Land we love, a monthly magazine devoted to literature, military history, and agriculture.

              THE LAND WE LOVE.
Ko. V. MARCH, 1869. Vol. VI.
SKETCH OF GENERAL W. Y. SLACK, OF MISSOURI.
Mr. A. Slack, of Booneville,
Missouri, has kindly furnished us
with the following obituary notices
of his heroic brother, Gen. W. T.
Slack, who fell in the struggle for
Constitutional freedom, at the
battle of Elk Horn, Missouri, on
the 7th March, 1862:
From tlie Memphis Avalanche, May
8th, 1862.
Brigadier Gen. William Yarnel
Slack, was born in Kentucky;
when three years of age, his
father, John Slack, emigrated to
Boone county, Missouri, and set-tled
near Columbia, where young
Slack, on completing his education,
studied law. When a young man,
he went to Livingston county, Mo.,
and commenced practicing law at
Chillicothe. Soon after, he mar-ried
the daughter of Maj. Wood-ward,
of Bichmond, Ray county,
Missouri, with whom he lived
happily, until her death, which
occurred in January, 1856. The
issue of this marriage was six
VOL. VI.—NO. V.
children, only two of whom are
living, a daughter, and a son but
seventeen years of age, who has
been in the service as a private,
since the commencement of the
war, and who has done his duty
as a soldier. On the 2nd of De-cember,
1857, General Slack was
again married to a daughter of
Hon. Gustavus Bower, of Paris,
Missouri, by whom he had two
children; the youngest being born
after the second retreat from
Livingston, he was never permit-ted
to see.
As captain of a company of
cavalry. Gen. Slack served with
distinction in the Mexican war,
under Col. Sterling Price, who
then commanded a regiment of
Missourians, with as much ability,
courage and success, as he
now leads armies to battle and
victory. At the well contested
battles of Canada, Embudo and
Taos, where the enemy number-ed
three to one, all who saw him,
agree in saying that none con-
25
358 Sketch of General W. Y. Slack, of Missouri. [March,
ducted themselves with greater
coolness, courage and gallantry,
than Capt. Slack. He remained
in this service about fourteen
months, having volunteered for
twelve. "When his country no
longer needed his services, he re-sumed
the practice of law, at
Chillicothe, which he continued
to pursue until he received from
Crov. Jackson, the appointment of
Brigadier General of the 4th
Military District, when he turned
his attention to the organization
of troops, according to the mili-tary
law of the State of Missouri.
He had mustered in but a few
companies, and these far apart, at
different points in the district,
when eight hundred Federals were
landed from the cars, on the night
of the 14th of June, 186 L, at
Chillicothe, and he was forced to
ieave his home and family, to
which he was destined never to
return.
From this time, until his death,
he was constantly in the field,
using every effort and energy in
the cause of Southern independ-ence.
During the fatiguing and
harassing marches of the State
Guard, /le u'fis ahcays at his 2^ost,
and shared the fare, the dangers,
and the hardships of his men.
He participated and contributed
largely to the success of the bat-tles
of Carthage and Oak Hill ; at
the latter he was dangerously
wounded in the hip, which, at
first was thought to be mortal,
but by the strict attention of Dr.
Iveith, his family physician, and
the careful nursing of his faithful
and atfectionate wife, who en-countered
every danger and came
to him, he at last recovered, and
again took command of his di-vision,
the 11th of October follow-ing.
When the troops,belonging to the
Missouri State Guard, were being
mustered into the Confederate
States service, last winter. Gen.
Slack used every effort to induce
the men under his command to
join it, nearly all of whom took
his advice, and are still in the
service.
A short time before the com-mencement
of the retreat from
Springfield, Gen. Slack was ap-pointed
by Gen. Price to command
the second brigade of Missouri
Confederates, a body consisting of
companies which had not been
organized into regiments or bat-talions,
in all about fifteen hun-dred
men.
It was with these men and the
4th division Missouri State Guard,
that Gen. Van Dorn,in his re-port
of the battle of Elk Horn,
speaks of Gen. Slack as " gallant-ly
maintaining a continued and
successful attack."
At this battle, on March the
7th, Gen. Slack was mortally
wounded—the ball entering an
inch above the old wound he re-ceived
at Oak Hill, ranging down-wards,
and which, wounding (Sa-cra?
Plexus of nerves, produced
paralysis of the urinary organs,
which resulted in inflammation
and gangrene. He was caught by
Col. Scott, his Aid-de-camp, when
about to fall from his horse, and
with the assistance of others care-fully
conveyed in an ambulance to
a house in Sugar Hollow, where
his wound was skilfully dressed
by Dr. Austin, the division sur-geon.
1869. Sketch of General W. Y. Slack, of Missouri. 359
The next day, when the order
was given to fall back, he was
placed in an ambulance and con-veyed
to Andrew Eallet's east of
the battle ground, accompanied
by Col. Cravens and Dr. Keith,
of the 4th division, and Sergeant
Street of the 2nd brigade; here
he remained until the 16th, and
seemed to be doing well, when be-coming
apprehensive of being
captured by the Federals, he de-sired
his attendants to take him
further away; they accordingly
removed him seven miles further,
to Moses Mills', where he rapidly
grew worse, and on Thursday,
March 20th, at a quarter past 3
o'clock, a. m., quietly breathed
his last; the next morning he was
buried eight miles east of the bat-tle
ground, by his faithful friends
and companions, all of whom re-turned
safely to the army.
When told his end was ap-proaching,
he expressed no re-grets,
nor gave any evidence of
alarm, but calmly awaited its ar-rival;
his request to Dr. Keith, to
give his watch to his son, if he
ever had an opportunity, was the
only mention he made of his
family or property.
None familiar with the capaci-ties
of Gen. Slack will deny that
he possessed many of the combi-nations
requisite to constitute an
efficient commander of volunteers.
Temperate and abstemious in his
habits, impetuous, daring and
courageous, yet prudent,wary and
cautious, he was well calculated
for skirmishing, or as leader in a
charge.
But these are not the qualities
which alone distinguished him.
His mind was bold, clear and
vigorous, and altogether practical,
which, added to a sound and
penetrating judgment, gave his
opinions no ordinary weight in
council, while his business and
orderly habits enabled him to
conduct with ease and accuracy,
the affairs of his command. He
was affable and courteous in his
manners, generous and unselfish
in his disposition, and kind and
indulgent in his nature; his age
was about 45 years. But that
which most distinguished him,
was his earnest devotion to the
cause in which he fell. It was for
this he gave up his beautiful home,
its enjoyments and associations,
it was for this he encountered
with the fortitude of a soldier and
patriot, the frost and snow of
winter, and the heat and dust of
summer; it was for this he en-dured
the hardships, toils and
privations of one of the longest
and most active and bloodiest
campaigns recorded, or to be re-corded,
on the pages of history;
it was for this he sufiered long and
painfully ; it was for this he look-ed
death in the face in many
shapes and forms ; it was for this
he died. Many others of the
great and noble of our land did
the same, but none endured all
more patiently, suffered all more
gladly, or gave up their lives more
freely. And of all the offerings
yet laid upon the altar of State
Sovereignty and Constitutional
Liberty, there is none purer or
nobler than that offered by Gen.
W. Y. Slack.
From tlie Army Argus.
We publish to-day, Maj. Gen,
360 The Burial and Eesurrection of Love. [March
,
Van Dorn's Keport of the battle
of Elk Horn
:
The Report refers in handsome
terms to Gen. Slack, and express-es
the hope that he may recover.
"We are pained to announce that
Gen. Slack's wound proved mor-tal.
He died as a brave man and a
Christian, his loss is almost irrep-arable.
It is generally conceded
that Gen. Slack was the ablest of
our Missouri brigadiers. He com-manded
a company in the Mexi-can
war, under Gen. Price, where
he rendered effective service, and
won a name for coolness and dar-ing.
After the Mexican war, he
resumed the practice of the law,
and ranked among the foremost
members of the bar.
On the occurrence of the recent
hostilities between the oSTorth and
South, he received from Governor
Jackson, the appointment of brig-adier
general.
He fought gallantly at Spring-field,
receiving a wound which
many of his friends, for a long
time, thought would prove mortal.
But, strange to say, he recovered,
and again led his division. He
was in most of the other battles
fought in Missouri, and always
endeared himself to his command
by his bravery and great pru-dence.
At Elk Horn, he was wounded
within an inch of the same spot in
which he had been wounded at
Springfield, but this time the
wound proved mortal. Earewell,
brave man! Your name is em-balmed
in the hearts of the peo-ple
of Missouri, and by your cour-age
and devotion, you have be-queathed
to your children a lega-cy
of more value than millions of
gold and silver.
THE BURIAL AND RESURRECTION OF LOVE.
BY " PEARL RITERS."
Deep, deep, deep,
Quickly so none should know,
I buried my warm love silently
Under the winter snow.
For you had coldly said
,
Coldly, and carelessly:
1869.] Tlie Burial and Eesurrection of Love. 361
" Bury your love, or let it live,
It is all the same to me."
I tore it out of my heart,
I crushed it within my hand
;
It called to you in its agony,
For help, but you came not, and
It struggled within my grasp.
It fought with my woman's will.
And kneeled to my woman's pride with tears,
Then silent it lay and still.
I knew that it was not dead,
But I said it soon will die,
Baried under the winter snow
Under the winter sky.
I kissed it tenderly
Just once for the long ago.
Then shrouded it with your cold white words.
Colder than all the snow.
Deep, deep, deep.
Quickly, so none should know,
I buried my warm love silently
Under the winter snow.
I laughed when it was done,
For why should a woman cry
When love is buried? O'er its grave
Why should a woman sigh?
I thought when I turned away
Some day he may see this grave
And say—''the woman I thought so weak
How strong she was, and brave!"
Throb, throb, throb,
Under the light spring snow.
Buried long, can my love still live?
Kneeling I said, when lo!
TJie Burial and Hesurrection of Love. [March,
My love looked up at me
Straight out of daisy's eyes,
Warmed to life by the balmy air
And the tender azure skies.
It sighed to me with the breeze
It sang to me with the birds,
And every note was an echo sweet
Of your olden loving words.
It smiled on me with the rose
It murmured to me with the bee,
And came to my heart as naturally
As comes the leaf to the tree.
And bowing my head I wept,
Wept o'er my vision love.
And touching my harp strings sad and low,
I told my grief to the dove.
Why should you live, poor love
Slighted, and scorned, and sore
To trail your pain through my future life
And poison my young heart's core?
Alas! when a woman loves
Her strength is too small and slight
To dig a grave that is deep enough
To bury it out of sight.
Habolochitto, Miss.
1869.] All About It. 363
ALL ABOUT IT.
A Lecture Delivered before the Young Hen of Bcdeigk, N'. C.
January, 1867.
BY GOV. Z. B. VANCE
My kind auditory will, I trust
,
pardon me, should my talk prove
rambling and disconnected to-night,
for the sake of my theme.
I promise them that it shall be
one worthy of them and of the
occasion; and have only to regret
that the speaker is no more wor-thy
of it, for my theme shall be
of North Carolina : All about
North Carolina. Of what else
should the humble individual be-fore
you speak, or who has a bet-ter
right.? Upon whom has she
more undeservedly lavished her
richest honors, or who repays
these obligations with a more
sincere and abiding love? Who,
during those ever-to-be-remem-l)
ered years of alternate triumph
Lnd despair, anguish and desola-tion,
watched her with a closer
scrutiny, or obtained a clearer in-sight
of the depth of the hidden
s:reams of her noble nature and
solid worth? Nor is it without
interest for all. There are none
here but will, doubtless, feel that
al the topics of my discourse,
whether touched with gravity,
humor or sarcasm, are well de-serving
of their earnest attention.
And particularly all those who
sincerely desire the welfare of our
State, and watch, prayerfully, to
behold in the changes of these
changeful times, that working to-gether
of all things for good, and
that turning of the wrath of man
into praise, wherein the wise can
see the mercy and goodness of
God to those who suffer.
There is a natural law which
regulates the attraction and re-pulsion
of bodies; and morally
also, that the more powerful com-munities
tend to absorb and swal-low
up the weaker, with whom
they are in contact; and that a
conquering people impress their
habits, manners, laws and insti-tutions
upon the conquered.
—
Though it may be painful and
humiliating in the extreme, it is
nevertheless a fact, that we in the
South are to all intents and pur-poses,
a conquered people, since
we are declared to be without
rights in, and absolutely at the
mercy of, the government of our
conquerors. The changes, there-fore,
to which we are subject, in
consequence of this condition,
will gradually steal in upon vis.
364 All About It. [March,
It is time we were considering
them, and making up our minds
as to those which we should wel-come
and those we should reject.
I propose to look at some of them
to-night. Of course, on an oc-casion
like the present, it is proper
for me to consider only such as
eflfect us socially, leaving those
greater political changes to be
discussed in a different forum.
—
And as the exposition of no man's
views is of value unless he speaks
honestly and boldly, I shall do
both, and only trust that any dis-senting
hearer may give full
weight to everything which goes
to rebut the presumption of malice
in the speaker.
We shall then, for a brief space,
speak of North Carolina, her past,
present and future, her people,
her society, institutions, manners;
in short—"All about it" as near
as may be.
Virginia to the north of us, was
settled by English Cavaliers;
South Carolina, mainly by French
Huguenots; both among the no-blest
stocks of Western Europe.
Korth Carolina, with but a slight
infusion of each, was settled by
a sturdier—and in some respectsr-a
better race than either. She
was emphatically the offspring of
religious and political persecution
,
and the vital stream of her infant
life, was of Scotch-Irish origin.
A cross of those two noble races
has produced a breed of men as
renowned for great deeds and
modest worth as, perhaps, any
other in this world. Two in-stances
will suffice for this. Per-haps,
the most manly and glori-ous
feat of arms in modern times,
was the defence of Londonderry,
as the boldest and most remarka-ble
State paper was the Mecklen-burg
Declaration ofIndependence.
Both were the work, mainly, of
men such as settled ISTorth Caro-lina.
If possible, they have clung
closer to the manners and opin-ions
of their British ancestors
than any other communities on
the continent. The novelties of
Democracy, and the wild theories
of Kepublicanism, have made less
progress, and moved more slowly,
here, than in any other State.
We are far more like the England
of William and Mary, and Queen
Anne, to-day, than is England her-self,
whilst both Irishisms and
Scotticisms are abundant. This
resemblance is traceable in many
things. The landed gentlemen,
their tenantry and yeomanry, the
profuse hospitality of country
homes, the hardy field sports and
out-door diversions, personal in-dependence,
pride of family and
opinion, and a hundred other
things, mark unmistakably our
descent. Our pronunciation
among the educated classes is said
to be, perhaps, more purely En-glish
than is spoken in the precincts
of Saint James; whilst our laws
both within themselves and in the
manner of their administration,
contain still more ineffaceable land-marks
of the great people from
whose loins we sprang. Thai
branch of our Legislature whick
is the peculiar voice of the peo-ple,
is with us, and with us onlj,
still termed the " Commons "
—
x
name pregnant with the destinies
of civilization. We still whip for
stealing— to the great disgust of
reflned and elegant thieves—crop
and stand in the pillory for per-
1869.] All About It. 365
jury, brand for bigamy and man-slaughter,
and hang for murder!
Ko mawkish sympathy for crime,
or maudlin philanthropy over the
hard fate of a scoundrel, has yet
crept into our good old English
criminal code; but with halter
and rod the Sheriff still stands
among us, the fearful Nemesis of
society, avenging her wrongs upon
all evil-doers with most distress-ing
impartiality!*
On the civil side of the docket,
that most ubiquitous and immortal
litigant, John Doe, continues to
complain of his equally immortal
colitigant, Kichard Doe, " for
that, whereas, heretofore to wit;"
and the said Richard , having, by
his most unjustifiable behavior,
got his loving friend, the tenant
in possession, into a scrape, con-tinues
still, as in the days of
Sergeant Bolle quietly to back
down, like some fiery war men of
the present age, and leave his
peaceable neighbor to fight it out
" to the last man "—or at least
"to the last dollar." Were my
Lord Coke to arise from his grave
now, and search for his glorious
common law, "ever approved by
these two faithful witnesses, au-thority
and reason," he would
find it flourishing, perhaps, bright-est
and and purest in that very
strange and far oS land first
visited by the ships, and planted
by the colonies, of that splendid
genius whose untimely and un-just
death damns with an adher-ing
infamy his own claims to the
highest place in the temple of
English law.
These characteristics, fed and
supported by the system of Afri-can
slavery, served for more than
a century to divide the Conserva-tive
from the Puritan elements in
American society. Nor would
there soon have been any change
in the peculiar customs and man-nerisms
of our people, had not
the rude shock of, war tumbled
down this great middle wall of
partition, which separated us from
the saints.
Perhaps, one of the most mark-ed
of the changes which we may
expect, is one that will soon be
apparent on the face of our coun-try
society. The abolition of
slavery will do wonders here. It
puts an end to the reign of those
lordly, landed proprietors, plant-ers
and farmers, who constituted
so striking and so pleasant a feat-ure
in our rural population. No
longer the masters of hundreds of
slaves wherewith to cultivate their
thousands of acres, the general
cheapness of lands in the South
will prevent their forming around
them a system of dependent ten-antry,
since every industrious
man will be able to plough his
own farm. They will, therefore,
gradually sell off their paternal
acres, no longer within the scope
of prudent management, and seek
homes in the towns and villages,
or contract their establishments
to their means and altered condi-tion.
Agriculture will then pass
gradually into the hands of small
farmers, and the great farms will,
forever, disappear. In all this
there is much good to be seen.
* The loyal Fetich have altered, all this, from prudential considerations for
themselves and friends.
366 All About It. [March^
An improved system of cultiva-tion,
an enlarged quantity and
quality of production, greatly en-hanced
value of real estate, and a
rapid increase of the aggregate
public wealth will most assuredly
be the result. But even this
change will not be one of un-mixed
benefit, nor will it be view-ed
by all—your humble speaker
for one at least—without emotions
of regret. I can scarcely imagine
it possible for any one to view the
steady disappearance of the race
of Southern country gentlemen,
without genuine sorrow. They
are not the peers of the stupid
beef-eating English Squire, re-nowned
in British history and in
comedy, for loyalty to the King,
ignorance, prejudice and drunk-enness:
not the Westerns and
Hardcastles, but the high-toned,
educated, chivalrous, intelligent
and hospitable Southern gentle-men
, of whom each one who hears
me, has at least a dozen in his
mind's eye, in Virginia and the
Carolinas. Whose broad fields
were cultivated by their own faith-ful
and devoted slaves, whose
rudely splendid mansions stand
where their fathers reared them,
among the oaks and the pines
which greeted the canoe of John
Smith, welcomed the ships of
Raleigh, and sheltered the wild
cavaliers of De Soto; whose hall
doors stood wide open, and were
never shut except against a re-treating
guest; whose cellar and
table abounded with the richest
products of the richest lands in
the world, and whose hospitality
was yet unstained by unrefined
excess; whose parlors and fire-sides
were adorned by a courtly
female grace which might vie
with any that ever lighted and
blessed the home of man; whose
hands were taught from infancy to
fly open to every generous and
charitable appeal, and whose
minds were enured to all self-respect
and toleration, and whose
strong brains were sudden death
to humbuggery, all the isms, and
the whole family of mean and
pestilential fanaticism. Can you
see these strong men, so armed at
all points for the common good,
holding all their wealth as hos-tages
for the public peace, torn
from their ancestral seats, and
swept away in the current of
progress, without feeling the whole
edifice of good government reel
beneath our feet like a drunken
man? I confess to my honest
conviction, that when this sturdy
dynasty of democratic kings shall
be overthrown, that the cause of
virtue in society and of Constitu-tional
liberty in politics, will each
have lost a stalwart right arm,
which will,I fear,be but poorly sup-plied
in the class which may succeed
them! Peace to the memory of
the Southern country gentlemen!
To them were we indebted for the
foundation of our once free gov-ernment,
and for its preservation
against the assaults of democratic
anarchy for more than three-fourths
of a century!
An immediate consequence of
this disturbance in our country
society will be a tendency—al-ready
perceptible— of our popula-tion
towards towns and villages.
It has been a matter of remark,
and with some, of congratulation
heretofore, that having fewer and
smaller cities and towns, we had
1869.] All About It. 367
also, the most law-abiding and
virtuous x)opulation in the United
States. The census returns, to a
great extent, sustained this as-sertion;
but the obverse showed a
considerable deficiency in national
wealth. We may now look for a
rapid increase in the population
of our towns and cities; real es-tate
there, will far out-grow in
value, that of the country; vice,
crime and pauperism will grow
with them as manufactures and
wealth increase. "With the good
we must also take the evil; the
tares must needs come with the
wheat. "With new kinds of ma-chinery,
will come new kinds of
rascality; with new kinds of in-dustry
and means ,of wealth, will
come a new species of robbery,
entirely strange to our honest old-fashioned
thieves ; and with 2^'>'og-ress
in the arts and sciences, will
come, also, a fantastic variety of
philanthropy, religion, politics
and morals, alike wondrous and
edifying; of which, more here-after.
There is also a great change at
hand for the negro, a taste of
which he is already enjoying.
This great problem is about
reaching its final solution. The
fate of the African slave in the
Southern States is at last about to
be sealed, for good or for evil.
His real, or imagined woes hav-ing
so long moved the cheap tears
of Ctiristendom, and his hard lot
having engaged the Jellabys of
two centuries, and formed the
burden of the press, the rostrum
and the pulpit, to the shame and
perversion of each, through pol-iticians
without statesmanship,
and preachers without religion;
now, that a great country has beea
drenched in fraternal blood, one-half
of it buried in the ashes of
its own desolation and strewn
with graves and bleaching bones
of slaughtered men, and that fires
of hatred have been kindled that
years of peace and good will shall
scarce be able to smother—all for
his sake—how is he to be affected by
this great, blood-bought change?
Has the result been adequate to
the cost? Or ivill it be? Have
the cruel wheels of this blessed
philanthropy, dragging axle-deep
in a heroic nation's blood, spared
him for whose sake they were
mainly set in motion ? Alas,
alas! A wise Humanity already
weeps at the crimes committed in
her name! And over the dead
carcasses of these simple, and— so
lately—happy children of bond-age,
and the ragged and perishing
survivors, pompously called,
"Freedmen," she is ready to
exclaim, " Oh, Freedom, there is
no curse like unto thine, when
thou art forced upon men whose
souls are not educated to receive
thee!"
What was the negro before the
war? A simple, happy and af-fectionate
bondsman. What is he
now? Fast merging into a rag-ged,
starving, dangerous vaga-bond.
What will he be? In
time—and that time is not long
—
nothing ; non-existent, an extinct
race, over whose untimely perish-ing
the good of all the earth will
mourn, and from whose sad story
the philosophic historian will
point a maxim, and illustrate that
godly philanthropy which propa-gates
its heavenly tenets by fire
and sword! Though from the
368 All About It. [March,
earliest times recorded in history,
to this day, the negro has been in
close contact with every promi-nent
civilization, I imagine it will
not be denied, but that his de-velopment,
as a Southern slave,far
exceeds that of any other condi-tion.
There was no laboring class
on earth with which his condition
would not compare advantageous-ly,
physically and morally. Who
that has ever enjoyed the pleas-ure
of our Southern homes, has
not been convinced of this? Or
who that knew him as a contented,
well-treated slave, did not learn
to love and admire the negro char-acter?
For one, I confess to al-most
an enthusiasm on the sub-ject.
The cheerful ring of their
songs at their daily tasks, their
love for their masters and their
families, their politeness and good
manners, their easily bought, but
sincere gratitude, their deep-seat-ed
aristocracy—for your genuine
negro was a terrible aristocrat,
—
their pride in their own, and their
master's dignity, together with
their over-flowing and never-fail-ing
animal spirits, both during
hours of labor and leisure, alto-gether,
made up an aggregation of
joyous simplicity and lidelity
when not perverted by harsh
treatment—that to me was ir-resistible!
A remembrance of the
seasons spent among them will
perish only with life. From the
time of the ingathering of the
crops, until after the ushering in of
the new year, was wont to be with
them a season of greater joy and
festivity than with any other peo-ple
on earth, of whom it has been
my lot to hear. In the glorious
November nights of our benefi-cent
clime, after the first frosts
had given a bracing sharpness
and a ringing clearness to the
air, and lent that transparent
blue to the heavens through
which the stars gleam like globes
of sapphire, when I have seen a
hundred or more of them around
the swelling piles of corn, and
heard their tuneful voices ringing
with the chorus of some wild re-frain,
I have thought I would
rather, far, listen to them than to
any music ever sang to mortal
ears; for it was the outpouring of
the hearts of happy and content-ed
men, rejoicing over that
abundance which rewarded the
labor of the closing year! And the
listening, too , has many a time and
oft, filled my bosom with emotions,
and opened my heart with charity
and love toward this subject and
dependent race, such as no ora-tory,
no rhetoric or minstrelsy in
all this wide earth could impart!
Nature ceased almost to feel
fatigue in the joyous scenes which
followed. The fiddle and the
banjo, animated as it would
seem like living things, literally
knew no rest, night or day ;
whilst Terpsichore covered her
face in absolute despair in the
presence of that famous double-shvffle
with which the long nights
and " master's shoes " were worn^
away together! Amid all these
teeming associations, connected
with the abolished system , there
come also a thousand memories
of childhood's experience, ditfer-ing
in my individual case, I will
venture to say, scarcely an hair's
breadth from that of scores who
listen to me to-night. I can
see now, through memory's
1869.] All About It. 369
faithful mirror, the boy who
tirst taught me to twist a
rabbit from a hollow tree, with
whom I have had many a
boyish struggle , and for whom I
have many a time, and oft, rob-bed
the pantry of its choicest
treasures! Who can forget the
cook by whom his youthful ap-petite
was fed? The fussy, con-sequential
old lady to whom I
now refer, has often, during my
vagrant inroads into her rightful
domains, boxed my infant jaws
with an imperious, " Bress de
Lord, git out of de way; dat chile
never kin get enufi','' and as often
relenting at sight of my hungry
tears, has fairly bribed me into
her love again with the very
choicest bits of the savory messes
of her art. She was haughty as
Juno, and aristocratic as though
her naked ancestors had come
over with the conqueror, or
" drawn a good bow at Hastings,"
instead of having been purchased
by deacon Tribulation Small-soul
from Cape Cod, for forty gal-lons
of New England rum, per
head, whilst roasting charcoal
babies for dinner; and yet her
pride invariably melted at the
sight of certain surreptitious
quantities of tobacco, with which
I made my court to this high
priestess of the region, sacred to
the stomach. And there too,
plainest of all, I can see the fat
and chubby form of my dear old
nurse, whose encircling arms of
love, fondled and supported me
from the time whereof the memo-ry
of this man runneth not to the
contrary. All the strong love of
her simple and faithful nature
seemed bestowed on her mistress'
children, which she was not per-mitted
to give to her own, long,
long ago, left behind, and dead in
' ole Varginney!' Oh I the won-derful
and the touching stories of
them and a hundred other things
which she has poured into my
infant ears! How well do I re-member
the marvelous story of
the manner in which she obtain-ed
religion, of her many and sore
conflicts with the powers of dark-ness
and of her first dawning
hopes in that blessed gospel whose
richest glory is, that it is preach-ed
to the poor, such as she was!
From her lips, too, I heard my first
ghost story ! Think of that !
None of your feeble, make-be-lieves
of a ghost story either, car-rying
infidelity on its face; but a
real bona-fide narrative, witnessed
by herself, and told with the
earnestness of truth itself. How
my knees smote together, and my
hair stood on end, " so-called "
—
as I stared and startled, and de-clared
again and again with quite
a sickly manhood indeed, that I
toasn^ scared a hit 1 Perhaps, the
proudest day of my boyhood was
when I was able to present her
with a large and flaming red cot-ton
handkerchief, wherewith, in
turban style she adorned her head.
And my satisfaction was complete
when my profound erudition en-abled
me to read for her on Sab-bath
afternoons, that most won-derful
of all stories. The Pilgrim's
Progress. Nor was it uninstruct-ive,
or a slight tribute to the
genius of the immortal tinker
could I but have appreciated it
to observe the varied emotions ex-cited
within her breast, by the re-cital
of those fearful conflicts by
370 All About It. [March,
the way, and of the unspeakable
glories of the celestial City, with-in
whose portals of pearl, I trust
her faithful soul has long since
entered!
Nor must the old uncle be for-gotten;
the trusted and conse-quential
right-hand man of the
household , first lieutenant or ser-geant
major of the whole estab-lishment
at the least. Though
hard and high, uncompromising
in all things, and especially as to
the family dignity, of whom all
urchins, both white and black,
stood in wholesome awe, I shall
never cease thinking of him with
genuine respect. With him too
is connected a problem in morals
that was wont to puzzle much my
juvenile logic, and I have not un-til
this day been able to make it
out quite right, that certain ur-chins
at and in the county afore-said,
with force and arms, not hav-ing
the fear of the rod before their
eyes, but being thereunto moved
and seduced by the cravings of
juvenile appetite, did, &c., &c.,
&c., certain water-melons of him,
the said "uncle," &c., &c., &c.
With these associations, so well
calculated to make their former
masters the fast friends of their
late servants, come some also of a
darker and less pleasing hue.
—
There were cases of harsh and
cruel treatment of these simple
minded people. Truthful men
have often blushed at but never
denied the fact, that mean and
tyrannical masters now and then
outraged humanity and furnished
our enemies with occasion of of-fence
against us all. But no com-munity
ever has been or ever will
be free from that despicable class
of men who abuse the trust which
God and society have reposed in
them, by ill-treating those who
are necessarily subject to and de-pendent
upon them. But, on the
whole, history must say that our
rule was a mild one, that our
slaves loved us and were happy,
and that is the end of the contro-versy.
They have themselves fur-nished,
unconsciously, proofwhich
will amply satisfy the impartial
of the truth of this, in the faith-fulness
with which they served
us, and the loving care which
they took of our helpless families
during the long years of war, and
in the sound of that conflict
which they knew was waging for
their deliverance.
Having referred to what his
condition was, let us glance brief-ly
to what it is now. The real
genuine negro, such as I have
tried to sketch, has disappeared.
We have some colored freedmen
here but not any negroes. His
joy and simplicity have departed.
The ringing song of his daily
work no longer awakens the
echoes of his native plains; the
boisterous laugh is hushed; the
fiddle, without strings, hangs in
silence on the cabin wall; the
voice of the insphing banjo is
heard no more, and the ever fa-mous
dance—the double-shuffle
—
is about to be numbered with the
lost arts. Forsaking the old plant-ation,
he wanders over the coun-try,
living upon freedom, crowd-ing
into filthy hovels, feeding
upon insufficient food, diseased,
hungry, and in rags, without that
l^rudent foresight which charac-terizes
most of the animals, he is
dying and passing away with a
1869.] All About It. 371
rapidity that is shocking to hu-manity.
His whole condition
now thunders the lie to all the de-nunciations
which religious fanat-icism
and political juggling have
so long heaped upon their former
masters, in tones so loud that all
the world must know, when too
late, upon whom is the blame for
the perishing of a whole people!
And worse than all, as if mis-chief
enough has not been already
done, special pains are taken to
sow the seeds of hatred between
the races, and to make the negro
believe that his old master, be-cause
he resisted emancipation,
is his natural enemy ! Notwith-standing
all these associations to
which I have referred, and which
bind every good-feeling man in
the country to his former slaves
with love and charity, there are
men who thrust us aside, claim-ing
to know more of the negro's
nature and capacities, and to be
animated with greater zeal for his
welfare than we! May God for-give
all such, for their second sin
is like to be greater than the first!
For, having torn him by violence,
and against his wish, from a state
of mild and humane servitude,
where his physical and moral con-dition
was superior to that which
ever befell him since the curse of
Ham, and placed him in the high
road to extinction, beneath the
tread of a dominant race ; should
they also succeed in destroying
that ancient love between master
and slave, and filling the heart of
one with bitterness, and the other
with jealous fear, and inaugura-ting
a war of races, then no man
can mistake the doom of the
weaker. Oh, woeful times! May
God preserve us from them!
I believe it is generally conceded
that, so far, the emancipation of
the negro has made his condition
worse, but it is not in the course
ofhuman nature to repair an error
by acknowledging it and turning
back from the path that led to it.
The course is to devise another
remedy, still deeper in the er-roneous
direction. As the scorn
of the world begins to gather
around those who waded through
the blood and ashes of a noble
country and over the prostrate
columns of constitutional liberty,
to create four million vagabonds,
they endeavor to stay that world's
judgment by a strange remedy.
Seeing that the negro is utterly
unable to endure the freedom of
his own labor and locomotion,
they propose to give him the over-sight
of the freedom of others!
Since his absolute incapacity to
take care of his few bodily wants
has been conclusively shown, it is
solemnly proposed to give him
charge of a great Republic.
—
Since he has failed to exhibit
the sagacity and industry of
an animal in providing against
the commonest wants, the ir-resistible
conclusion—i/ie logical
ergo—is, that he is fully com-petent
to solve that greatest of
all problems which has vexed
the genius of man
—
self-govern-ment
!! ! This process much re-sembles
that by which a logican
would undertake to derive shoe-pegs
from the rings of Saturn.
To illustrate, if illustration can
render more absurd such an utter
absurdity—if a negro is found un-able
to drive one mule in a cart,
the remedy is to give him, imme-
372 All About It. [March,.
diately, the reins of a coach and
six, wherein is all the family and
crockery !
!
Such is negro suffrage, the sup-porting
idea of which is, of course,
negro equality, social and po-litical.
Now, hereupon, I beg leave to
remark that I don't feel as much
shocked at this asserted equality
of the races as some people seem
to be. I recognize in it, on the
contrary, a considerable infusion
of that which, that immortal
philosopher Square, termed "the
eternal fitness of things;" subject
to a modification. One Mr. Josh
Billings, a gentleman who has
managed to get off much senten-tious
philosophy, in very bad En-glish
indeed, once said in reply to
the question, did he believe in the
final salvation of men, " Yes,
but let me pick the men." So, if
allowed to pick the men, I shall
announce myself as a believer in
the equality of whites and blacks;
and my selection should not over-look
the merits of those who
preach the doctrine. Thus, when
I hear a man assert that, a negro
is his equal, I take it for granted,
sure enough that he is. For, al-though,
to all outward seeming,
he might be a little better than a
half- reclaimed savage, yet, as he
must, of necessity, know his own
meanness better than I can, I
take his word for it readily. The
only danger is of doing the negro
injustice by the comparison. For
to my seeming, that soul, however
lowly, that looks up and strives to
get higher, is infinitely superior
to that which, however high, looks
down and strives to get lower I
The process of going down hill is
both easy and inglorious. A
brick-bat can do that much. Be
all this as it may, I trust that the'~^
good people of the South will ,'
strive earnestly to keep friends
with the negro, under all the
changes which may be forced upon
both. He served us well and
faithfully, and left us not of his
own accord. Let us, in all things
which are best for both, requite
this service. As he must remain
our neighbor, let us give him, if
permitted, a home, wages, educa-tion,
morality and religion.
And now as the negro will
not leave us, let us for a moment
leave him. Suffrage for him
is a step toward that great progf-ress
which is to renovate the
South; and although it is amus-ing
to watch the effort to prove
the perfect equality of the wild
ass of Assyria and the war horse
of Job, let us leave the name-sakes—
wild and domestic—to rec-oncile
the incongruities which
God has placed between his laws
and the theories of men, whilst we
look at some other changes about
to come upon our beloved land.
Having noticed the alteration,
perfected and prospective, in our
country society, towns and vil-lages,
and in our system of labor,
we may contemplate a serious
change in our clergymen and our
system of theology. There Will
be a great pressure here, for in
the opinion of our ISTorthern
friends, the reforming hand of
Progress is badly needed among
the dry bones of Southern reli-gionists.
It is certainly a matter
of reproach that our preachers
are fully as old-fashioned as their
theology, and Si j^rogressive clergy-
1869.] All About It. 373
man of the new faith, whilst be-holding
their sincere efforts to
save sinners, might say of them
as it is reported that Senator Hale
ofKew Hampshire once said of
Giddings when the latter intro-duced
a bill in the House looking
to a practical abolition of slavery:
" The cussed old fool I he thinks
we are in earnest!" Surely, no
reasonable man could now think
that a system of religion and mor-als
which answered for Moses and
the miserable secessionists who
left Egypt with him, would do for
the improved and revised saints
of the present day and of this
great Eepublic! Certainly not!
—
Moses was a slaveholder, up to
his eyes in the " sum of all
villainy," and sanctioned iniquity
by a law, wherein he laid down
rules and regulations for the gov-ernment
of these slaves bought
with his money! What did he
know about religion by the side of
the modern saints whose grand-fathers
made their fortunes in the
horrors of the "middle passage?"
Neither he nor any of the
motley crowd which followed
him ever dreamed of the steam
engine, lucifer matches, the At-lantic
cable or the Howard
Amendment! And yet our de-luded
preachers cite him as au-thority
in morals I All his crude
and ignorant notions have long
since been superseded—except
polygamy, indeed, which, under
the fostering care of the Govern-ment,
is doing smartlj'—and it
should not be expected that a re-ligion
laid down under such cir-cumstances
by such a people could
stand in the blaze of light which
streams over the land from the
VOL. VI. NO. V.
saintly theology of John Brown
and Lucy Stone! Nor, in the es-timation
of the progressive theo-logians,
does the church of the
new dispensation much improve
upon the old, since it abolishes
polygamy which they loved, and
failed to rebuke slavery which
they hated; and since Christ, its
divine head, declared that the
kingdom which he founded was
not of this world. As He there-fore
failed to rebuke the greatest
sin known to man, slavery, and
disconnected his church from pol-itics
and the things of this world,
in their estimation his mission
was but half fulfilled after all.
—
Progressive theology has there-fore
supplied the mission, and has
kindly added such conditions as
render the salvation of the sin-ner
—
or at least the success of the
2oarty—more secure. In addition
to the old tests it is now necessary
to swear to the sinfulness of slave-ry
and the divine right of our
government (for this principle is
local) to do precisely whatever it
pleases. Now, it is necessary to
preach a kingdom of this vrorld,
(or a lower one,) politics, litera-ture,
and the family of isms—any
thing, in short, but the plain, old-fashioned
bread of life to perish-ing
sinners—Christ and him cru-cified!
The great Apostle Paul,
with a soul rejoicing in the en-larged
and universal salvation of
his Master, thrusting the sickle of
his mighty genius into the whiten-ing
harvest of a world, preached
of righteousness, temperance and
a judgment to come: his more pre-tentious
and enlightened follow-ers
confine their savory ministra-tions
to rebellion, confiscation and
26
374 All About It. [March,
negro suffrage! Jesus Christ
taught servants to be obedient
unto their masters; these im-proved
moralists teach them to
cut their masters' throats! Ab-horrence
of rebellion against the
government—for any cause what-ever
—
whilst they hold the reins,—
and a firm adherence to the doc-trine
of passive obedience is now
declared to be the only road to
heaven—at least by way of Eich-mond
and New Orleans! One
hundred and eighty years ago,
English cavaliers were shamed
out of this base doctrine by the
Puritans and were forced to join
them in hurling a tyrant from his
tlirone; now the Puritans, with
lire and sword, preach damna-tion
to all who resist the powers
that be—whichpoicers they now are!
Circumstances alter cases. [See
Parmer vs. Lawyer, Webster's
Spelling Book; The Colonies vs.
King George III. ; Jefferson's Ee-ports,
4th July, '7G; United States
vs. Hartford Convention; Sal-mon
P. Chase on the relation of
the Ohio Legislature vs. The Fu-gitive
Slave Law and various
other cases familiar to the pro-fession!]
A drunken wag in the
mountains of North Carolina once
resolved himself into a political
meeting to consider the state of
the country, and as President,
Secretary and Chairman of the
committee reported and adopted
unanimously quite a series of
resolutions, two of which bear
upon the subject before us, and
were as follows: ^^ Besolved, That
in a general way there is a good
deal of human nature in man-kind.
Eesolved, That we don't
care what in the thunder happens
provided it don't happen to us!''''
That which was perfectly right in
1688 and in 1776 has a perfect
right to be wrong in 1861, provid-ed
the pressure is changed ! of
course! Though Kero was a
great scoundrel for two hundred
years or more, whilst Nero was
on the other side, it is gratifying
to know that an enlightened cler-gy
have preached him into quite
a respectable old gentleman.
—
Some in fact prefer him to Wash-ington,
but I can't say that my
prejudices extend quite so far.
After all, Nero's respectability
depends much on the side he hap-pens
to take in politics. And
herein, of obedience to Nero from
the pulpit, and of those who
preach such doctrine, let an an-ecdote
give my opinion. In obe-dience
to that spirit of mischief
which induced our soldiers to
"jaw" every stranger out of uni-form
(and many in it) whom they
met, a saucy private once bawled
out to a rather daintily dressed
stranger passing by, who chanced
to be a chaplain, '
'• Halloo, Mister,
what army do you belong to?"
" To the army of the Lord," rath-er
sanctimoniously said the chap-lain;
whereupon the soldier re-sponds,
" Well then, old hoss,
you'd better spur up, for you're a
darned long ways from your head-quarters."
Will our pulpit be able to resist
such changes as these, the most
ruinous and dangerous of all?
As teachers not only of a pure
and undefiled religion, but of
manners and morals, and princi-pally
the disseminators of general
education throughout our great
land , will this vast band of guard-
1869.] All About it. 375
ians of our civilization give way
before the erroneous, but bolder
and more energetic teachings of
their Korthern brethren? Much
of their energy, their industry,
their thrift, their means of wealth
and such characteristics wherein
they are our confessed superiors,
we should gladly seek to learn;
but may God preserve us from
their peculiar religious civiliza-tion!
May our pious clergy resist
to the last extremity—and only
death is that last extremity—the
introduction here of their politi-cal
preaching ; their Millerism,
Mormonism, Spiritualism, Free-love-
ism, Miscegenation, Material-ism,
and Radicalism, with all the
thousand and one morbid senti-mentalities
and false teachings
which mark, lamentably, the decay
of public virtue and evangelical re-ligion!
And though this tide has
begun to roll in, and some even of
the weaker sort among ourselves
have begun to yield, may the angel
of the Lord, repenting Him of the
evils we have suffered, jet show
us the threshing floor of another
Oman, the Jebusite, at which the
pestilence may be stayed, ere it
destroy our Israel, though we
should sacrifice all the oxen of our
wealth!
When religion becomes corrupt,
referring principally to the things
of this world—requiring even al-legiance
to a party, as a test of
orthodoxy, the road to national
and social ruin is short and easy.
For I am convinced that even the
wisest statesmen err, in under-standing
the part which learned
and pious clergymen bear in the
government and civilization of
the world. A comparison of the
wordly great, with the successful
teachers of Christianity will il-lustrate
my meaning. Ca?sar and
Cicero are known to scholars.
Luther and Wesley are known to,
and govern, all classes and condi-tions
of men. Shakspeare is read
and admired by millions of men;
but John Bunyan is loved and
admired by hundreds of millions
of human souls! The sublime
song of the Paradise Lost even
may perish, and the Elegy in a
country church-yard be forgotten;
but the North star ceasing to
guide the pilots of the sea, shall,
following in the track of the con-stellation
of the Cross, disappear
from the gaze of men beyond the
everlasting ices of the Pole, and
the Bedouin of the desert shall
halt his camels upon the disinte-grated
dust of the loftiest Pyra-mid,
ere little children in every
part of the wide earth shall cease
to repeat, before going to rest,
that simple prayer of some for-gotten
Christian poet, "Now I
lay me down to sleep, I pray the
Lord my soul to keep."
These dangerous influences
which threaten to overwhelm our
clergymen, are but old forms .of
human vice; old foes in new faces.
As Sir Edward Coke observes of
copy-hold tenures, though they
come of a mean house they are
yet of a very ancient descent.
—
Most of them are of unmistakably
Puritan origin, and the ancestors
of Puritanism were distinguished
even so long ago as the sojourn of
our Saviour on earth, when they
were represented as giving alms
to the sound of the trumpet, as
making long prayers in the mar-ket
places, and the motto on their
376 All About It. [Marchy
coat of arms was " Lord, I thank
Thee that I am not as other peo-ple!"
Let us resist this change
Avith our united power, and pray
that our clergymen may adhere
—
even through martyrdom if need
be—to their old-fashioned religion.
We shall he pressed, too, to
change the manner of bringing up
our children if we would become
rich and great like our conquerors.
In addition to the catechism and
a love for the cardinal virtues and
proprieties generally, we have
heretofore endeavored to teach
our children unsellishness, liber-ality,
and what the Irish call
"the open hand." This is a
great mistake, progrressit'eZy speak-ing.
Too strict a reverence for
all the members of the "noble
family of Truth," unfits the mind
of the boy for the sharp substi-tutes
and ingenious devices, which
are the life of individual and na-tional
wealth. He must be made
to read the sublime apothegms of
that light of the eighteenth cen-tury,
B. Franklin, and his juve-nile
heart must be fired
—
or pre-cipitated,
by the studies of the
wise glories of such immortal ut-terances
as "Time is money,"
" Money saved is money made,"
" Take care of the dimes and the
dollars will take care of them-selves,"
" He that would thrive
must rise at five," " He that hath
thriven may lie till seven," "A
stitch in time saves nine," with
much other wondrous philosophy
of like nature. The boy must be
taught that the chief end of man
is—to make money! and the
greatest sin (next to slaveholding)
is to enjoy it! He must be taught
not to fox-hunt because, on a cal-culation
of the time, that the men,
the horses and dogs occupy ia
catching it, 'tis cheaper to buy the
skin ready caught! Bird shooting
must be abjured for a similar
reason, and an old horse or an old
dog must be killed immediately to
save forage! His infant lips must
be made to lisp the price of onions,
and his nostrils made to delight
in and revere the smell of cod-fish,
if you would have him be-come
a great and glorious pillar
of the State!
In connection herewith, we are
iqjon the sJcirts of another great
change, in the habits and man-ners
of the mothers of these
children. In the new state of
progress into which we are like to
enter, under Jacobin auspices, we
shall, doubtless, incur the risk of
having some strong-minded women I
Perhaps this term does not suf-ficiently
convey our meaning.
The intellects of our women are
sufficiently strong—in the right
direction—already. We mean,
simply, those women who, drop-ping
the' characteristics of their
own sex, are constantly raiding
into the dominions of the other
for the purpose, it would seem
—
of capturing pantaloons I Like a
forlorn hope, they are constantly
trying to storm and ^ ; carry the
hreeches. They are women com-pounded—
not to say confounded
English grog-fashion, " 'alf and
'alf," who, somehow or another
have got mixed up, strangely
enough, with the progress and pe-culiar
civilization of our enter-prising
brethren of the North. A
school-boy who prayed that to-morrow,
"it might rain just a
leetle too hard to go to school and-
1869.] All About It. 377
not quite hard enough to prevent
going a fishin' " hit upon a dis-tinction
that eminently applies to
these fungi of a superior mental
culture, since any one of them
might be described as a little too
much of a woman to be a man,
and a little too much of a man to
be a woman! What useful pur-pose
in social or political economy,
these aviphihia serve, I really can-not
see; but some how they are
either cause or effect of wealth
and greatness, and I warn my
unfortunate male friends to look
for them as we progress! A col-porteur
traveling once upon one
of our noble Southern rivers,
stepped ashore, when the boat
stopped at a wharf where there
had been great excitement about
the small pox. Everybody fled as
the boat drew near, except one
old woman, and thinking to dis-tribute
more books, he approach-ed
her and said, " my good wo-man
have you the scriptures about
here?" "Kot gist yet, thank the
Lord," was the reply, "but the
way they've got it down to Nor-folk
is a sin!" So, we have not
this social pestilence amongst us
yet, but the way they have it up
Korth, is terrible, and it will
spread this way if we are not
careful. The preventive is
alone in the hands of our blessed
countrywomen. We can only beg
and implore them to resist the
temptation , and by all the glori-ous
associations of the most noble
womanhood the world ever saw,
to drive back this most odious,
vicious and contemptible innova-tion;
and to preserve for their
sake and ours, the modesty and
purity of their mothers. In this
case, boasted man cannot help; he
can only grasp his pantaloons and
pray! We can innoculate against
small-pox, we can clean up our
streets and fumigate against the
yellow- fever; we can even diet
ourselves against cholera, but
there is no relief in the ingenuity
of man against the tide of strong-minded
womanism which threat-ens
us ! The only possible allevia-tion
ever yet discovered—and
which I cordially recommend to
all single males present to-night
—
is to marry as quick as possible,
and then it may take you only in
varioloid form!
Thus I have glanced—and
scarcely glanced—at a few of the
prominent changes likely to be
impressed upon our people as a
result of the Great Eevolution in
which we have fought and lost.
A hundred others might be
noticed, if time permitted. Change
is all around us, and pervades the
atmosphere. As our cities grow,
our literature will improve, for
somehow great cities are favor-able
to the culture and develop-ment,
though not to the birth, of
genius. But as it improves, it
will not purify, especially our
newspaper literature. History,
poetry, fiction, will intermin-gle
with fulsome biography
and miscellaneous criticism;
whilst Pill advertisements, Ead-way's
Ready Relief and the Fra-grant
Sozodont will attain their
maximum glory and struggle for
the mastery. Even our pronun-ciation
will change, more or less,
with our style, as may be already
seen in the strange accentuation
given to many familiar objects, so
as almost to disguise them from
378 All About It. [March,
us. For instance our Capital
city is known as Baw-la^ without
the ' click ' by which it was wont
to be known to both citizens and
politicians; the most lively and
ambitious little city in the interior
of the State, is called Shar-lott
;
whilst that goodly city wljich com-mands
so pleasing a prospect over
the mingling floods of the Neuse
and the Trent—ignoring its
famed mother—that glorious home
of liberty and nursling of the
Alps—has become simply Nuh-hurn
!
Dear, native land! All these
things and many more are to
<3ome upon thy children, sweep-ing
away the land-marks of our
early love, and many of the
simple and happy ways which our
fathers taught us, so that we shall
enjoy them no more forever! Her
very faults are endeared to us,
and her short-comings even awak-en
the liveliest emotions in the
bosoms of all who love her well.
With the captive of Chillon, I
can say:
" To such a long communion tends,
My very chains and I grew friends,
To make us what we are. Even I
Kegained my freedom with a sigh !"
During all the sad years that
tried the souls of men I was a
close observer, and participated
in all that concerned the State of
North Carolina, and I say, with
truth, that not only am I proud
of the glorious manner in which
she came through the fiery ordeal
but that even my opinion of the
nobility of human nature has been
improved. Time will not permit
me to speak now—as it should be
spoken—of the many claims of
her people to the respect and con-fidence
of the world. Other and
abler hands must do that. I will
therefore close this sketch by re-lating
two or three incidents— and
those not the most striking—of
the hundreds I could relate illus-trating
the true nobleness of her
people, and the gallantry and
steadfastness of her soldiers dur-ing
the late war.
~^
One cold and frosty Decem-ber
morning, a poor but neatly
clad woman stepped timidly into
the Executive chamber whilst I
was its occupant, leading a rag-ged
and barefoot boy. With
many tears she told her story and
his; she was a widow with five
little children, this, her eldest and
only support, was but 17 years
old, had been in the army since
he was 15, had served honorably
those two years and bore the
manly scars of battle upon his
body, but in an evil hour had de-serted.
Then when he got home,
hungry and almost naked, she
had kept him only long enough to
make him one shirt, to hide his
nakedness, and had then started
immediately to Raleigh—a dis-tance
of sixty miles—to deliver
him to me. I asked her if she
knew that the punishment for de-sertion
was death. She said she
did, but she wanted him to do his
duty to his country be the conse-quences
what they might, and
begged me to send him to his reg-iment
and write to General Lee
to be merciful! Knowing thus all
the possible consequences, this
brave and noble widow yet
brought forward her first born
—
the Isaac of her hopes— and gave
him to her country, either to per-ish
in the ranks of its defenders or
1869.J All About It. 379
to die the ignominious death of a
felon, as that country might think
best! Think of that, oh ye rich
and mighty dames and matrons
who boast of giving your jewels,
and even your children to die no-ble
deaths! and say within your
hearts did not this poor widow's
offering exceed all of yours? Suf-fice
it to say that the boy was not
punished.
Again: in passing through the
mountains once, some soldiers
stopped at an humble cabin and
asked for something to eat. (By
the way, what soldier ever did
pass a house without asking for
something to eat? or that, hadn't
had a bite in three days?) The
poor woman, who was its proprie-tor,
kindly invited them in, and
began to tell them her distresses
and how she had been treated. That
she had been a widow pretty well
to do, and her three grown boys
had been in the army ever since
the war begun, that as the scene
of war came nearer and nearer to
her, the soldiers began to pass by
and consume her substance.
—
First, they had destroyed all her
provender, then her chickens,
turkeys, ducks and geese, then all
her hogs, then her cattle, and
lastly, they had killed and eaten
before her eyes, her last milk cow,
and had' otherwise preyed upon
her, until, said she, " I've got
nothing in this world for you to
eat, boys, except that one little
piece of bacon you see hanging up
there!" As she rose up to pre-pare
even it for them, they began
to feel somewhat ashamed—
a
rather uncommon virtue with a
hungry soldier—declared they
would not intrude on a woman
who had suffered so, and got up
to go. " Ko," said she, as she
sharpened her knife on the bricks of
the chimney jam and gave it a
murderous flourish at the piece of
bacon, " you just sit still; ifs all
right; as like as any way my
three boys have helped to eat up
your mammy's old cow, or some
body else's; so I'll divide!" And
she did divide; and if the territo-ry
of the late Confederate States
had only been as big as that old
woman's heart, Sherman's great
army would have perished of sheer
old age before it had finished its
march to the sea!
During the last fatal retreat
from the blood-stained ramparts
of Eichmond and Petersburg, to
the memorable spot which wit-nessed
the final scenes of that
once splendid army of IsTorthern
Virginia, everything of course was
in the utmost confusion. The
old campaigners in the ranks
knew quite as well as their offi-cers
that the war was over and
whilst those who kept their ranks
fought with but little heart, or
straggled carelessly and hope-lessly
along, thousands deliberate-ly
walked off" to their homes.
With lessening rations and for-age,
and a routed and melting
army (vhose demoralization was
increasing every moment, it be-came
every hour more and more
difficult to check the flushed and
swarming enemy sufficiently, to
save the trains upon which all
depended. It had become truly
a rout,
" With many a weary league to go
With every now and then a blow
And ten to one at least, the foe,"
When on one occasion, a spot
380 All About It. [March,
having been chosen for a stand,
some artillery placed in position
and Gen. Lee, sitting his horse on
a commanding knoll, sent his
staff and all about him to rally
the stragglers behind a certain
line and beg them to give one
more fire and hold the enemy at
bay, until the slowly struggling
trains could be got forward
out of the way. Mournfully
he beholds his once splendid
warriors, broken and scattered,
come straggling loosely along
—
saddest of sights to a sol-dier's
eye—by twos and threes,
here a squad, there the remnant
of a company, parts of regiments,
brigades and divisions, without
drums or colors, mixed in hope-less,
careless, and inextricable
confusion, and rallying but slow-ly
and unwillingly on the ap-pointed
line. But presently the
roll of a drum is heard, a pennon
flashes in the sunlight, the head
of an orderly column comes into
view, then emerges a small but
entire brigade,
"Alasliow few!
Since but the fleeting of a day
Had thinned it ! But the wreck was
true,
and with arms at will, with mar-tial
tread and serried ranks, its
commander at its head, and every
living subaltern at his post, it
comes, files promptly to the left
along its appointed position ; the
sharp commands, "halt, front,
dress" ring upon the air, and
they are ready once more for the
deadly and hopeless struggle! A
smile of momentary joy plays
over the distressed features of
that illustrious chieftain, he calls
out to an Aid, "what troops are
those?" "Coxe's North Caro-lina
brigade" was the reply.
—
Then it was that, taking off his
hat and bowing his head with the
goodly courtesy and kindly feel-ing
of a gentleman, which are so
pleasant to see in misfortune, he
said, " May God bless gallant old
Korth Carolina!"
Kot long since, I was invited to
deliver an address at Winchester,
Virginia, on the occasion of con-secrating
the Stonewall Cemetery
there, filled as it is with Confed-erate
dead, gathered up from the
battle-fields of the valley, by the
loving patriotism of that people.
The reason given for selecting me,
was because the North Carolina
dead far exceeded those from Vir-ginia
herself or any other State
represented there! So it is on all
the battle-fields from Charleston
to Gettysburg; and so it is like-wise
among all the rude and un-tended
graves around the North-ern
prisons.
Considering all that is com-mendable
in the character of our
people, as illustrated by their
bearing in adversity as well as in
prosperity, and these changes to
which she is subject, my object
has been to urge you to be cau-tious
in choosing those things
which we should welcome and
those we should reject. " Prove
all things, hold fast that which is
good."
We know that our institutions
and customs have been favorable
to the formation of a people en-dowed
with the noblest character-istics
of fallen human nature. Let
us be sure, whatever we do, that
we barter nothing of this for
wealth and power.
1869.] All About It, 381
There is very much that we can
learn from the people of the
Korth, and I hope, sincerely,
that we shall not be ashamed to
learn it. Their physical energy,
their inventive and mechanical
genius, their thrift, economy and
industry far surpass ours. In-dividual
thrift makes aggregate
wealth, this wealth, in turn , builds
cities, ships, rail-roads, canals,
churches, and endows colleges,
schools, and spreads intelligence.
In laboring for all these, I only
beg my countrymen to preserve,
as far as possible, their time-honored
institutions, their old-fashioned
hospitality, their hon-esty,
public and private, the sim-plicity
of their manners, the
modest purity of their women,
and their evangelical religion !
The way is open for us to make
Korth Carolina all we should wish
her to be in material prosperity,
without sacrificing one jot or
tittle of those good qualities which
we esteem her pride and her glory.
We must complete as rapidly as
possible our noble system of in-ternal
improvements until every
section is linked with the other;
we must prepare to dig up the
inexhaustible mineral riches of
her bosom; we must induce the
inflow of population, and stimu-late
the agricultural interests un-til
one continuous system of well
cultivated and smiling farms shall
cover the whole land from the low
country of the east, across the
rolling champaign hills of the
interior, to the feet of the great
western highlands. Those mag-nificent
" pastures of the sky "
should not only enrapture the eye
of the traveler, and fill the hearts
of their dwellers with adoration
and praise with their inimita-ble
scenes of glorious beauty, but
should be made to gladden the
hearts of their tillers with the
sight of unnumbered thousands
of lowing herds and feeding
flocks ; whilst their frostless
steppes—as well as the Eastern
plains— should teem with those
native vines, now famous through
the enterprise of strangers—and
rejoice their owners with vintages
rivalling the glories of Eshcol!
All this, and more, we can do, if
we will labor and be patient.
But we must first he true to our-selves.
We must aid each other,
and patronize our own I We must
patronize our own university,*
colleges and schools ; we must
buy of our own manufactories,
support our own newspapers and
stimulate and foster the genius of
our own young men.
Amid all these changes and
revolutions, it is pleasant to know
that there is one thing, at least,
which knoweth neither variable-ness
nor shadow of turning—the
kindly love and devoted patriot-ism
of the women of North Caro-lina,
for all who have suffered in
her behalf. Especially, during
the season of despair and gloom
which has so long paralyzed the
strong arms of men, has it been
refreshing to our souls to witness
their unceasing and pious eflbrts
in behalf of our dead heroes.
—
Even if their own great deeds
were not—as they are—amply
sufiicient to redeem an unfortu-
* When its FeticMsm shall be removed.
382 All About It. [March,
nate cause, and to fill the world
with their splendid fame, the ef-forts
of their devoted country-women
would alone redeem their
names from perishing. Erom the
sea- shore to the mountains they
are all at work—striving to feed
the poor, to shelter the orphan
and to bless the memories of their
dead defenders. ISTo adversity
discourages them; and there is
no spot so remote, but they may
be found " working diligently with
their hands.'' Not long since, I
had occasion to visit again that
prettiest nursling of the Allegha-nies—
my native town of Ashe-ville.
Crossing the Blue Kidge
on horse-back, and winding my
way down that loveliest of all the
valleys, I ever beheld, which
nestles under the shadow of Mt.
Mitchell and his gigantic confreres,
I stood at length upon the sum-mit
of that sharp spur which,
leading directly from the highest
peaks of the Black Mountain,
guides the limpid waters of the
Swannanoa into those of the
French Broad. Beneath my feet
lay my native town—quiet enough
now, though torn, despoiled and
blackened by the flames of war
—
whilst straight before me, and on
either hand lay, tranquilly sleep-ing
in the evening sunbeams, two-thirds
of my native county, taken
in at one sweeping glance I In-voluntarily
I paused, and in-stantly,
faithful memory filled my
soul with the scenes and incidents,
joys and sorrows of years. It
was in the earlier part of that
most delightful season in our
Alpine land, when summer pre-paring
to die, decks herself as for
a festival in her most srorgeous
robes, and blazing in the mellow
autumnal sunlight with the
thousand hues of the forest, makes
earth quite as beauteous, and al-most
as glorious "as the o'er-arching
firmament, fretted with
golden fire." The distant mount-ain
peaks were bathing joyfully
in the rich tide of outflowing
light, the valleys seemed slumber-ing
in real and grateful peace, and
the quiet village wrapped in such
fresh and soothing verdure, as al-most
to make its blackened ruins
appear beautiful. The scene too,
was that of my youthful hopes,
sorrows and triumphs; where I
had placed my young feet on the
first round in the ladder of am-bition,
had tasted first of its
waters and found them, even then,
mingled with bitterness. My
gazing was long, and my emotions
were many. Drawing my feast-ing
eyes at length slowly away
from the magnificent panorama of
mountain, hill and dale, and
shining waters, and gazing eager-ly
upon every recognized house
and familiar object, it fell at last
upon the final earthly home of
man—the village church-yard.
There among the tombs of peace-ful
citizens, gleamed also, in the
soft light, the white tablets which
marked the resting-places of
many who had given their young
blood in defence of that goodly
land, in whose bosom they slept so
well. Then I thought sadly of
the many, who were sleeping on
wild and distant battle-fields, and
wondered if there were any who
would think to seek out and adorn
their bloody beds! How could I,
for a moment, have wondered
thus? For, after gazing and
1869.] Dead— Very Dead. 383
gazing, and thinking and think-ing,
until my eyes were moist
with the teeming memories of the
past, what time the " herd winds
slowly o'er the lea," I spurred
down into the village, and almost
the first thing which greeted me
was the din of the preparation
my lovely townswomen were mak-ins:
to raise the means wherewith
to re-inter and adorn the graves
of those very slaughtered boys of
whom I had been thinking!
With a proud and grateful
heart, I said then, as I know you
will all join me in saying to-night.
May God bless the women of
North Carolina! And let him
that says not amen, be anathema,
maranalha I
DEAD—VERY DEAD.
[Sketch from a Bomance of I860.]
BY L. YIRGIKIA FRENCH.
Precisely so. In pummelling
and pulverizing to annihilation
the black body of "Southern
slavery," the stony spirit of
Plymouth Eock has pounded the
life out of a most beautiful and
sacred social relation:—the hand
of "Progress" (so-called) has
wiped out, forever, the peculiar
Southern "institution " of "Black
Mammy." But, in 1860--61, it
was not so. That institution,
now buried deep in the '
' dead
past," was then part and parcel
of the "living Present." At all
events, you would have thought
so, had you, for a moment, be-held
" Jfmn????/," the most notable
in position, and elephantine in size
of the "ebony idols" of "An-dalusia."
She was a matron of
some fifty summers and winters ,
—
most generally " girt about with
growing infancy " and the amplest
of all ample aprons, either of
checkered homespun or snowy
linen, as duty or leisure predomi-nated
2^i'o ^€"'" Her usual cos-tume
was, like herself, more com-fortable
than classic,—nothing
stifi" about her, save her neck and
her well-ironed head-kerchief,
which she persisted in wearing
after an odd fashion of her own
inventing, and which "Mas'
Syd" styled "a la Havelock."
The circumference being about
equal, it was difficult to deter-mine
where the dame's shoulders
ended and the waist began, in-deed,
had it not been for the
voluminous strings of the omni-present
apron, which encircled
her like a belt of drift, marking
384 Dead—Very Bead. [March,
high tide upon some giant syca-more,
the beholder might have
been left in a painful state of sus-pense
as to the fact whether or
not she possessed a waist at all.
Her hair, (it must be called so by
compliment, and from fear of a
applying any sheepish term to so
stately a dame;) was iron-gray
but concealed under the white
'kerchief,—her eyes small, with
the kindliest twinkle in them,
—
her complexion a brown ma-hogany,
sleek and shining, and
her large mouth expressive of
great good humor. Her features
were high and prominent, more
like those of an Indian than an
individual of " African descent "
her manner was of the most un-equivocal
and uncompromising
dignity: and she was given, at
times, to speaking of people as
being " of no force," with quite a
grand air. As to temperament,
good "Mammy" had nearly, if
not quite, as much spirit as body,
which is saying a great deal when
one pauses to contemplate her
number of pounds avoirdupois.
She stood in no great awe of any
earthly power whatever, though
she had an affectionate reverence
for "old Master" and "Madame;"
but she was sufficient in herself to
hold the entire " army of Africa "
on that plantation in a state of
wholesome subjection. In kitch-en
and cabin an autocrat—a veri-table
'
' monarch of all she sur-veyed;"
taking a general super-vision
of men and boys, keeping
a rigid look-out over the women,
and reprimanding at large the
troops of juvenile ebony; which,
regarded as a natural sequence to
their mothers, danced and tum-bled
about in the sunshine, or,
when "weather-bound," toddled
and capered through their kitten-like
divertisements over the cabin
floor. So supreme was her rule
throughout the " quarters," that
she always knew before-hand the
exact opinion of " them niggers,"
upon any given subject,—they
never daring openly to differ from
her views, or dispute her man-dates
upon any occasion. Her
denunciations of their divers der-ilictions
from duty, were often
furious, her gesticulation stormy
in the extreme,—her threatening
thunderous,—her temper torna-dic,
and, at such tempestuous
times, very serious indeed were
the sharp lightenings of her
" coups de langue.''^ The " boys,"
when they, individually, did not
happen to be the culprits, de-lighted
to get her upon what they
rather quaintly termed " a tali
horse," and when once fairly
seated upon that imaginary steed,
she was never known to abate
from want of words, but simply
and solely from lack of breath.
Yet, from the fact that her wrath
was of the loquacious species,
—
her ire of the imprecatory sort,
arose the consequent fact that,
though her bursts of righteous in-dignation
frequently assumed a
sublime stage of x^assion, they
seldom proceeded to serious ex-tremities.
On the whole, then,
when good "Mammy's" heart
was well understood, (for she had
a heart "as big as a meetin'-
house," more or less) she was
comprehended to be more amiable
and less formidable than a first
view, of her lofty bearing and
1869.] Dead—Very Dead. 385
physical force, would warrant one
in supposing.
To every member of the Yert-ner
family she was devotedly at-tached,
having been all her life
one of their retainers, as her pa-rents
were before her; she con-sidered
herself as one of them
—
making it a strictly personal mat-ter,
their family was hers— no
more, no less. Her especial ado-ration
was "de childun," her
young mistresses, she regarded as
a pair of moat uncommon angels,
with black eyes and rose-colored
dresses,—Sydney she doted on
the "Master " she loved sincerely,
and Madame Komayne, she ad-mired
to the deep extent of imi-tating
her in every possible way,
and saying often with an imperial
air; " Madame and me," did thus
and so! This, in itself was the
profoundest compliment possible
—flattery, with " Mammy " could
no farther go.
This good old family servant
had one distinctive peculiarity—
direct consequence of her force of
character and independent habit
of thought. Being herself of a
most substantial constitution—
a
kind of feminine Colossus, combin-ing
physical abundance and mus-cular
force, with a heart at times
the tenderest, and hands at times
the gentlest. She had been ap-pointed
to nurse and watch over
the late Mrs. Yertner, during the
last five years of her life, and she
had, almost literally, (as she ex-pressed
it,) "carried her in dese
arms." Such was the tender ad-oration
with which this gentlest
of gentle-women had inspired her
faithful nurse, during these long
years of patience and of pain, that
"Mammy " could form no higher
idea of the heavenly beatitudes
than that of still " tendin' on poor
dear Miss Lily," listening to her
as she read the Bible promises,
and carrying her golden harp for
her amid the splendors of the Kew
Jerusalem! She entertained an
abiding faith that this was one
day to be her happy and enviable
lot;—and woe to any imprudent
Ethiopian who, unadvisedly dared
intimate a doubt of this, (to her,)
most consoling and comfortable
theory. An irreverent grandson
of her own—a sort of " Imp of the
Perverse "—once had the ill-judg-ed
temerity to venture the query.
" Ehl an' who's gwine fur to tote
your gold harp, granny, while
you's a totinov Miss Lily's?" TJghl
the resources of the English lan-guage
are quite inadequate to a
description of the "length and the
breadth, the depth and the
height" of the "ducking," re-ceived
by this " noble Eoman,"
Julius, upon that unfortunate oc-casion;
it can only be expressed
in his own peculiar lingo, when
he sputteringly asserted that he
was—" a dem-dem-demol-obolish-ed
nigger!"
" Poor dear Miss Lily!" Mam-my
would soliloquize, as she pen-sively
leaned her Havelock upon
a colossal hand—" poor dear Mis-sus—
I trus' in the Lord she's got
her strength. Harps o' gold mus'
in reason be heavy, hit will be too
great an ondertakin' for /ler, poor
baby—an' crowns o' gold is heavy
likewise—too burdensome I'm mis-trustin'
for that little pale head
that used to lean back onto my
busom so faint like, as she said
—
'Oh! mammy—my head aches so,
386 Dead—Very Dead. [March
,
mammy!' Lord love it! hit 91 ever
was strong. Kow, hit's a pleas-ant
place thar—an' so 'twas a
pleasant place here, for Mas'
Caroll, God bless 'im, (that's ole
master I mean,) made her way
mighty easy,—ef crowns 0' gold
an' harps o' gold could a' saved
her precious life, he'd a' had 'em
fixed up right centre, shure! But
she never got no strength for all
Ms lovin' of her, an' my nussin' of
her,—an' though I reckon the
Good Master above 'ill make it all
mighty pleasant for her; the main
question is—will hit gin her the
strength? I often wonders—to
meself like, jis' as I'm a doin'
now—ef hit will be easier an'
plainer, walkin' on them streets
o' gold in the New Jerusalem she
used to read to me about, than
'twas on all these purty paths as
was made roun' an' roun' this
big house jis' a purpose for her
tired little feet? I reckon 'twill, I
reckon 'twill, be all springy and
velvety like. Poor Miss Lily—she
was one o' the chosen,— s/ie was.
That good man, Bruther Sanford,
is often a tellin' of us, ' As thy
days is, so shall thy strength be,'
but 'twasn't so with that sweet
creature—no 't wasn't. Tbemore
days she had the weaker she got,
an' at last she jis' naterally faded
away like a lily—as she was. I
hopes the Good Master 'ill ar-range
it so as to make the harps,
an' the crowns, an' things easy,
an' the burden light, or else that
he'll arrange it so as to gin her
the strength:—'t any rate, ontil
I gets thar to 'sist her—poor ba-by!"
The idea that she, herself,
would ever miss the golden gates
of the Celestial City, had never
once intruded upon good Mam-my's
brain; she was just as cer-tain
that her "calling and elec-tion
" was made sure, as that her
beloved Miss Lily had gone on
before, and was even now waiting
for her. If she endeavored to fol-low
the kindly teachings of her
Mistress and Brother Sanford, it
was not so much as a means of at-taining
heaven—but rather that
one who was so sure of going
there, ought, in reason, to con-duct
herself here in a manner
consistent with so happy and re-spectalde
a destiny
!
From Mammy's attendance on
her lovely mistress arose another
marked peculiarity. It so hap-pened
that upon two occasions,
Mrs. Vertner had visited a
"Water-cure," in search of her
lost health, and "Mammy" of
course, as an indispensable req-uisite,
accompanied her. Here
she was bitten by the "Cure"
and became an almost fanatical
disciple of Pressnitz. Mrs. Vert-ner
being, for a time as it seemed,
benefited by the treatment ad-ministered
in her nurse's tender
way, the said nurse , to the last,
maintained that '
' ef poor, dear
Miss Lily could only a made out
to live long enough to a tried hit
all on complete, hit would, in the
Good Master's time, a giu her the
strength." Mammy, from that
time forward, constituted herself
an entire "corps d'Afrique," un-der
especial orders to administer
" the treat?7je?if" to all diseases,
moral, mental and physical, which
appeared upon that plantation.
Water was the universal pana-cea
for all '
' the ills that flesh is
heir to." Madame Komayne fre-
1869.] Dead—Very Dead. 387
quently observed that it was a
blessing the river was so con-venient,
as without it, Mammy
would have been to all everlasting
in a fever of dread, lest the sup-ply
springs and cisterns should
sink, Ariel-like, into the "middle
earth " and leave her without the
slightest amelioration, either for
moral or physical evil. Evidently
her direst idea of the horrors of a
hell, arose from her belief that in
such a sphere existed nothing of
her favorite element—but on the
contrary, that Fire , its antagonist-ic
principle, reigned supreme.
" Plenty o' water in Heaven,"
—she would forcibly announce,
" the Good Master knows what
he's about. Four big shinin'
rivers into the Paradise aint all
for nothin':—an' then thar's that
'sea o' glass like onto a crystal,'
—
that's water too. 'Taint glass, no
how,—what would folks want wi'
glass in heaven? Cheap, brickly
stuff—an' them a walkin' onto
dimonds and all sich! Ko—bless
the Lord ! that sea's water
—
hit
is!" And then she would go on
to argue, (not without some show
of reason it must be confessed;)
'•"What would be the sense o'
havin' a hell-fire an' plenty o'
water right on hand? Water''
s
Jire^s master ^ an' with hit we could
cure hell an' drown the devil—or
i-quench ''im out, one. Only give
me grace for to pour rivers enough
down that sink-hole, an' I'll
'range hit all about centre. I'd
engage to git all the meanness
outen' ole Sam himself, by proper
an' jew-dishus treatme?i^. I'd
pack 'im, an' douche 'im, an'
plunge 'im: or I'd drownd 'im,
an'' squench 'im, an' naturally put
his pipe out for 'im, bodily; 1
would, the owdashus ole fiery
flyin' cuss! Hear me now?"
In pursuance, therefore, of the
idea that water was nothing less
than a sort of liquid "philoso-pher's
stone," by contact with
which all things evil were to be
transmuted into the purest possi-ble
good. Mammy had established
a certain regimen for not only
routing disease from the ebony
body, physical, but of driving the
" often infirmity " of " badness''''
out of the juvenile ebony body,
moral. She had imbibed in copi-ous
draughts, the principle that
water is a purifying, refreshing
and ultimately regenerating agent,
and she was not an individual to
think a thing, and then allow it
to remain xQuietly laid up in laven-der
in tne regions of thought.
Like a woman of will, as she was,
she was for putting all such think-ings
into vigorous, not to say
rigorous, practice. Holding it
firmly as one of the " thirty-nine
articles " of her faith, that Afri-can
childhood and youth de-mand
nothing less than the ex-igent
watchfulness of dragons,
gorgons, etc., she constituted her-self
a guardian of that type to
such an unlimited extent, that the
horrified juveniles considered her
no less than an entire brigade of
the aforesaid monsters. But no
one could doubt the fact that her
regimen had its advantages. The
little urchins verily improved un-der
it,—they were sleek, shining
and"soasie,"—the consequences
of scrubbing off, and rubbing out
the "badness " inherent in youth-ful
Ebony. They improved vast-ly
under her superhuman efforts
338 " J/amm?/." [March,
towards bringing the blood into a them. It was related of her, that
state of healthful circulation , upon one occasion, when Brother
after a fit of that chilly and sul- Sanford was holding forth, elo-len
iniquity denominated "the quently, in the chapel, upon this,
sulks:" a searching attrition of her favorite Scripture subject and
their ears with rasping hucka- depicting the Creator's stern pun-back
after a fibbing style of con- ishment of an evil world ; her
versation: and a series of super- irrepressible enthusiasm got the
erogatory slaps in connection with better of her discretion, and she
a douche (vulgarly styled a "duck- electrified both minister and audi-ing,")
when the harmony of the ence by springing to her feet,
infantile corps had been disturbed clapping her colossal hands with
by that domestic enormity, "a the emphasis of a pistol-shot, and
free fight all round." exclaiming in a triumphal shout
—
The Deluge met with "Mam- '< Glory to God I he had ^em thar !
my's " most unqualified approval, he had -em thar /"
She regarded it as a master-stroke, ^. ^ ^;. * ^
a splendid comjj d'etat of the Good
Master for getting " the bad " out Dead-very dead. Forever past
of " a world lying in wickedness," away is this Boanerges type of the
one gone to the unmitigated good family nurse and foster
"bad," so to speak. To be sure, mother. Gone too-to come again
the experiment resulted in the no more, is the softer image of the
destruction of a world of people, same extinct "institution " which
but that, in her opinion, was a l^^s gladdened the homes of hun-matter
of secondary consequence, ^reds of us in days gone by, and
since their " owdashus badness " whose portrait is hastily sketched
went down to destruction with ^elow. Gone—all gone.
"MAMSIY."
{A Home Picture of 1800.
Where the broad mulberry branches hang a canopy of leaves
Like an avalanche of verdure, drooping o'er the kitchen eaves,
And the sunshine and the shadow dainty arabesques have made
On the quaint, old oaken settle, standing in the pleasant shade;
Sits good "Mammy " with " the child'un " while the summer after-noon
Wears the dewy veil of April, o'er the brilliancy of June.
1869.] " Mammy.'' 389^
Smooth and snowy is the 'kerchief, lying folded with an air
Of matron dignity above her silver-sprinkled hair;
Blue and white the beaded necklace used " of Sundays " to bedeck
(A dearly cherished amulet,) her plump and dusky neck;
Dark her neatly ironed apron, of a broad and ample size,
Spreading o'er the dress of "homespun " with its many colored dyes.
True, her lips are all untutored, yet how genially they smile,
And how eloquent their fervor, praying, " Jesus bless de chile!"
True, her voice is hoarse and broken, but how tender its replies;
True, her hands are brown and withered, yet how loving are her eyes;
She has thoughts both high and holy tho' her brow is dark and low;
And her face is dusk and wrinkled but her soul as white as snow!
An aristocrat is "Mammy "—in her dignity sedate,
" Haught as Lucifer " to " white trash " whom she cannot tolerate;
Patronizing too, to " Master " for she " nussed 'im when a boy;"
Familiar, yet respectful, to "the Mistis "—but the joy
Of her bosom is " de child'un," and delightedly she'll boast
Of the " born blood " of her darlings—"good as kings and queens
a'most."
There she sits beneath the shadow, crooning o'er some olden hymn,
Watching earnestly and willingly, altho' her eyes are dim;
Laughing in her heart sincerely, yet with countenance demure
Holding out before "her babies " every tempting little lure,
—
Koting all their merry frolics with a quiet, loving gaze,
Telling o'er at night to "Mistis " all their " cunnin' little ways."
Kow and then her glance will wander o'er the pastures far away
Where the tasselled corn-fields waving, to the breezes rock and sway,
To the river's gleaming silver, and the hazy distance where
Giant mountain-peaks are peering thro' an azure veil of air;
But the thrill of baby voices—baby laughter, low and sweet,
Recall her in a moment to the treasures at her feet.
So " rascally," so rollicking, our bold and sturdy boy
In all his tricksy way-wardness is still her boast and joy.
She'll chase him thro' the shrubberies—his mischief-mood to cure,
" Hi! whar dat little rascal now?—de b'ars will git 'im shure!"
When caught she'll stoutly swing him to her shoulder, and in pride
Go marching round the pathways—" 'jus to see how gran' he ride."
YOL. VI.—NO. V. 30
390 Bee Culture. [March,
And the "Birdie " of our bosoms—Ah! how soft and tenderly
Bows good " Mammy's" mother-spirit to her baby witchery I
{ All io her is dear devotion whom the angels bend to bless,
All our thoughts of her are blended with a holy tenderness;)
Coaxing now, and now caressing—saying with a smile and kiss
—
"Jus' for Mammy—dat's a lady—will it now?" do that, or this.
On the sweet white-tufted clover, worn and weary with their play,
Toying with the creamy blossoms, now my little children lay;
Harnessed up with crimson ribbons, wooden horses side by side
^ '• Make believe '
' to eat their '
' fodder ' '—(blossoms to their noses tied !
)
iNear them stands the willow wagon—in it ' 'Birdie's " mammoth doll.
And our faithful " Brave " beside them, noble guardian over all.
Above them tloat the butterflies, around them hum the bees,
And birdlings warble, darting in and out among the trees
;
The kitten sleeps at "Mammy's " side, and two brown rabbits pass
Hopping close along the paling, stealing thro' the waving grass
;
—G-ladsome tears blue eyes are filling and a watching mother prays
—
' 'God bless 'Mammy' and my children, in these happy, halcyon days!"
BEE CULTURE.
When so many people of the as a science in the European col-
South are struggling for life, like leges of agriculture, and in 1857,
ship-wrecked mariners, no float- the yield of honey and wax in
ing plank should be allowed to Austria, was estimated at seven
drift uselessly past them. If " fig- millions of dollars." Almost ev-ures
do not lie," bee-keeping is ery Southern plantation has a few
one of these unnoticed planks, neglected bee hives, which would
and if we may trust enthusiastic perish altogether, were they in a
apiarians, it is no despicable one. less favored land ; but our mild
Nay, in their estimation it is far winters, and blossom laden sum-more
than a mere floating plank
—
mers are so favorable to their ex-it
is a taut, capacious, sea-worthy istence, that they yield a fair re-vessel.
It is a business which, turn of wax and honey, in spite of
however, neglected at the South, the ravages of their great destroy-has
kept pace in other lands, with er, the bee moth. Formerly, we
other improvements in this age of were obliged to say of bee culture
so-called progress. It is taught as Bacon said of agriculture.
1869.] Bee Culture. 391
when he made a bon-fire of his
agricultural books, " These books
contain no principles." We pla-ced
our wee brown-coated laborers
in a hive many times larger than
they required, and however anx-ious
for their welfare, were oblig-ed
to look helplessly on, while the
brave little fellows battled with
the moths, who to them, are
"mighty sons of Anak, giants in
their land." Now, we have learn-ed
so to dispose their forces that
the enemy is beaten every time.
The moth is a cowardly fellow,
and never contests the field when
opposed by anything like equal
powers. The bees, themselves,
must do the fighting—our inter-ference
is useless when it comes to
hard blows—but it is our part to
see that each division of the Lili-putian
army is well recruited—no
gaps in their ranks—and that
their commissariat is well sup-plied.
The mode of doing this has
now been ascertained with accu-racy,
and bee-keeping is no lon-ger
a hap-hazard sort of business,
without any "principles." More-over,
bee-keeping is a beautiful
business. We confess to a weak-ness
for the beautiful even in busi-
-ness ; and a probably unorthodox
suspicion that everything ugly is
^n '
' evil invention of the enemy."
A poet may be a bee-keeper.
He may sit down amidst his blos-som-
embowered apiary, und com-mune
with Aristotle and Virgil
about his busy little charge while
their musical hum fills his ears,
and he may even come to
the conclusion that the golden
age of the classic poets was not
all a myth, and that we have
gradually progressed downward
instead of upward—downward
through the silver and the
brazen ages, until we have
reached this hard iron one, ruled
by the iron-handed sons of Cain.
He may also dream, that as there
is !:c coarser metal than iron, and
we can go no farther in this down-ward
course, we may hope to com-mence,
by the "law of circulari-ty,"
to rise upward again, and
emerge, in our orbit, from the
iron age into the golden one.
The entering wedges to this gold-en
age are occupations which re-quire
little labor and produce
great abundance, and may be more
easily managed than we think for,
and our present object is to show
how profitable the golden age oc-cupation
of bee-keeping may be
made, even in this the age of
iron. The Eev. L. L. Langstroth
tells us that in a favorable season,
he has obtained from a single
hive over one hundred pounds of
surplus honey. And we are fur-ther
told in the Patent Office Re-port
for 1863, that it is not unusual
under the most favorable circum-stances,
for single hives to pro-duce
two hundred pounds in a
season. In East Friesland, Hol-land,
bees are maintained at the
rate of two thousand hives to a
square mile. Two thousand colo-nies
therefore, under the inost fa-vorable
circumstances would yield
from 200,000 to 400,000 pounds of
honey. At 25 cents per lb., this
amount of comb honey would be
worth from $50,000 to S100,000.
Does any planter make as much
from a square mile, or six hun-dred
acres of cotton? The reply
will be, "Yes, under the most
favorable circumstances we can."
392 Bee Culture. [March,
But it is at the cost of the labor
of Sisyphus, each day repeating
the labor of the former, each year
repeating the toil of the preceding.
In the one case the laborers are
human beings—in the other they
are hees. Bees delight in labor
—
human beings do not. It is the
highest good of bees to labor— it
is the highest good of human
beings to have time for mental
and moral cultivation and for re-creation.
In bee-keeping, all you
have to do is to provide hives and
keep your colonies strong, about
the same amount of trouble as
providing bagging and rope for,
and ginning,your twelve or fifteen
hundred bales of cotton, which
you have produced from your six
hundred acres, under the most
favorable circumstances. Ko
apiary can be counted on for this
amount of honey, however. But
we are told in the same Patent
Office Keport, that it is "en-couraging
to know that already
there are a few extensive apiaries
in our country, which, under en-lightened
cultivation, produce an-nually,
from five to fifty dollars
worth of honey and wax to each
colony." We are told also, by
another writer, that one parish
priest in Spain, (which like the
South, is a tine country for bees)
possesses five thousand hives or
colonies. Taking five dollars as
the minimum profit of each hive,
and this parish priest would
realize ^25 ,000 annually. The ob-jection
may be raised to all this,
that where honey is produced in
very large quantities, there is
danger of the supply exceeding
the demand, and therefore it will
become unsalable. We think
there is but little danger of the
demand exceeding the supply for
many years to come, and when
we remember how easily honey
may be converted into that much
demanded article, sugar, we doubt
if this danger will ever occur.
To convert honey into sugar,
nothing more is necessary than to
expose it to the light. Men of
science tell us that this is the
reason why it is necessary for bees
to work in the dark—the honey
for their purposes must be in a
liquid state, and exposure to the
light always candies or crystal-lizes
it. The reason for this sin-gular
transformation is a very
curious one. The following ac-count
of it is given in the Quar-terly
Hevieio of Science. " Every
one knows what honey fresh from
the comb is like. It is a clear,
yellow syrup, without a trace of
solid sugar in it. Upon straining,
however, it gradually assumes a
crystalline appearance—it can-dies,
as the saying is, and ulti-mately
becomes a solid lump of
sugar. It has not been suspected
that this change is due to a photo-graphic
action; that the same
agent which alters the molecular
arrangement of the iodine of
silver in the excited collodion
plate, and determines the forma-tion
of camphor and iodine crys-tals
in a bottle, causes the sj-rup
honey to assume a crystalline
form. This, however, is the case.
M. Scheilber has enclosed honey
in stoppered flasks, some of which
he has kept in perfect darkness,
whilst others have been exposed
to the light. The invariable re-sults
have been, that the sunned
portion rapidly crystallizes, whilst
1869.] Bee Culture. 393
that kept in the dark remains per-fectly
liquid. We now see why-bees
are so careful to work in
darkness—the existence of their
young depends on the liquidity of
the saccharine food presented to
them." Honey can also be trans-formed
into sugar of a solid white
concrete form, by boiling until it
is reduced to a certain consistence
and then "treating with moist
clay, as practised by the sugar-baker
for purifying sugar from its
unctuous, treacly matter."
—
(Bees' Cyclopedia.)
In the United States, Lang-stroth
and Quinby are our chief
authorities in bee-culture. They
agree in all essential particulars,
and the former is the inventor, or
rather perfector, of the hive which
enables us to obtain a knowledge
of the exact condition of each
colony, at all times, and which
supplies, therefore, the one thing
needed for complete success in
bee-keeping. They each obtain
their profits from the surplus
boxes or caps, placed upon the
hive, and which the bees general-ly
fill as soon as their own com-missary
stores are attended to.
Quinby was very successful with
the common box hive, taking care
to make them of the right size,
viz: to contain 2,000 cubic inches.
The caps, or boxes, for surplus
honey should fit on the top, and
should be exactly the same size,
except in height, which should
not be more than seven inches.
One side, or the two opposite sides
of the honey box should be of
glass, in order that the bee-keeper
may see when they are filled with
honey. These glass sides should
be covered to exclude the lisht.
For a description of Langstroth's
hive, the reader is referred to his
work on the honey bee. The
hives and honey boxes should all
be made in the winter, in order to
be ready for the swarming season,
which usually begins here in
April and continues for two
months. The apiary should not
be so situated as to receive the
full rays of the sun during the
heat of the day. A few hours of
morning sun to dry the moisture
around is quite sufficient. Dark
colored comb and honey are al-ways
the result of two much heat
and light. In South America,
where the bees build on trees in
the open air, the comb is as black
as jet. If there are no low-grow-ing
trees near the apiary, it
will be necessary to plant some
bushes six or eight feet in height,
for the swarms to settle upon. In
hiving a swarm, the inexperi-enced
bee-keeper should protect
himself from stings, by wearing a
broad brimmed straw hat, over
which a bag made of two yards
of mosquito netting should be
drawn and tied securely under the
arms. The hands should be
shielded by India rubber, or thick
buckskin gloves with gauntlets.
Mr. Langstroth uses a bee-hat,
made of a piece of wire-cloth, one
foot wide and two and a half feet
long, sewed to a circular piece of
leather at the top, and with a frill
of cotton cloth at the bottom, to
be tucked under the coat, to pro-tect
the neck. Old apiarians
handle their bees without any of
these lorecautions and incur no
risk. When there is danger of
a swarm running ofl', they may
be arrested by throwing water, or
394 Bee Culture. [March,
even earth amongst them, but no
ringing of bells, or beating of
pans has the slightest effect.
—
After the swarm has settled, the
usual plan is to saw off the limb
and lay it upon a table under-neath,
upon which a white sheet
has been spread, and place an
empty hive over them. When it
is not desirable to saw off the
limb, they may be shaken into the
hive, (inverting it for the purpose)
by giving a quick jarring motion
to the limb. Then turn the hive
on the bottom board and place it
where you wish it to stand. In
using Langstroth's hive, the bees
should be shaken into a basket
and carried to the hive and turned
out upon a sheet, fastened over
the alighting board. If they
show any reluctance to enter,
sprinkle them with water. Only
one swarm should be allowed to
leave each hive. By using Lang-stroth's
hive, all after swarms
which weaken the parent colony,
may be prevented. His hives are
so constructed that each comb is
built upon a separate frame which
may be taken out at pleasure.
About a week after the first swarm
has issued, take out all the frames
and look them over carefully until
you find the queen cells, which
are easily distinguished by their
large size, and cut out all but one.
The old queen always leaves with
the first swarm, leaving her suc-cessors
in the unhatched condi-tion
in the queen cells. If all
these unhatched queens, except-ing
one, are destroyed, there will
be no more swarming, for bees
never swarm unless led by a
queen. The Golden Rule in bee-keeping
is to KEEP STKO^TG
COLONIES, and one of the means
of doing this, is to prevent all
after-swarming. When the colo-nies
grow feeble from other causes
than over-swarming, they are to
be recruited in the following sim-ple
manner. Take brood combs
from strong colonies, containing a
sufficient number of bees in the
pupte state, and place them in the
hives containing the weak colo-nies.
An experienced bee-keeper
can tell from the weight of the
hives whether the colonies are
strong enough. Each hive should
contain at least thirty lbs. of bees.
Orchard and forest trees are most
important auxiliaries to an apiary.
All fruit blossoms furnish deli-cious
honey, but none supplies it
in such quantity as the blossoms
of the apple. The raspberry also
furnishes most delicious honey.
The catkins of the chestnut and
chinquapin are also very valuable,
and the blossoms of the persim-mon
are often seen covered with
bees. White clover is one of the
most important plants from which
bees derive their supplies. It is
in the Spring when fruit blossoms
fill our orchards and forests, that
honey is gathered in the greatest
abundance. A week or ten days
of favorable weather will enable
a strong colony to lay up an am-ple
supply for the year, if they
have a suflicient quantity of fruit
blossoms to gather from. And
instead of injuring the coming
crop of fruit by robbing their blos-soms,
they bestow a great benefit
upon them. In proof of this fact,
the American Bee Journal makes
the following statement:
" At the Apiarian General Con-vention
held at Stutgard in Wirt-
1869.] Bee CaJture. 395
emburg, in September, 1858, the
celebrated pomologist, Professor
Lucas, one of the directors of the
Hohenheim Institute, said: 'The
interests of the horticulturist and
bee-keeper combine and run paral-lel.
A judicious pruning of our
fruit-trees will cause them to blos-som
more freely and yield honey
more plentifully. I would urge
attention to this on those who are
both fruit-growers and bee-keep-ers.
A careful and observant bee-keeper
at Potsdam writes to me
that his trees yield decidedly
larger crops since he has estab-lished
an apiary in his orchard,
and the annual product is now
more certain and regular than be-fore,
though his trees had always
received due attention.
Some years ago, a wealthy lady
in Germany established a green-house
at considerable cost, and
stocked it with a great variety
of choice native and exotic fruit
trees—expecting in due time to
have remunerating crops. Time
passed, and annually there was a
super-abundance of blossoms,
with only a very little fruit.
—
Various plans were devised and
adopted to bring the trees into
bearing, but without success, till
it was suggested that the blos-soms
needed fertilization, and that
by means of bees the work could
be effected. A hive of busy honey-gatherers
was introduced next
season; the remedy was effectual
there was no longer any difficulty
iu producing crops there. The
bees distributed the pollen, and
the setting of the fruit followed
naturally.' "
There are four occupations
which we believe could be com-bined
most profitably and beauti-fully
in this climate. In truth,
they "dove-tail" into each other
so exquisitely that they seem but
different parts of one charmed
whole. These occupations are
bee-keeping, orcharding, wool-growing
aud landsGaxie gardening^
the last being but the golden cord
which binds the three first to-gether.
By orcharding, we must
not be understood to mean the
ownership of a patch of crooked
moss-grown and canker-worm-eaten
apple trees, but the careful
cultivation of every variety of
fruit-bearing tree which belongs
to our latitude, from the massive
chestnut, which tosses its giant
branches to the sky, to the light
and graceful amelanchier, with its-crimson,
currant-like fruit. The
landscape gardener furnishes the
rich turf upon which the sheep
feed—the sheep enrich the soil
and keep down the weeds around
the orchard trees, and the or-chard
trees furnish the blossoms
of which the bees make their
honey, and the bees in their turQ
fertilize the blossoms of the or-chard,
thus completing the circle
of mutual benefits. Then the
owner finds them " dove-tailing ""
into each other, with equal har-mony,
in the claims upon his at-tention.
The lambing season is
over just before the swarming
season commences—then comes
sheep-shearing—then the hay-making,
and then the gathering,
boxing and marketing of summer
fruits—then the vintage and gath-ering
of nuts and winter stores
of fruit, and then the landscape
gardener may take up his pruning
knife and spade, planting and
trimming during our mild winter
months, until January comes
again with its fleecy treasures.
We have said that landscape-gar-dening
is but the golden cord
which binds the other occupations
396 Bee Culture. [March,
together. That is, the turf, trees,
sheep and bees should, and could,
form one beautiful whole, ar-ranged
by the artistic taste of a
landscape-gardener. Let heavy
masses of wood, dense enough for
Druids' homes and temples, crown
the hills and be composed of chest-nuts,
black and Persian walnuts,
shell-bark hickory nuts, Swiss and
Italian pines, salisburias and
araucarias, persimmons and mul-berries,
and let the usual orchard
fruits mingle their exquisite odors
and blossoms on the outskirts of
the heavier trees, catching the
sun-light, and strewing the eme-rald
sod with their pearly white
and rose-tinted petals, while the
bees give a murmuring chorus to
songs of the nest-building birds.
Let the copse wood be composed of
filberts, chinquapins and hazle-nuts,
and let the blackberries,
" Black as beauty's tresses
And sweet as love's caresses "
grow, not in straight lines, but in
masses not too tangled for the
gardener to enter with his prun-ing-
knife occasionally. The sheep
are good pruners as well as mow-ers,
and a thicket of Chickasaw
plums assumes a miniature or-chard
look, whenever they have
access to it. They clear out
noxious weeds and hiding-places
for snakes, spiders, &c., as if by
magic. By the employment of
hurdle fences, these gentle labor-ers
will fertilize, mow and weed
your land whenever you desire it;
growing at the same time wool
for your raiment and mutton for
your table, and pets for your
children. Poet and philosopher,
what more could you ask?
But to return to our proper sub-ject,
bee-culture. Our purpose in
the foregoing remarks is not to
induce young enthusiasts to in-vest
money in bees, but merely to
persuade the present owners of
bees to take care of them and
make the most of them. A single
colony sending out one swarm, or
" doubling every year, would, in
ten years, increase to 1,024: stocks,
and in twenty years, to over a
million. At this rate, our whole
country might, in a few years, be
stocked with bees. It is not easy
to overstock any country with
bees. On this subject, Lang-stroth
remarks:
" It is difficult to repress a
smile when the owner of a few
hives, in a district where as many
hundreds might be made to pros-per,
graveljj- imputes his ill- suc-cess
to the fact, that too many
bees are kept in his vicinity. If,
in the spring, a colony of bees is
prosperous and healthy, it will
gather abundant stores, in a
favorable season, even if hun-dreds
equally strong are in its
immediate vicinity; while, if it is
feeble, it will be of little or no
value, even if it is in 'a land
flowing with milk and honey
'
and there is not another stock
within a dozen miles of it. There
is probably not a square mile in
this whole countrj^ which is over-stocked
with bees, unless it is so
unsuitable for bee-keeping as to
make it unprofitable to keep them
at all."
Mr. Langstroth's work should
be read by every bee-keeper. It
is written in an entertaining style,
but rather too difluse for the ordi-nary
reader. It would be an ad-vantage
to have a condensed edi-tion
for practical people who are
not fond of general literature.
18G9.] John C. Calhoun. 397
Yirgil, Aristotle and Columellus
are very well ia their proper
places, but when the bees are
swarming, we haven't time to
attend to them. Quinby's Mys-teries
of Bee Keeping, also, con-tains
much valuable information,
but Langstroth's hive is admitted
by Quinby to be the last improve-ment
in bee-keeping. It is an
art which cannot be taught in a
magazine article, but many farm-ers,
at the South, are very suc-cessful,
who have no guides but
their own good sense. Keep
YOUR COLOKIES STRONG is the
golden rule. There may be as
many modes of doing this, as
there are modes of enriching the
soil. The " principles " of agri-culture
are now thought to be
well understood, but Mr. Dickson
places his dependence upon com-mercial
fertilizers; Mr. Gift upon
home-made fertilizers, and Mr.
Howard upon sheep. Mr. Quin-by
was very successful with com-mon
box hives, but admits that
he is more successful with mov-able
comb hives, and we know a
mountain farmer who has sold
hundreds of pounds of honej"
from hives made of sections of
hollow trees.
JOHX C. CALHOUN.
I will commence my reminis-cences
of public men , with Mr.
Calhoun, who stood pre-eminent-ly
above all others, in South Car-olina,
of my day and time. In
early life, I had a most exalted
opinion of this distinguished
Carolinian, his talents, patriot-ism
and purity of character.
—
This opinion was formed from his
general course in public life, his
speeches in Congress, and his ad-ministration
of the War Depart-ment,
under President Monroe.
Whilst going to school, at Ashe-ville,
IST. C, in 1822, I remember
writing an article advocating his
claims to the Presidency over
those of Adams, Jackson, Clay
and Crawford. In the summer of
1825, there was a public dinner
given Mr. Calhoun, at Greenville,
S. C. I was one of the committee
who extended him the invitation,
and prepared the toasts drank,
one of which pointed to the
Presidency as the crowning re-ward
of his public life. This was
the first time, I ever had the
pleasure of seeing Mr. Calhoun,
and I was then a student of law
in Judge Earle's office. The
speech he made, on that occasion,
was a very brief one, and the
company was not large. General
Thompson, afterwards Minister
to Mexico, presided at the dinner.
Judge Earle, who was never an
admirer of Mr. Calhoun, was not
present, and left the village in
order to avoid the dinner. He
had been a Crawford man, and
belonged to the political school of
Judge William Smith, of South
398 John C. Calhoun, [March,
Carolina. In the Presidential
canvass of 1824, Judge Earle sup-ported
John Quincy Adams. He
had no very high opinion of Gen.
Jackson, as a statesman, but was
never very decided in his poli-tics.
The next time I saw Mr. Cal-houn,
was at Pendleton Court,
and it was the last time I spoke
to him for many years. During
our political excitement, in 1832,
in South Carolina, I became very
strongly prejudiced against Mr.
Calhoun, and it was not in my
nature to seek the company of
those I did not like. The total
abandonment, by Mr. Calhoun,
of his early national principles
and his zealous espousal of what
he had once repudiated as " The
Virginia abstractions," shook my
contidence in his wisdom and
steadfastness of purpose in poli-tics.
I did not see how a great
statesman could radically change
his political principles, and be
both wise and sincere.
In 1845, I met Mr. Calhoun at
the anniversary of the Pendleton
Agricultural Society. I had been
invited by the President of the
Society, Major George Seaborn, to
deliver the anniversary address on
that occasion. After it was over,
Mr. Calhoun came up and com-plimented
the effort I had made
in the cause of agriculture. He
was then starting to Alabama,
to look after his planting interest
in that State, and expressed his
regret at not being able to have
me at his house, near the village
of Pendleton. Mr. Calhoun was,
at that time, very much interested
in farming, and he always made
good crops. He paid great at-tention
to the preservation and
improvement of his lands. Hill-side
ditching was introduced by
him in this section of the State,
and after completing this labor,
on his farm, he then turned his
attention to manuring his fields.
He wisely remarked that it was
of little value to manure, till the
land was prepared to retain it.
Nullification had passed over in
South Carolina, and was an obso-lete
idea, with all thinking and
reflecting men. The aspirations
ofparty had subsided, and I ceased
to think of Mr. Calhoun's incon-sistency
and tergiversations in poli-tics.
I began, once more, to ad-mire
his brilliant genius and ap-preciate
his public services in
many respects. In the summer
of 184G, I met Mr. Calhoun in
"Washington, and had the pleasure
of hearing him address the Senate
on several occasions. I was very
much struck with his earnest and
ardent manner in debate. He
spoke with great ease and fluency,
his sentences were terse, and his
conclusions rapid. He seemed to
regard more the idea expressed,
than the language in which it was
uttered. His style of speaking
pleased me more than the grand,
solemn manner of Mr. Webster.
He had all the feeling and fire of
the orator, which I thought Mr.
Webster wanted in some measure.
I had the pleasure of dining
with Mr. Calhoun, during my
stay in Washington, with Gov.
McDuflie, Judge Butler and Mr.
Burt, of South Carolina. At the
table there was an amusing dis-cussion
between him and Judge
Butler, on the location of nation-al
capitals. Mr. Calhoun re-
1869.] John C. Calhoun. 399
marked that the Capital of a na-tion
was always on one side, and
never in the centre of a kingdom,
or empire. Judge Butler con-troverted
this assertion and in-stanced
Spain and Jerusalem.
Mr. Calhoun explained by stating
that Madrid was a Moorish city,
and not originally the Capital of
Spain. What he said in regard to
Jerusalem, I do not now remem-ber,
with sufficient accuracy to
state. But Mr. Calhoun was al-ways
well posted in reference to
any theory which he advanced.
If facts failed him, he would,
nevertheless, support his theory
with the most urgent argument
and reasoning. I remember hear-ing
Warren E.. Davis give an ac-count
of a discussion at a dinner
table, between Mr. Calhoun and
an English Captain , in reference
to the Trade Winds. The Cap-tain
listened very attentively to
the theory, but said he had often
crossed the Equator, and his ob-servation
did not sustain Mr. Cal-houn's
theory. Nevertheless, Mr.
Calhoun's argument satisfied the
party that he was correct, in op-position
to the positive experience
and observation of the English
Captain. In other words, the
Captain's facts were of less weight
than Mr. Calhoun's argument.
After the adjournment of Con-gress,
I traveled to the Virginia
Springs in company with Mr.
Calhoun, Gov. McDuffle and Mr.
Burt. We were all in the same
stage coach. Mr. Calhoun spoke
of Clay's and Webster's manner in
debate. He said when Webster
was worsted in argument, he felt
it, and you saw that he did feel it
and know it. But Clay would
never give any such manifesta-tions.
He never acknowledged
that he was worsted in debate,
and would never let you see that
he thought so. Mr. Calhoun said
Col. Benton was the greatest of
humbugs, and could make more
out of nothing than any other
man in the world. " He ought,"
said Mr. Calhoun, '' to have gone
about all his life with quack doc-tors
and written pufis for their
medicines. Had he done so, he
might have made a fortune!"
—
There was no kind feeling be-tween
Mr. Calhoun and Col. Ben-ton.
Throughout life, they were
bitter personal enemies. Mr. Cal-houn
had a bad opinion of the
Colonel, and he reciprocated it
most cordially.
When I left the Springs to re-turn
home, by the way of Abing-don,
Ya., and Greenville, Tenn.,
Mr. Calhoun requested me to
write him as to the condition of
the roads and staging through the
mountains. He and Mrs. Cal-houn
intended returning to South
Carolina over that route. He was
anxious to visit Wythe county,
where his ancestors had lived
some time after their removal
from Pennsylvania, and before
they finally settled in Abbeville
district. South Carolina. The
roads and staging I found bad
enough, and so reported to Mr.
Calhoun. On their arrival in
Greenville, S. C, Mrs. Calhoun
said to me as soon as I saw her,
" did you ever expect to see me
alive, after passing over those
roads in Virginia and Tennes-see?"
Whilst I was a candidate for
Congress, in opposition to Gov.
400 John C. Calhoun. [March,
Orr, I visited Mr. Calhoun twice
in my electioneering tours through
Pickens district. I never found
any where, a kinder man, or one
more plain and unassuming in
his manners than Mr. Calhoun;
but I was particularly struck with
his kindness and winning man-ners
at his own house. How true
it is that greatness is never pre-tending
or assuming. It is
only " the would be great man,"
who has to assume and pretend to
what he has not. The first visit
I paid Mr. Calhoun, we were
alone the whole day, and from
ten o'clock till dinner was an-nounced,
I do not think either of
us left our seats for a moment,
nor was there scarcely a pause in
conversation. He was in fine
spirits, and his conversation was
truly fascinating. It was not
that of a studied speech or lecture,
in which Mr. Calhoun too often
indulged with his admiring listen-ers.
It was natural and simple,
cordial and cheerful, amusing and
instructive, giving and taking,
calling in the whole range of his
life's experience, thought and
learning. He spoke of his course
in Congress, described his con-temporaries,
told anecdotes of
Kandolph, Lowndes, Jackson,
Polk, Benton and others. He did
not admire President Polk, and
spoke of the Mexican war as most
unfortunate. He did not believe
that our armies could capture the
city of Mexico, or hold the coun-try
if we conquered it. He spoke
in high terms of the officers of the
United States army, and said he
knew thirty of those officers, who
were capable of commanding the
largest armies of Europe.
When the Missouri question
was on the tapis, in Congress, Mr.
Calhoun said he suggested to Mr.
Lowndes, that Congress having
authorized the formation of a
State Constitution, the people of
Missouri, if not admitted into the
Union, would be a legal, inde-pendent
State, out of the L'nion,
and beyond the control of the
United States. In speaking of
the Federal Union, he said the
love of it, with the American peo-ple,
was stronger than their love
of liberty! I w^as greatly shocked,
as a Union man, with this idea,
and did not assent to it. I con-tended
that the love of the Union
with the American people, was
only for the purpose of maintain-ing
their liberty and independ-ence.
But it would seem from
our present political condition,
that Mr. Calhoun was right, and
I was wrong. A large portion of
the Northern people seem willing
to establish a military despotism
to preserve the Union, and I am
extremely mortified to see that a
portion of the Southern people are
willing to acquiesce in this disposi-tion
to get back into the Union.
I have always said that all great
men were egotists. Cicero and
Demosthenes were eminently so.
Mr. Calhoun was not without this
foible of greatness, any more than
he was of one other infirmity,
which it is said belongs to all
great men
—
ambition. He liked
very much to talk of himself, and
he always had the good fortune
to make the subject exceedingly
interesting and captivating to his
hearers. Mr. Calhoun was a man
of the very highest mental energy
and activity. In this respect, no
18G9.] John C. Calhoun. 401
one surpassed him. But he was
unfortunate in always having the
great powers of his mind con-centrated
on one subject at a
time. He thought and reasoned
so rapidly and directly, and was
so absorbed by the one subject for
the time being, that he pursued
the argument without considering
how the question would affect
something else. This was too
much bis character to be a wise
statesman or a safe counselor.
Whilst the advocate of a great
system of Internal Improvement,
he thought of nothing but the
social and commercial blessings
which it would bestow upon the
country. He did not stop to con-sider,
or turn to right or left, to
see how such a system would
strengthen the powers of the
National Government, and crush
those of the States. When he
became the advocate of a tariff
for protection, he thought only of
building up the jSTational Inde-pendence
and encouraging Ameri-can
labor. He did not reflect on
its sectional bearing, or stop to
consider that one portion of the
United States would not find it
profitable to engage in manufac-tures.
When he became the
champion of Xulliflcation, if not
its author, he saw in it nothing
more than a remedy for getting
rid of the onerous exactions of
the tariff system for protection,
which he himself had formerly
advocated through the highest
and most patriotic motives. He
did not consider whether or not
Nullification would make our
]^}'ational Union a rope of sand.
This did not make an objection to
the one idea which had possessed
his great mind, and that was
to break down the system of pro-tection.
In pursuing one ques-tion,
he lost sight of all others.
Plow many thousands of such
men of smaller minds do we not
meet in ordinary life. They
are forever wrong, and always
changing their opinions, because
they are always on the extreme,
and never right. Philosophy
teaches us that extremes are al-ways
dangerous, and that the
path of wisdom and safety is ever
a middle course.
Unfortunately, Mr. Calhoun,
throughout his brilliant career as
an American statesman, was
jumping from one extreme to
another, in politics. From the