University of Virginia Library

LETTER LXIX.

My last letter was dated from “an old Inn” in Virginia.
Since then we have come on to this city of
“magnificent edifices;” for the old “magnificent distances”
are superbly filled up with noble buildings.

I must say a word about that old Virginia Inn. It
was the most comfortable “home,” not to be in one's
own, I ever dwelt in. It stood in a broad, green valley,
many miles long, and from the Inn the country gently
sloped to circumenclosing hills, wooded all over with
massive masses of green forest. The vale itself was a
valley of farms, large, and wealthy-looking, with hospitable-appearing
farm-houses in the bosom of each, and
each with its park of woodland; and the stage road to
the Sulphur Springs, (the “Saratoga” of southern aristocracy)
of a light brown color, and smooth as a race
course, wound meanderingly through its bosom.

The Inn stood in the centre of this agricultural scene.
It was a large, rambling, old Virginia mansion house, and
once belonged to a family of the old régime, one of the
proverbial (and in this case truly so) “FIRST FAMILIES”
of Virginia. The original proprietor was a
cavalier of Charles the Second, and was a large landholder
under the crown. But the revolution, which destroyed

the stately law of primogeniture, divided and
subdivided among half a dozen equal heirs his regal domains,
until within the present generation, the once noble
estate, diminished to two hundred acres and a handful
of slaves, and the lands worn out, came into the hands
of the long baronial line of the Bodleys. The gentleman
inheriting, finding his harvest would not maintain
the estate, and that money must be realized in some way
from his patrimony, had the good sense (refined and educated
a Virginian as he is) to convert his paternal mansion
into an “Inn.” Situated on the great road of
travel, and offering from its imposing exterior, (ancient
yet respectable,) temptations to the comfort-loving traveler,
it soon became the aristocratic resort of touring Virginians,
and the excellent proprietor (the descendant of a
lord become a landlord) has become independent.

Happy would many a Virginia gentleman of the “first
families” be, if he could turn his decaying mansion into
an Inn of profit! Numerous, very, are the old estates
gone to decay, scattered over the Old Dominion, wherein
genteel poverty dwells, with the prideful recollections of
ancestral name and honors. The improvident manner
in which the old Virginia proprietors wasted their lands
with the soil-consuming tobacco, has impoverished half
of their descendants. The present proprietors, unable
to maintain their aristocratic estate, part one after another
with their family servants, whose price goes to
maintain what the wretched crops ought to do, or they
leave their barren heritages, and with their servants seek
the West or South, and there buying new land at government
price, build up a new, young “Virginia family”
in Texas, Alabama, or Mississippi.

So necessary is the annual decimation of slaves by
sale to support these old decayed families, that it has become
a settled trade for men whose occupation is to buy
slaves, to travel through the “Old Dominion,” from estate
to estate, to purchase the negroes that the necessities
of these genteel families (who have nothing left of
their ancestral glory, but the old mansion, half in ruins,
and the wide, barren fields scarcely yielding bread)
compel them to dispose of, whenever opportunity offers.
The slave-buyer is seldom disappointed, however
grand the exterior of the baronial looking house to
which he rides up. Here he gets one, there another,
and in a few weeks he enters Lynchburg, Alexandria, or
Richmond with a hundred or more, whom the necessities
of the first families have compelled to be sold. Hundreds
of such buyers are ever traversing the state, and
the markets of the South and West are almost wholly
supplied with slaves, through the res angusta domi, in
the Old Dominion.

From this view of the facts (and facts they certainly
are), it would appear that Virginia is gradually coming
to free farming and the slow abandonment of slave cultivature.
As it is, slaves are raised here more as a
marketable and money-returning commodity than for
their productive labor.

It is one of the most beautiful states in the Union.
Its citizens, with truth, boast a nobler ancestry from
England's halls, than any other! Its character for intelligence,
genius, hospitality, and refinement, is not surpassed
anywhere. A Virginia gentleman (poor, and
living on starved lands though he may be) is the gentleman
of the age! Washington, her son, has, for evermore,

ennobled her as the birth-place of heroes. She
has given to the Republic the majority of her presidents!
and to the National Legislative halls, the noblest minds
of our race. The grand scenery of her valleys, mountains,
forests, and smiling fields, the diversity of her
climate, the noble character of her citizens, ought to
make her “the Paradise of America,” as Sir Walter
Raleigh called it, and therefore named it, in honor of his
worshipful “Eve,” (Queen Bess,) Virginia!

Our Inn is worthy of having for its host a descendant
of the chivalrous Borderleighs, (now modernized in spelling
to Bodleys,) one of the old North of England nobles.
He loses none of his Virginia stateliness or self-respect
in playing Boniface. He retains his self-respect and is
therefore still a gentleman; and we feel that he is one.
His vast parlor is hung round with old portraits of his
Virginia and British ancestors. The bed-rooms look so
respectable with their black oak and carved furniture,
the panneled wainscotting, old-fashioned testers, and oval
mirrors, that one seems to be carried back into the days
of William and Mary. Some of the furniture is two hundred
years old, and was brought over to Jamestown from
England. A beaufet is in the dining room, curiously
shaped and carved, which belonged to Sir Walter Raleigh,
he who sacrificed a cloak, hoping to get a crown. Queen
Bess was a terrible flirt! She had more joy in tyrannnizing
over the noble hearts of the brave men about her,
than in reigning over her realm of England.

There is a portrait of her all begrimed with smoke, in
the sitting room, which our courteous and high born host
says, once belonged to the ancient Claiborne or Clayborn
family, a race of statesmen and soldiers.

From the Inn one has a delightful prospect of fields,
woods, intervales, mountains, and a shining river. A
broad lawn is before the house, across which is a smooth,
half-moon shaped road, along which the stage-coach
dashes up to the door.

Such a table as one has here! Never were travelers so
banqueted. At breakfast, coffee and cream like liquid
gold; six kinds of bread, each hot, as bread always is in
the South, and all delicious with butter rich as honey;
amber-colored honey also, with a fragrance as if gathered
from the flowers that bloom on Hymettus! Then steaks,
so juicy and flavorable; broiled chickens just delicately
crisped and more delicately buttered; fresh fish from a
pond, nicely browned to a turn; ham the tint of a blood
peach; sliced bread and butter, and I know not what
other delicacies. Our dinners are unapproachable by
any city “Astor;” and for tea such sweetmeats, such
blackberries and cream, such delicious bread!—but you
will think I am an epicure truly if I go on. Suffice it
to say that we remained there a week (for my husband
is a quiet epicure in his way), and took stage for a town
where we could strike the railroad.

We flew through Petersburg, paused to breathe in
Richmond, which has flowing at its side a wild, rock-filled
river of a hundred rapids, which we crossed at a
dizzy height, looking down upon it from the car windows
with that thrill of the nerves which gazing from a great
height irresistibly causes.

We ascended the Potomac and passed Mount Vernon.
I was previously told that when we came opposite to it,
the bell of the boat would be struck thirteen times, not
only in homage to the Great Deliverer of the “Thirteen

Republics,” but also to notify passengers when the boat
came near the political Mecca of Americans. But no
bell sounded—no notice was taken by the steamer of
the spot, which no British war-ship passes without
lowering its colors and firing a salute. We Americans
seem to be destitute of all suggestive imagination and
reverential associations.

We shall remain in the Capital a few days, and thence
hasten to New York to hit the steamer; for we reside
the next two years abroad. This is the last Needle,
therefore, you will receive from me, Mr. —, and which
must terminate forever our correspondence. The request
of so many of my friends I feel must be cheerfully complied
with; and while in Philadelphia, I shall make (if
possible) arrangements with a publisher, to issue my poor
writings in one or two volumes under the title of

“THE SUNNY SOUTH: