to the shore. There were evidences of its having laid even houses under water; but, on its subsiding, it would be found to have left a deposit of two inches and a half of fine new soil on the fields on either side of its channel. I never stood on the banks of the southern rivers without being reminded of Daniell's Views in India and Ceylon: the water level, shadowy and still, and the thickets actually springing out of it, with dark-green recesses, with the relief of a slender white stem, or dangling creeper here and there. Some creepers rise like a ladder, straight from the water to a bough one hundred and twenty feet high. As for the softness of the evening light on the water, it is indescribable. It is as if the atmosphere were purified from all mortal breathings, it is so bright, and yet not dazzling; there is such a profusion of verdure.
There were black women ploughing in the field, with their ugly, scanty, dingy dresses, their walloping gait, and vacant countenance. There were scarlet and blue birds flitting over the dark fallows. There was persimon sprouting in the woods, and the young corn-plants in the field, with a handful of cotton-seed laid round each sprout. There was a view from a bluff which fully equalled all my expectations of what the scenery of the southern States would be; yet, tropical as it was in many respects, it reminded me strongly of the view from Richmond Hill. We were standing on the verge of a precipice, of a height which I dare not specify. A deep fissure to our right was spanned by a log which it made one shudder to think of crossing. Behind us lay a cotton-field of 7,000 acres within one fence. All this, and the young aloes, and wild vines, were little enough like Richmond; and so was the faint blue line of hills on the horizon; but it was the intervening plain, through which the river ran, and on which an infinite variety of noble trees grew, as it appeared, to an interminable distance. Here their tops seemed woven into compactness; there they were so sprinkled as to display the majesty and grace of their forms. I looked upon this as a glorification of the Richmond view.
It was now the middle of April. In the kitchen garden the peas were ripening, and the strawberries turning red, though the spring of 1835 was very backward. We had salads, young asparagus, and radishes.
The following may be considered a pretty fair account of the provision for a planter's table, at this season; and, except with regard to vegetables, I believe it does not vary much throughout the year. Breakfast at seven; hot wheat bread, generally sour; corn bread, biscuits, waffles, hominy, dozens of eggs, broiled ham, beef-steak or broiled fowl, tea and coffee. Lunch at eleven; cake and wine, or liqueur. Dinner at two; now and then soup (not good,) always roast turkey and ham; a boiled fowl here, a tongue there; a small piece of nondescript meat, which generally turns out to be pork disguised; hominy, rice, hot corn-bread, sweet potatoes; potatoes mashed with spice, very hot; salad and radishes, and an extraordinary variety of pickles. Of these, you are asked to eat everything with everything else. If you have turkey and ham on your plate, you are requested to add tongue, pork, hominy, and pickles. Then succeed pies of apple, squash, and pumpkin; custard, and a variety of preserves as extraordinary as the preceding pickles: pine-apple, peach, limes, ginger, guava jelly, cocoa-nut, and every sort of plums. These are almost all from the West-Indies. Dispersed about the table are shell almonds, raisins, hickory, and other nuts; and, to crown the whole, large blocks of ice-cream. Champagne is abundant, and cider frequent. Ale and porter may now and then be seen; but claret is the most common drink. During dinner a slave stands at a corner of the table, keeping off the flies by waving a large bunch of peacock's feathers fastened into a handle,—an ampler fan than those of our grandmothers.
Supper takes place at six, or seven. Sometimes the family sits round the table; but more commonly the tray is handed round, with plates which must be held in the lap. Then follow tea and coffee, waffles, biscuits, sliced ham or hung-beef, and sweet cake. Last of all, is the offer of cake and wine at nine or ten.
The profits of cotton-growing, when I was in Alabama, were thirty-five per cent. One planter whom I knew had bought fifteen thousand dollars' worth of land within two years, which he could then have sold for sixty-five thousand dollars. He expected to make, that season, fifty or sixty thousand dollars of his growing crop. It is certainly the place to become rich in; but the state of society is fearful. One of my hosts, a man of great good-nature, as he shows in the treatment of his slaves, and in his family relations, had been stabbed in the back in the reading-room of the town, two years before, and no prosecution was instituted. Another of my hosts carried loaded pistols for a fortnight, just before I arrived, knowing that he was lain in wait for by persons against whose illegal practices he had given information to a magistrate, whose carriage was therefore broken in pieces, and thrown into the river. A lawyer with whom we were in company one afternoon, was sent for to take the deposition of a dying man who had been sitting with his family in the shade, when he received three balls in the back from three men who took aim at him from behind trees. The tales of jail-breaking and rescue were numberless; and a lady of Montgomery told me that she had lived there four years, during which time no day, she believed, had passed without some one's life having been attempted, either by duelling or assassination. It will be understood that I describe this region as presenting an extreme case of the material advantages and moral evils of a new settlement, under the institution of slavery. The most prominent relief is the hospitality,—that virtue of young society. It is so remarkable, and to the stranger so grateful, that there is danger of its blinding him to the real state of affairs. In the drawing-room, the piazza, the barouche, all is so gay and friendly, there is such a prevailing hilarity and kindness, that it seems positively ungrateful and unjust to pronounce, even in one's own heart, that all this way of life is full of wrong and peril. Yet it is impossible to sit down to reflect, with every order of human beings filling an equal space before one's mental eye, without being struck to the soul with the conviction that the state of society, and no less of individual families, is false and hollow, whether their members are aware of it or not; that they forget that they must be just before they can be generous. The severity of this truth is much softened to sympathetic persons on the spot; but it returns with awful force when they look back upon it from afar.
In the slave quarter of a plantation hereabouts I saw a poor wretch who had run away three times, and been re-captured. The last time he was found in the woods, with both legs frost-bitten above the knees, so as to render amputation necessary. I passed by when he was sitting on the door-step of his hut, and longed to see him breathe his last. But he is a young man, likely to drag out his helpless and hopeless existence for many a dreary year. I dread to tell the rest; but such things must be told sometimes, to show to what a pass of fiendish cruelty the human spirit may be brought by merely witnessing the exercise of irresponsible power over the defenceless. I give the very words of the speaker, premising that she is not American by birth or education, nor yet English.
The master and mistress of this poor slave, with their children, had always treated him and his fellow-slaves very kindly. He made no complaint of them. It was not from their cruelty that he attempted to escape. His running away was therefore a mystery to the person to whom I have alluded. She recapitulated all the clothes that had been given to him; and all the indulgences, and forgivenesses for his ingratitude in running away from such a master, with which he had been blessed. She told me that she had advised his master and mistress to refuse him clothes, when he had torn his old ones with trying to make his way through the woods; but his master had been too kind, and had again covered his nakedness. She turned round upon me, and asked what could make the ungrateful wretch run away a third time from such a master?
"He wanted to be free."
"Free! from such a master!"