April 29th.—This morning up at 6 A.M., bade farewell to our hostess and Barnwell Island, and proceeded with Trescot back to the Pocotaligo station, which we reached at 12·20. On our way Mr. Heyward and his son rode out of a field, looking very like a couple of English country squires in all but hats and saddles. The young gentleman was good enough to bring over a snake hawk he had shot for me. At the station, to which the Heywards accompanied us, were the Elliotts and others, who had come over with invitations and adieux; and I beguiled the time to Savannah reading the very interesting book by Mr. Elliott, senior, on the Wild Sports of Carolina, which was taken up by some one when I left the car-carriage for a moment and not returned to me. The country through which we passed was flat and flooded as usual, and the rail passed over dark deep rivers on lofty trestle-work, by pine wood and dogwood tree, by the green plantation clearing, with mud bank, dyke, and tiny canal mile by mile, the train stopping for the usual freight of ladies, and negro nurses, and young planters, all very much of the same class, till at 3 o’clock P.M., the cars rattled up alongside a large shed, and we were told we had arrived at Savannah.
Here was waiting for me Mr. Charles Green, who had already claimed me and my friend as his guests, and I found in his carriage the young American designer, who had preceded me from Charleston, and had informed Mr. Green of my coming.
The drive through such portion of Savannah as lay between the terminus and Mr. Green’s house, soon satisfied my eyes that it had two peculiarities. In the first place, it had the deepest sand in the streets I have ever seen; and next, the streets were composed of the most odd, quaint, green windowed, many coloured little houses I ever beheld, with an odd population of lean, sallow, ill-dressed unwholesome-looking whites, lounging about the exchanges and corners, and a busy, well-clad, gaily-attired race of negroes, working their way through piles of children, under the shade of the trees which bordered all the streets. The fringe of green, and the height attained by the live oak, Pride of India, and magnolia, give a delicious freshness and novelty to the streets of Savannah, which is increased by the great, number of squares and openings covered with something like sward, fenced round by white rail, and embellished with noble trees to be seen at every few hundred yards. It is difficult to believe you are in the midst of a city, and I was repeatedly reminded of the environs of a large Indian cantonment—the same kind of churches and detached houses, with their plantations and gardens not unlike. The wealthier classes, however, have houses of the New York Fifth Avenue character: one of the best of these, a handsome mansion of rich red sandstone, belonged to my host, who coming out from England many years ago, raised himself by industry and intelligence to the position of one of the first merchants in Savannah. Italian statuary graced the hall; finely carved tables and furniture, stained glass, and pictures from Europe set forth the sitting-rooms; and the luxury of bath-rooms and a supply of cold fresh water, rendered it an exception to the general run of Southern edifices. Mr. Green drove me through the town, which impressed me more than ever with its peculiar character. We visited Brigadier-General Lawton, who is charged with the defences of the place against the expected Yankees, and found him just setting out to inspect a band of volunteers, whose drums we heard in the distance, and whose bayonets were gleaming through the clouds of Savannah dust, close to the statue erected to the memory of one Pulaski, a Pole, who was mortally wounded in the unsuccessful defence of the city against the British in the War of Independence. He turned back and led us into his house. The hall was filled with little round rolls of flannel. “These,” said he, “are cartridges for cannon of various calibres, made by the ladies of Mrs. Lawton’s ‘cartridge class.’” There were more cartridges in the back parlour, so that the house was not quite a safe place to smoke a cigar in. The General has been in the United States’ army, and has now come forward to head the people of this State in their resistance to the Yankees.
We took a stroll in the park, and I learned the news of the last few days. The people of the South, I find, are delighted at a snubbing which Mr. Seward has given to Governor Hicks of Maryland, for recommending the arbitration of Lord Lyons, and he is stated to have informed Governor Hicks that “our troubles could not be referred to foreign arbitration, least of all to that of the representative of a European monarchy.” The most terrible accounts are given of the state of things in Washington. Mr. Lincoln consoles himself for his miseries by drinking. Mr. Seward follows suit. The White House and capital are full of drunken border ruffians, headed by one Jim Lane of Kansas. But, on the other hand, the Yankees, under one Butler, a Massachusetts lawyer, have arrived at Annapolis, in Maryland, secured the “Constitution” man-of-war, and are raising masses of men for the invasion of the South all over the States. The most important thing, as it strikes me, is the proclamation of the Governor of Georgia, forbidding citizens to pay any money on account of debts due to Northerners, till the end of the war. General Robert E. Lee has been named Commander-in-Chief of the Forces of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and troops are flocking to that State from Alabama and other States. Governor Ellis has called out 30,000 volunteers in North Carolina, and Governor Rector of Arkansas has seized the United States’ military stores at Napoleon. There is a rumour that Fort Pickens has been taken also, but it is very probably untrue. In Texas and Arkansas the United States regulars have not made an attempt to defend any of the forts.
In the midst of all this warlike work, volunteers drilling, bands playing, it was pleasant to walk in the shady park, with its cool fountains, and to see the children playing about—many of them, alas! “playing at soldiers”—in charge of their nurses. Returning, sat in the verandah and smoked a cigar; but the musquitoes were very keen and numerous. My host did not mind them, but my cuticle will never be sting-proof.
April 30th.—At 1·30 P.M. a small party started from Mr. Green’s to visit the cemetery of Bonaventure, to which every visitor to Savannah must pay his pilgrimage; difficiles aditus primos habet—a deep sandy road which strains the horses and the carriages; but at last “the shell road” is reached—a highway several miles long, consisting of oyster shells—the pride of Savannah, which eats as many oysters as it can to add to the length of this wonderful road. There is no stone in the whole of the vast alluvial ranges of South Carolina and Maritime Georgia, and the only substance available for making a road is the oyster shell. There is a toll gate at each end to aid the oyster shells. Remember they are three times the size of any European crustacean of the sort.
A pleasant drive through the shady hedgerows and bordering trees lead to a dilapidated porter’s lodge and gateway, within which rose in a towering mass of green one of the finest pieces of forest architecture possible; nothing to be sure like Burnham Beeches, or some of the forest glades of Windsor, but possessed, nevertheless, of a character quite its own. What we gazed upon was, in fact, the ruin of grand avenues of live oak, so well-disposed that their peculiar mode of growth afforded an unusual development of the “Gothic idea,” worked out and elaborated by a superabundant fall from the overlacing arms and intertwined branches of the tillandsia, or Spanish moss, a weeping, drooping, plumaceous parasite, which does to the tree what its animal type, the yellow fever—vomito prieto—does to man—clings to it everlastingly, drying up sap, poisoning blood, killing the principle of life till it dies. The only differ, as they say in Ireland, is, that the tillandsia all the time looks very pretty, and that the process lasts very long. Some there are who praise this tillandsia, hanging like the tresses of a witch’s hair over an invisible face, but to me it is a paltry parasite, destroying the grace and beauty of that it preys upon, and letting fall its dull tendrils over the fresh lovely green, as clouds drop over the face of some beautiful landscape. Despite all this, Bonaventure is a scene of remarkable interest; it seems to have been intended for a place of tombs. The Turks would have filled it with turbaned white pillars, and with warm ghosts at night. The French would have decorated it with interlaced hands of stone, with tears of red and black on white ground, with wreathes of immortelles. I am not sure that we would have done much more than have got up a cemetery company, interested Shillibeer, hired a beadle, and erected an iron paling. The Savannah people not following any of these fashions, all of which are adopted in Northern cities, have left everything to nature and the gatekeeper, and to the owner of one of the hotels, who has got up a grave yard in the ground. And there, scattered up and down under the grand old trees, which drop tears of Spanish moss, and weave wreathes of Spanish moss, and shake plumes of Spanish moss over them, are a few monumental stones to certain citizens of Savannah. There is a melancholy air about the place independently of these emblems of our mortality, which might recommend it specially for picnics. There never was before a cemetery where nature seemed to aid the effect intended by man so thoroughly. Everyone knows a weeping willow will cry over a wedding party if they sit under it, as well as over a grave. But here the Spanish moss looks like weepers wreathed by some fantastic hand out of the crape of Dreamland. Lucian’s Ghostlander, the son of Skeleton of the Tribe of the Juiceless, could tell us something of such weird trappings. They are known indeed as the best bunting for yellow fever to fight under. Wherever their flickering horsehair tresses wave in the breeze, taper end downwards, Squire Black Jack is bearing lance and sword. One great green oak says to the other, “This fellow is killing me. Take his deadly robes off my limbs!” “Alas! See how he is ruining me! I have no life to help you.” It is, indeed, a strange and very ghastly place. Here are so many querci virentes, old enough to be strong, and big, and great, sapfull, lusty, wide armed, green-honoured—all dying out slowly beneath tillandsia, as if they were so many monarchies perishing of decay—or so many youthful republics dying of buncombe brag, richness of blood, and other diseases fatal to overgrown bodies politic.
The void left in the midst of all these designed walks and stately avenues, by the absence of any suitable centre, increases the seclusion and solitude. A house ought to be there somewhere you feel—in fact there was once the mansion of the Tatnalls, a good old English family, whose ancestors came from the old country, ere the rights of man were talked of, and lived among the Oglethorpes, and such men of the pigtail school, who would have been greatly astonished at finding themselves in company with Benjamin Franklin or his kind. I don’t know anything of old Tatnall. Indeed who does? But he had a fine idea of planting trees, which he never got in America, where he would have received scant praise for anything but his power to plant cotton or sugar-cane just now. In his knee-breeches, and top boots, I can fancy the old gentleman reproducing some home scene, and boasting to himself, “I will make it as fine as Lord Nihilo’s park.” Could he see it now?—A decaying army of the dead. The mansion was burned down during a Christmas merrymaking, and was never built again, and the young trees have grown up despite the Spanish moss, and now they stand, as it were in cathedral aisles, around the ruins of the departed house, shading the ground, and enshrining its memories in an antiquity which seems of the remotest, although it is not as ancient as that of the youngest oak in the Squire’s park at home.
I have before oftentimes in my short voyages here, wondered greatly at the reverence bestowed on a tree. In fact, it is because a tree of any decent growth is sure to be older than anything else around it; and although young America revels in her future, she is becoming old enough to think about her past.
In the evening Mr. Green gave a dinner to some very agreeable people, Mr. Ward, the Chinese Minister—(who tried, by-the-bye, to make it appear that his wooden box was the Pekin State carriage for distinguished foreigners)—Mr. Locke, the clever and intelligent editor of the principal journal in Savannah, Brigadier Lawton, one of the Judges, a Britisher, owner of the once renowned America which, under the name of Camilla, was now lying in the river (not perhaps without reference to a little speculation in running the blockade, hourly expected), Mr. Ward and Commodore Tatnall, so well known to us in England for his gallant conduct in the Peiho affair, when he offered and gave our vessels aid, though a neutral, and uttered the exclamation in doing so,—in his despatch at all events,—“that blood was thicker than water.” Of our party was also Mr. Hodgson, well known to most of our Mediterranean travellers some years back, when he was United States’ Consul in the East. He amuses his leisure still by inditing and reading monographs on the languages of divers barbarous tribes in Numidia and Mauritania.