I saw a good deal of your uncle and his family when at Petersburg and was very pleasantly entertained by them. It was Christmas holidays and the girls were enjoying themselves, and I did some of the same.

[213]

I have seen but little of Southern Society or domestic life. I go over too much ground and too hastily for that. I spend but a week at a town: it takes half that to find any body at home and the rest to begin an acquaintance. I have been unfortunate, too, in rarely finding any body to whom I had letters and have been able no more than to glance at the outside of things—Occasionally getting peeps in through accidental openings. For 4 days after I reached here I didn’t find a soul at home & nobody called or if they did their cards missed coming to me.

However, since then-I’ve been up to Dick Taylor’s. He has been lately taken all aback by a paralysis of right side—all his limbs powerless. He has a capital plantation and a devil of a Creole wife-young, childish, whimsical, comical; with a baby of her own. A capital manager he is and is making money-nearly paid off a debt of $100,000 contracted in purchase of plantation-3 good years. It is the most complete gambling-cotton & sugar planting. Negroes well taken care of and comfortable as possible.

Bayne was immensely busy at law and I couldn’t get near him till yesterday when he dined with me at St. Charles. Today he is going to take me out to a plantation & in the evening to a Quadroon circle of friends.

To-morrow I go up Red River on the “St. Charles,” how high I don’t know. It depends on the water & the boiler, which my berth is directly over. I hope it will be to Texas and not to Heaven.

Lost all my baggage—taken by mistake while I was dining out and sent up the river. Can’t get it back till I am gone—have to get a new outfit. All my papers, books, &c., in it.

It’s jolly hot.

I haven’t experienced any remarkable amount of Southern hospitality. What I have met with has been mainly from Northern people & English.

Jackson has been and is making a fortune. Built a fine house, fine as yours (in Southern style), and was too busy to let me see much of him or be of any service to me. I wasted a week waiting for him to get me onto an Alabama cotton plantation; which he didn’t after all. Nice woman, his wife, & they were kind to me at home. I had the run of the house, dined & tea’d twice or thrice. He said he would write to you & if you were within reach would strike you for writing him such a letter, you aggravatin’ wretch. He hadn’t thought much about Slavery—if he had he didn’t like to say what he thought, beyond the simple material view. Owns some capital niggers.

Bayne has come in to take me away, so goodbye.

Yours Truly