Morganton.—Departure for Charleston.—Lincolnton.—Chester.—Winesborough.—Columbia.—Aspect of the Country on the Road.—Agriculture, &c. &c.
Morganton, the principal town of the county of Burke, contains about fifty houses built of wood, and almost all inhabited by tradesmen. One warehouse only, supported by a commercial house at Charleston, is established in this little town, where the inhabitants, for twenty miles round, come and purchase mercery and jewellery goods from England, or give in exchange a part of their produce, which consists chiefly of dried hams, butter, tallow, {266} bear and stag skins, and ginseng, which they bring from the mountains.
From Morganton to Charleston it is computed to be two hundred and eighty-five miles. There are several roads to it, which do not vary in point of distance above twenty miles. Travellers take that where they think of finding the best houses for accommodation: I took the one that leads through Lincolnton, Chester, and Columbia. The distance from Morganton to Lincolnton is forty-five miles. For the whole of this space the soil is extremely bad, and the plantations, straggling five or six miles from each other, have but a middling appearance. The woods are in a great measure composed of different kinds of oaks, and the surface of the ground is covered with grass, intermixed with plants.
Lincolnton, the principal town of the county of Lincoln, is formed by the junction of forty houses, surrounded by the woods like all the small towns of the interior. Two or three large shops, that do the same kind of business as that at Morganton, are established {267} there. The tradesmen who keep them send the produce of their country to Charleston, but they find it sometimes answers their purpose better to stock themselves with goods from Philadelphia, although farther by six hundred miles. Some expedite them by sea to Carolina, whence they go by land to Lincolnton. The freight, a little higher from England to Charleston, and the enormous advance which the merchants lay on their goods, appear the only motives that make them give the preference to those of Philadelphia.
At Lincolnton they print a newspaper in folio, that comes out twice a week. The price of subscription is two dollars per year; but the printer, who is his own editor, takes, by way of payment, for the ease of his country subscribers, flour, rye, wax, &c. at the market price. The advertisements inserted for the inhabitants of the country are generally the surest profit to the printers. The foreign news is extracted from the papers that are published at the sea ports. The federal government, of which the constant aim is {268} to propagate among the people instruction, the knowledge of the laws, grants the editors of periodical papers, throughout the whole extent of the United States, the right to receive, free of postage, the newspapers that they wish to exchange among themselves, or those which are addressed to them.
The county of Lincoln is populated, in a great measure, by Germans from Pennsylvania. Their plantations are kept in the greatest order, and their lands well cultivated. Almost all have negro slaves, and there reigns much more independance among them than in the families of English origin. One may form a correct idea of the industry of some of them by the appearance of the plantation where I stopped, situated upon a branch of the Catabaw River. In eight hundred acres, of which it is composed, a hundred and fifty are cultivated in cotton, Indian corn, wheat, and oats, and dunged annually, which is a great degree of perfection in the present state of the agriculture of this part of the country. Independant of this, he has built in his yard several {269} machines, that the same current of water puts in motion; they consist of a corn mill, a saw mill, another to separate the cotton seeds, a tan-house, a tan-mill, a distillery to make peach brandy, and a small forge, where the inhabitants of the country go to have their horses shod. Seven or eight negro slaves are employed in the different departments, some of which are only occupied at certain periods of the year. Their wives are employed under the direction of the mistress in manufacturing cotton and linen for the use of the family.
The whole of my landlord’s taxes, assessed upon his landed property, and these different kinds of industry, did not amount annually to more than seven dollars; whilst under the presidency of J. Adams they had increased to fifty; at the same time his memory is not held in great veneration in Upper Carolina and the Western States, where the political opinion is strongly pronounced in the sense of opposition, and where nobody durst confess himself publicly attached to the federal party.
{270} In all the towns that I travelled through every tanner has his tan mill, which does not cost him above ten dollars to erect. The bark is put into a wooden arch, twelve or fourteen feet in diameter, the edges of which are about fifteen inches high, and it is crushed under the weight of a wheel, about one foot thick, which is turned by a horse, and fixed similar to a cyder-press. For this purpose they generally make use of an old mill-stone, or a wooden wheel, formed by several pieces joined together, and furnished in its circumference with three rows of teeth, also made of wood, about two inches long and twelve or fifteen wide.
From Lincolnton to Chester court house in the state of South Carolina, it is computed to be about seventy miles. For the whole of this space the earth is light and of an inferior quality to that situated between Morganton and Lincolnton, although the mass of the forests is composed of various species of oaks; in the mean time the pines are in such abundance there, that for several miles the ground is covered {271} with nothing else. Plantations are so little increased there, that we scarcely saw twenty where they cultivate cotton or Indian wheat. We passed by several that had been deserted by the owners as not sufficiently productive: for the inhabitants of Georgia and the two Carolinas, who plant nothing but rice, choose frequently rather to make new clearings than to keep their land in a state of producing annually, by regular tillage, as they do in Europe, and even in New England and Pennsylvania. The considerable extent of this country, compared with the trifling population, gives rise to these changes which take place after fifteen or twenty successive harvests.
Chester contains about thirty houses, built of wood; among the number are two inns and two respectable shops. In the principal county towns of the Western and Southern States, they have neither fairs nor markets. The inhabitants sell the produce of their culture to shopkeepers settled in the small towns, or what is more usual in the south, they convey them in waggons to the sea ports.
{272} From Chester the country grows worse in every respect. The traveller no longer meets reception at plantations; he is obliged to put up at inns, where he is badly accommodated both in point of board and lodging, and pays dearer than in any other part of the United States. The reputation of these inns is esteemed according to the quantity and different kinds of spirits that they sell, among which French brandies hold always the first rank, although they are often mixed with water for the third or fourth time.
They reckon fifty-five miles from Chester to Columbia; twenty-five miles on this side we passed through Winesborough, composed of about a hundred and fifty houses. This place is one of the oldest inhabited in Carolina, and several planters of the low country go and spend the summer and autumn there. Fifteen miles on this side Winesborough the pine barrens begin, and thence to the sea side the country is one continued forest composed of pines.
Columbia, founded within these twenty years, is the seat of government for the state of South Carolina. {273} It is built about two hundred fathoms from the Catabaw River, upon an uniform spot of ground. The number of its houses does not exceed two hundred; they are almost all built of wood, and painted grey and yellow; and although there are very few of them more than two stories high, they have a very respectable appearance. The legislature, formed by the union of the delegates of different counties that send them in a number proportionate to their population, meet there annually on the first of December, and all the business is transacted in the same month; it then dissolves, and, except at that time, the town derives no particular advantage from being the seat of government.
The inhabitants of the upper country, who do not approve of sending their provisions to Charleston, stop at Columbia, where they dispose of them at several respectable shops established in the town.
The river Catabaw, about twenty fathoms broad, is only navigable during the winter; the rest of the year its navigation is stopped by large rocks that intercept {274} its course. They have been, nevertheless, at work for these several years past in forming a canal to facilitate the descent of the boats, but the work goes on very slowly for the want of hands, although the workmen are paid at the rate of a dollar per day.
Columbia is about a hundred and twenty miles from Charleston; for the whole of this space, and particularly from Orangeburgh, composed of twenty houses, the road crosses an even country, sandy and dry during the summer; whilst in the autumn and winter it is so covered with water that in several places, for the space of eight or ten miles, the horses are up to their middles. Every two or three miles we meet with a miserable log-house upon the road, surrounded with little fields of Indian corn, the slender stalks of which are very seldom more than five or six feet high, and which, from the second harvest, do not yield more than four or five bushels per acre. In the mean time, notwithstanding their sterility, this land is sold at the rate of two dollars per acre.
The extreme unwholesomeness of the climate is {275} clearly demonstrated by the pale and livid countenances of the inhabitants, who, during the months of September and October, are almost all affected with tertian fevers, insomuch that at this period of the year Georgia and the Lower Carolinas resemble, in some measure, an extensive hospital. Very few persons take any remedy, but wait the approach of the first frosts, which, provided they live so long, generally effect a cure. The negroes are much less subject to intermittent fevers than the whites; and it is seldom that in the great rice plantations there is more than one fifth of them disabled on this account.