POWER AND LIBERTY.
Richmond, Aug. 16, 1835.
Richmond stands in an admirable situation on the slope of a hill whose base is bathed by the James River. Its Capitol, with its brick columns covered with plaster, with its cornice and architrave of painted wood, produces an effect, at a distance, which even the Parthenon, in the days of Pericles, could not have surpassed; for the sky of Virginia, when it is not darkened by a storm, or veiled with snow, is as beautiful as that of Attica. Richmond has its port nearer than the Piræus was to Athens, while, at the same time it stands upon the falls of James River. Richmond enchanted me from the first by its charming situation and the cordiality of its inhabitants; and it pleases me by its ambition, for it aspires to be a metropolis, and it is making the due preparations to assume that character by the great works which it is executing or aiding to execute, canals, railroads, water-works, huge mills, workshops, for which the fall in the river affords an almost unlimited motive power. Here I also found some countrymen, whose love for their country had not been chilled by fifty years of absence and eighty years of age, and who have preserved, amidst the simplicity of American manners, that fine flower of courtesy, of which the germ is daily disappearing amongst us. I went yesterday, for the second time, to visit the cannon and mortars, given to America during her struggle for independence, by Louis XVI. In the Capitol, by the side of the statue of Washington, I found the bust of Lafayette. I heard the names of Rochambeau and d'Estaing pronounced, as if they were old friends who had left but yesterday. I seem to myself, at times to have been miraculously transported, not into France, but on the frontiers.
My admiration of Richmond is not, however, blind; the founders of the new city have plotted out streets one hundred feet wide, like the highways in the style of Louis XIV.; but in our great roads, between the quagmires on the right and left, there is at least a strip of passable pavement or roadway. The streets of new Richmond have neither pavement nor light. In the rainy season, they are dangerous bogs, in which, I am told, that several cows, who are here allowed by the municipal authorities to go at large, have met with the fate of the master of Ravensworth in the Kelpie. Richmond has, also, something of the aspect of Washington; with the exception of the business part of the town, it is neither city nor country; the houses are scattered about on an imaginary plan, and it is almost impossible to find any lines to guide you, or to recognise the street K, F, or D, to which you are referred; for the alphabet has furnished the names here, as the arithmetic has done at Washington. The plot of Richmond has, however, this advantage over that of Washington, that it is on a smaller scale and will be more speedily filled up; whilst Washington with its arrangements for a million inhabitants, will not, perhaps, have fifty thousand, twenty years hence.
There is something in Richmond which offends me more than its bottomless mudholes, and shocks me more than the rudeness of the western Virginians,[DA] whom I met here during the session of the legislature; it is slavery. Half of the population is black or mulatto; physically, the negroes are well used in Virginia, partly from motives of humanity, and partly, because they are so much live stock raised for exportation to Louisiana; morally, they are treated as if they did not belong to the human race. Free or slave, the black is here denied all that can give him the dignity of man. The law forbids the instruction of the slave or the free man of colour in the simplest rudiments of learning, under the severest penalties; the slave has no family; he has no civil rights; he holds no property. The white man knows that the slave has opened his ear to the word which every thing here proclaims aloud, liberty; he knows that in secret the negro broods over hopes and schemes of vengeance, and that the exploits and martyrdom of Gabriel, the leader of an old conspiracy, and of Turner, the hero of a more recent insurrection, are still related in the negro cabins.[DB] The precautionary measures which this knowledge has induced the whites to adopt, are such as freeze the heart of a stranger with horror.
Richmond is noted for its tobacco and flour market. The Richmond flour is prized at Rio Janeiro as much as at New York, at Lima as well as at Havana. The largest flour-mill in the world is at Richmond, running twenty pair of stones, containing a great variety of accessory machinery, and capable of manufacturing 600 barrels of flour a day. The reputation of the Richmond flour in foreign markets, like that of the American flour in general, depends upon a system of inspection peculiar to the country, which contravenes, indeed, the theory of absolute commercial freedom, but is essential to the prosperity of American commerce, and has never, that I have heard of, been a subject of complaint. The flour is inspected previous to its being exported. The weight of each barrel and the quality of of the flour are ascertained by the inspector, and branded on the barrel-head. The superior qualities only can be exported; the inspection is real and thorough, and is performed at the expense of the holder. The Havana, Brazilian, or Peruvian merchant is thus perfectly sure of the quality of the merchandise he buys; both the buyer and the seller find their advantage in it.
Commerce can no more dispense with confidence in the market than with credit in the counting-house.
Tobacco is subjected to the same system of inspection, and in general, all the coast States, all those from which produce is exported to foreign parts, have established this system, and applied it to almost all articles in which frauds can be committed. Thus in New York wheat-flour and Indian corn-meal, beef, pork, salt fish, potash, whale oil, lumber, staves, flax-seed, leather, tobacco, hops, spirits, are all inspected. In regard to flour, the law is more rigourous than in respect to other articles. The inspector brands with the word light those barrels which are not of the legal weight, and the exportation of which is also prohibited, and with the word bad those which are of poor quality. As for Indian corn, it is required that the grain shall have been kiln-dried before grinding. Flour from other States cannot be sold in the city of New York, even for local consumption, unless it has been inspected the same as if for exportation. Every inspector has the right to search vessels in which he suspects that there is flour that has not been inspected, and to seize what has been so shipped, or what it has been attempted to ship. There are beside various other provisions and penalties to prevent fraud.
If the necessity of these inspections were not sufficiently proved by their good effects and by long experience, it would be by the abuses that prevail in those articles of commerce which are not subjected to the system. Complaints have already been made in Liverpool, that bales of cotton are often made up of an inferior article concealed beneath an outer layer of good quality. From a report addressed to the Chamber of American Commerce in this metropolis of the cotton trade, by the principal cotton-brokers, it appears that this has not been confined to two or three bales, amidst large quantities, but that whole lots of one or two hundred bales have been found thus deficient.