University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XX.

April 29th.—This morning up at six, A. M., bade farewell
to our hostess and Barnwell Island, and proceeded with Trescot
back to the Pocotaligo station, which we reached at 12·20.
On our way Mr. Heyward and his son rode out of a field,
looking very like a couple of English country squires in all but
hats and saddles. The young gentleman was good enough
to bring over a snake-hawk he had shot for me. At the
station, to which the Heywards accompanied us, were the
Elliotts and others, who had come over with invitations and
adieux; and I beguiled the time to Savannah reading the
very interesting book by Mr. Elliott, senior, on the Wild
Sports of Carolina, which was taken up by some one when
I left the carriage for a moment and not returned to me. The
country through which we passed was flat and flooded as
usual, and the rail passed over dark deep rivers on lofty
trestle-work, by pine wood and dogwood-tree, by the green
plantation clearing, with mud bank, dike, and tiny canal mile
by mile, the train stopping for the usual freight of ladies, and
negro nurses, and young planters, all very much of the same
class, till at three o'clock, P. M., the cars rattled up along-side
a large shed, and we were told we had arrived at Savannah.

Here was waiting for me Mr. Charles Green, who had already
claimed me and my friend as his guests, and I found in
his carriage the young American designer, who had preceded
me from Charleston, and had informed Mr. Green of my
coming.

The drive through such portion of Savannah as lay between
the terminus and Mr. Green's house, soon satisfied my
eyes that it had two peculiarities. In the first place, it had

the deepest sand in the streets I have ever seen; and next,
the streets were composed of the most odd, quaint, green-windowed,
many-colored little houses I ever beheld, with an odd
population of lean, sallow, ill-dressed unwholesome-looking
whites, lounging about the exchanges and corners, and a busy,
well-clad, gayly-attired race of negroes, working their way
through piles of children, under the shade of the trees which
bordered all the streets. The fringe of green, and the height
attained by the live-oak, Pride of India, and magnolia, give
a delicious freshness and novelty to the streets of Savannah,
which is increased by the great number of squares and openings
covered with something like sward, fenced round by
white rail, and embellished with noble trees to be seen at
every few hundred yards. It is difficult to believe you are
in the midst of a city, and I was repeatedly reminded of the
environs of a large Indian cantonment—the same kind of
churches and detached houses, with their plantations and gardens
not unlike. The wealthier classes, however, have houses
of the New York Fifth Avenue character: one of the best of
these, a handsome mansion of rich red-sandstone, belonged to
my host, who coming out from England many years ago,
raised himself by industry and intelligence to the position
of one of the first merchants in Savannah. Italian statuary
graced the hall; finely carved tables and furniture, stained
glass, and pictures from Europe set forth the sitting-rooms;
and the luxury of bath-rooms and a supply of cold fresh water,
rendered it an exception to the general run of Southern edifices.
Mr. Green drove me through the town, which impressed
me more than ever with its peculiar character. We
visited Brigadier-General Lawton, who is charged with the
defences of the place against the expected Yankees, and found
him just setting out to inspect a band of volunteers, whose
drums we heard in the distance, and whose bayonets were
gleaming through the clouds of Savannah dust, close to the
statue erected to the memory of one Pulaski, a Pole, who
was mortally wounded in the unsuccessful defence of the city
against the British in the War of Independence. He turned
back and led us into his house. The hall was filled with
little round rolls of flannel. "These," said he, "are cartridges
for cannon of various calibres, made by the ladies
of Mrs. Lawton's 'cartridge class.'" There were more
cartridges in the back parlor, so that the house was not
quite a safe place to smoke a cigar in. The General has
been in the United States' army, and has now come forward
to head the people of this State in their resistance to the
Yankees.

We took a stroll in the park, and I learned the news of the
last few days. The people of the South, I find, are delighted
at a snubbing which Mr. Seward has given to Governor
Hicks of Maryland, for recommending the arbitration of
Lord Lyons, and he is stated to have informed Governor
Hicks that "our troubles could not be referred to foreign arbitration,
least of all to that of the representative of a European
monarchy." The most terrible accounts are given of
the state of things in Washington. Mr. Lincoln consoles
himself for his miseries by drinking. Mr. Seward follows
suit. The White House and capital are full of drunken border
ruffians, headed by one Jim Lane, of Kansas. But, on
the other hand, the Yankees, under one Butler, a Massachusetts
lawyer, have arrived at Annapolis, in Maryland, secured
the "Constitution" man-of-war, and are raising masses of
men for the invasion of the South all over the States. The
most important thing, as it strikes me, is the proclamation of
the Governor of Georgia, forbidding citizens to pay any
money on account of debts due to Northerners, till the end of the
war. General Robert E. Lee has been named Commander-in-Chief
of the Forces of the Commonwealth of Virginia,
and troops are flocking to that State from Alabama and other
States. Governor Ellis has called out 30,000 volunteers in
North Carolina, and Governor Rector of Arkansas has seized
the United States' military stores at Napoleon. There is a
rumor that Fort Pickens has been taken also, but it is very
probably untrue. In Texas and Arkansas the United States
regulars have not made an attempt to defend any of the forts.

In the midst of all this warlike work, volunteers drilling,
bands playing, it was pleasant to walk in the shady park, with
its cool fountains, and to see the children playing about—
many of them, alas! "playing at soldiers"—in charge of
their nurses. Returning, sat in the veranda and smoked a
cigar; but the mosquitoes were very keen and numerous.
My host did not mind them, but my cuticle will never be
sting-proof.

April 30th.—At 1·30 P. M. a small party started from Mr.
Green's to visit the cemetery of Bonaventure, to which every
visitor to Savannah must pay his pilgrimage; difficiles aditus
primos habet—a deep sandy road which strains the horses

and the carriages; but at last "the shell road is reached—a
highway several miles long, consisting of oyster shells—the
pride of Savannah, which eats as many oysters as it can to
add to the length of this wonderful road. There is no stone
in the whole of the vast alluvial ranges of South Carolina and
Maritime Georgia, and the only substance available for making
a road is the oyster-shell. There is a toll-gate at each end
to aid the oyster-shells. Remember they are three times the
size of any European crustacean of the sort.

A pleasant drive through the shady hedgerows and bordering
trees lead to a dilapidated porter's lodge and gateway,
within which rose in a towering mass of green one of the finest
pieces of forest architecture possible; nothing to be sure
like Burnham Beeches, or some of the forest glades of Windsor,
but possessed, nevertheless, of a character quite its own.
What we gazed upon was, in fact, the ruin of grand avenues
of live-oak, so well-disposed that their peculiar mode of
growth afforded an unusual development of the "Gothic idea,"
worked out and elaborated by a superabundant fall from the
overlacing arms and intertwined branches of the tillandsia, or
Spanish moss, a weeping, drooping, plumaceous parasite, which
does to the tree what its animal type, the yellow fever—
vomito prieto—does to man—clings to it everlastingly, drying
up sap, poisoning blood, killing the principle of life till it dies.
The only differ, as they say in Ireland, is, that the tillandsia
all the time looks very pretty, and that the process lasts very
long. Some there are who praise this tillandsia, hanging like
the tresses of a witch's hair over an invisible face, but to me it
is a paltry parasite, destroying the grace and beauty of that
it preys upon, and letting fall its dull tendrils over the fresh
lovely green, as clouds drop over the face of some beautiful
landscape. Despite all this, Bonaventure is a scene of remarkable
interest; it seems to have been intended for a place
of tombs. The Turks would have filled it with turbaned
white pillars, and with warm ghosts at night. The French
would have decorated it with interlaced hands of stone, with
tears of red and black on white ground, with wreaths of immortelles.
I am not sure that we would have done much
more than have got up a cemetery company, interested Shilliber,
hired a beadle, and erected an iron paling. The Savannah
people not following any of these fashions, all of which
are adopted in Northern cities, have left everything to nature
and the gatekeeper, and to the owner of one of the hotels, who

has got up a grave-yard in the ground. And there, scattered
up and down under the grand old trees, which drop tears of
Spanish moss, and weave wreaths of Spanish moss, and
shake plumes of Spanish moss over them, are a few monumental
stones to certain citizens of Savannah. There is a
melancholy air about the place independently of these emblems
of our mortality, which might recommend it specially for picnics.
There never was before a cemetery where nature
seemed to aid the effect intended by man so thoroughly.
Every one knows a weeping willow will cry over a wedding
party if they sit under it, as well as over a grave. But here
the Spanish moss looks like weepers wreathed by some fantastic
hand out of the crape of dreamland. Lucian's Ghostlander,
the son of Skeleton of the Tribe of the Juiceless, could
tell us something of such weird trappings. They are known
indeed as the best bunting for yellow fever to fight under.
Wherever their flickering horsehair tresses wave in the breeze,
taper end downwards, Squire Black Jack is bearing lance and
sword. One great green oak says to the other, "This fellow
is killing me. Take his deadly robes off my limbs!" "Alas!
see how he is ruining me! I have no life to help you." It
is, indeed, a strange and very ghastly place. Here are so
many querci virentes, old enough to be strong, and big, and
great, sapful, lusty, wide-armed, green-honored—all dying
out slowly beneath tillandsia, as if they were so many monarchies
perishing of decay—or so many youthful republics
dying of buncombe brag, richness of blood, and other diseases
fatal to overgrown bodies politic.

The void left in the midst of all these designed walks and
stately avenues, by the absence of any suitable centre, increases
the seclusion and solitude. A house ought to be there somewhere
you feel—in fact there was once the mansion of the Tatnalls,
a good old English family, whose ancestors came from the
old country, ere the rights of man were talked of, and lived
among the Oglethorpes, and such men of the pigtail school,
who would have been greatly astonished at finding themselves
in company with Benjamin Franklin or his kind. I don't
know anything of old Tatnall. Indeed who does? But he
had a fine idea of planting trees, which he never got in America,
where he would have received scant praise for anything
but his power to plant cotton or sugar-cane just now. In his
knee breeches, and top boots, I can fancy the old gentleman
reproducing some home scene, and boasting to himself, "I will

make it as fine as Lord Nihilo's park." Could he see it now?
—A decaying army of the dead. The mansion was burned
down during a Christmas merrymaking, and was never built
again, and the young trees have grown up despite the Spanish
moss, and now they stand, as it were in cathedral aisles, around
the ruins of the departed house, shading the ground, and enshrining
its memories in an antiquity which seems of the
remotest, although it is not as ancient as that of the youngest
oak in the Squire's park at home.

I have before oftentimes in my short voyages here, wondered
greatly at the reverence bestowed on a tree. In fact,
it is because a tree of any decent growth is sure to be older
than anything else around it; and although young America
revels in her future, she is becoming old enough to think
about her past.

In the evening Mr. Green gave a dinner to some very
agreeable people, Mr. Ward, the Chinese Minister—(who
tried, by the by, to make it appear that his wooden box was
the Pekin State carriage for distinguished foreigners)—Mr.
Locke, the clever and intelligent editor of the principal journal
in Savannah, Brigadier Lawton, one of the Judges, a
Britisher, owner of the once renowned America which, under
the name of Camilla, was now lying in the river (not perhaps
without reference to a little speculation in running the blockade,
hourly expected), Mr. Ward and Commodore Tatnall, so
well known to us in England for his gallant conduct in the
Peiho affair, when he offered and gave our vessels aid, though
a neutral, and uttered the exclamation in doing so,—in his
despatch at all events,—"that blood was thicker than water."
Of our party was also Mr. Hodgson, well known to most of
our Mediterranean travellers some years back, when he was
United States Consul in the East. He amuses his leisure
still by inditing and reading monographs on the languages of
divers barbarous tribes in Numidia and Mauritania.

The Georgians are not quite so vehement as the South
Garolinians in their hate of the Northerners; but they are
scarcely less determined to fight President Lincoln and all his
men. And that is the test of this rebellion's strength. I did
not hear any profession of a desire to become subject to England,
or to borrow a prince of us; but I have nowhere seen
stronger determination to resist any reunion with the New
England States. "They can't conquer us, sir?" "If they
try it, we'll whip them."