This the richest county of Alabama, and the road is lined with valuable plantations!

The following is an extract from a letter dated Columbus, Mississippi, November 24, 1856, published in the London Daily News. It is written by an Englishman travelling for commercial purposes, and tells what he has learned by experience of the custom of the country:

The same writer afterwards relates the following experience:—

A naturalist, the author of a well-known standard work, who has made several tours of observation in the Slave States, lately confided to me that he believed that the popular report of Southern hospitality must be a popular romance, for never, during all his travels in the South, had he chanced to be entertained for a single night, except by gentlemen to whom he was formally presented by letter, or who had previously been under obligations to him, without paying for it in money, and to an amount quite equal to the value received. By the wealthier, a night’s entertainment had been frequently refused him, under circumstances which, as must have been evident to them, rendered his further progress seriously inconvenient. Once, while in company with a foreign naturalist—a titled man—he had been dining at the inn of a small county-town, when a certain locally distinguished judge had seen fit to be eloquent at the dinner-table upon the advantages of slavery in maintaining a class of “high-toned gentlemen,” referring especially to the proverbial hospitality of Southern plantations, which he described as quite a bewilderment to strangers, and nothing like which was to be found in any country unblessed with slavery, or institutions equivalent to it. It so happened that the following night the travellers, on approaching a plantation mansion in quest of lodging, were surprised to find that they had fallen upon the residence of this same judge, who recognized them, and welcomed them and bade them be at home. Embarrassed by a recollection of his discourse of hospitality, it was with some difficulty that one of them, when they were taking leave next morning, brought himself to inquire what he might pay for the entertainment they had received. He was at once relieved by the judge’s prompt response, “Dollar and a quarter apiece, I reckon.”

It is very true that the general custom of the South which leads a traveller to ask for a lodging at any private house he may chance to reach near nightfall, and to receive a favourable answer not merely as a favour but as a matter of business, is a convenient one, is one indeed almost necessary in a country so destitute of villages, and where, off certain thoroughfares of our merchants, there are so few travellers. It is a perfectly respectable and entirely sensible custom, but it is not, as is commonly represented to be, a custom of hospitality, and it is not at all calculated to induce customs of hospitality with the mass of citizens. It is calculated to make inhospitality of habit and inhospitality of character the general rule; hospitality of habit and of character the exception. Yet the common misapplication of the word to this custom is, so far as I can ascertain, the only foundation of the arrogant assumption of superiority of character in this respect of the Southerners over ourselves—the only ground of the claim that slavery breeds a race of more generous and hospitable citizens than freedom.

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The difficulty of giving anything like an intelligent and exact estimate of the breeding of any people or of any class of people is almost insurmountable, owing to the vagueness of the terms which must be used, or rather to the quite different ideas which different readers will attach to these terms. The very word which I have employed to designate my present subject has itself such a varied signification that it needs to be defined at the outset. I mean to employ it in that sense wherein, according to Webster, it covers the ground of “nurture, instruction, and the formation of manners.” It is something more than “manners and customs,” then, and includes, or may include, qualities which, if not congenital, are equally an essential part of character with those qualities which are literally in-bred of a man. Such qualities are mainly the result of a class of circumstances, of the influence of which upon his character and manners a man, or a child growing to a man, is usually unconscious, and of which he cannot be independent if he would.

The general difficulty is increased in dealing with the people of the Slave States, because among themselves all terms defining social rank and social characteristics are applied in a manner which can be understood only after considerable experience; and also because the general terms of classification, always incomplete in their significance, fail entirely with a large class of Southerners, whose manners have some characteristics which would elsewhere be thought “high bred,” if they had not other which are elsewhere universally esteemed low and ruffianly.

There are undoubted advantages resulting from the effects of slavery upon the manners of some persons. Somewhat similar advantages I have thought that I perceived to have resulted in the Free States, where a family has been educated under favourable influences in a frontier community. There is boldness, directness, largeness, confidence, with the effect of the habitual sense of superiority to most of the community; not superiority of wealth, and power from wealth merely, but of a mind well stocked and refined by such advantages of education as only very unusual wealth, or very unusual individual energy, rightly directed, can procure in a scattered and frontier community. When to this is added the effect of visits to the cultivated society of denser communities; when refined and polished manners are grafted on a natural, easy abandon; when there is high culture without effeminacy either of body or mind, as not unfrequently happens, we find a peculiarly respectable and agreeable sort of men and women. They are the result of frontier training under the most favourable circumstances. In the class furthest removed from this on the frontier—people who have grown up without civilized social restraints or encouragements and always under what in a well-conditioned community would be esteemed great privations—happens, on the other hand, the most disagreeable specimen of mankind that the world breeds; men of a sort almost peculiar to America and Australia; border ruffians, of whom the “rowdies” of our eastern towns are tame reflections. Cooper has well described the first class in many instances. I know of no picture of the latter which represents them as detestable as I have found them.

The whole South is maintained in a frontier condition by the system which is apologized for on the ground that it favours good breeding. This system, at the same time, tends to concentrate wealth in a few hands. If there is wisdom and great care in the education of a family thus favoured, the result which we see at the North, under the circumstances I have described, is frequently reproduced. There are many more such fruits of frontier life at the South than the North, because there is more frontier life. There is also vastly more of the other sort, and there is everything between, which degrees of wealth and degrees of good fortune in education would be expected to occasion. The bad breed of the frontier, at the South, however, is probably far worse than that of the North, because the frontier condition of the South is everywhere permanent. The child born to-day on the Northern frontier, in most cases, before it is ten years old, will be living in a well organized and tolerably well provided community; schools, churches, libraries, lecture and concert halls, daily mails and printing presses, shops and machines in variety, having arrived within at least a day’s journey of it; being always within an influencing distance of it. There are improvements, and communities loosely and gradually cohering in various parts of the South, but so slowly, so feebly, so irregularly, that men’s minds and habits are knit firm quite independently of this class of social influences.

There is one other characteristic of the Southerner, which is far more decided than the difference of climate merely would warrant, and which is to be attributed not only to the absence of the ordinary restraints and means of discipline of more compact communities in his education, but unquestionably also to the readiness and safety with which, by reason of slavery, certain passions and impulses may be indulged. Every white Southerner is a person of importance; must be treated with deference. Every wish of the Southerner is imperative; every belief undoubted; every hate, vengeful; every love, fiery. Hence, for instance, the scandalous fiend-like street fights of the South. If a young man feels offended with another, he does not incline to a ring and a fair stand-up set-to, like a young Englishman; he will not attempt to overcome his opponent by logic; he will not be content to vituperate, or to cast ridicule upon him; he is impelled straightway to strike him down with the readiest deadly weapon at hand, with as little ceremony and pretence of fair combat as the loose organization of the people against violence will allow. He seems crazy for blood. Intensity of personal pride—pride in anything a man has, or which connects itself with him, is more commonly evident. Hence, intense local pride and prejudice; hence intense partisanship; hence rashness and over-confidence; hence visionary ambition; hence assurance in debate; hence assurance in society. As self-appreciation is equally with deference a part of what we call good breeding, and as the expression of deference is much more easily reduced to a matter of manners and forms, in the commonplace intercourse of society, than self-appreciation, this characteristic quality of the Southerner needs to be borne in mind in considering the port and manners he commonly has, and judging from them of the effects of slavery.

It must be also considered that the ordinary occupations and amusements of people of moderate wealth at the North are seldom resorted to at the South, that public entertainments of any kind, for instance, are impracticable to a sparse population; consequently that where men of wealth are socially disposed, all intercourse with others is highly valued, prepared for, and made the most of. Hence, with these, the act of social intercourse is more highly esteemed, and is much more frequently carried to a nice perfection of manner than it usually is with men otherwise of corresponding education, and habits at the North.

In a Northern community a man who is not greatly occupied with private business is sure to become interested in social enterprises and to undertake duties in them which will demand a great deal of time and strength. School, road, cemetery, asylum, and church corporations; bridge, ferry, and water companies; literary, scientific, art, mechanical, agricultural and benevolent societies; all these things are managed chiefly by the unpaid services of gentlemen during hours which they can spare from their private interests. In the successful operations of such enterprises they find much of the satisfaction of their life. So, too, our young men, who are not obliged to devote their thoughts chiefly to business success, are members and managers of reading rooms, public libraries, gymnasiums, game clubs, boat clubs, ball clubs, and all sorts of clubs, Bible classes, debating societies, military companies; they are planting road-side trees, or damming streams for skating ponds, or rigging diving-boards, or getting up firework displays, or private theatricals; they are always doing something, not conversing for the entertainment of the moment. Planters, the details of whose business fall into the hands of overseers, and young men of fortune, at the South, have, when at home on the plantation, none of these occupations. Their talents all turn into two channels, politics and sociality; the very paucity of society making it the more esteemed and the more carefully used. Social intercourse at the North is a relaxation from the ordinary bent of men’s talents; at the South, it is that to which mainly their talents are bent. Hence, with men who are otherwise on a par, in respect of natural advantages and education, the Southerner will have a higher standard of manners than the Northerner, because, with him, social intercourse is the grand resource to which all other possible occupations of his mind become subordinate. The Northerner, being troubled by no monotony, unquestionably too much neglects at present this, the highest and final art of every type of civilization. In making this comparison, however, it must not be forgotten that it is made between men who are supposed to be equal in all respects, except in the possession of this advantage, and who are equally at leisure from any necessary habitual occupation for a livelihood.

Having conceded to the South certain elements of advantage in this respect, for a single class, it still remains to inquire where is the greatest weight of advantage for this class, and for all classes of our citizens. In attempting to make such a general comparison, I shall begin at the bottom of the social ladder, and return to the class who can in a great degree choose how they will be occupied.

In the North at the Revolution we scarcely had a distinct class corresponding to the lowest white class of Virginia, as described by Jefferson, our labourers being less ignorant and coarse in their habits, and associating much more familiarly with their betters. We have now a class more nearly corresponding to it furnished by the European peasant immigration. It is, however, a transient class, somewhat seldom including two generations, and, on an average, I trust, not one. It is therefore practically not an additional class, but, overlooking the aged and diseased, a supplement to our lowest normal class. Out of twenty Irish emigrants, landing in New York, perfectly destitute, of whose history I have been intimately cognizant, only two, both of whom were over fifty years of age, have lived out five years here without beginning to acquire wealth and becoming superior in their ambition and habits to the lowest order, which I believe to include a majority of the whites in the plantation districts of the South.[64] Our lowest class, therefore, has a higher standard than the lowest class of the Slave States. This, I understand, is made very evident where the two come together at the West, as in southern Illinois. The very poorest and lowest New England women who go there are frequently offended by the inconsiderate rudeness and coarseness of the women immigrating from the South, and shocked by their “shiftless,” comfortless, vagrant habits, so much so that families have often removed, after having been once established, to escape being bored and annoyed by their Southern-born neighbours.

Referring to the lowest class, North and South, as the fourth, I class as third, the lowest rank in society, North or South, in which regard is had by its members to the quality of their associates from other than moral motives, or the prejudices of locality, race, sectarianism, and politics. In other words, that in which there is a distinct social selectiveness and pride. I think that everywhere in the Free States men of this class would almost universally feel their position damaged—be a little ashamed—if obliged to confess that they did not take a newspaper, or were unable to read it with a clear understanding of the intelligence it was intended to communicate. Allusions to the main facts of American history, to any clause of the Bible, to the provisions of the Constitution, and the more important laws, State and National, would be understood in most cases by those whom I refer to as the third class in Northern society. In few families of this class would you fail to find some volumes of the English poets, or some works of great novelists or renowned travellers. Nothing like this would you find, however, in a grade of society distinctly superior to the lowest at the South.

The ratio of the number of the citizens who cannot read at all to the whole, appears, by the census returns, to be only three times larger at the South than at the North. I believe it to be much greater at the South than these returns indicate.[65] The comparative education of the third class “North” and of the third class “South,” however, cannot be at all judged from these statistics, supposing them correct. Those who can read and who do not read, or whose reading is confined within extremely narrow limits, are a much larger number at the South than at the North, owing to the much poorer supply of books and newspapers which commerce can afford to put within the reach of the former. The census returns two million newspapers, for instance, printed annually in Virginia, one hundred and fifteen million in New York. There is a post-office to every fourteen square miles in New York, one to forty-seven square miles in Virginia; over five hundred publishers and booksellers in New York, but forty in Virginia. Thirty thousand volumes in public libraries in Virginia, eight hundred thousand in New York. The area occupied by the population of Virginia being much the largest, it may be inferred that with the disposition and the ability to read anything in particular, the Virginian of the third class will have to travel more than thirty times as far as the New Yorker to procure it. The same proposition will hold good in regard to most other means of cultivation, and the third class of the South generally has seemed to me to be as much more narrow-minded, rude, coarse, “dangerous,” and miserable, than the third class of the Free States, as the most sanguine friend of popular education could anticipate from these facts.

The great difference in character between the third class of the South and that of the North, as indicated by their respective manners, is found in the much less curiosity and ready intelligent interest in matters which have not an immediate personal bearing in that of the South. Apathetic carelessness rather than simple indifference, or reckless incivility as to your comfort, is what makes the low Southerner a disagreeable companion. It is his impertinent shrewdness which makes you wish to keep the Yankee at a distance. The first seems without object, spiritless; the latter keen to better himself, if with nothing else, with information which he can draw from you, and by gaining your good opinion.

The next or second class would include, both North and South, those with whose habits and character I am most familiar, and of whom I can speak with the best right to confidence. It would include in New England and New York the better educated farmers—these owning, I should say, half the agricultural land—the permanently established manufacturers and merchants of moderate capital; most of the shopkeepers and the better-educated master mechanics and artisan foremen; most of the preachers, physicians, and lawyers (some ranking higher). It would correspond most nearly to what in England would be called the lower-middle class, but any higher grade being very ill-defined, existing distinctly but in few localities, and rarely recognized as existing at all, it is in a great measure free from the peculiar vulgarity of its English parallel.

The number of those at the South who correspond in education and refinement of manners and habits to the average of this class of the North, it will be evident, from a similar mode of reasoning to that before employed, must be very much smaller relatively, either to the territory or the whole white population of their respective regions.

In the comparison commonly made by Southern writers between the condition of the people of a sparsely-settled country and another, it is usually assumed that the advantages of the latter are confined exclusively to towns, and to large and crowded towns. By contrasting the evils which concentrate in such towns with the favourable circumstances of localities where at least wood, water, and air are abundant, and corn enough to support life can usually be got by any one with a little occasional labour, an argument of some force to ignorant people is easily presented. The advantages possessed by a people living in moderately well-occupied rural districts, who are even more free from the evils of great towns than their own people, are entirely overlooked by most Southern writers. Such is the condition, however, of more white people in the Free States than the whole white population of the Slave States. A majority of our farmers’ daughters can walk from their dwellings to schools of a quality such as at the South can be maintained not twice in five hundred square miles. These schools are practically a part of their homes. Probably, in more than half the families of the South, the children of which are instructed to the least degree which would be considered “respectable,” among this second class of the North, private governesses are obliged to be employed, or the children must be for many years at boarding-schools. We all know that the young women who go to the South, to meet the demand thus occasioned for home education, are not generally, though they may be in cases, our own most esteemed and successful instructresses; and we also know from their report that their skill and labour has necessarily to be long chiefly employed in laying those simple foundation habits of instructability, which our Northern children acquire imperceptibly from association with those of the neighbourhood slightly in advance of them. Churches and the various sub-organizations centreing in them, in which class distinctions are much lost sight of, to the great advantage of the manners of the lower classes, and little chance of injury to the higher; libraries; literary societies; lecture arrangements; dramatic and musical, art and scientific entertainments, and also highly educated professional men, with whom, for various purposes, many persons are brought often in contact, are correspondingly more frequent at the North, correspondingly more accessible; in other words, the advantages to be derived from them are cheaper, and so more influential on the manners of the people at large.

The common opinion has been that the Southerners or planters of the class now under consideration, are more social, more generous, more heartily kind and genial than Northerners. According to my experience, the reverse of all this is true, as a general rule. Families live so isolatedly at the South, that any social contact, out of the family, is of course much more eventful and stimulating than it is ordinarily at the North, and this accounts for the common opinion. I could not but think, however, that most persons at the South looked to the voluntary good offices and conversation of others, both within and without their families, for their enjoyment of the world, much less than most at the North. It may be that when in towns they attach a greater value to, and are more careful to make use of the opportunities for social gathering afforded by towns, than are Northerners. In towns they attach more consequence to forms, are more scrupulous in matters of etiquette, more lavish in expenditure for dress, and for certain other things which are the signs of luxury rather than luxury itself, such as plate and fancy brands of wines. They make less show of fine art and less pretence of artistic judgment; more of respect and regard for their associates, and of indifference or superiority to all others.

As to manner or deportment simply, with the same impulse and intention, that of the Southerner will habitually, under ordinary circumstances, be best, more true, more composed, more dignified. I have said that the second class at the North is without the pervading vulgarity of the class to which it most nearly corresponds in England, the reason being that those which constitute it seldom wish or attempt to appear to belong to a superior class, not clearly recognizing a superior class. Individuals, however, very generally have a strong desire to be thought better informed, more ingenious, more witty, as well as more successful in their enterprises than they are, and this stamps them with a peculiar quality of manners vulgarly called “smartness,” the absence of which makes Southern men and women generally much more agreeable companions than Northerners of the same degree of education and accomplishments in other respects. Not but that snobs abound; of these it will be more convenient to speak under the next division, however.

The traditional “old family,” stately but condescending, haughty but jovial, keeping open house for all comers on the plantations of Virginia or South Carolina, is not wholly a myth.

There really was something which, with some sort of propriety, could be termed a gentry in Carolina and Virginia in their colony days; yet of the names which are now thought to have belonged to it, as descended of brave, loyal, and adventurous cavaliers, some I once saw in London upon an old freight-list of a ship outward bound for Virginia, with the addition of tinker and tailor, poacher and pickpocket, all to be sold for life, or a term of years, to the highest bidder when they should arrive. A large majority of the fathers of Virginia were unquestionably of this class.

What was properly to be termed the gentry in Virginia and South Carolina previous to the Revolution, was very small in number. A large proportion of the families who composed it, and who remained after the Revolution in the country (for many were Tories) have since passed in all their branches through a poverty-stricken period, very dissipating in its influence upon hereditary breeding, novelists and dramatic old servants to the contrary notwithstanding. Many of those who have retained wealth and family pride in succession to the present time, have undeniably, from various causes, degenerated wofully in breeding. Coarse tastes and brutal dispositions cannot be disguised under a cavalier address, and the most assured readiness in the established forms of polite society. Of the real “old families” which remain at all “well bred” in their qualities, habits, and manners, by reason of their lineage, I think it will be difficult for most readers who have not studied the matter at all to form a sufficiently small estimate; call them a dozen or a hundred, what does it matter in a region much larger than the old German empire? Associating with these are a few hundred more new or recuperated families, in which there is also the best breeding, and in certain few parts or districts of the South, to be defined and numbered without difficulty, there is a wealthy, distinct, generous, hospitable, refined, and accomplished first class, clinging with some pertinacity, although with too evident an effort, to the traditional manners and customs of an established gentry.

There was a gentry in the North as well as in Virginia and Carolina in the colony period, though a less important and numerous one. As the North has been much more prosperous, as the value of its property has much more rapidly increased than that of the South, the advantages of wealth have, I believe, been more generally retained in families, and probably the number of those who could trace their breeding in an uninterrupted parental influence from the colonial gentry, is now larger at the North than the South.

Including new families, in whose habits and manners and conversation the best bred people of Europe would find nothing more offensive and inharmonious with themselves than might be ascribed to local fashion or a desire to avoid appearances which, though perfectly proper in an aristocratic society, would be snobbish in a republic, there is unquestionably at this time a very much larger number of thoroughly well-bred people in the Free than in the Slave States. It is equally certain that the proportion of such people to the whole population of whites is larger at the North than the South.

The great majority of wealthy planters who at the present day assume for themselves a special social respectability and superiority to the class I have defined as the second, are, as a general rule, not only distinguished for all those qualities which our satirists and dramatists are accustomed to assume to be the especial property of the newly rich of the Fifth Avenue, but, as far as I have had opportunity to observe both classes, are far more generally and ridiculously so than the would-be fashionable people of New York, or of any other part of the United States. It is a part of the rôle they undertake to act, to be hospitable and generous, as it was lately that of our fops to be sleepy and critical. They are not hospitable and generous, however; they know not the meaning of these terms. They are absurdly ostentatious in entertainment, and extravagant in the purchase of notoriety; possibly they have more tact in this than our Potiphars, but such has not been my personal observation.