The sojourner in the Slave States is struck with the wretched and degraded appearance of a class of people called by the slaveholders, “poor white folks,” and “the tallow-faced gentry,” from their pallid complexion. They live in wretched hovels, dress slatternly, and are exceedingly filthy in their habits. Many of them are clay or dirt-eaters, which is said to cause their peculiar complexion. Their children, at a very early age, form this filthy and disgusting habit; and mere infants may be found with their mouths filled with dirt. The mud with which they daub the interstices between the logs of their rude domicils, must be frequently renewed, as the occupants pick it all out in a very short time, and eat it. This pernicious practice induces disease. The complexion becomes pale, similar to that occasioned by chronic ague and fever.
Akin to this is the practice of snuff-dipping, which is not confined exclusively to females of the poor white caste, though scarcely one in fifty of this class is exempt from the disgusting habit. The method is this: The female snuff-dipper takes a short stick, and wetting it with her saliva, dips it into her snuff-box, and then rubs the gathered dust all about her mouth, and into the interstices of her teeth, where she allows it to remain until its strength has been fully absorbed. Others hold the stick thus loaded with snuff in the cheek, a la quid of tobacco, and suck it with a decided relish, while engaged in their ordinary avocations; while others simply fill the mouth with the snuff, and imitate, to all intents and purposes, the chewing propensities of the men. In the absence of snuff, tobacco in the plug or leaf is invariably resorted to as a substitute. Oriental betel-chewing, and the Japanese fashion of blacking the teeth of married ladies, are the height of elegance compared with snuff-dipping. The habit leads to a speedy decay of the teeth, and to nervous disorders of every kind. Those who indulge in it become haggard at a very early age.
The Petersburg (Va.) Express estimates the number of women in that State as one hundred and twenty-five thousand, one hundred thousand of whom are snuff-dippers. Every five of these will use a two-ounce paper of snuff per day; that is, to the hundred thousand dippers, two thousand five hundred pounds a day, amounting, in one year, to the enormous quantity of nine hundred and twelve thousand pounds. This practice prevails generally, it says, among the poor whites, though some females of the higher classes are guilty of it.
The poor whites obtain their subsistence, as far as practicable, in the primitive aboriginal mode, viz., by hunting and fishing. When these methods fail to afford a supply, they cultivate a truck-patch, and some of them raise a bale or two of cotton, with the proceeds of the sale of which they buy whiskey, tobacco, and a few necessary articles. When all other methods fail, they resort to stealing, to which many of them are addicted from choice, as well as from necessity. They are exceeding slovenly in their habits, cleanliness being a rare virtue. Indolence is a prevailing vice, and its lamentable effects are everywhere visible. They fully obey the scriptural injunction, take no thought for the morrow. A present supply, sufficient to satisfy nature’s most urgent demands, being obtained, their care ceases, and they relapse into listless inactivity. They herd together upon the poor sand-hills, the refuse land of the country, which the rich slaveholder will not purchase, for which reason, they are sometimes called sand-hillers, and here they live, and their children, and their children’s children, through successive generations, in the same deplorable condition of wretchedness and degradation.
They are exceedingly ignorant; not one adult in fifty can write; not one in twenty can read. They can scarcely be said to speak the English language, using a patois which is scarcely intelligible. An old lady thus related an incident of which her daughter “Sal” was the heroine. “My darter Sal yisterday sot the lather to the damsel tree, and clim up, and knocked some of the nicest saftest damsels I ever seed in my born days.” I once called to make some inquiry about the road, at a small log tenement, inhabited by a sand-hiller and family. A sheet was hanging upon the wall, containing the portraits of the Presidents of the United States. I remarked to the lady of the house that those were, I believed, the pictures of the Presidents.
“Yes!” she replied; “they is, and I’ve hearn tell of ’em a long time. They must be gittin’ mighty old, ef some of ’em aint dead. That top one,” she continued, “is Gineral Washington. I’ve hearn of him ever sence I was a gal. He must be gittin’ up in years, ef he aint dead. Him and Gineral Jackson fit the British and Tories at New Orleans, and whipped ’em, too.”
She seemed to pride herself greatly on her historical knowledge.
One of these geniuses once informed me of a peculiar kind of book “he’d hearn tell on,” that the Yankees had. He had forgotten its name, but thus described it: “It told the day of the week the month come in on. It told when we was a gwine to have rain, and what kind of wether we was gwine to have in gineral. May-be they call it a rain-book.”
I replied that I had heard of the book, and I believed that it was called an Almanac.
“You’ve said it now,” remarked the man. “It’s a alminick, and I’d give half I’s wuth to have one. I’d no when to take a umberell, and if I haddent nary one, I’d no when I could go a huntin’ without gittin’ wet.”