This letter will be the first of a series, in which, while travelling at the South, I propose to give you such minutes of the observations that I make as shall seem to me indicative of the wealth and intelligence of the districts through which I pass; of the elements of happiness possessed by their inhabitants; and of the degree in which they are made available. More especially I wish to examine and describe their agricultural character and the manner of the husbandry under which are produced those great staples, the annual magnitude and value of which have become a subject, in our day, of world-wide interest and of vital consequence to our manufactures and commerce.

No man can write of the South and put Slavery entirely in the background. I wish to see for myself, and shall endeavor to report with candor and fidelity, to you, the ordinary condition of the laborers of the South, with respect to material comfort and moral and intellectual happiness. I am disposed to treat the subject with kindness, frankness and candor, and I trust in so doing I may be able to encourage the conviction that it is only in the justice, good sense, and Christian sentiment of the people of the South, that the evils of Slavery will find their end.

I shall endeavor to ascertain the general disposition and purposes of our Southern fellow-citizens with regard to Slavery, and shall look for any indications of a changing character, advance or otherwise, in civilization, religion and intelligence, of the African race under the influence of the circumstances in which it exists at the South. I shall also study as far as I am able, the economical aspect of Slavery, and learn what degree of adaptability is exhibited by the negro for other than agricultural and domestic drudgery.

Twelve hours of travel over exceedingly mismanaged railroads, changing cars four times; a few miles by omnibus, and a few more of horse-draft; no chance to dine or sup, only to snatch a poor mouthful in a ferryboat; left, nevertheless, half an hour at one point, with no one to direct you or explain the delay; obliged to run at another to save your passage; no fires in New-Jersey; roasting ones in Maryland;—so you come from the metropolis to the capital of the United States. Fares high, and speed low. It is too shameful to be passed without grumbling.

In the vicinity of the District of Columbia, the staple crop is tobacco; the land much of the same character, and cultivated most miserably on the same system as has long prevailed in the tobacco districts of the Middle States, [87]

and which I shall describe in Virginia. Wheat culture has lately become profitable by the aid of guano, a very large amount of which has been used this season. The “three crop” system of Virginia is followed where tobacco is not cultivated: maize, wheat and clover (rest, or pasture) in constant succession, the fertility of the soil being sustained by dung applied to the hoed crop, and lime, plaster, and of late, guano, to the wheat. The clover is sometimes allowed to remain two years, and the whole crop of the second year plowed in. This, with liming or marling, (the marl being mainly fossil sea-shells, containing about forty per cent. carbonate of lime), is an improving course. On one farm that I visited, there was a large dairy-stock, supplying milk to Washington City, and on this turnips (ruta baga and hybrids) were largely cultivated. The crop of this year was estimated to be 30,000 bushels, grown on about 33 acres. They were sown from the 15th to 25th of July, by drill barrow, flat, the soil enriched by dung and guano. The stock of this farm was excellent, a large proportion being thoroughbred Short-horns, with imported Ayrshires and Alderneys, and some small black and white “Natives.”

What the ordinary stock of the region is may be judged on market day at Washington; the most miserable, dwarfish, ugly, lean kine that I ever saw. I do not believe all the Northern States could produce such a scurvy drove. Market day in Washington (it occurs three times a week) is very amusing to the stranger. The horses are as bad as the cattle, and the human stock (negroes) is, if possible, worse than either. I saw but one pair of horses out of over a hundred together, that did not appear to have been foundered or maimed.

There is a good story told by a member of Congress from Pennsylvania, to show the style in which business is often done in these parts. An old negro woman called at his door, having a fine turkey for sale. Struck with her fatigued appearance, he asked her how far she had come, and learned that she had been [88]

three days and nights on the road. “Old massa” was in need of some money, and having nothing else convenient to sell, she had been dispatched on foot with the turkey to Washington, to “raise” it for him.

The number of slaves in Maryland has slightly increased during the last ten years. A great many are annually sold out of the State, the purchasers being mainly Jews, who take them first to Richmond, Virginia, and after-wards to New-Orleans. There are many free negroes, and I have heard complaints of kidnappers. One gentleman told me that many more free boys were sent South and made slaves in his District, than there were of slaves that escaped to the free States. In the District of Columbia the Slave-trade no longer exists, and the number of slaves has decreased twenty-five per cent. during the last ten years. White servants are employed at some of the hotels, and Irishmen are largely engaged on public works, and considerably in agriculture. At one plantation where I found them digging drains, when I asked the proprietor why he did not employ them more, he asserted that slave-labor was much cheaper, except for certain operations. His main objection to the Irish was, that they would not perform their work faithfully, and that they cheated and lied to him. He thought better of Germans, but thought there was no chance of any other laborers coming in competition with slaves for general agricultural purposes. He was a large hereditory slave-owner. A few German emigrants have settled in Maryland during the last ten years, and are doing very well as farmers.

In Fairfax, the nearest county of Virginia to Washington, a large number of Northern farmers have latterly settled, and are reported to be successful and well satisfied. The Virginians everywhere give a hearty welcome to [89] Northern immigrants. I understand that these Northern men seldom purchase slaves, but frequently hire them. They are usually small farmers, occupying from fifty to one hundred and fifty acres of land, and tilling it mainly by their own labor and that of their families, in the old New-England way. They are said to have greatly improved the general character of the county, and on this point the following evidence is interesting.

“In appearance the county is so changed in many parts, that a traveler who passed over it ten years ago, would not now recognize it. Thousands and thousands of acres, which had been cultivated in tobacco by the former proprietors, would not pay the cost, and were abandoned as worthless, and became covered with a wilderness of pines. These lands have been purchased by Northern emigrants; the large tracts divided and subdivided, and cleared of pines; and neat farm houses and barns, with smiling fields of grain and grass in the season, salute the delighted gaze of the beholder. Ten years ago, it was a mooted question whether Fairfax lands could be made productive; and if so, would they pay the cost? This problem has been satisfactorily solved by many, and in consequence of the above altered state of things, school houses and churches have doubled in number.”—Report to Com. of Patents, 1852.

There is one cotton factory in the District of Columbia employing one hundred and fifty hands, male and female; a small foundry; a distillery; and two tanneries—all not giving occupation to fifty men; less than two hundred altogether, out of a resident population of nearly 150,000, being engaged in manufactures. Very few of the remainder are engaged in producing occupations.

Leaving Washington at day-light, and breakfasting on the boat as she passed Mount Vernon, I took the cars at Acquia Creek for Richmond, Virginia. Flat rail; distance 75 miles; time, 5½ hours (13 miles an hour); fare, $3.50; 4⅔ cents, a mile. Boat makes 55 miles in 3½ hours, including two stoppages; (12½ miles an hour); fare $2.00; (3.6 cents a mile.)

The country seen by the traveler on the route, is not, I believe, a fair specimen of this part of Virginia. Most of it is wet, swampy; pine and white and red oak forest, now and then an old “clearing;” the fields grown over with thin, dry, coarse grass, young gum trees, pines and sassafras. Rotting log-cabins that you can see the light through the chinks of, are scattered around a shabby board-house without a tree or a bit of grass near it; swine, and black and white children, lounge about; and perhaps a white and a black woman’s face are thrust together out at the door, to stare at the train. The only sign of a production other than the little live stock, is to be found in the long piles of cord-wood, which line the rail-road.

There will be occasionally a few miles of a more cultivated district. The soil looks poor and there is much water standing in it. Considerable breadths of it are in wheat, which is usually well put in, in narrow bands or beds, and carefully water-furrowed; contrasting much with all the other husbandry and indicating that it has been of late a sufficiently profitable crop to rouse some enterprise and skill. This is due to guano. The stubble of maize, [90] three or four feet high, it having been cut above the ear for fodder, is the only sign of any other crop that you can find, except very rarely a small patch of sweet potato ridges. Much the larger share of the fields are “resting” and covered with a tall, dry, coarse and worthless grass, called broomsedge. In about three miles of one of the best tracts we passed, I judged there were the proportions of three hundred “at rest”; one hundred, wheat; and twenty, maize.

The planter’s house is usually a plain, two-story, clap-boarded building, fifty feet long, and twenty wide, divided in its length by a hall, against each outside door of which is a broad porch. It is more commonly shaded by a few old white-oak trees, left from the original forest growth. Scattering about it, without much order, are from two to a dozen log-cabins for the negroes. The latter you will see, men and women, loading and carting maize to the corn-crib, or “grubbing” the sassafras bushes with great awkward hoes and clumsy axes, loaded with much unnecessary weight of iron. At every cross-road and stopping-place you see plenty of them with mules and long heavy wagons, and with crownless or brimless hats, and rags and grins and incomprehensible outcries to the cattle; all but for their dark, inexpressive faces, exactly like the poorest Irish peasantry. Their masters, you see, too, occasionally, on horseback (very good blood-like horses), or they leave the seat by the side of you, carrying out a pair of saddlebags, and mount a horse that a black boy has brought for them. At twenty such country stations I did not see a spring-carriage.

Many of the planters’ mansions are much finer than those I have described. You see these at a distance on the most elevated ground in the vicinity, with more or less of a grove about them and the “negro quarters” at some distance; log huts as before but regularly placed in rows. The house may be of brick and quite large with a verandah, and long low buildings stretching out from it, somewhat after the fashion of the Washington mansion at Mount Vernon; more commonly they are in a compact heavy style, not in particularly bad taste, but never elegant and usually failing in neatness and more or less needing repairs.

We passed in sight of one tannery and two or three saw mills, and at Fredericksburg through the streets of a rather busy, shabbily built town; but altogether the country showed less signs of an active and prospering people, in the distance passed over, than any other I have ever journeyed through either in the old or new world. A coarse rough looking old man sat beside me, and wishing to obtain some information, I asked him if he was acquainted with the country. “No I ain’t—don’t look very fertile, does it?”

“It does not indeed.”

“I’ve heerd ’em say out West, that old Virginny was the mother o’ statesmen—reckon she must be about done, eh? This ere’s about the barrenest look for a mother, ever I see.”

At a way-station a lady entered the car with a family behind her. She looked about, as if seeking a place where they could get together, and I rose and suggested to a gentleman on the next seat that by both of us moving we might [91] leave her four seats, and offering her my place withdrew; she accepted it without thanking me, and immediately installed in it a great negro-woman, and seated the rest of her party near her. There was a young white girl, probably her daughter, and a bright and very pretty, nearly white, mulatto girl of about the same age; the latter was dressed as expensively, and appeared every way as well as the former, and they talked and laughed together, as if on terms of entire equality and perfect familiarity. Afterwards I noticed that they were all four eating something out of the same paper. Many people at the North would have been indignant or “disgusted” with such proceedings, but they excited no attention here.