University of Virginia Library

Dear E——,—To-day, I have the pleasure of announcing to you a variety of improvements about to be made in the infirmary of the island. There is to be a third story—a mere loft indeed—added to the buildings, but by affording more room for the least distressing cases of sickness to be drafted off into, it will leave the ground-floor and room above it comparatively free for the most miserable of these unfortunates. To my unspeakable satisfaction these destitute apartments are to be furnished with bedsteads, mattresses, pillows, and blankets; and I feel a little comforted for the many heart-aches my life here inflicts upon me: at least some of my twinges will have wrought this poor alleviation of their wretchedness for the slaves, when prostrated by disease or pain.

I had hardly time to return from the hospital home this morning before one of the most tremendous storms I ever saw burst over the island. Your northern hills, with their

solemn pine woods, and fresh streams and lakes, telling of a cold rather than a warm climate, always seem to me as if undergoing some strange and unnatural visitation, when one of your heavy summer thunder-storms bursts over them. Snow and frost, hail and, above all, wind, trailing rain clouds and brilliant northern lights, are your appropriate sky phenomena; here, thunder and lightning seem as if they might have been invented. Even in winter (remember, we are now in February) they appear neither astonishing nor unseasonable, and I should think in summer (but Heaven defend me from ever making good my supposition) lightning must be as familiar to these sweltering lands and slimy waters as sunlight itself.

The afternoon cleared off most beautifully, and Jack and I went out on the river to catch what might be caught. Jack’s joyful excitement was extreme at my announcing to him the fact that Mr. —— had consented to try plowing on some of the driest portions of the island instead of the slow and laborious process of hoeing the fields; this is a disinterested exultation on his part, for at any rate as long as I am here, he will certainly be nothing but ‘my boy Jack,’ and I should think after my departure will never be degraded to the rank of a field-hand or common laborer. Indeed the delicacy of his health, to which his slight slender figure and languid face bear witness, and which was one reason of his appointment to the eminence of being ‘my slave,’ would, I should think, prevent the poor fellow’s ever being a very robust or useful working animal.

On my return from the river I had a long and painful conversation with Mr. —— upon the subject of the flogging which had been inflicted on the wretched Teresa. These discussions are terrible: they throw me into perfect agonies of distress for the slaves, whose position is utterly hopeless; for myself, whose intervention in their behalf

sometimes seems to me worse than useless; for Mr. ——, whose share in this horrible system fills me by turns with indignation and pity. But, after all, what can he do? how can he help it all? Moreover, born and bred in America, how should he care or wish to help it? and of course he does not; and I am in despair that he does not: et voila, it is a happy and hopeful plight for us both. He maintained that there had been neither hardship nor injustice in the case of Teresa’s flogging; and that, moreover, she had not been flogged at all for complaining to me, but simply because her allotted task was not done at the appointed time. Of course this was the result of her having come to appeal to me, instead of going to her labor; and as she knew perfectly well the penalty she was incurring, he maintained that there was neither hardship nor injustice in the case; the whole thing was a regularly established law, with which all the slaves were perfectly well acquainted; and this case was no exception whatever. The circumstance of my being on the island could not of course be allowed to overthrow the whole system of discipline established to secure the labor and obedience of the slaves; and if they chose to try experiments as to that fact, they and I must take the consequences. At the end of the day, the driver of the gang to which Teresa belongs reported her work not done, and Mr. O—— ordered him to give her the usual number of stripes; which order the driver of course obeyed, without knowing how Teresa had employed her time instead of hoeing. But Mr. O—— knew well enough, for the wretched woman told me that she had herself told him she should appeal to me about her weakness and suffering and inability to do the work exacted from her.

He did not, however, think proper to exceed in her punishment the usual number of stripes allotted to the non-performance of the appointed daily task, and Mr. ——

pronounced the whole transaction perfectly satisfactory and en regle. The common drivers are limited in their powers of chastisement, not being allowed to administer more than a certain number of lashes to their fellow slaves. Head man Frank, as he is called, has alone the privilege of exceeding this limit; and the overseer’s latitude of infliction is only curtailed by the necessity of avoiding injury to life or limb. The master’s irresponsible power has no such bound. When I was thus silenced on the particular case under discussion, I resorted in my distress and indignation to the abstract question, as I never can refrain from doing; and to Mr. ——’s assertion of the justice of poor Teresa’s punishment, I retorted the manifest injustice of unpaid and enforced labor; the brutal inhumanity of allowing a man to strip and lash a woman, the mother of ten children; to exact from her toil which was to maintain in luxury two idle young men, the owners of the plantation. I said I thought female labor of the sort exacted from these slaves, and corporal chastisement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any manly or humane man. Mr. —— said he thought it was disagreeable, and left me to my reflections with that concession. My letter has been interrupted for the last three days; by nothing special, however. My occupations and interests here of course know no change; but Mr. —— has been anxious for a little while past that we should go down to St. Simon’s, the cotton plantation.

We shall suffer less from the heat, which I am beginning to find oppressive on this swamp island; and he himself wished to visit that part of his property, whither he had not yet been since our arrival in Georgia. So the day before yesterday he departed to make the necessary arrangements for our removal thither; and my time in the meanwhile has been taken up in fitting him out for his departure.

In the morning Jack and I took our usual paddle, and having the tackle on board, tried fishing. I was absorbed in many sad and serious considerations, and wonderful to relate (for you know —— how keen an angler I am), had lost all consciousness of my occupation, until after I know not how long a time elapsing without the shadow of a nibble, I was recalled to a most ludicrous perception of my ill-success by Jack’s sudden observation, ‘Missis, fishing berry good fun when um fish bite.’ This settled the fishing for that morning, and I let Jack paddle me down the broad turbid stream, endeavoring to answer in the most comprehensible manner to his keen but utterly undeveloped intellects the innumerable questions with which he plied me about Philadelphia, about England, about the Atlantic, etc.. He dilated much upon the charms of St. Simon’s, to which he appeared very glad that we were going; and among other items of description mentioned, what I was very glad to hear, that it was a beautiful place for riding, and that I should be able to indulge to my heart’s content in my favorite exercise, from which I have, of course, been utterly debarred in this small dykeland of ours. He insinuated more than once his hope and desire that he might be allowed to accompany me, but as I knew nothing at all about his capacity for equestrian exercises, or any of the arrangements that might or might not interfere with such a plan, I was discreetly silent, and took no notice of his most comically turned hints on the subject. In our row we started a quantity of wild duck, and he told me that there was a great deal of game at St. Simon’s, but that the people did not contrive to catch much, though they laid traps constantly for it. Of course their possessing firearms is quite out of the question; but this abundance of what must be to them such especially desirable prey, makes the fact a great hardship. I almost wonder they don’t learn to shoot like savages with

bows and arrows, but these would be weapons, and equally forbidden them.

In the afternoon I saw Mr. —— off for St. Simon’s; it is fifteen miles lower down the river, and a large island at the very mouth of the Altamaha.

The boat he went in was a large, broad, rather heavy, though well-built craft, by no means as swift or elegant as the narrow eight-oared long boat in which he generally takes his walks on the water, but well adapted for the traffic between the two plantations, where it serves the purpose of a sort of omnibus or stage-coach for the transfer of the people from one to the other, and of a baggage wagon or cart for the conveyance of all sorts of household goods, chattels, and necessaries. Mr. —— sat in the middle of a perfect chaos of such freight; and as the boat pushed off, and the steersman took her into the stream, the men at the oars set up a chorus, which they continued to chant in unison with each other, and in time with their stroke, till the voices and oars were heard no more from the distance. I believe I have mentioned to you before the peculiar characteristics of this veritable negro minstrelsy—how they all sing in unison, having never, it appears, attempted or heard anything like part-singing. Their voices seem oftener tenor than any other quality, and the tune and time they keep something quite wonderful; such truth of intonation and accent would make almost any music agreeable. That which I have heard these people sing is often plaintive and pretty, but almost always has some resemblance to tunes with which they must have become acquainted through the instrumentality of white men; their overseers or masters whistling Scotch or Irish airs, of which they have produced by ear these rifacciamenti. The note for note reproduction of ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, maman?’ in one of the most popular of the so-called Negro melodies with which all America and England

are familiar, is an example of this very transparent plagiarism; and the tune with which Mr. ——’s rowers started him down the Altamaha, as I stood at the steps to see him off, was a very distinct descendant of ‘Coming through the Rye.’ The words, however, were astonishingly primitive, especially the first line, which, when it burst from their eight throats in high unison, sent me into fits of laughter. What the obnoxious Jenny meant by shaking her toe, whether defiance or mere departure, I never could ascertain, but her going away was an unmistakable subject of satisfaction; and the pause made on the last ‘oh!’ before the final announcement of her departure, had really a good deal of dramatic and musical effect. Except the extemporaneous chants in our honor, of which I have written to you before, I have never heard the negroes on Mr. ——’s plantation sing any words that could be said to have any sense. To one, an extremely pretty, plaintive, and original air, there was but one line, which was repeated with a sort of wailing chorus— Upon enquiring the meaning of which, I was told it was supposed to be the lamentation of a slave from one of the more northerly states, Virginia or Carolina, where the labor of hoeing the weeds, or grass as they call it, is not nearly so severe as here, in the rice and cotton lands of Georgia. Another very pretty and pathetic tune began with words that seemed to promise something sentimental— but immediately went off into nonsense verses about gentlemen in the parlor drinking wine and cordial, and ladies in the drawing-room drinking tea and coffee, etc.. I have heard that many of the masters and overseers on these plantations prohibit melancholy tunes or words, and encourage nothing but cheerful music and senseless words, deprecating the effect of sadder strains upon the slaves, whose peculiar musical sensibility might be expected to make them especially excitable by any songs of a plaintive character, and having any reference to their particular hardships. If it is true, I think it a judicious precaution enough—these poor slaves are just the sort of people over whom a popular musical appeal to their feelings and passions would have an immense power.

In the evening, Mr. ——’s departure left me to the pleasures of an uninterrupted tete-a-tete with his crosseyed overseer, and I endeavored, as I generally do, to atone by my conversibleness and civility for the additional trouble which, no doubt, all my outlandish ways and notions are causing the worthy man. So suggestive (to use the new-fangled jargon about books) a woman as myself is, I suspect, an intolerable nuisance in these parts; and poor Mr. O—— cannot very well desire Mr. —— to send me away, however much he may wish that he would; so that figuratively, as well as literally, I fear the worthy master me voit d’un mauvais oeil, as the French say. I asked him several questions about some of the slaves who had managed to learn to read, and by what means they had been able to do so. As teaching them is strictly prohibited by the laws, they who instructed them, and such of them as

acquired the knowledge, must have been not a little determined and persevering. This was my view of the case, of course, and of course it was not the overseer’s. I asked him if many of Mr. ——’s slaves could read. He said ‘No; very few, he was happy to say, but those few were just so many too many.’ ‘Why, had he observed any insubordination in those who did?’ And I reminded him of Cooper London, the Methodist preacher, whose performance of the burial service had struck me so much some time ago—to whose exemplary conduct and character there is but one concurrent testimony all over the plantation. No; he had no special complaint to bring against the lettered members of his subject community, but he spoke by anticipation. Every step they take towards intelligence and enlightenment lessens the probability of their acquiescing in their condition. Their condition is not to be changed—ergo, they had better not learn to read; a very succinct and satisfactory argument as far as it goes, no doubt, and one to which I had not a word to reply, at any rate, to Mr. O——, as I did not feel called upon to discuss the abstract justice or equity of the matter with him; indeed he, to a certain degree, gave up that part of the position, starting with ‘I don’t say whether it’s right or wrong;’ and in all conversations that I have had with the southerners upon these subjects, whether out of civility to what may be supposed to be an Englishwoman’s prejudices, or a forlorn respect to their own convictions, the question of the fundamental wrong of slavery is generally admitted, or at any rate certainly never denied. That part of the subject is summarily dismissed, and all its other aspects vindicated, excused, and even lauded, with untiring eloquence. Of course, of the abstract question I could judge before I came here, but I confess I had not the remotest idea how absolutely my observation of every detail of the system, as a practical iniquity, would go to confirm my opinion of its abomination. Mr. O—— went on to condemn and utterly denounce all the preaching and teaching and moral instruction upon religious subjects, which people in the south, pressed upon by northern opinion, are endeavoring to give their slaves. The kinder and the more cowardly masters are anxious to evade the charge of keeping their negroes in brutish ignorance, and so they crumble what they suppose and hope may prove a little harmless, religious enlightenment, which, mixed up with much religious authority on the subject of submission and fidelity to masters, they trust their slaves may swallow without its doing them any harm—i.e., that they may be better Christians and better slaves—and so, indeed, no doubt they are; but it is a very dangerous experiment, and from Mr. O——’s point of view I quite agree with him. The letting out of water, or the letting in of light, in infinitesimal quantities, is not always easy. The half-wicked of the earth are the leaks through which wickedness is eventually swamped; compromises forerun absolute surrender in most matters, and fools and cowards are, in such cases, the instruments of Providence for their own defeat. Mr. O—— stated unequivocally his opinion that free labor would be more profitable on the plantations than the work of slaves, which, being compulsory, was of the worst possible quality and the smallest possible quantity; then the charge of them before and after they are able to work is onerous, the cost of feeding and clothing them very considerable, and upon the whole he, a southern overseer, pronounced himself decidedly in favor of free labor, upon grounds of expediency. Having at the beginning of our conversation declined discussing the moral aspect of slavery, evidently not thinking that position tenable, I thought I had every right to consider Mr. ——’s slave-driver a decided abolitionist.

I had been anxious to enlist his sympathies on behalf

of my extreme desire, to have some sort of garden, but did not succeed in inspiring him with my enthusiasm on the subject; he said there was but one garden that he knew of in the whole neighborhood of Darien, and that was our neighbor, old Mr. C——’s, a Scotchman on St. Simon’s. I remembered the splendid gardinias on Tunno’s Island, and referred to them as a proof of the material for ornamental gardening. He laughed, and said rice and cotton crops were the ornamental gardening principally admired by the planters, and that, to the best of his belief, there was not another decent kitchen or flower garden in the State, but the one he had mentioned.

The next day after this conversation, I walked with my horticultural zeal much damped, and wandered along the dyke by the broad river, looking at some pretty peach trees in blossom, and thinking what a curse of utter stagnation this slavery produces, and how intolerable to me a life passed within its stifling influence would be. Think of peach trees in blossom in the middle of February! It does seem cruel, with such a sun and soil, to be told that a garden is worth nobody’s while here; however, Mr. O—— said that he believed the wife of the former overseer had made a ‘sort of a garden’ at St. Simon’s. We shall see ‘what sort’ it turns out to be. While I was standing on the dyke, ruminating above the river, I saw a beautiful white bird of the crane species alight not far from me. I do not think a little knowledge of natural history would diminish the surprise and admiration with which I regard the, to me, unwonted specimens of animal existence that I encounter every day, and of which I do not even know the names. Ignorance is an odious thing. The birds here are especially beautiful, I think. I saw one the other day, of what species of course I do not know, of a warm and rich brown, with a scarlet hood and crest—a lovely creature, about the size of your northern robin, but more elegantly shaped.

This morning, instead of my usual visit to the infirmary, I went to look at the work and workers in the threshing mill—all was going on actively and orderly under the superintendence of head-man Frank, with whom, and a very sagacious clever fellow, who manages the steam power of the mill, and is honorably distinguished as Engineer Ned, I had a small chat. There is one among various drawbacks to the comfort and pleasure of our intercourse with these colored ‘men and brethren,’ at least in their slave condition, which certainly exercises my fortitude not a little,—the swarms of fleas that cohabit with these sable dependants of ours are—well—incredible; moreover they are by no means the only or most objectionable companions one borrows from them, and I never go to the infirmary, where I not unfrequently am requested to look at very dirty limbs and bodies in very dirty draperies, without coming away with a strong inclination to throw myself into the water, and my clothes into the fire, which last would be expensive. I do not suppose that these hateful consequences of dirt and disorder are worse here than among the poor and neglected human creatures who swarm in the lower parts of European cities; but my call to visit them has never been such as that which constrains me to go daily among these poor people, and although on one or two occasions I have penetrated into fearfully foul and filthy abodes of misery in London, I have never rendered the same personal services to their inhabitants that I do to Mr. ——’s slaves, and so have not incurred the same amount of entomological inconvenience.

After leaving the mill, I prolonged my walk, and came, for the first time, upon one of the ‘gangs,’ as they are called, in full field work. Upon my appearance and approach there was a momentary suspension of labor, and the usual chorus of screams and ejaculations of welcome, affection, and infinite desires for infinite small indulgences.

I was afraid to stop their work, not feeling at all sure that urging a conversation with me would be accepted as any excuse for an uncompleted task, or avert the fatal infliction of the usual award of stripes; so I hurried off and left them to their hoeing.

On my way home I was encountered by London, our Methodist preacher, who accosted me with a request for a prayer-book and Bible, and expressed his regret at hearing that we were so soon going to St. Simon’s. I promised him his holy books, and asked him how he had learned to read, but found it impossible to get him to tell me. I wonder if he thought he should be putting his teacher, whoever he was, in danger of the penalty of the law against instructing the slaves, if he told me who he was; it was impossible to make him do so, so that, besides his other good qualities, he appears to have that most unusual one of all in an uneducated person—discretion. He certainly is a most remarkable man.

After parting with him, I was assailed by a small gang of children, clamoring for the indulgence of some meat, which they besought me to give them. Animal food is only allowed to certain of the harder working men, hedgers and ditchers, and to them only occasionally, and in very moderate rations. My small cannibals clamored round me for flesh, as if I had had a butcher’s cart in my pocket, till I began to laugh and then to run, and away they came, like a pack of little black wolves, at my heels, shrieking, ‘Missis, you gib me piece meat, missis, you gib me meat,’ till I got home. At the door I found another petitioner, a young woman named Maria, who brought a fine child in her arms, and demanded a present of a piece of flannel. Upon my asking her who her husband was, she replied, without much hesitation, that she did not possess any such appendage. I gave another look at her bonny baby, and went into the house to get the flannel for

her. I afterwards heard from Mr. —— that she and two other girls of her age, about seventeen, were the only instances on the island of women with illegitimate children.

After I had been in the house a little while, I was summoned out again to receive the petition of certain poor women in the family-way to have their work lightened. I was, of course, obliged to tell them that I could not interfere in the matter, that their master was away, and that, when he came back, they must present their request to him: they said they had already begged ‘massa,’ and he had refused, and they thought, perhaps, if ‘missis’ begged ‘massa’ for them, he would lighten their task. Poor ‘missis,’ poor ‘massa,’ poor woman, that I am to have such prayers addressed to me! I had to tell them, that if they had already spoken to their master, I was afraid my doing so would be of no use, but that when he came back I would try; so, choking with crying, I turned away from them, and re-entered the house, to the chorus of ‘Oh, thank you, missis! God bless you, missis!’ E——, I think an improvement might be made upon that caricature published a short time ago, called the ‘Chivalry of the South.’ I think an elegant young Carolinian, or Georgian gentleman, whip in hand, driving a gang of ‘lusty women,’ as they are called here, would be a pretty version of the ‘Chivalry of the South’—a little coarse, I am afraid you will say. Oh! quite horribly coarse, but then so true—a great matter in works of art, which, now-a-days, appear to be thought excellent only in proportion to their lack of ideal elevation. That would be a subject, and a treatment of it, which could not be accused of imaginative exaggeration, at any rate.

In the evening I mentioned the petitions of these poor women to Mr. O——, thinking that perhaps he had the power to lessen their tasks. He seemed evidently annoyed at their having appealed to me; said that their work was

not a bit too much for them, and that constantly they were shamming themselves in the family-way, in order to obtain a diminution of their labor. Poor creatures! I suppose some of them do; but again, it must be a hard matter for those who do not, not to obtain the mitigation of their toil which their condition requires; for their assertion and their evidence are never received—they can’t be believed, even if they were upon oath, say their white taskmasters; why? because they have never been taught the obligations of an oath, to whom made, or wherefore binding; and they are punished both directly and indirectly for their moral ignorance, as if it were a natural and incorrigible element of their character, instead of the inevitable result of their miserable position. The oath of any and every scoundrelly fellow with a white skin is received, but not that of such a man as Frank, Ned, old Jacob, or Cooper London.