AN ENGLISHMAN IN SOUTH CAROLINA. DECEMBER, 1860, AND JULY, 1862.
CHAPTER FIRST.
'The happiest people on the face of the earth, sir!'
I had heard the assertion in almost all of the slave States, and knew something of the institution on which it was based: I was now listening to the familiar sentence at an epoch that has become historical. I sat in Charleston, South Carolina, during Secession time, December, 1860.
'They are better fed and better treated than any peasantry in the civilized world. I've travelled in Europe and seen for myself, sir. What do you think of women—white women—working in the fields and living on nothing better than thin soup and vegetables, as they do in France, all the year round? And a man, with a family of nine children to support, breaking stones on the high road, in winter, for eight English shillings a week? Such a thing couldn't happen in South Carolina—in all the South, sir!'
'Perhaps not!' I didn't add that worse social wrongs might and did occur daily, in the eulogized region; knowing the utter unprofitableness of any such discussion, not to mention its danger at a period rife with excitement.
'You are an Englishman,' continued my interlocutor—a portly, middle-aged, handsome man, to whom I had been introduced just before the hotel dinner, toward the close of which our colloquy occurred—'and therefore a born abolitionist—as a matter of sentiment, that is. You know nothing at all about the workings of our institution, excepting what the d—d Yankees please to write about us, and the word slavery shocks you. Call it servitude, vassalage, anything else, it might be endurable enough. One of the advantages, by the way, that Secession is going to bring with it is, that the world will be brought into direct contact with us, and thus see us as we are, not through the eyes of the North.'
'You are in earnest about Secession, then?'
'In earnest! by —— I should think we were! Don't you know we are, from what you have seen here?'
I did, and a moment's reflection might have checked my thoughtless inquiry. I said so.