Society in America, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Harriet Martineau

Kentucky is equally adapted for agriculture and commerce. She may have ports on the rivers, along her whole northern and western boundary; and she has already roads superior to almost any in the United States. She is rich in stone, and many other minerals; in mineral waters, and in a soil of unsurpassed fertility. The State is more thickly settled than is evident to the passing traveller; and the effect will appear when more markets, or roads to existing markets, are opened. In one small county which I visited, my host and his brother had farms of fifteen hundred acres each; and there were two hundred and fifty other farms in the county. Sometimes these farms are divided among the children. More commonly, all the sons but one go elsewhere to settle. In this case, the homestead is usually left to the youngest son, who is supposed likely to be the most attached to the surviving parent.

The estates of the two brothers, mentioned above, comprising three thousand acres, were bought of the Indians for a rifle. We passed a morning in surveying the one which is a grazing farm. There is a good red-brick house for the family: and the slave-quarter is large. Nothing can be more beautiful than the aspect of the estate, from the richness of its vegetation, and the droves of fine cattle that were to be seen everywhere. I never saw finer cattle. The owner had just refused sixty dollars apiece for fourteen of them. Fifteen acres of the forest are left for shade; and there, and under single oaks in the cleared pasture, were herds of horses and mules, and three donkeys; the only ones I saw in the United States.

We passed an unshaded meadow, where the grass had caught fire every day at eleven o'clock, the preceding summer. This demonstrates the necessity of shade.

We passed "a spontaneous rye-field." I asked what "spontaneous" meant here; and found that a fine crop of rye had been cut the year before; and that the nearly equally fine one now before us had grown up from the dropped seed.

We enjoyed the thought of the abundance of milk here, after the dearth we had suffered in the South. Forty cows are milked for the use of the family and the negroes, and are under the care of seven women. The proprietor declared to me that he believed his slaves would drive him mad. Planters, who grow but one product, suffer much less from the incapacity and perverse will of their negroes: the care of stock is quite another matter; and for any responsible service, slaves are totally unfit.

Instead of living being cheaper on country estates, from the necessaries of life being raised on them, it appears to be much more expensive. This is partly owing to the prevailing pride of having negroes to show. One family, of four persons, of my acquaintance, in South Carolina, whose style of living might be called homely, cannot manage to live for less than three thousand dollars a year. They have a carriage and eleven negroes. It is cheaper in Kentucky. In the towns, a family may live in good style for two thousand five hundred dollars a year; and for no great deal more in the country. A family entered upon a good house, near a town, with one hundred and twenty acres of land, a few years ago, at a rent of three hundred dollars. They bought house and land, and brought their slaves, and now live, exclusive of rent and hire of servants, for two thousand dollars a year, in greater numbers and much higher style than the South Carolina family.

The prospects of agriculture in the States north-west of the Ohio are brilliant. The stranger who looks upon the fertile prairies of Illinois and Indiana, and the rich alluvions of Ohio, feels the iniquity of the English corn laws as strongly as in the alleys of Sheffield and Manchester. The inhuman perverseness of taxing food is there evident in all its enormity. The world ought never to hear of a want of food,—no one of the inhabitants of its civilised portions ought ever to be without the means of obtaining his fill, while the mighty western valley smiles in its fertility. If the aristocracy of England, for whom those laws were made, and by whom they are sustained, could be transported to travel, in open wagons, the boundless prairies, and the shores of the great rivers which would bring down the produce, they would groan to see from what their petty, selfish interests had shut out the thousands of half-starved labourers at home. If they could not be convinced of the very plain truth, of how their own fortunes would be benefited by allowing the supply and demand of food to take their natural course, they would, for the moment, wish their rent-rolls at the bottom of the sea, rather than that they should stand between the crowd of labourers and the supply of food which God has offered them. The landlords of England do not go and see the great western valley; but, happily, some of the labourers of England do. Far off as that valley is, those labourers will make themselves heard from thence, by those who have driven them there; and will teach the brethren whom they have left behind where the blame of their hunger lies. Every British settler who ploughs a furrow in the prairie, helps to plough up the foundations of the British Corn Laws.

There is a prospect, not very uncertain or remote, of these prairie lands bringing relief to a yet more suffering class than either English labourers or landlords; the sugar-growing slaves of the south. Rumours of the progress of sugar-making from beet in France have, for some time past, been interesting many persons in the United States; especially capitalists inclined to speculate, and the vigilant friends of the slave. Information has been obtained, and some trials made. Individuals have sown ten acres and upwards each, and manufactured sugar with a small apparatus. The result has been encouraging; and a large manufactory was to be opened in Philadelphia on the 1st of November last. Two large joint-stock companies have been founded, one in New Jersey and the other in Illinois. Their proceedings have been quickened by the frosts of several successive seasons, which have so cut off the canes in the south, as that it cannot supply one quarter of the domestic consumption: whereas it had previously supplied half. Some of the southern newspapers have recommended the substitution of beet for canes. However soon this may be done, the northern sugar planters, with their free labour, will surely overpower the south in the competition. This is on the supposition that beet will answer as well as canes; a supposition which will have Bern granted whenever the south begins to grow beet in preference to canes.