The South-West, by a Yankee. In Two Volumes. Volume 2

by J. H. Ingraham

A few days since, in company with a northern friend, I made an excursion to an extensive plantation two hours' ride from the city. We left the hotel at an early hour, exchanging our mattresses—the universal southern bed—for more luxurious seats in elastic Spanish saddles, upon delightfully cradling pacers, and proceeded through one of the principal streets, already alive with pedestrians and horsemen; for, in a southern climate, evening and morning constitute the day—the day itself being a "noon of indolence," where ice and shade are the only blessings to be devoutly wished. Ambling along at an easy gait toward the great southern road, leading to New-Orleans, we passed, just on the confines of the country, the residence of the Presbyterian clergyman, and one of the most charming retreats I have yet seen in the vicinity of Natchez, whose suburbs are peculiarly rich in tasteful country seats. Our eyes lingered over the luxuriant shrubbery clustering about the edifice, entwining around its columns and peeping in at the windows. Clumps of foliage, of the deepest green, were enamelled with flowers of the brightest hues; and every tree was an aviary, from which burst the sweetest melody. What a spot for the student! Among flowers and vines and singing birds! What a freshness must they fling around his heart! What a richness must clothe even the language of sermons composed in such pleasant shades—the cool wind loaded with fragrance, leaping from among the trees upon the brow, and playing refreshingly among the hair!

Leaving, to the right, the romantic fort Rosalie, rearing its green parapets in strong relief against the sky—a prominent object amid the slightly elevated surface of the surrounding country—we turned into one of those pleasant roads which wind in all directions through the rich scenery of this state. The first mile we passed several neat dwellings, of the cottage order; one of which, with a gallery in front, and surrounded by a smooth, green slope, was the residence of the Episcopalian clergyman. It was a chaste and pretty mansion, though not so luxuriantly embowered as the abode of the clergyman above alluded to. A huge colonnaded structure, crowning an abrupt eminence near the road, struck our eyes with an imposing effect. It was the abode of one of the wealthiest planters of this state; who, like the majority of those whose families now roll in their splendid equipages, has been the maker of his fortune. The grounds about this edifice were neglected; horses were grazing around the piazzas, over which were strewed saddles, whips, horse blankets, and the motley paraphernalia with which planters love to lumber their galleries. On nearly every piazza in Mississippi may be found a wash-stand, bowl, pitcher, towel, and water-bucket, for general accommodation. But the southern gallery is not constructed, like those at the north, for ornament or ostentation, but for use. Here they wash, lounge, often sleep, and take their meals.—Here will the stranger or visiter be invited to take a chair, or recline upon a sofa, settee, or form, as the taste and ability of the host may have furnished this important portion of a planter's house. I once called on a planter within an hour's ride of Natchez, whose income would constitute a fortune for five or six modest Yankees. I entered the front yard—a green level, shaded with the relics of a forest—the live oak, sycamore, and gum trees—through a narrow wicket in a white-washed paling, the most common fence around southern dwellings. In the front yard were several sheep, colts, calves, two or three saddle and a fine pair of carriage-horses, negro children, and every variety of domestic fowl. The planter was sitting upon the gallery, divested of coat, vest, and shoes, with his feet on the railing, playing, in high glee, with a little dark-eyed boy and two young negroes, who were chasing each other under the bridge formed by his extended limbs. Three or four noble dogs, which his voice and the presence of his servant, who accompanied me to the house, kept submissive, were crouching like leopards around his chair. A litter of young bull-headed pups lay upon a blanket under a window opening into a bed-room, white with curtains and valances; while a domestic tabby sat upon the window-sill, gazing musingly down upon the rising generation of her hereditary foes, perhaps with reflections not of the most pleasing cast. A hammock, suspended between an iron hook driven into the side of the house and one of the slender columns which supported the sloping roof of the gallery, contained a youth of fourteen, a nephew of the planter, fast locked in the embraces of Morpheus; whose aid-de-camp, in the shape of a strapping negress, stood by the hammock, waving over the sleeper a long plume of gorgeous feathers of the pea-fowl—that magnificent bird of the south, which struts about the ground of the planter, gratifying the eye with the glorious emblazonry upon his plumage by day, and torturing the ear with his loud clamours by night. A pair of noble antlers was secured to one of the pillars, from whose branches hung broad-brimmed hats, bridles, a sheep-skin covering to a saddle, which reposed in one corner of the piazza, a riding whip, a blanket coat or capote, spurs, surcingle, and part of a coach harness. A rifle and a shot-gun with an incredibly large bore, were suspended in beckets near the hall entrance; while a couple of shot-pouches, a game-bag, and other sporting apparatus, hung beside them. Slippers, brogans, a pillow, indented as though recently deserted, a gourd, and a broken "cotton slate," filled up the picture, whose original, in some one or other of its features, may be found in nearly every planter's dwelling in this state.

There are many private residences, in the vicinity of Natchez, of an equally expensive character with the one which furnished the above description, whose elegant interiors, contrasting with the neglected grounds about them, suggest the idea of a handsome city residence, accidentally dropped upon a bleak hill, or into the midst of a partially cleared forest, and there remaining, with its noble roof grasped by the arms of an oak, and its windows and columns festooned by the drooping moss, heavily waving in the wind. Thus are situated many of the planters' dwellings, separated from the adjacent forests by a rude, white-washed picket, enclosing around the house an unornamented green, or grazing lot, for the saddle and carriage-horses, which can regale their eyes at pleasure, by walking up to the parlour windows and gazing in upon handsome carpets, elegant furniture, costly mantel ornaments, and side-boards loaded with massive plate; and, no doubt, ruminate philosophically upon the reflection of their figures at full-length in long, richly-framed mirrors. Very few of the planters' villas, even within a few miles of Natchez, are adorned with surrounding ornamental shrubbery walks, or any other artificial auxiliaries to the natural scenery, except a few shade trees and a narrow, gravelled avenue from the gate to the house. A long avenue of trees, ornamenting and sheltering the approach to a dwelling, is a rare sight in this state, though very frequently seen in Louisiana. Yet, in no region of the south can fine avenues of beautiful trees be made with such facility as in Mississippi. No state surpasses this in the beauty, variety, and rapid growth of its ornamental shade trees; the laurel, sycamore, locust, oak, elm, and white bay, with the "pride of China,"—the universal shade tree in the south-west—arrive here at the most perfect maturity and beauty. Every plantation residence is approached by an avenue, often nearly a mile in length; yet so little attention is paid to this species of ornament and comfort, in a climate where shade is a synonym for luxury, that scarcely one of them is shaded, except where, in their course through a forest, nature has flung the broad arms of majestic trees across the path.

The peculiarity of the dwellings of planters, evinced in hiding the prettiest cottage imaginable under the wild, gnarled limbs of forest trees, fringed with long black moss, like mourning weeds, which hangs over the doors and windows in melancholy grandeur, may be traced, very naturally, to the original mode of life of most of the occupants, who, though now opulent, have arisen, with but few exceptions, from comparative obscurity in the world of dollars. Originally occupying log huts in the wilderness, their whole time and attention were engaged in the culture of cotton; and embellishment, either of their cabins or grounds, was wholly disregarded. When they became the lords of a domain and a hundred slaves; for many retain their cabins even till then—ostentation, as they saw the elegancies of refined society displayed around them—necessity, for fear of being entombed in the ruins of their venerable log palaces—or a desire for greater comfort—razed the humble cabin, and reared upon its site the walls of an expensive and beautiful fabric. Here the planter stops. The same causes which originally influenced him to neglect the improvement of his grounds, still continue to exist; and though he may inhabit a building that would grace an English park, the grounds and scenery about it, with the exception of a paling enclosing a green yard, are suffered to remain in their pristine rudeness. Thus far, and with few exceptions, no farther, have the wealthiest planters advanced. Here they have taken a stand; and a motive cause, equal to that which led to the first step from the cabin to the more elegant mansion, must again operate, or the finest villas in Mississippi will, for many years to come, be surrounded, on one or more sides, with the native forests, or stand in unpicturesque contiguity with ploughed fields, cattle-pens, and the several interesting divisions of a farm-yard.

You will judge, from this state of things, that the Mississippi planters are not a showy and stylish class, but a plain, practical body of men, who, in general, regard comfort, and conformity to old habits, rather than display and fashionable innovations; and who would gaze with more complacency upon an acre of their domain, whitened, like a newly-washed flock, with cotton, than were it spread out before them magnificent with horticulture, or beautifully velveted with green. Still planters are not destitute of taste; it is their principle to make it yield to interest. "What a fine park you might have around your house," once remarked an English gentleman to a planter in this state, as he surveyed the finely undulating fields here and there sprinkled with an oak, extending on every side around the dwelling.

"Very true," replied the southron, "but these few acres yield me annually from ten to twelve bales of cotton: this would be too great a sacrifice for the mere gratification of the eye."

"Still very true," replied the Englishman, "but this sense could be gratified without any sacrifice. Your plantation consists of eight or nine hundred acres, and not one half is under cultivation; a portion of that now uncultivated might be substituted for this." To this the planter answered, that the soil about his house would produce more to the acre than the other, by at least one bale in every ten, having been long under cultivation; and that merely as a matter of taste, though no one admired a fine park or lawn more than himself, he could not devote it to this object.

This principle of the land economist, so devoutly reverenced, will long preclude that desirable union of taste and interest, which is the combined result of wealth attained and enjoyed. The last state men cannot be said to be in, who, however wealthy, never relax their exertions in adding to their incomes; which is, and ever will be the case with the planter, and indeed every other man, so long as he can, by his efforts, annually increase his revenue ten or twenty thousand dollars. To the immense profit which every acre and the labour of every slave yield the planter, and to no other cause, is to be referred the anomalous result manifested in neglecting to improve their estates: for an acre, that will yield them sixty dollars per annum, and a slave, whose annual labour will yield from two to five hundred dollars, are, by the laws which regulate the empire of money, to be appropriated to the service of interest, to the entire exclusion of the claims of taste.

About a mile from Natchez, we passed, close by the road-side, a family cemetery, whose white paling was bursting with shrubbery. No mausoleum gratefully relieving the eye, rose amid the luxuriant foliage, enshrining the affection of the living or the memory of the dead. On the opposite side of the road stood a handsome mansion, though without that noble expanse of lawn which is the finest feature in the grounds of an English country residence. Instead of a lawn, a small unimproved court-yard intervened between the house and the road. Winding round an extensive vegetable garden, attached to the house, which is the only dwelling for more than ten miles immediately on the road, we travelled for an hour, either over a pleasantly rolling country, with extensive cotton fields, spreading away on either hand; or beneath forest trees, which, in height and majesty, might vie with the "cedars of Lebanon." There is a grandeur in the vast forests of the south, of which a northerner can form no adequate conception. The trees spring from the ground into the air, noble columns, from fifty to a hundred feet in height, and, expanding like the cocoa, fling abroad their limbs, which, interlocking, present a canopy almost impervious to the sun, and beneath which wind arcades of the most magnificent dimensions. The nakedness of the tall shafts is relieved by the luxuriant tendrils of the muscadine and woodbine twining about them, in spiral wreaths, quite to their summit, or hanging in immense festoons from tree to tree. In these woods horsemen can advance without obstruction, so spacious are the intervals between the trees, so high the branches above them, and so free from underwood is the sward. Of such forest-riding the northerner knows nothing, unless his lore in tales of Italian banditti may have enabled him to form some idea of scenes with which his own country refuses to gratify him. So much do the northern and southern forests differ, that a fleet rider will traverse the latter with more ease than the woodman can the former.

Cut from the shaft of a southern forest tree, a section forty or fifty feet in length, and plant the mutilated summit in the earth, and its stunted appearance would convey to a Mississippian a tolerably correct idea of a forest tree in New-England; or add to the low trunk of a wide spreading northern oak, the column abstracted from its southern rival, and northerners would form from its towering altitude, a tolerable idea of a forest tree in Mississippi. Hang from its heavy branches huge tassels of black Carolina moss, from two to six feet in length—suspend from limb to limb gigantic festoons of vines, themselves but lesser trees in size, and clothe its trunk with a spiral vestment of leaves, as though a green serpent were coiled about it, and you will have created a southern tree in its native majesty. Imagine a forest of them lifting their tops to heaven and yourself bounding away upon a fleet horse beneath its sublime domes, with a noble stag, flying down its glades like a winged creature, while the shouts of hunters, the tramp of horses, and the baying of hounds echo through its solemn corridors, and then you will have some faint idea of the glory of a southern forest and the noble character of its enjoyments.[5]