A SECOND VISIT
THE UIITED STATES
NORTH AMERICA,
BY SIR CHAKLES IYELL, F.R.S.,
PRESIDENT OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OK LONDON, AUTHOK OF "THE PHINCIPLES
OF GEOLOGV," AND " TBAVELS IN NOKTH AMERICA."
IN TWO VOLUMES. ^^"^
S'~f"
VOL. I.
NEW YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.
LONDON: JOHN MURE AY.
1849.
\ (O •
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
Voyage from Liverpool to Halifax. — Gale. — Iceberg. — Drift Ice and Gulf
Stream. — Coast of Newfoundland. — Engine room of Steamer. — Con
versations on Coolies in the West Indies. — Halifax. — News of Judge
Story's Death. — Boston. — Success of the Mail Steam Packets. — Cus
tom House Officers 13
CHAPTER II.
Boston. — Horticultural Show in Faneuil Hall. — Review of Militia. —
Peace Association. — Excursion to the White Mountains. — Railway
Traveling. — Portsmouth, New Hampshire. — Geology, Fossils in Drift.
— Submarine forest. — Wild Plants : Asters, Solidagos, Poison Ivy. —
Swallows. — Glacial Grooves. — Rocks transported by Antarctic Ice. —
Body of a Whale discovered by an American Trader in an Iceberg . 27
CHAPTER III.
Portland in Maine. — Kenriebec River. — Timber Trade. — Fossil Shells at
Gardiner. — Augusta the Capital of Maine. — Legal Profession: Advo
cates and Attorneys. — Equality of Sects. — Religious Toleration. — Cal-
viuiscic Theology. — Day of Doom ....... 41
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER IV.
PAGE
Journey from Portland to the White Mountains. — Plants — Churches,
School-houses. — Temperance Hotel. — Intelligence of New-Englanders.
— Climate, Consumption. — Conway. — Division of Property. — Every
Man his own Tenant. — Autumnal Tints. — Bears hybernating. — Willey
Slide. — Theory of Scratches and Grooves on Rocks. — Scenery. —
Waterfalls and Ravines. — The Notch. — Forest Trees and Mountain
Plants.— Fabyan's Hotel.— Echo 53
CHAPTER V.
Ascent of Mount Washington. — Mr. Oakes. — Zones of distinct Vegeta
tion. — Belt of Dwarf Firs. — Bald Region and Arctic Flora on Sum
mit. — View from Summit. — Migration of Plants from Arctic Re
gions. — Change of Climate since Glacial Period. — Granitic Rocks 0*
White Mountains. — Franconia Notch. — Revival at Bethlehem. — Miller-
ite Movement. — The Tabernacle at Boston. — Mormons. — Remarks on
New England Fanaticism ......... 66
CHAPTER VI.
Social Equality. — Position of Servants. — War with England. — Coalition
of Northern Democrats, and Southern Slave-owners. — Ostracism of
Wealth. — Legislators paid. — Envy in a Democracy. — Politics of the
Country and the City. — Pledges at Elections. — Universal Suffrage. —
Adventure in a Stage Coach. — Return from the White Mountains. —
Plymouth in New Hampshire. — Congregational and Methodist
Churches. — Theological Discussions of Fellow Travelers. — Temper
ance Movement. — Post-Office Abuses. — Lowell Factories . . .80
CHAPTER VII.
Plymouth, Massachusetts. — Plymouth Beach. — Marine Shells. — Quick
sand. — Names of Pilgrim Fathers. — Forefathers' Day. — Pilgrim Rel
ics. — Their Authenticity considered. — Decoy Pond. — A Barn Travel
ing. — Excursion to Salem. — Museum. — Warrants for Execution of
Witches. — Causes of the Persecution. — Convert iiou with Colored
Abolitionists. — Comparative Capacity of White uud Negro Kaot-e. —
Half-Breeds and Hybrid Intellects ....... 93
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER VIII.
PAGE
Pretended Fossil Sea Serpent, or Zeuglodon, from Alabama. — Recent
Appearance of a Sea Serpent in Gulf of St. Lawrence. — In Norway in
1845. — Near Cape Ann, Massachusetts, 1817. — American Descrip
tions. — Conjectures as to Nature of the Animal. — Sea Snake stranded
in the Orkneys proved to be a Shark. — Dr. Barclay's Memoir. — Sir
Everard Home's Opinion. — Sea Serpent of Hebrides, 1808. — Reasons
for concluding that Pontoppidan's Sea Snake was a Basking Shark. —
Captain M'Quhae's Sea Serpent 107
CHAPTER IX.
Boston. — No Private Lodgings. — Boarding-houses. — Hotels. — Effects of
the Climate on Health. — Large Fortunes. — Style of Living. — Serv
ants. — Carriages. — Education of Ladies. — Marriages. — Professional
Incomes. — Protectionist Doctrines. — Peculiarities of Language. —
Literary Tastes. — Cost of Living. — Alarms of Fire .... 122
CHAPTER X.
Boston. — Blind Asylum and Laura Briclgeman. — Respect for Freedom
of Conscience. — Cemetery of Mount Auburn. — Channing's Cenotaph. —
Episcopal Churches. — Unitarian Congregations. — Eminent Preach
ers. — Progress of Unitarians why slow. — Their works reprinted in
England. — Nothingarians. — Episcopalian Asceticism. — Separation of
Religion and Politics . . 133
CHAPTER XI.
Boston. — Whig Caucus. — Speech of Mr. Webster. — Politics in Masachu-
setts. — Election of Governor and Representatives. — Thanksgiving Day
and Governor's Proclamation. — Absence of Pauperism. — Irish Repeal
Meeting. — New England Sympathizer. — Visit to a Free School. —
State Education. — Pay and Social Rank of Teachers — Importance of
the Profession. — Rapid Progress and Effects of Educational Move
ment. — Popular Lectures. — Lending Libraries . . . . .141
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XII.
PAGE
Boston, Popular Education, continued. — Patronage of Universities and
Science. — Channing on Milton. — Milton's Scheme of teaching the
Natural Sciences. — New England Free Schools. — Their Origin. — First
Puritan Settlers not illiterate. — Sincerity of their Religious Faith. —
Schools founded in Seventeenth Century in Massachusetts. — Discour
aged in Virginia. — Sir W. Berkeley's Letter. — Pastor Robinson's Views
of Progress in Religion. — Organization of Congregational Church
es. — No Penalties for Dissent. — Provision made for future Variations
in Creeds. — Mode of working exemplified. — Impossibility of conceal
ing Truths relating to Religion from an educated Population. — Gain
to the Higher Classes, especially the Clergy. — New Theological Col-
. lege. — The Lower Orders not rendered indolent, discontented, or ir
religious by Education. Peculiar Stimulus to Popular Instruction in
the United States 155
CHAPTER XIII.
Leaving Boston for the South. — Railway Stove. — Fall of Snow. — New-
Haven, and Visit to Professor Silliman. — New York. — Improvements
in the City. — Croton Waterworks. — Fountains. — Recent Conflagra
tion. — New Churches. — Trinity Church. — News from Europe of Con
verts to Rome. — Reaction against Tractarians. — Electric Telegraph,
its Progres in America. — Morse and Wheatstone. — 11,000 Schools in
New York for Secular instruction. — Absence of Smoke. — Irish Voters.
— Nativism 178
CHAPTER XIV.
New York to Philadelphia. — Scenery in New Jersey. — War about Ore
gon. — Protectionist Theories. — Income Tax and Repudiation. — Re
criminations against British Aggrandizement. — Irish Quarter and
fraudulent Votes. — Washington. — Congress and Annexation of Texas.
— General Cass for War. — Winthrop for Arbitration. — Inflated Elo
quence. — Supreme Court. — Slavery in District of Columbia. —
Museum, Collection of Corals. — Sculpture from Palenque. — Conversa
tions with Mr. Fox. — A Residence at Washington not favorable to a
just Estimate of the United States. — False Position of Foreign Diplo
matists . 191
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XV.
PAGE
Washington to Richmond. — Legislature of Virginia in Session. — Substi
tution of White for Slave Labor. — Progress of Negro Instruction ,~
-^-SJave-dealers. — Kindness to Negroes. — Coal of Oolitic Period near
Richmond. — Visit to the Mines. — Upright Fossil Trees. — Deep Shafts,
and "Thickness of Coal Seams. — Explosion of Gas. — Natural Coke. —
Resemblance of the more modern Coal-measures to old Carboniferous
Rocks. — Whites working with free Negroes in the Mines . . . 205
CHAPTER XVI.
Journey through North Carolina. — Wilmington. — Recent Fire and Pass
ports for Slaves. — Cape Fear River and Smithfield. — Spanish Moss,
and Uses of. — Charleston. — Anti-Negro Feeling. — Passage from Mu-
lattoes to Whites. — Law against importing free Blacks. — Dispute with
Massachusetts. — Society in Charleston. — Governesses. — War-Panic. —
Anti-English Feeling caused by Newspaper Press. — National Arbitra
tion of the Americans. — Dr. Bachman's Zoology. — Geographical
Representation of Species. — Rattle-Snakes. — Turkey Buzzards . .218
CHAPTER XVII.
Charleston to Savannah. — Beaufort River, or Inland Navigation in South
Carolina.— Slave Stealer.— Cockspur Island.— Rapid growth of Oysters.
— Eagle caught by Oyster. — Excursion from Savannah to Skiddaway
Island.— Megatherium and Mylodon. — Cabbage Palms, or tree Palmet
tos. — Deceptive Appearance of Submarine Forest. — Alligators swal
lowing Flints. — Their Tenacity of Life when decapitated. — Grove
of Live Oaks.— Slaves taken to Free States 230
CHAPTER XVIII.
Savannah to Darien. — Anti-Slavery Meetings discussed. — War with
England. — Landing at Darien. — Crackers. — Scenery on Altamaha
River. — Negro Boatmen singing. — Marsh Blackbird in Rice Grounds. —
Hospitality of Southern Planters. — New Clearing and Natural Rotation
of Trees. — Birds. — Shrike and Kingfisher. — Excursion to St. Simon's
Island. — Butler's Island and Negroes. — Stumps of Trees in Salt
CONTENTS.
PAGH
Marshes proving Subsidence of Land. — Alligator seen. — Their Nests
and Habits. — Their Fear of Porpoises. — Indian Shell Mound on St.
Simon's Island. — Date-palm, Orange, Lemon, and Olive Trees. — Hur
ricanes. — Visit to outermost Barrier Island. — Sea Shells on Beach. —
Negro Maid-Servants 240
CHAPTER XIX.
Rivers made turbid by the Clearing of Forests. — Land rising in successive
Terraces. — Origin of these. — Bones of extinct Quadrupeds in Lower
Terrace. — Associated Marine Shells. — Digging of Brunswick Canal. —
Extinction of Megatherium and its Contempories. — Dying out of rare
Species — Gordonia Pubescens. — Life of Southern Planters. — Negroes
on a Rice Plantation. — Black Children. — Separate Negro Houses.-^
Work exacted. — Hospital for Negroes. — Food and Dress. — Black/
Driver. — Prevention of Crimes. — African Tom. — Progress of Negroes j
in Civilization. — Conversions to Christianity. — Episcopalian, Baptist,
and Methodist Missionaries. — Amalgamation and Mixture of Races . 256
Library, j
A SECOND VISIT
TO
THE UNITED STATES,
CHAPTER I.
Voyage from Liverpool to Halifax. — Gale. — Iceberg. — Drift Ice and Gulf
Stream. — Coast of Newfoundland. — Engine-room of Steamer. — Conver
sations on Coolies in the West Indies. — Halifax. — News of Judge Story's
Death. — Boston. — Success of the Mail Steam Packets. — Custom House
Officers.
Sept. 4. 1845. — EMBARKED with my wife at Liverpool, in
the Britannia, one of the Cunard line of steam-ships, bound for
Halifax and Boston. On leaving the wharf, we had first been
crammed, with a crowd of passengers and heaps of luggage, into
a diminutive steamer, which looked like a toy by the side of the
larger ship, of 1200 tons, in which we were to cross the ocean.
I was reminded, however, by a friend, that this small craft was
more than three times as large as one of the open caravels of
Columbus, in his first voyage, which was only 1 5 tons burden,
and without a deck. It is, indeed, marvelous to reflect on the
daring of the early adventurers; for Frobisher, in 1576, mado
his way from the Thames to the shores of Labrador with two
small barks of 20 and 25 tons each, not much surpassing in size
the barge of a man-of-war ; and Sir Humphry Gilbert crossed to
Newfoundland, in 1583, in a bark of 10 tons only, which was
lost in a tempest on the return voyage.
14 GALE. [CHAP. I.
The morning after we set sail we found ourselves off Cork, in
the midst of the experimental squadron of steamers and ships of
the line, commanded by Sir Hyde Parker. They had been out
several weeks performing their nautical evolutions, and we had
the amusement of passing close to the largest ships of the fleet —
the St. Vincent and the Superb. Our captain fired a salute as
we went under the batteries of the last of these — the Admiral's
ship.
After sailing at the rate of more than 200 miles a day for
four days, our progress was retarded, Sept. 8, by an equinoctial
gale, which came in from the southwest, and. blowing for twelve
hours, raised such a sea, that we only made four miles an hour.
Another gale of still greater violence came on six days after
ward, on the night of the 14th, when the ship was running at
the rate of ten and a half miles an hour, along the eastern edge
of the Great Baifk. The wind had been N.E., when suddenly,
and in an instant, it blew from the N.W. I was in my berth
below when this squall struck the vessel, and supposed that we
had run upon some floating timber or an iceberg. We felt the
ship heel as if falling over. On inquiry next day of the captain,
and the only passenger who was on deck at the time of this con
cussion, I learnt that they saw a cloud of white foam advancing
toward them on the surface of the sea from the N.W., like a
line of surf on a beach. The captain had time to get the sails
hauled half up, all except the top-sail, which was torn to pieces,
when the advancing line of foam reached the ship, at which
moment there was some vivid lightning, which the passenger
thought was the cause of the blow resembling the stroke of a
solid body against the steamer. When the wind first filled the
sails in an opposite direction, it seemed as if the masts must give
way. All hands had been called on deck, and the men went
into the rigging to furl the sails with the utmost order and cool
ness. In a few minutes the wind had veered rapidly round the
compass, from N.W. to N.E., and then went on to blow from
this, the old quarter again, a perfect hurricane for twenty-three
hours ; the spray being carried mast high, so that there was a
complete mingling of sea and sky. We could never tell whether
CHAP. I.] POKPOISES. 15
the cloud which enveloped us consisted chiefly of the foam "blown
off the crests of the waves, or of the driving mist and rain which
were falling during the greater part of the day.
Among our passengers were some experienced American sea-
eaptains, who had commanded vessels of their own round Cape
Horn, and, being now for the first time in a steamer at sea, were
watching with professional interest the Britannia's behavior in
the storm. They came to the conclusion, that one of these vessels,
well appointed, with a full crew, skilled officers, and good en
gineers, was safer than any sailing packet ; being light in their
rigging, and having small sails, they run no danger of having
their masts carried away in a stiff breeze, and the power of steam
enables them always to make way, so as to steer and keep their
head to the wind, on which safety depends. It sometimes hap
pens, when a wave strikes a sailing vessel in a squall, that before
she has time to work round and get her head to windward, an
other wave breaks over and swamps her, and to such an accident
the loss of several packets between the United States and Liver
pool is attributed.
I observed that there was no lightning conductor in our ship ;
and it seems to be the prevailing belief that steam-boats are less
liable than other vessels to suffer from lightning, although the
steamers in the royal navy are fitted with copper-wire rope con
ductors.
My chief amusement, when the weather was moderate, was
to watch the porpoises (Delphinus phoccena) gamboling, rolling,
and tumbling in the water, and yet keeping up with our ship
when she was running eleven miles an hour. They were very
numerous, usually following each other in a line at short intervals,
each individual about four or five feet long, their backs of a blue-
ish-black color, swimming without effort, and seeming scarcely to
move either their fins or tail. Occasionally they dive, and then
re-appear to take breath at a great distance, often leaping up out
of the water, so as to display their silvery white bodies. The
only other living creatures which attracted our attention, when
still far from land, were enormous flights of sea-birds, which filled
the air, or were seen swimming on the ocean near the shoal called
16 ICEBERG. [CHAP. I.
the Flemish Cap, lat. 47° 35' N. ; long. 44° 3.2' W. They
feed on fish peculiar to these comparatively shallow parts of the
Atlantic.
But the event of chief interest to me on this voyage AV.-IS be
holding, for the first time in my life, a large iceberg. . It came
in sight on the 13th Sept., a season when they are rarely met
with here. We were nearing the Great Bank, which was about
eight miles distant, the air foggy, so that I could only see it
dimly through the telescope, although it was as white as snow,
and supposed by the officers to be about 200 feet high. The
foggy and chilly state of the atmosphere had led the captain to
suspect the proximity of floating ice, and half-hourly observations
had been made on the temperature of the sea, but the water was
always at 49° F., as is usual in this month. We were then in
lat. 47° 37' N., long. 45° 39' W., our latitude corresponding to
that of the Loire in France.
To a geologist, accustomed to seek for the explanation of vari
ous phenomena in the British Isles and Northern Europe, espe
cially the transportation of huge stones to great distances, and the
polishing and grooving of the surfaces of solid rocks, by referring
to the agency of icebergs at remote periods, when much of what
is now land in the northern hemisphere was still submerged, it is
no small gratification to see, for the first time, one of these icy
masses floating so far to the southward. I learnt from our cap
tain that last year, June 1844, he fell in with an iceberg aground
at some distance from the land ofT Cape Race, on the S.E. point
of Newfoundland, in lat. 4G° 40' N. It was of a square shape,
100 feet high, and had stranded in a sea of some depth ; for its
sides were steep, and soundings of fifty fathoms were obtained
close to the ice. It was seen at the same spot ten days after
ward by a brig. A military officer on board also tells me that
last year, when he was in garrison in Newfoundland, an iceberg
continued aground in the harbor of St. John's for a year, and
they used to fire cannon-balls at it from the battery. There are,
indeed, innumerable well-authenticated cases of these islands of
floating ice having stranded on the* great oceanic shoals S.E. of
Newfoundland, even in places where the water is no less than
CHAP. I.] DRIFTING OF ICEBERGS. 17
100 fathoms deep, the average depth over the Great Bank being
from forty to fifty fathoms. That they should be arrested in.
their course is not; surprising, when we consider that the mass of
floating ice below water is eight times greater than that above ;
and Sir James Ross saw icebergs which had rur. aground in
Baffin's Bay, in water 1500 feet deep. If we reflect on the
weight of these enormous masses, and the momentum which
they accjuire when impelled by winds and currents, and when
they are moving at the rate of several miles an hour, it seems
difficult to over-estimate the disturbance which they must create
on a soft bottom of mud or loose sand, or the grinding power they
must exert when they grate along a shelf of solid rock overspread
with a layer of sand.
Mr. Redfield of New York has lately published * a chart show
ing the positions of the icebergs observed in the North Atlantic
daring the last fifteen years, and it will be remarked, that they
have been met with at various points between the 47th and 36th
parallels of latitude,' the most southern being that which Captain
Couthuoy encountered, lat. 36° 10' N., long. 39° W., a mile
long and 100 feet high. This berg w^as on the extreme southern
boundary of the gulf stream, which it had crossed against the
direction of the superficial current, so as to get as far south as the
latitude of the Straits of Gibraltar. In fact, these great ice-
islands coming from the Greenland seas are not stopped by the
gulf-stream, which is a mere superficial current of warmer water
flowing in an opposite direction, but are borne along from N.E.
to S.W. by the force of the arctic under-current, consisting of
colder water, into which the icebergs descend to a great depth.
All the circumstances connected with the geographical outline
of the coast, the shape of the sea-bottom, the oceanic currents,
and the prevailing winds, although liable to be modified and
greatly altered in the course of time, may continue nearly the
same for the next ten thousand or twenty thousand years ; and
in that period thousands of bergs, occasionally charged with frag
ments of rock, and many of them running aground in a variety
of places, will be conveyed in every century over certain tracts
* Amer. Journ. Science, vol. xlviii. 1844,
18 COAST OF NEWFOUNDLAND. [CHAP. I.
of the Atlantic, and in given directions. The natural course of
oceanic currents transporting ice from polar regions is from N.E.
to S.W. ; the westerly inclination being due to the influence of
the increased velocity of the diurnal rotation of the earth's sur
face as we proceed southward. Now it is a well-known fact,
and one of great geological interest, which I had an opportunity
of verifying myself in 1842,^ that in Canada the polished surfaces
of hard rocks exhibit those strise and straight parallel grooves
(such as are generally ascribed to glacial action) in a N.E. and
S.W. direction, and the blocks called erratic have also traveled
from N.E. to S.W. Their course, therefore, agrees, as Mr.
Redfield has pointed out, with the normal direction of polar cur
rents charged with ice, where no disturbing causes have inter
vened. In order to account for the phenomenon, we have to sup
pose that Canada was submerged at the time when the rocks
were polished and striated by the grating of the ice on the ancient
sea-bottom ; and that this was actually the case, is proved by in
dependent evidence, namely, the occurrence of marine shells of
recent species at various heights above the level of the sea in
the region drained by the St. Lawrence. f Professor Hitchcock
has shown that, in Massachusetts, there is another system of
striai and grooves running from N.N.E. to S.S.W. ; the bould
ers and transported blocks of the same region having taken a cor
responding course, doubtless, in consequence of the floating ice
bergs having, in that case, been made by winds or currents, or
the shape of the land and sea-bottom, to deviate from the normal
direction.
Many of the icebergs annually drifted into southern latitudes
in the Atlantic, are covered with seals, which are thus brought
into very uncongenial climates, and probably are never able to
make their way back again. They are often seen playing about
the rocks on the shores of Massachusetts in summer, so that they
seem able, for a time at least, to accommodate themselves to con
siderable heat.
Early on the morning of the 1 5th of September, the captain
* Sec "Lyoll's Travels in North America,'' vol. ii, p. 135.
t Ibid. vol. h. p, 143.
CHAP. I.] ENGINE-ROOM OF A STEAMER. 19
got sight of land, consisting of the hills near St. John's, New
foundland, about forty miles distant. When we came on deck,
we were running rapidly in smooth water along the shore, within
four miles of Trespassey Bay. The atmosphere was bright, and
we had a clear view of the rocky coast, which reminded me of
some of the most sterile, cold, and treeless parts of Scotland.
Not even a shrub appeared to vary the uniform covering of green
turf; yet we were in a latitude corresponding to the South of
France.
In a large steam-ship like the Britannia, there are three very
distinct societies, whose employments during the voyage are sin
gularly contrasted. There are the sailors, all of whom were
fully occupied under their officers, for a time at least, during the
gale, furling the sails and attending to the ordinary duties of a
sailing ship. Then there is the saloon, where gentlemen and
well-dressed ladies are seen lounging and reading books, or talk
ing, or playing backgammon, and enjoying, except during a hur
ricane, the luxuries arid expensive fare of a large hotel. Tn
another spacious room, which I had the curiosity to visit after
the storm, is a large corps of enginemen and firemen, with sooty
faces and soiled clothes, pale with heat, heaping up coals on the
great furnaces, or regulating the machinery. On visiting the
large engine-room, we were filled with admiration at seeing the
complicated apparatus, and the ease with which it moved, having
never once stopped for a minute when traversing 3000 miles of
ocean, although the vessel had been .pitching and rolling, and
sometimes quivering, as she was forced by the power of the steam
against the opposing waves, and although the ship had sometimes
heeled at a very high angle, especially when struck suddenly by
the squall of the 14th. The engine is so placed near the center
of the ship, that during a storm the piston is never inclined at a
higher angle than twelve degrees, which does not derange the
freedom of its motion. The Britannia, a ship of 1200 tons, has
four large boilers ; the engines having a 44-0 horse power.
When she left Liverpool she had 550 tons of cuals in her, and
burned from thirty to forty tons a day, her speed augmenting
sensibly toward the end of the voyage, as she grew lighter ;
20 REVOLUTIONS OF ENGINE. [CHA.P. I.
but, on the other hand, the vibration caused by the machinery
increasing also, much to the discomfort of the passengers.
Among the wonders of the engine-room, no object made so
lively an impression on my mind as a small dial, called the
Indicator, where a hand, like that of a clock, moving round in a
circle, registers the number of revolutions made by the wheels of
the engine during the whole voyage ; this hand or index being
attached to one of the moving shafts, and made to advance
slightly by every stroke. We were going at the time at the
rate of ten and a half miles an hour, and the paddle-wheels
were revolving fifteen and a half times a minute ; but during the
gale they had only made six or seven revolutions, the engineer,
to avoid too great a strain on the machinery, having then burned
much less coal, and going no more than half speed. Our short
est day's sail, during the whole voyage, was 114 miles. I
observed, on our arrival at Boston, that the number of revolu
tions registered by the Indicator was 275,122, the ship having
run 2946 miles in fourteen days and twenty-two hours ; the
distance from Liverpool to Halifax being 2550 miles, and from
thence to Boston 396. For the sake of comparing this result
with former voyages of the Britannia, I made the following
extract from the Log Book of the chief engineer : —
Number of Length of
Revolutions Voyage.
of the Engines. Days. Hours.
Outward Voyage, May. 1845 .... 273,328 .... 14 12
Homeward do. June, " .... 253,073 .... 11 8
Outward do. July, " .... 282,409 .... 18 13
Homeward do. August, " .... 292,122 .... 14 2
It is remarkable how nearly the number of strokes made by
the engine in our present voyage agrees with those recorded in
the voyage of last May, which it will be seen was of the sarn,e
length, with the exception of a few hours, the longer voyage
exhibiting a slight excess in the number of revolutions. In all
the four trips, the difference between the highest and lowest
numbers, amounts to no more than a seventh or eighth of the
whole. It is like the regular pulsation of the heart, beating a
given number of times in a minute ; the pulse quickening during
CHAP. I.] COOLIES IN THE WEST INDIES. 21
excitement and more rapid motion, and being slower when in
comparative rest, yet on the whole preserving a remarkable
uniformity of action. Nor can any one in full health and vigor
be more unconscious of the rapid contractions and dilatations of
the heart, than are nearly all the inmates of the steam-ship of
the complicated works and movements of the machinery, on the
accuracy of which their progress and safety depends.
In the course of the last twelve months, the steamers on this
line have sometimes taken as much as seventeen, and even
twenty-one days, to make their passage against head winds by
Halifax, to Boston ; but the comparative advantage of steam
power is never more evident than at the period of the most
tedious voyages, the liners having required seventy days or more
to cross in corresponding seasons.
During the passage we had some animated discussions in the
saloon on the grand experiment now making by the British
government, of importing Coolies, or Hindoo emigrants, from the
Deccan into the West Indies, to make up for the deiiciency of
Negro labor consequent on the emancipation of the slaves. We
had on board a Liverpool merchant, who had a large contract
for conveying these Coolies across the ocean, and who told us
that more than forty ships would be employed this year (1845)
in carrying each 300 Hindoo laborers to Jamaica, at the cost of
£lG per head, and that he should sell the casks, which con
tained the water for their drink, for the sugar trade in the West
Indies. The New Englanders on board wished to know how
far this proceeding differed from a new slave trade. It was
explained to them that the emigrants were starving in their own
country ; that the act was a voluntary one on their part ; and
that, after a short term of years, the government was bound to
give them a free passage back to their native country. Of this
privilege many, after saving a sum of money, had actually
availed themselves. It was also alleged that they made good
agricultural laborers in a tropical climate. The Americans
replied, that to introduce into any colony two distinct races,
having different languages and religions, such as Negroes and
Hindoos, is a curse of the greatest magnitude, and of the most
22 COOLIES IN THE WEST INDIES. [CHAP. I.
lasting kind, as experience had proved throughout the American
continent.
A Barbadoes planter, who was present, declared his opinion
that in his island the emancipation of the negroes had been suc
cessful ; the population, about 120,000, being dense, arid a large
proportion of them having white blood in their veins, with many
of the wants of civilized men, and a strong wish to educate their
children. The Americans, however, drew from him the admis
sion, that in proportion as the colored people were rising in so
ciety, the whites, whose aristocratic feelings and tastes were
wounded by the increased importance of the inferior race, were
leaving Barbadoes, the richest of them retreating to England,
and the poor seeking their fortunes in the United States. It was
also conceded, that in the larger islands, such as Jamaica, which
the Americans compared to their Southern States, the negroes
have retreated to unoccupied lands and squatted, and could not
be induced to labor, and were therefore retrograding in civiliza
tion ; so that the experience of more than ten years would be
required before the Americans could feel warranted in imitating
the example of England, even if they had the means of indemni
fying the southern planters.
We landed at Halifax on the 17th of September, and spent
some hours there very agreeably, much refreshed by a walk on
terra firma, and glad to call on some friends in the town. I
was surprised to find that some of our fellow passengers, bound
for Montreal, intended to go on with us to Boston, instead of
stopping here ; so great are the facilities now enjoyed of traveling
from New England to Canada, passing via Boston by railway to
Albany, and thence by steam-boats through Lakes George and
Champlain to Montreal.
The chief subject of conversation, during the remaining two
days of our voyage, was the death of Judge Story, the eminent
jurist, whose works and decisions have been often cited as of high
authority by English judges. The news of this unexpected event
reached us at Halifax, and was evidently a matter of deep con
cern to his fellow citizens, by whom he had been much loved and
admired. After retiring from the bench of the Supreme Court
CHAP. I.] JUDGE STORY. 03
at Washington, Story had been placed at the head of the Law
School in Harvard University, which he had soon raised to celeb
rity from small beginnings, drawing students to his lectures from
every state of the Union.
I afterward read, in the newspapers of Boston, several funeral
orations pronounced in his honor, some from the pulpit, by preach
ers of his own denomination (he was president of the Unitarian
Association), which praised him for his pure, scriptural, and lib
eral Christianity, and represented him as an earnest defender of
the faith, one who had given to its evidences that accurate inves
tigation which his reflecting mind and professional habits demand
ed. "What he found to be true, he was never ashamed or afraid
to declare. He valued the Gospel and felt his own need of its
restraining and consoling power, alike in temptation and grief,"
&c.
But eloquent eulogies were not wanting from ministers of some
of the other churches, usually called in New England, by way
of distinction from the Unitarian, " orthodox," some of which
displayed at once the intensity and liberality of sectarian feeling
in this country. They did homage to his talents and the upright
ness of his conduct, and they dealt with his theological opinions in
the spirit of Dry den's beautiful lines : —
" The soul of Arcite went where heathens go,
Who better live than we, though less they know."
I will extract, from one of the most favorable of these effusions,
the following passage : —
" Judge Story was a Christian who professed a firm belief in
the Bible as a revelation from God. He was a Unitarian ; but
if he reposed in the divine mercy through the mediation of
Christ, and if he came with the temper of a child to the Scrip
tures, I have no doubt he has been received of Him to whom, in
his last words, he committed himself in prayer ; and, had he been
more orthodox in his creed without the Christian spirit and the
Christian life, his orthodoxy would not have saved him."
Sept. i9. — Early in the morning of the fifteenth day from
our leaving Liverpool, we came in sight of the lighthouse of Cape
24 SEVERE FROST AT BOSTON. [CHAP. I.
Anne, and a small and gayly painted green schooner, in full sail,
and scudding rapidly through the water, brought us a pilot. In
a few hours the long line of coast became more and more distinct,
till Salem, Nahant, Lynn, the harbor of Boston and its islands,
and at last the dome -of the State House, crowning the highest
eminence, came full into view. To us the most novel feature in
the architectural aspect of the city, was the Bunker Hill Monu
ment, which had been erected since 1842 ; the form of which,
as it resembles an Egyptian obelisk, and possibly because I had
seen that form imitated in some of our tall factory chimneys, gave
me no pleasure.
After the cloudy and stormy weather we had encountered in
the Atlantic, and the ice and fogs seen near the great banks, we
were delighted with the clear atmosphere and bright sunshine of
Boston, and heard with surprise of the intense heat of the sum
mer, of which many persons had lately died, especially in New
York. The extremes, indeed, of heat and cold in this country,
are truly remarkable. Looking into the windows of a print
shop, I saw an engraving of our good ship, the Britannia, which
we had just quitted, represented as in the act of forcing her way
through the ice of Boston harbor in the winter of 1844 — a truly
arctic scene. A fellow passenger, a merchant from New York,
where they are jealous of the monopoly hitherto enjoyed by their
New England rival, of a direct and regular stearn communica
tion with Europe, remarked to me that if the people of Boston
had been wise, they would never have encouraged the publication
of this print, as it was a clear proof that the British government
should rather have selected New York, where the sea never
freezes, as the fittest port for the mail packets. I had heard
much during the voyage of this strange adventure of the Britan
nia in the ice. Last winter it appears there had been a frost of
unusual intensity, such as had not been known for more than half
a century, which caused the sea to be frozen over in the harbor
of Boston, although the water is as salt there as in mid-ocean.
Moreover, the tide runs there at the rate of four or five miles an
hour, rising twelve feet, and causing the whole body of the ice to
be uplifted arid let down again to that amount twice every twen-
CHAP. I.] SEVERE FROST AT BOSTON. 25
ty-four hours. Notwithstanding this movement, the surface re
mained even and unbroken, except along the shore, where it
cracked.
Had the continuance of this frost been anticipated, it would
have been easy to keep open a passage ; but on the 1st of Feb
ruary, when the Britannia was appointed to sail, it was found
that the ice was seven feet thick in the wharf, and two feet
thick for a distance of seven miles out ; so that wagons and carts
were conveying cotton and other freights from the shore to the
edge of the ice, where ships were taking in their cargoes. No
sooner was it understood that the mail was imprisoned, than the
public spirit of the whole city was roused, and a large sum of
money instantly subscribed for cutting a canal, seven miles long
and 100 feet wide, through the ice. They began the operation
by making two straight furrows, seven inches deep, with an ice
plough drawn by horses, and then sawed the ice into square
sheets, each 100 feet in diameter. When these were detached,
they were made to slide, by. means of iron hooks and ropes fixed
to them, under the great body of the ice, one edge being first
depressed, and the ropes being pulled by a team of horses, and
occasionally by a body of fifty men. On the 3d of February,
only two days after her time, the steamer sailed out, breaking
through a newly-formed sheet of ice, two inches thick, her bows
being fortified with iron to protect her copper sheeting. She
burst through the ice at the rate of seven miles an hour without
much damage to her paddles ; but before she was in clear water,
all her guard of iron had been torn off. An eye-witness of the
scene told me that tents had been pitched on the ice, then cov
ered by a slight fall of snow, and a concourse of people followed
and cheered for the first mile, some in sleighs, others in sailing
Doats fitted up with long blades of iron, like skates, by means of
which they are urged rapidly along by their sails, not only before
the wind, but even with a side wind, tacking and beating to
windward as if they were in the water.
The Britannia, released from her bonds, reached Liverpool in
Ifteen days, so that no alarm had been occasioned by the delay;
,nd when the British Post-Office department offered to defray
VOL. i. — B
26 CUSTOM-HOUSE OFFICERS. [CHAP. 1.
the expense of the ice-channel, the citizens of Boston declined to
be reimbursed.
We were not detained more than an hour in the Custom
house, although the number of our packages was great. In that
hour the newspapers which had come out with us had been soj
rapidly distributed, that our carriage was assailed in the streets
by a host of vociferous boys, calling out, " Fifteen days later
from Europe" — " The Times and Punch just received by the
Britannia." In the course of my travels in the United States I
heard American politicians complaining of the frequent change
of officials, high and low, as often as a new party comes into
power. In spite of this practice, however, the Custom-house
officers, greatly to the comfort of the public, belong to a higher
grade of society than those at Liverpool and our principal ports.
I asked a New England friend, who was well acquainted with
the " Old Country," whether the subordinates here are more
highly paid ? " By no means," he replied. " The difference,
then," said I, " must be owing to the better education given to
all in your public schools?" "Perhaps, in some degree," he
rejoined ; " but far more to the peculiarity of our institutions.
Hecent examples are not wanting of men who have passed in a
few years from the chief place in one of our great Custom-houses
to a seat in the Cabinet or an appointment as embassador to a
first-rate European power ; but, what is far more to the point,
men who are unsuccessful at the bar or the church, often accept
inferior stations in the Custom-house and other public offices
without loss of social position." This explanation led me to
reflect how much the British public might gain if a multitude
of the smaller places in the public service at home, now slighted
by aristocratic prejudices as ungenteel, were filled by those gentle
men who, after being highly educated at Eton and other public
schools, lead now a pastoral life in Australia, or spend their best
days in exile far from their kindred and native land, as soldiers
or sailors, wilhin the tropics.
CHAPTER II.
Boston. — Horticultural Show in Faneuil Hall. — Review of Militia. — Peace
Association. — Excursion to the White Mountains. — Railway Traveling.
— Portsmouth, New Hampshire. — Geology, Fossils in Drift. — Submarine
Forest. — Wild Plants ; Asters, Solidagos, Poison Ivy. — Swallows. —
Glacial Grooves. — Rocfcs transported by Antarctic Ice. — Body of a Whale
discovered by an American Trader in an Iceberg.
GREAT progress has been made in beautifying the city of
Boston by new public buildings in the three years since we were
last here. Several of these are constructed of granite, in a hand
some style of architecture. The site of the town is almost an
island, which has been united to the main land by long mounds,
which are beginning to radiate in all directions, except the east,
like the spokes of a wheel. Railway trains are seen continually
flying to and fro along these narrow causeways at all hours of
the day.
On the evening of our arrival we went to a horticultural show
of fruit and flowers in Faneuil Hall, where we found a large
assembly of both sexes enjoying a " temperance feast," a band of
music in the gallery, and the table spread with cakes, fruit, ices,
tea, milk, and whey. I was glad to observe, what I am told,
howrever, is an innovation here, that the ladies, instead of merely
looking on from a gallery to see the gentlemen eat, were sitting
at table in the body of the hall, and listening to some of the first
orators of the land, Daniel Webster, R. C. Winthrop, and our
friend and late fellow-voyager in the Britannia, Edward Everett,
whose reception, on his return from his embassy to England, was
most enthusiastic. He said, " he had been so lately rocking on
the Atlantic, whose lullaby was not always of the gentlest, that
he was hardly fit for a rocking in < the old cradle of Liberty ;'
and felt almost unconsciously inclined to catch at the table to
steady himself, expecting to see the flowers and the fruit fetch
away in some lee-lurch. Even the pillars of old Faneuil Hal!,
28 REVIEW OF MILITIA. [CHAP. II.
which are not often found out of the true plumb-line, seemed to
reel over his head."
Allusion was here made to this Hall having been the place of
large popular meetings before 1775, where American patriotism
was first roused to make a stand against the claims of the mother-
country to impose taxes without consent of the provincial legis
lature. In later days, the building being under the control of
the city authorities, and the Whigs being usually in the ascendant
here, the moderate party have almost always obtained possession
of the Hall.
Sept. 23. — From the windows of a friend's house, opening on
the Common, we have a full view of what is called the " Fall
Parade," or autumnal review of the Boston militia, cavalry and
infantry, which has lasted all day, ending with a sham fight and
much firing of cannon. Not that there is any excess of military
fervor in this State, as in some others at the present moment ;
on the contrary, a numerous and increasing Peace Association is
distributing, gratis, many thousand copies of a, recent Fourth-of-
July oration against war and military establishments, delivered
by Mr. Charles Sumner. I was asked by a young friend here,
in full uniform, whether I did not think " Independence-day" (an
anniversary when all who have a regimental costume are accus
tomed to wear it), a most inappropriate time for such an effusion,
in which non-resistance principles bordering on Quakerism had
been avowed; the orator asking, among other questions, "What
is the use of the militia of the United States ?" and going as far
as Channing in pronouncing war to be unchristian.
I remembered having once admired the present Bishop of St.
Asaph for choosing a certain day, set apart by the English
Church for commemorating the " conspiracy, malicious practices,
and Popish tyranny of the Romanists," for preaching a sermon
on religious toleration ; and I therefore felt some hesitation in
condemning the opportunity seized upon by an enthusiast of the
peace party for propagating his views.
" There is a soul of goodness in things evil
Would men observingly distill it out."
So long as the War of Independence lasted, I can understand
CHAP. II.] PEACE ASSOCIATION. 29
the policy of annually reading out to the assembled multitude the
celebrated " Declaration," setting forth the injuries inflicted by
Great Britain, her usurpations previous to the year 1776, "her
design to reduce the Americans to a state of absolute dependence
by quartering armed troops upon the people — refusing to make
the judges independent of the crown — imposing taxes without
consent of the colonies — depriving them of trial by jury — some
times suspending their legislatures — waging war against the
colonies, arid transporting to their shores large armies of foreign
mercenaries to complete the work of death, desolation, and
tyranny already begun, with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy
scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages — exciting domestic
insurrections — bringing on the inhabitants of the frontiers the
merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is the
destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions," &c., &c.
All this recital may have been expedient when the great
struggle for liberty and national existence was still pending ; but
what effect can it have now, but to keep alive bad feelings, and
perpetuate the memory of what should nearly be forgotten ? In
many of the newer States the majority of the entire population
have either themselves come out from the British Isles as new
settlers, or are the children or grandchildren of men who emi
grated since the " Declaration" was drawn up. If, therefore,
they pour out in schools, or at Fourth-of-July meetings, declama
tory and warlike speeches against the English oppressors of
America, their words are uttered by parricidal lips, for they are
the hereditary representatives, not of the aggrieved party, but of
the aggressors.
To many the Peace Associations appear to aim at objects as
Utopian and hopeless as did the Temperance Societies to the
generation which is now passing away. The cessation of war
seems as unattainable as did the total abstinence from intoxicating
liquors. But we have seen a great moral reform brought about,
in many populous districts, mainly by combined efforts of well-
organized societies to discourage intemperance, and we may hope
that the hostilities of civilized nations may be mitigated at least
by similar exertions. " Iri the harbor of Boston," says Mr.
30 ENVIRONS OF BOSTON. [CHAP. II.
Sumner, " the Ohio, a ship of the line, of ninety guns, is now
swinging idly at her moorings. She costs as much annually to
maintain her in service, in salaries, wages, and provisions, as four
Harvard Universities." He might have gone on to calculate
how many primary schools might be maintained by the disband
ing of single regiments, or the paying off of single ships, of those
vast standing armies and navies now kept up in so many coun
tries in Europe. How much ignorance, bigotry, and savage
barbarism in the lower classes might be prevented by employing
in education a small part of the revenues required to maintain
this state of armed peace !
Sept. 22. — At this season the wealthier inhabitants of Boston
are absent at watering-places in the hills, where there are mine
ral springs, or at the sea-side. Some of them in their country
villas, where we visited several friends in the neighborhood. The
environs of Boston are very agreeable ; woods and hills, and bare
rocks, and small lakes, and estuaries running far into the land,
and lanes with hedges, and abundance of wild flowers. The
extreme heat of summer does not allow of the green meadows
and verdant lawns of England, but there are some well-kept
gardens here — a costly luxury where the wages of labor are so
high.
Sept. 24. — I had determined before the autumn was over to
make an excursion to the White Mountains of New Hampshire,
which, with the exception of those in part of the Alleghany
range in North Carolina, are the loftiest east of the Mississippi.
Accordingly, I set off with my wife on the railway for Ports
mouth, fifty-four miles north of Boston, which we reached in two
hours and three quarters, having stopped at several intervening
places, and going usually at the rate of twenty miles an hour.
There were about eighty passengers in the train, forty of whom
were in the same carriage as ourselves. " The car," in shape
like a long omnibus, has a passage down the middle, sometimes
called " the aisle," on the back part of which the seats are ranged
transversely to the length of the apartment, which is high enough
to allow a tall man to walk in it with his Jiat on. Each seat
holds two persons, and is well-cushioned and furnished with a
CHAP. II.] RAILWAY TRAVELING. 31
wooden back ingeniously contrived, so as to turn and permit the
traveler to face either way, as he may choose to converse with
any acquaintance who may be sitting- before or behind him.
The long row of windows on each side affords a good view of
the country, of which more is thus seen than on our English
railroads. The trains, moreover, pass frequently through the
streets of villages and towns, many of which have sprung up
since the construction of the railway. The conductor passes
freely through the passage in the center, and from one car to
another, examining tickets and receiving payment, so as to pre
vent any delay at the stations.
If we desire to form an estimate of the relative accommoda
tion, advantages, comforts, and cost of the journey in one of these
railways as compared with those of England, we must begin by
supposing all our first, second, and third-class passengers thrown
into one set of carriages, and we shall then be astonished at the
ease and style with which the millions travel in the United
States. The charge for the distance of fifty-four miles, from
Boston to Portsmouth, was 1^ dollar each, or 6s. 4:d. English,
which was just half \vhat we had paid three weeks before for
first-class places on our journey from London to Liverpool
(21. 10s. for 210 miles), the speed being in both cases the same.
Here there is the want of privacy enjoyed in an English first-
class carriage, and the seats, though excellent, are less luxurious.
On the other hand, the power of standing upright when tired of
the sitting posture is not to be despised, especially on a long
journey, and the open view right and left from a whole line of
windows is no small gain. But when we come to the British
second and third-class vehicles, cushionless, dark, and if it happen
to rain, sometimes closed up with wooden shutters, and contrast
them with the cars of Massachusetts, and still more the average
appearance, dress, and manners of the inmates, the wide differ
ence is indeed remarkable; at the same time, the price which
the humblest class here can afford to pay proves how much
higher must be the standard of wages than with us.
On starting, we had first to cross the harbor of Boston in a
large ferry-boat, where, to economize time, there is a bar- with
32 PORTSMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE. [CHAP. II,
refreshments, so that you may breakfast ; or, if you please, buy
newspapers, or pamphlets, or novels. We then flew over rails,
supported on long lines of wooden piles, following the coast, and
having often the sea on one side, and fresh-water lakes, several
miles long, or salt marshes, on the other. In some of the
marshes we saw large haycocks on piles, waiting till the winter,
when, the mud and water being firmly frozen, the crop can be
carried in. We were soon at Lynn, a village of shoemakers,
exporting shoes to distant parts of the Union ; and next went
through the center of the town of Salem, partly in a tunnel in
the main street ; then proceeded to Ipswich, leaving on our left
Wenham Lake, and seeing from the road the wooden houses in
which great stores of ice are preserved. In some of the low
grounds I saw peat cut, and laid out to dry for fuel. We
crossed the river Merrimack near its mouth, on a bridge of great
length, supported by piles, and then entered New Hampshire,
soon coming to the first town of that state, called Portsmouth,
which has a population of 8000 souls, and was once the resi
dence of the colonial governor. Here I made a short stay, pass
ing the evening at the house of Mr. J. L. Hayes, to whom we
had letters of introduction, where we found a gay party assem
bled, and dancing.
Next morning I set out on an excursion with Mr. Hayes, to
explore the geological features of the neighborhood, which agree
with those of the eastern coast generally throughout Massachu
setts, and a great part of Maine — a low region of granitic rocks,
overspread with heaps of sand and gravel, or with clay, and
here and there an erratic or huge block of stone, transported
from a distance, and always from the north. Lakes and ponds
numerous, as in the country of similar geological composition in
the south of Norway and Sweden. Here, also, as in Scandina
via, the overlying patches of clay and gravel often contain marine
fossil shells of species still living in the Arctic Seas, and belong
ing to the genera Saxicava, Astarte, Cardium, Nucula, and
others, the same which occur in what we call the northern drift
of Ireland and Scotland. Some of the concretions of fine clay,
more or less calcareous, met with in New Hampshire, in this
CHAP. II.] GEOLOGY.
" drift" on the Saco river, thirty miles to the north of Ports
mouth, contain the entire skeletons of a fossil fish of the same
species as one now living in the Northern Seas, called the cape-
Ian (Mallotus villosus), about the size of a sprat, and sold abun
dantly in the London markets, salted and dried like herrings. I
obtained some of these fossils, which, like the associated shells,
show that a colder climate than that now prevailing in this re
gion was established in what is termed "the glacial period."
Mr. Hayes took me to Kittery, and other localities, where these
marine organic remains abound in the superficial deposits. Some
of the shells are met with in the town of Portsmouth itself, in
digging the foundation of houses on the south bank of the river
Piscataqua. This was the most southern spot (lat. 43° 6' N.)
to which I yet had traced the fossil fauna of the boulder period,
retaining here, as in Canada, its peculiar northern characters,
consisting of a profusion of individuals, but a small number of
species ; and a great many of those now abounding in the neigh
boring sea being entirely absent. It is only farther to the south,
and near the extreme southern limit of the drift, or boulder clay,
as at Brooklyn, in Long Island, for example, that a mixture of
more southern species of shells begin to appear, just as Professor
E. Forbes has detected, in the drift of the south of Ireland, the
meeting of a Mediterranean and Arctic fauna.
Every where around Portsmouth I observed that superficial
polish in the rocks, and those long, straight, grooves or furrows,
which I before alluded to (p. 18), as having been imprinted by
icebergs on the ancient floor of the ocean. By the inland posi
tion of these fossil shells of recent species, the geologist can prove
that, at times comparatively modern in the earth's history, the
larger part of New England and Canada lay for ages beneath
the waters of the sea, Lake Champlain and the valley of the
St. Lawrence being then gulfs, and the White Mountains an
island.* But it is a curious fact that we also discover along this
same eastern coast signs no less unequivocal of partial subsidence
of land at a period still more recent. The evidence consists of
swamps, now submerged at low water, containing the roots and
* See my "Travels in N. America, 1841-2," vol. ii. p. 142.
34 SUBMARINE FOREST. [CHAP. II.
upright stools of the white cedar ( Cupressus thyoides), showing
that an ancient forest must once have extended farther seaward.
One of these swamps we passed yesterday at Hampton, on the
way from Boston to Portsmouth ; and Mr. Hayes gave me speci
mens of the submarine wood in as fresh a state as any occurring
a few yards deep in a British peat-bog.
That some of these repositories of buried trees, though geolo
gically of the most modern date, may really be of high antiquity,
considered with reference to the history of man, I have no doubt ;
and geologists may, by repeated observations, ascertain the min
imum of time required for their formation previously to their sub
mergence. Some extensive cedar-swamps, for example, of the
same class occur on the coast near Cape May, in the southern
extremity of the State of New Jersey, on the east side of Dela
ware Bay, filled with trees to an unknown depth ; and it is a
constant business to probe the soft mud of the swamp with poles
for the purpose of discovering the timber. When a log is found,
the mud is cleared off, and the log sawed up into proper lengths
for shingles or boards. The stumps of trees, from four to five
feet, and occasionally six feet in diameter, are found standing
with their roots in the place in which they grew, and the trunks
of aged cedars are met with in every possible position, some of
them lying horizontally under the roots of the upright stumps.
Dr. Bresley, of Dennis Creek, counted 1080 rings of annual
growth between the center and outside of a large stump six feet
in diameter, and under it lay a prostrate tree, which had fallen
and been buried before the tree to which the stump belonged first
sprouted. This lower trunk was five hundred years old, so that
upward of fifteen centuries were thus determined, beyond the
shadow of a doubt, as the age of one small portion of a bog, the
depth of which is as yet unknown.
Mr. Hayes drove me in his carriage through woods of fir on
both banks of the Piscataqua, where the ground was covered
with that fragrant shrub, the candleberry (Myrica cerifem), the
wax of which, derived from its shining black berries, is used for
making candles. The odor of its leaves resembles that of our
bog-myrtle (Myrica gale). The barberry, also (Berberis vul-
CHAP. II.] WILD PLANTS.— SWALLOWS. 35
garis), although not an indigenous plant, is very abundant and
ornamental in the woods here. It has overrun, in modern times,
the eastern shores of New England, and made its way many
miles inland, to the great annoyance of the agriculturists. Some
naturalists wonder how it can spread so fast, as the American
birds refuse, like the European ones, to feed on. its red berries :
but if it be true that cattle, sheep, and goats occasionally browse
on this shrub, there is no mystery about the mode of its migration,
for the seeds may be sown in their dung. The aromatic shrub
called sweet fern (Comptonia asplenifolia), forms nearly as large
a proportion of the undergrowth here as does the real fern (Pteris)
in some of our English forests. I have seen this part of North
America laid down in some botanical maps as the region of asters
and solidagos ; and certainly the variety and abundance of golden
rods and asters is at this season very striking, although a white
everlasting ( GnafaMuin) is almost equally conspicuous. Among
other shrubs, I saw the poison-ivy (Rkus radicans), a species of
sumach, growing on rocks and walls. It has no effect on some
people, but the slightest touch causes an eruption on the skin of
others. A New England botanist once told me that, by way
of experiment, he rubbed his arm with the leaves, and they gave
rise to a painful swelling, which was long in subsiding.
In Mr. Hayes's garden at Portsmouth were some of the smaller
white-bodied swallows or martins (Hirundo viridis), protected
from their enemy, the larger martin (Hirundo purpurea), by
having small holes made for them in flower-pots, which the
others could not pass through. The larger kind, or house-martin,
is encouraged every where, small wooden boxes being made for
them on roofs or on the tops of poles, resembling pigeon-houses,
which may often be seen on the top of a sign-post before a New
England inn. They are useful in chasing away birds of prey
from the poultry-yard ; and I once saw a few of them attacking
a large hawk. But I suspect they are chiefly favored for mere
amusement sake, arid welcomed, like our swallows, as the mes
sengers of spring, on their annual return from the south. It is
pleasing to hear them chattering with each other, and to mark
their elegant forms and bluish-black plumage, or to watch them
36 GLACIAL GROOVES. [CHAP. II
on the wing1, floating gently in the air, or darting rapidly after
insects. Thousands of these birds, with their young, died in
their nests in the spring of 1836, during a storm of cold rain,
which lasted two weeks, and destroyed the insects throughout
the states of New York and New England. The smaller species
(Hifundo vi/ridis) then regained possession of their old haunts,
occupying the deserted houses of the more powerful species, which,
like the house-sparrow in Europe, has followed the residence of
man.
The sun was very powerful at noon ; but the severity of the
cold here in winter is so great, that a singular effect is produced
in the Piscataqua when the thermometer sinks to 15° below zero.
The tide pours into the estuary a large body of salt water par
taking of the warmer temperature of the gulf stream, and this
water, coming into the colder atmosphere, smokes like a thermal
spring, giving rise to dense fogs.
I had been desirous of making the acquaintance of Mr. Hayes,
in consequence of having read, before I left England, an excellent
paper published by him in the Boston Journal of Natural History,
for 1844, on the Antarctic Icebergs, considered as explanatory
of the transportation of rocky masses, and of those polished rocks
and glacial grooves and strise before alluded to. He had derived
his information from experienced men engaged in the southern
whale fisheries, principally merchants of New Bedford, Massa
chusetts, and Stonington, Rhode Island. On looking over his
original MS. notes, I 'found he had omitted to print some parti
culars of the evidence, which I consider of no small interest as
throwing light on a class of geological appearances hitherto
thought least reconcilable with the ordinary course of nature.
As to the carriage of huge fragments of rock for many hundreds
of miles, from one region to another, such transportation was
formerly appealed to by writers now living as among the marvels
of the olden time, resembling the feats of the fabulous ages, and
as much transcending the powers of nature in these degenerate
days, as the stone hurled by Hector against the Grecian gate,
exceeded in weight and size what could now be raised from the
ground by two of the strongest of living men (oloi vvv (3poroi).
CHAP. II.] ORGANIC REMAINS IN ICE. 37
But after reading the accounts given by Sir James Ross and Captain
Wilkes, of the transfer of erratics by ice, from one point to another
of the southern seas, these traveled boulders begin to be regarded
quite as vulgar phenomena, or matters of every-day occurrence.
There still remain, however, among the wonders of the polar
regions, some geological monuments which appear sufficiently
anomalous when we seek to explain them by modern analogies.
I refer to the preservation in ice of the carcasses of extinct species
of quadrupeds in Siberia ; not only the rhinoceros originally dis
covered, with part of its flesh, by Pallas, and the mammoth
afterward met with on the Lena by Adams, but still more
recently the elephant dug up by Midderidorf, September, 1846,
which retained even the bulb' of the eye in a perfect state, and
which is now to be seen in the museum at Moscow.^
In part of the unpublished evidence collected by Mr. Hayes,
are statements which may perhaps aid us in elucidating this ob
scure subject ; at all events they are not undeserving of notice,
were it only to prove that nature is still at work in the icy regions
enveloping a store of organic bodies in ice, which, after a series
of geographical and climatal changes, and the extermination of
some of the existing cetacea, might strike the investigator at some
remote period of the future as being fully as marvelous as any
monuments of the past hitherto discovered. The first extract,
which I make, with Mr. Hayes' permission, is from the evidence
of Captain Benjamin Pendleton, of Stonington, who, from his
knowledge of the South Shetland fisheries, was chosen by the
American government to accompany the late exploring expedition to
the Antarctic seas. He had cruised in 1820 and 1822 for GOO
miles along the lofty ice cliffs bounding the great southern conti
nent. He says, that in 1821 , when he wished to bury a seaman
in one of the South Shetland islands, several parties of twelve
men each, were set to dig a grave in the blue sand and gravel ;
but after penetrating in nearly a hundred places through six or
eight inches of sand, they came down every where upon solid
blue ice. At last he determined to have a hole cut in the ice,
of which the island principally consisted, and the body of the man
* See "Principles of Geology," by the Author, 7th ed. 1847, p. 83.
38 WHALE DISCOVERED IN AN ICEBERG. [CHAP. II.
was placed in it. In 1822, Captain Barnham dug out the body
from the ice, and found the clothes and flesh perfectly fresh as
when they were buried.
So far this narrative may be said merely to confirm and to
bear out another published by Captain Kendall, of our navy, in
the London Geographical Journal, 1830 (pp. 65, 66), where he
relates that the soil of Deception Island, one of the South Shet-
lands, consists of ice and volcanic ashes interstratified, and he
discovered there the body of a foreign sailor, which had long
been buried, with the flesh and all the features perfectly pre
served. Mr. Darwin, commenting on that fact, has observed,
that as the icy soil of Deception Island is situated between lat.
62° and 63° S., it is nearer the equator by about 100 miles than
the locality where Pallas first found the frozen rhinoceros of Si
beria, in lat. 64° N.*
But Captain Pendleton goes on to relate, that while he was
in Deception Island an iceberg was detached from a cliff of ice
800 feet high. The piece which fell off was from 60 to 100 feet
deep, and from 1500 to 3000 feet in length. At an elevation of
about 280 feet above the level of the sea, part of a whale was
seen remaining inclosed in the ice-cliff, the head and anterior
parts having broken off about the flippers and fallen down with
the detached mass of ice. The species was what the whalers
call the " Sulphur-bottom," resembling the fin-back. Captain
Pendleton contrived to get out the portion which had fallen, and
obtained from it eight or ten barrels of oil. The birds for a long
time fed upon the entrails. This fact was known to Captain
Beck and others. Captain William Pendleton, another whaler
of experience, also informs Mr. Hayes, that skeletons of whales
had been met with in the South Shetlaiids, when he visited
them, 300 feet above the level of the sea. Thomas Ash also
saw, on " Ragged Island" beach, the skeleton and some of the
soft parts of a whale many feet above the reach of the highest
tides. Captain William Beck, master of a whaling ship, has
seen whales' bones and carcasses sixty or seventy feet above the
sea-level, and a mile and a half from the water.
* Darwin's Journal, 2d ed. p. 249.
CHAP. II.] ICEBERGS. 39
To explain how the bodies and skeletons of these inhabitants
of the deep, whether found entombed or not in ice, were carried
up to considerable heights above the level of the sea, appeared to
me at first more difficult than to account for their having been
included in solid ice. A few months after my visit to Ports
mouth I saw Captain Wilkes, of the United States Exploring
Expedition, and called his attention to the problem. He
remarked, that the open sea sometimes freezes round the Sand
wich Islands, so that ships can not approach within 100 miles
of the shore. In like manner, in Antarctic regions, the ocean
often freezes over the base of a cliff formed of barrier ice. In
all these cases, the sheet of ice, however continuous, does not
adhere to the land or the barrier, because the rise and fall of the
tide, however slight, causes a rent, permitting the whole mass to
move up and down. The snow, drifting off the land in vast
quantities during winter, falls over the cliffs upon the frozen
surface of the sea, until its weight is such that it causes the
whole mass to sink ; and unless the winds and currents happen
to float it off, it may go on subsiding till it acquires a great
thickness, and may at last touch the bottom. Before this hap
pens, however, it usually gets adrift, and, before it has done
melting, tumbles over or capsizes more than once.
On my return to England, in 1846, I described the same
phenomena to my friend Dr. Joseph Hooker, and subsequently
to Sir James Ross, and they both of them, without hearing
Captain Wilkes's theory, suggested the same explanation, having
observed that a great sheet of ice had formed in the sea by the
freezing of melted snow on the southern or polar side of every
Antarctic island. If the carcass of a dead whale be thrown up
on this ice, it must soon be buried under other snow drifted from
the land, and will at length be inclosed in the lower part of an.
iceberg, formed in the manner before described. The frequent
overturning or reversal of position of these great masses, arises
from the temperature of the water at the depth of 1000 or 1500
feet, to which they frequently descend, being much warmer than
the incumbent air or more superficial water. When the inferior
or submerged portions melt, the center of gravity is soon changed •
40 ICEBERGS. [CHAP. II.
and a magnificent example is recorded by Sir James Ross of the
capsizing of a great island of ice near Possession Island, in lat.
71° 56' S. What had previously been the bottom came up
and rose 100 feet above the surface of the sea, and the whole of
the new top and eastern side were seen to be covered with earth
and stones. A party landed on it, and a slight .rocking motion
was still perceptible, such as no waves or swell of the sea, even
in a storm, are ever capable of imparting to such large icebergs.^
The lower down the carcass of the whale is buried in the original
berg, the higher up will it be raised above the level of the sea
when the same berg has turned over.
# Sir J. Ross's Voyage to Southern Seas, vol. i. pp. 195, 196.
CHAPTER III.
Portland in Maine. — Kennebeo River. — Timber Trade. — Fossil Shells at
Gardiner. — Augusta, the Capital of Maine. — Legal Profession : Advo
cates and Attorneys. — Equality of Sects. — Religious Toleration. — Cal-
vinistic Theology. — Day of Doom.
Sept. 25, 1845. — HERE we are at mid-day fK-ing along at
the rate of twenty-five and occasionally thirty miles an hour, on
our way to Portland, the chief city of Maine. It was only yes
terday afternoon that we left Boston, and in less than three
hours we performed what would have been formerly reckoned a
good day's journey of forty-five miles, had seen at Portsmouth
some collections of natural history, and afterward gone to a ball.
In the forenoon of this day I have made geological excursions 011
both banks of the Piscataqua, arid before dark shall have sailed
far up the Kennebec. It is an agreeable novelty to a naturalist
to combine the speed of a railway and the luxury of good inns
with the sight of the native forest — the advantages of civilization
with the beauty of unreclaimed nature — no hedges, few plowed
fields, the wild plants, trees, birds, and animals undisturbed.
Cheap as are the fares, these railroads, I am told, yield high
profits, because the land through which they run costs nothing.
When we had traversed a distance of about sixty miles, the cars
glided along some rails over the wharf at Portland, and we almost
stepped from our seats on to the deck of the Huntress steamer,
which was ready to convey us to the mouth of the Kennebec river.
After threading a cluster of rocky islands adorned with fir and
birch in the beautiful Bay of Casco, we came to the Sound, and
for a short space were in the open sea, with no view but that of
a distant coast. As there was nothing to see, we were glad to
be invited to dinner, and were conducted to the gentlemen's
cabin, a sort of sunk story, to which the ladies, or the women of
every degree, were, according to the usual etiquette, taken down
first, and carefully seated at the table by the captain, before the
42 NEW ENGLAND TRAVELING. [CHAP. III.
gentlemen were admitted. Above this apartment where we
dined was the ladies' cabin, and above that the upper deck,
where we sat to enjoy the prospect as we approached the mouth
of the Kennebec. In the forepart of the vessel, on this upper
deck, is a small room, having windows on all sides, where the
man at the helm is stationed ; riot at the stern, as in our boats,
which is considered by the Americans as a great improvement
on the old system, as the steersman's view can not be intercepted,
and the passengers are never requested to step on one side to
enable him to^ see his way. Directions to the engineer, instead
of being transmitted by voice through an intermediate messenger,
are given directly by one or more loud strokes on a bell. The
fuel used is anthracite, the absence of oxygen being compensated
by a strong current of air kept up by what resembles a winnow-
ing-machine, and does the work of a pair of bellows.
After sailing up the Kennebec about fifteen miles we came to
Bath, a town of 5000 souls, chiefly engaged in ship-building, a
branch of industry in which the State of Maine ranks first in
the Union ; the materials consisting of white oak and pine, the
growth of native forests. Large logs of timber squared, and
each marked with the owner's name, are often cast into the
river, sometimes far above Augusta, and come floating down 100
miles to this place. In wrinter many of them get frozen into the
ice and imprisoned for six or seven months, until the late spring
releases them, and then not a few of them are carried far out
into the Atlantic, where they have been picked up, with the
owner's name still telling the place of their origin. The water
is salt as far as Bath, above which it is fresh and freezes over, so
as to allow sleighs and skaters to cross it in winter, although the
influence of the tide extends as far up as Augusta, about forty
miles above Bath. I am informed that the whole body of the
ice rises and falls, cracking along the edges where it is weakest.
Over the fissures planks are placed to serve as a bridge, or snow
is thrown in, which freezes, and affords a passage to the central
ice. The Kennebec, besides being enlivened by the " lumber
trade," is at this season whitened with the sails of vessels laden
with hay, which has been compressed into small bulk by the
CHAP. III.] THE KENNEBEC. 43
power of steam. Many of these merchantmen are destined for
New York, where the unusual heat and drought of the summer
has caused a scanty crop of grass, but hundreds are bound to the
distant ports of Mobile and New Orleans ; so that the horses of
Alabama and Louisiana are made to graze on the sweet pastures
of Maine, instead of the coarser and ranker herbage of the south
ern prairies. In a few months these northern-built ships will
bring back bales of cotton for factories newly established by Bos
ton capitalists, and worked on this river both by water power
and steam. Such are the happy consequences of the annexation
of Louisiana to the United States. But for that event, the fa
vorite theories of political economy in New England, and the duty
of protecting native industry, would have interposed many a
custom-house and high tariff bet\vreen Maine and the valley of
the Mississippi.
As we passed Bath a large eagle, with black wings and a
white body, was seen soaring over our heads ; and, a few miles
above, where the salt and fresh water meet, seals were seen
sporting close to the steamer. The Kermebec is said to abound
in salmon. We admired the great variety of trees on its banks ;
two kinds of birch with larger leaves than our British species,
several oaks arid pines, the hemlock with foliage like a yew-tree,
and the silver-fir, and two species of maple, the sugar or rock
maple (Acer saccharinuni), and the white (A. dasycarpum),
both of which yield sugar. To these two trees the beauty and
brilliancy of the autumnal tints of the American forests are due,
the rock maple turning red, purple and scarlet, and the white,
first yellow, and then red.
We were conveyed in the Huntress to Gardiner, the head of
steam- boat navigation here, sixty-eight miles distant from Port
land, where we visited the country house of Mr. Gardiner, whose
family gave its name to the settlement. It is built in the style
of an English country seat, and surrounded by a park. At Mr.
Allen's I examined, with much interest, a collection of fossil
shells and Crustacea, made by Mrs. Allen from the drift or " gla
cial" deposits of the same age as those of Portsmouth, already
described. Among other remains I recognized the tooth of a
44 FOSSIL REMAINS. [CHAP. III.
walrus, similar to one procured by me in Martha's Vineyard,*
and other teeth, since determined for me by Professor Owen as
belonging to the buffalo or American bison. These are, I be
lieve, the first examples of land quadrupeds discovered in beds of
this age in the United States. The accompanying shells consist
ed of the common mussel (Hfytilus edulis), Saxciava rugosa,
]\Iya arenaria, Pecten Islandicus, and species of the genera
Astartc, Nucula, &c. The horizontal beds of clay and sand
which contain these remains of northern species, and which
imply that the whole region was beneath the sea at no distant
period, impart to the scenery of the country bordering the Kerme-
bec its leading features. The deposit of clay and sand is 170
feet thick in some places, and numerous valleys 70 feet deep are
hollowed out of it by every small stream. At Augusta I saw
this modern tertiary formation, 100 feet thick, resting on a ledge
of mica schist, the shells being easily obtained from an under
mined cliff of clay. Tn some places, as at Gardiner, conical hil
locks, chiefly of gravel, about fifty feet high, and compared here,
on account of the regularity of their form, to Indian mounds^
stand isolated near the river. I conceive them to owe their
shape to what the geologists term " denudation," or the action
of waves and currents, which, as the country was rising gradu-
al]y out of the sea, removed the surrounding softer clay arid left
these masses undestroyed. They would offer resistance to the
force of moving water by the great weight and size of their com
ponent materials ; for in them we find not only pebbles, but
many large boulders of granite and other rocks.
Mr. Allen drove us in his carriage to Augusta, six miles from
Gardiner, and 200 miles N.E. of Boston, where we visited the
State House, handsomely built in the Grecian style, with a por
tico and large columns, the stone used being the white granite of
this country. The rooms for the two houses of the legislature
are very convenient. I was shown the library by the governor,
who called my attention to some books and maps on geology, and
talked of a plan for resuming the geological survey of the State,
not yet completed.
* See " Travels," vol. i. p. 256.
CHAP. III.] LEGAL PROFESSION. 45
Sept. 27. — Returned by the Huntress steamer to Portland,
after sailing at the rate of fourteen miles an hour. On board
were some lawyers, to one of whom, a judge in the State of
Maine, Mr. Gardiner had introduced me. The profession of the
law is, of all others in the United States, that which attracts to
it the greatest number of able and highly educated men, not only
for its own sake, but because it is a great school for the training
up of politicians. The competition of so many practitioners
cheapens fees, and, although this is said to promote litigation, it
has at least the great advantage of placing the poor man on a
more equal footing with the rich, as none but the latter can
attempt to assert their rights in countries where the cost of a
successful law-suit may be ruinous. Practically, there is much
the same subdivision of labor in the legal profession here as in
England ; for a man of eminence enters into partnership with
some one or more of the younger or less talented lawyers, who
play the part assigned with us to junior counsel and attorneys.
There are, however, no two grades here corresponding to barris
ter and attorney, from the inferior of which alone practitioners
can pass in the regular course of promotion to the higher. Every
lawyer in the United States may plead in court, and address a
jury ; and, if he is successful, may be raised to the bench : but
he must qualify as counselor, in order to be entitled to plead in
the Supreme Courts, where cases are heard involving points at
issue between the tribunals of independent states. The line
drawn between barrister and attorney in Great Britain, which
never existed even in colonial times in Massachusetts, could only
be tolerated in a country where the aristocratic element is ex
ceedingly predominant. In the English Church, where seats in
the House of Lords are held by the bishops, we see how the rank
of a whole profession rnay be elevated by making high distinc
tions conferred only on a few, open to all. That, in like man
ner, the highest honors of the bar and bench might be open
without diriment to the most numerous class of legal practition
ers in Great Britain, seems to be proved by the fact, that occa
sionally some attorneys of talent, by quitting their original lino
of practice and starting anew, can attain, like the present Chief
46 EQUALITY OF SECTS. [CHAP. III.
Justice of the Common Pleas, to places of the first dignity. In
Canada, under British rule, it is the custom to grant licenses to
the same individual to practice indifferently in all the courts as
advocate, solicitor, attorney, and proctor. When we consider
the confidential nature of the business transacted by English at
torneys, the extent of property committed to their charge, the
manner in which they are consulted in family affairs of the ut
most delicacy, as in the framing of marriage contracts and wills,
and observe, moreover, how the management of elections falls
into their hands, we may well question the policy of creating an
artificial line of demarkation between them and the advocates,
marked enough to depress their social rank, and to deter many
y^ung men of good families, who can best afford to obtain a lib
eral education, from entering the most profitable, and, in reality,
the most important branch of the profession.
I have mentioned the Supreme Courts ; in these, in each state,
cases are heard involving points at issue between two independent
jurisdictions ; and in order to preserve uniformity in the interpret
ation of many different codes, as in the statutes passed from time
to time by state legislatures, the previous decisions of courts of
law are referred to, and the authority of judges of high repute in
any part of the Union, and even in Great Britain, frequently
cited. As points of international law are perpetually arising
between so many jurisdictions, the Supreme Courts afford a fine
field for the exercise of legal talent, and for forming jurists oi
enlarged views.
Portland, with 15,000 inhabitants, is the principal city of
Maine ; gay and cheerful, with neat white houses, shaded by
avenues of trees on each side of the wide streets, the bright sunny
air unsullied, as usual in New England, by coal smoke. There
are churches here of every religious denomination : Congregation-
alists, Baptists, Methodists, Free-will Baptists, Universalists,
Unitarians, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, and Quakers, al]
living harmoniously together. The late governor oPthe state
was a Unitarian ; and, as if to prove the perfect toleration of
churches the most opposed to each other, they have recently had
a Honuui Catholic governor
CHAP. III.] RELIGIOUS TOLERATION. 47
On Sunday we accompanied the family of a lawyer, to whom
we had brought letters, to a Unitarian church. There was
nothing doctrinal in the sermon, and, among other indications of
the altered and softened feelings of the sects which have sprung
from the old Puritan stock, I remarked a gilt cross placed over
the altar. The officiating minister told me that this step had
been taken with the consent of the congregation, though not with
out the opposition of some of his elders. The early Puritans re
garded this symbol as they did pictures and images, as the badges
of superstition, the relics of the idolatrous religion so lately re
nounced by them ; and it is curious to read, in the annals of the
first colonists at Salem, how, in 1634, the followers of Roger
Williams, the Brownist, went so far as to cut that "popish em
blem," the red cross, out of the royal standard, as one which the
train bands ought no longer to follow.^
During my first visit to the New England States, I was
greatly at a loss to comprehend by what means so large a pop
ulation had been brought to unite great earnestness of religious
feeling with so much real toleration. In seeking for the cause, we
must go farther back than the common schools, or at least the
present improved state of popular education ; for we are still met
with the question, How could such schools be maintained by the
state, or by compulsory assessments, on so liberal a footing, in
spite of the fanaticism and sectarian prejudices of the vulgar ?
When we call to mind the religious enthusiasm of the early Pu
ritans, and how at first they merely exchanged a servile obedience
to tradition, and the authority of the Church, for an equally blind
scripturalism, or implicit faith in the letter of every part of the
Bible, acting as if they believed that God, by some miraculous
process, had dictated all the Hebrew words of the Old, and all
the Greek of the New Testament ; nay, the illiterate among
them cherishing the same superstitious veneration ibr every sylla
ble of the English translation — how these religionists, who did
riot hesitate to condemn several citizens to be publicly whipped
for denying that the Jewish code was obligatory on Christians as
a rule of life, arid who were fully persuaded that they alone were the
# Graham's History of United Stales, vol. i. p. 227.
48 CALVINISTIC THEOLOGY. [CHAP. III.
chosen people of God, should bequeath to their immediate posterity
such a philosophical spirit as must precede the organization by the
whole people of a system of secular education acceptable to all,
and accompanied by the social and political equality, of religious
sects such as no other civilized community has yet achieved —
this certainly is a problem well worthy of the study of every
reflecting mind. To attribute this national characteristic to the
voluntary system, would be an anachronism, as that is of com
paratively modern date in New England ; besides that the de
pendence of the ministers on their flocks, by transferring ecclesi
astical power to the multitude, only gives to their bigotry, if they
be ignorant, a more dangerous sway. So, also, of universal suf
frage ; by investing the million with political power, it renders
the average amount of their enlightenment the measure of the
liberty enjoyed by those who entertain religious opinions disap
proved of by the majority. Of the natural effects of such power,
and the homage paid to it by the higher classes, even where the
political institutions are only partially democratic, we have
abundant exemplification in Europe, where the educated of the
laity and clergy, in. spite of their comparative independence of
the popular will, defer outwardly to many theological notions of
the vulgar with which they have often no real sympathy.
To account for 'the toleration prevailing in New England and
the states chiefly peopled from thence, we must refer to a com
bination of many favorable circumstances, some of them of ancient
date, and derived from the times of the first Puritan settlers. To
these I shall have many opportunities of alluding in the sequel ;
but I shall mention now a more modern cause, the effect of which
was brought vividly before my mind, in conversations with sev
eral lawyers of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts,
whom I fell in with on this tour. I mean the reaction against
the extreme Calvinism of the church first established in this part
of America, a movement which has had a powerful tendency to
subdue and mitigate sectarian bitterness. In order to give me
some -idea of the length to which the old Calvinistic doctrines
were instilled into the infant mind, one of my companions pre
sented me with a curious poem, called the " Day of Doom,"
CHAP. III.] « DAY OF DOOM." 49
formerly used as a school book in New England, and which
elderly persons known to him had been required, some seventy
years ago, to get by rote as children. This task must have occu
pied no small portion of their time, as this string of doggrel
rhymes makes up no less than 224 stanzas of eight lines each.
They were written by Michael Wigglesworth, A.M., teacher of
the church of Maiden, New England, and profess to give a poet
ical description of the Last Judgment. A great array of Scrip
ture texts, from, the Old and New Testament, is cited throughout
in the margin as warranty for the orthodoxy of every dogma.
Were such a composition now submitted to any committee of
school managers or teachers in New England, they would not
only reject it, but the most orthodox among them would shrewdly
suspect it to be a " weak invention of the enemy," designed to
caricature, or give undue prominence to, precisely those tenets of
the dominant Calvinism which the moderate party object to, as
outraging human reason and as derogatory to the moral attri
butes of the Supreme Being. Such, however, were not the feel
ings of the celebrated Cotton Mather, in the year 1705, when he
preached a funeral sermon on the author, which I find prefixed
to my copy of the sixth edition, printed in 1715. On this occa
sion he not only eulogizes Wigglesworth, but affirms that the
poem itself contains " plain truths drest up in a plain meter ;"
and further prophesies, that " as the { Day of Doom' had been
often reprinted in both Englands, it will last till the Day itself
shall arrive." Some extracts from this document will aid the
reader to estimate the wonderful revolution in popular opinion
brought about in one or two generations, by which the harsher
and sterner features of the old Calvinistic creed have been nearly
eradicated. Its professors, indeed, may still contend as stoutly
as ever for the old formularies of their hereditary faith, as they
might fight for any other party banner ; but their fanatical de
votion to its dogmas, and their contempt for all other Christian
churches, has happily softened down or disappeared.
The poem opens with the arraignment of all " the quick and
dead," who are summoned before the throne of God, and, having
each pleaded at the bar, are answered by their Judge. Some
VOL, I. — *C
50 " DAY OF DOOM." [CHAP. III.
of them declare that the Scriptures are " so dark, that they have
puzzled the wisest men ;" others that, being " heathens," and
having never had " the Avritten Word preached to them," they
are entitled to pardon ; in reply to which, the metaphysical sub
tleties of the doctrines of election and grace are fully propound
ed. The next class of offenders might awaken the sympathies
of any heart not protected by a breastplate of theological dog
matism : —
" Then to the bar all they drew near
Who died in infancy,
And never had, or good or bad,
Effected personally," &c.
These infants remonstrate against the hardship of having
Adam's guilt laid to their charge : —
"Not we, but he, ate of the tree
Whose fruit was interdicted ;
Yet on us all, of his sad fall,
The punishment's inflicted."
The Judge replies, that none can suffer " for what they never
did :"— -
(171.) "But what you call old Adam's fall,
And only his trespass,
You call amiss to call it his,
Both his and yours it was.
(172.) "He was designed, of all mankind.
To be a public head ;
A common root, whence all should shoot,
And stood in all their stead.
" He stood and fell, did ill and well
Not for himself alone,
But for you all, who now his fall
And trespass would disown.
(173.) " If he he had stood, then all his brood
Had been established," &c.
(174.) " Would you have grieved to have received
Though Adam so much good?" &c.
" Since then to share in his welfare
You would have been content,
You may with reason, share in his treason,
And in his punishm^ : "
CHAP. III.] " DAY OF DOOM." 51
A great body of Scripture texts are here introduced in confirm
ation ; but the children are told, even including those " who from
the womb unto the tomb were straightway carried," that they
are to have " the easiest room in hell :" —
(181.) "The glorious King, thus answering,
They cease, and plead no longer,
Their consciences must needs confess
His reasons are the stronger."
The pains of hell and the constant renovation of strength to
enable the " sinful wight" to bear an eternity of torment, are
then dilated upon at such length, and so minutely, and a picture
so harrowing to the soul is drawn, as to remind us of the excel
lent observations on this head of a modern New England divine.
"It is not wonderful," he says, " that this means of subjugating
the mind should be freely used and dreadfully perverted, when
we consider that no talent is required to inspire fear, and that
coarse minds and hard hearts are signally gifted for this work of
torture." "It is an instrument of tremendous power," he adds,
" enabling a Protestant minister, whilst disclaiming papal pre
tensions, to build up a spiritual despotism, and to beget in those
committed to his guidance a passive, servile state of mind, too
agitated for deliberate and vigorous thought."^
That the pious minister of Maiden, however, had no desire to
usurp any undue influence over his panic-stricken hearers, is very
probable, and that he was only indulging in the usual strain of
the preachers of his time, when he told of the " yelling of the
damned, as they were burnt eternally in the company of devils,"
and went on to describe how —
" God's vengeance feeds the flame
With piles of wood and brimstone flood,
That none can quench the same."
We next learn that the peace and calm blessedness of the
saints elect, who are received into heaven, is not permitted to be
disturbed by compassion for the damned ; mothers and fathers
feeling no pity for their lost children : —
* Channing's Works, London, voL iii. p. 263,
52 "DAY OF DOOM." [CHAP. III.
" The godly wife conceives no grief,
Nor can she shed a tear.
For the sad fate of her dear mate
When she his doom doth hear."
The great distinction between the spirit of the times when
these verses were written and the present age, appears to be this,
that a paramount importance was then attached to those doctrinal
points in which the leading sects differed from each other, whereas
now Christianity is more generally considered to consist essen
tially in believing and obeying those scriptural precepts on which
all churches agree.
CHAPTER IV.
Journey from Portland to the White Mountains. — Plants. — Churches,
School-houses. — Temperance Hotel. — Intelligence of New Englanders.
— Climate, Consumption. — Conway. — Division of Property. — Every Man
his own Tenant. — A\\tumnal Tints. — Bears hybernating. — Willey Slide.
— Theory of Scratches and Grooves on Rocks. — Scenery. — Waterfalls
and Ravines. — The Notch. — Forest Trees and Mountain Plants. —
Fabyan's Hotel. — Echo.
Sept. 28, 1845. — LEAVING Portland and the sea-coast, we
now struck inland in a westerly direction toward the White
Mountains, having hired a carriage which carried us to Standish.
We passed at first over a low, featureless country, but enlivened
by the brilliant autumnal coloring of the foliage, especially the
bright red, purple, and yellow tints of the maple. The leaves
of these trees and of the scrub oak had been made to change
color by the late frost of the 10th of this month. On the borders
of the road, on each side, mixed with the fragrant " sweet fern,"
we saw abundance of the Spircea tomentosa, its spike of purplish
flowers now nearly faded. The name of " hard hack" was given
to it by the first settlers, because the stalk turned the edge of
the mower's scythe. There were also golden rods, everlastings,
and asters in profusion ; one of the asters being called " frost
blow," because flowering after the first frost. We also gathered
on the ground the red fruit of the checkerberry (Gaulteria pro
cumbent), used in New England to flavor sweetmeats. By the
side of these indigenous plants was the common English sell-heal
(Prunella vulgaris), the mullein ( Verbascum tliapsus), and other
flowers, reminding me of the remark of an American botanist,
that New England has become the garden of European weeds ;
so that in some agricultural counties near the coast, such as Essex
in Massachusetts, the exotics almost outnumber the native plants.
It is, however, found, that the farther we travel northward,
toward the region where North America and Europe approach
54 CHURCHES.— SCHOOL-HOUSES. [CHAP. IV
each other, the proportion of plants specifically common to the
two continents is constantly on the increase ; whereas in passing
to the more southern states of the Union, we find almost every
indigenous species to be distinct from European plants.
Although the nights are cold, the sun at mid-day is very hot,
the contrast of temperature in the course of each twenty-four
hours being great, like that of the summer and winter of this
climate.
We journeyed on over very tolerable roads without paying
turnpikes, one only, I am told, being established in all Maine.
The expenses of making and repairing the highways are defrayed
by local taxes, a surveyor being appointed for each district. We
went through the villages of Gorham, Standish, Baldwin, Hiram,
and Bloomfield, to Conway, and then began to enter the mount
ains, the scenery constantly improving as we proceeded. Here
and there we saw Indian corn cultivated, but the summer of
Maine and New Hampshire is often too short to bring this grain
to maturity.
Usually, in a single village, we saw three, four, or five
churches, each representing a different denomination ; the Con-
gregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and now and then, though
more rarely, the Unitarians. Occasionally, in some quiet spot
where two village roads cross, we saw a small, simple building,
and learned that it was the free or common school provided by
law, open to all, not accepted as a bounty, but claimed as a right,
where the children of rich and poor, high and low, and of every
sect, meet upon perfect equality. It is a received political maxirn
here, that society is bound to provide education, as well as security
of life and property, for all its members.
One evening, as we were drawing near to a straggling village,
in the twilight, we were recommended by a traveler, whom we
had met on the road, to take up our quarters at a temperance
hotel, where, he said, " there would be no loafers lounging and
drinking drams in the bar-room." We looked out for the sign,
and soon saw it, surmounted by a martin-house of four stories,
each diminishing in size from the bottom to the top, but all the
apartments now empty, the birds having taken flight, warned by
CHAP. IV.] TEMPERANCE HOTEL. 55
the late frost. "We had, indeed, been struck with the dearth of
the feathered tribe in Maine at this season, the greater number
of birds being migratory. As soon as our carriage stopped at
the door, we were ushered by the host and his wife into a small
parlor, where we found a blazing wood fire. It was their private
sitting-room at times, when they had no guests, and on the table
were books on a variety of subjects, but most of them of a reli
gious or serious character, as Bishop Watson's Apology in reply
to Tom Paine. We saw, also, a treatise on Phrenology, styled
" The only True Philosophy," and Shakspeare, and the poems
of Cowper and Walter Scott. In each window were placed two
chairs, not ready to be occupied, as they would be in most coun
tries, but placed face to face, or with their fronts touching each
other, the usual fashion in New England.
On one of the walls was seen, in a gilt frame, the Declaration
of Independence, with all the signatures of the subscribers, sur
rounded by vignettes or portraits of all the ten presidents of the
United States, from General Washington to Mr. Tyler. On
another side of the room was a most formidable likeness of
Daniel Webster, being an engraving published in Connecticut.
Leaning over the portrait of the great statesman, is represented
an aged man holding a lantern in his hand, and, lest the mean
ing of so classical an allusion should be lost, we read below —
" Diogenes his lantern needs no more,
An honest man is found, the search is o'er."
While supper was preparing, I turned over a heap of news
papers, of various shades of politics. One of them contained a
spirited reply to the leading article of an extreme democratic
journal, which had enlarged on a favorite text of the popular
party, " The whole of Oregon is ours." In another I saw, in
large type, " The continent, the whole continent down to the
isthmus ;" so that, before Texas is yet fairly annexed, the
imagination of the " more territory" zealots has incorporated all
Mexico, if not Central America, into the Union. In the obitu
aries were recorded, as usual, the names of several " revolutionary
soldiers," aged eighty-five and ninety, and I spent some minutes
56 PROVINCIAL NEWSPAPERS. [CHAP. IV.
in wondering why they who fought for republican independence
had been so frequently rewarded with longevity, till it occurred
to me that, he who took the field before 1776 could not die a
juvenile in 1845. Among other electioneering addresses, I read
the following : " Fellow democrats, the Philistines are upon us,
the whigs are striving to sow dissension in our ranks, but our
object must be to place in the senate a sterling democrat," &c.
Such an appeal to electors who are to fill up a vacancy in the
more conservative branch of the Congress at Washington, is suf
ficiently startling to an Englishman. Another article, headed,
"Henry Clay, President for 1848," seemed a most premature
anticipation of a future and distant contest, Mr. Polk having just
been chosen for the next four years as first magistrate, after many
months of excitement and political turmoil. Yet, upon the whole,
the provincial newspapers appear to me to abound in useful and
instructive matter, with many well-selected extracts from modern
publications, especially travels, abstracts of lectures on temperance
or literary and scientific subjects, letters on agriculture, or some
point of political economy or commercial legislation. Even in
party politics, the cheapness of the innumerable daily and weekly
papers enables every villager to read what is said on more than
one side of each question, and this has a tendency to make the
multitude think for themselves, and become well informed on
public affairs.
We happened to be the only strangers in the tavern, and,
when supper was brought in by the landlord and his wife, they
sat down beside us, begged us to feel at home, pressed us to eat,
and evidently considered us more in the light of guests whom
they must entertain hospitably, than as customers. Our hostess,
in particular, who had a number of young children and no nurse
to help her, was willing to put herself to some inconvenience
rather than run the risk of our feeling lonely. Their manners
were pleasing, and, when they learned that we were from En
gland, they asked many questions about the free-kirk movement
in Scotland, and how far the system of national education there
differed from that in Prussia, on which the landlord had been
reading an article in a magazine. They were greatly amused
CHAP. IV.] INTELLIGENCE OF NEW ENGLANDERS. 57
when I told them that some of the patriots of their State had
betrayed to me no slight sensitiveness and indignation about an
expression imputed to Lord Palmerston in a recent debate on the
Canadian border-feud, when he spoke of " the wild people of
Maine."
They were most curious to learn the names of the rocks and
plants we had collected, and told us that at the free-school they
had been taught the elements of geology and botany. They iff-
forrned us that in these rural districts, many who teach in the
winter months spend the money they receive for their salary in
educating themselves in some college during the remainder of
the year ; so that a clever youth may in this way rise from the
humblest station to the bar or pulpit, or become a teacher in a
large town. Farm laborers in the State, besides being boarded
and found in clothes, receive ten dollars, or two guineas, a month
wages, out of which they may save and " go west," an expression
every where equivalent to bettering one's condition. " The pros
pect of heaven itself," says Cooper, in one of his novels, " would
have no charms for an American of the back-woods, if he
thought there was any place farther west."
I remarked that most of the farmers and laborers had pale
complexions and a care-worn look. " This was owing partly,"
said the landlord, " to th*6 climate, for many were consumptive,
and the changes from intense heat to great cold are excessive
here; and party** to the ambitious, striving character of the
natives, who <a^e not content to avoid poverty, but expect, and
not without reason, to end their days in a station far above that
from which they start." We were struck with the almost en
tire absence of the negro race in Maine, the winter of this State
being ill suited to them. The free blacks are in great part
paupers, and supported by the poor laws. We fell in with a
few parties of itinerant Indians, roaming about the country like
our gipsies.
Resuming our journey, we stopped at an inn where a great
many mechanics boarded, taking three meals a day at the ordi
nary. They were well dressed, but their coarse (though clean)
hands announced their ordinary occupation. After dinner several
c*
58 DIVISION OF PROPERTY. [CHAP. IV.
of them went into the drawing-room, where some " ladies" of
their own class were playing on a piano-forte ; other mechanics
were reading newspapers and books, but after a short stay they
all returned to their work. On looking at the books they had
laid down, I found that one was D'Israeli's " Coningsby," an
other Burns' Poems, and a third an article just reprinted from
Frazer's Magazine, on "the Policy of Sir Robert Peel."
" As we passed through Conway, seeing there was but one
meeting-house, I asked to what denomination it belonged. The
reply was, "Orthodox." I went on to say that the place seemed
to be thriving. My informant replied, with evident satisfaction,
"Yes, and every man here is his own tenant," meaning that they
all owned the houses and lands they occupied. To be a lessee, in
deed, of a farm, where acres may be bought so cheap, is a rare
exception, to the general rule throughout the United States.
The approach to an equal subdivision of property among children,
is not the result here of a compulsory law, as in France, but of
custom ; and I was surprised to find how much the partition is
modified, according to the individual views of the testator. I was
assured, indeed, by persons on whose authority I could depend,
that in nine cases out of ten the small working farmers in New
England do not leave their property in equal shares to their
children, as the law would distribute it if they died intestate.
It is very common, for example, to leave the sons twice as much
as the daughters, and frequently to give the eldest son the land,
requiring him to pay small legacies to the others." In the case
of one of my acquaintances, where the sons had larger shares
than the daughters, it was provided, that if one of the two
brothers died, the other should take all his share. As a general
rule, the larger the estate the greater is the inequality of partition
among the children. When I inquired into the manner in which
the twelve or fourteen largest fortunes, such as would rank as
considerable in England, had been bequeathed in Boston and its
vicinity, and in New York, I was astonished to learn that none
of them had been left in equal shares among the children by men
of English descent, the one and only exception being that of a
Frenchman. In the more newly settled states, there is less in-
CHAP. IV.] EVERY MAN HIS OWN TENANT. 59
equality in the distribution both of real and personal property ;
but this is doubtless in no small degree connected with the more
moderate size of the fortunes there. The ideas entertained in
some of these ruder parts of the country, of the extreme destitu
tion of the younger children of aristocratic families in Great
Britain, are often most mistaken and absurd ; though particular
instances in Scotland, springing out of the old system of entails,
may have naturally given rise to erroneous generalizations. It
was evident to me that few, if any, of these critics, had ever re
garded primogeniture as an integral portion of a great political
system, wholly different from their own, the merits of which can
not fairly be tried by a republican standard.
Both in New England and in the State of New York, I heard
many complaints of the inadequacy of the capital belonging to
small landed proprietors to make their acres yield the greatest
amount of produce with the least expenditure of means. They
are often so crippled with debt and mortgages, paying high in
terest, that they can not introduce many improvements in agri
culture, of which they are by no means ignorant. Nevertheless,
the farmers here constitute a body of resident yeomen, industrious
and intelligent ; absenteeism being almost unknown, owing to the
great difficulty of letting farms, and the owners being spread
equally over the whole country, to look after the roads and
village-schools, and to see that there is a post-office even in each
remote mountain hamlet. The pride and satisfaction felt by men
who till the land which is their own, is, moreover, no small ad
vantage, although one which a political economist, treating solely
of the production of wealth, may regard as lying out of his prov-
vince. As a make-weight, however, in our estimate of the amount
of national happiness derived from landed property, it is not to be
despised; and where "every man is his own tenant," as at Con-
way, the evils of short leases, of ejectments on political grounds,
or disputes about poaching and crimes connected with the game-
laws are unknown.
After passing Conway, we had fairly entered the mountains
of New Hampshire, and enjoyed some rambles over the hills,
delighted with the gound of rushing torrents and the wildness of
60 • FORESTS.— BEARS. [CHAP. TV.
the scenery. I had sometimes remarked in Norway that the
birch trees are so equally intermixed with dark pines, as to im
part, by the contrast of colors, a spotted appearance to the woods,
not always picturesque ; but here I saw the dark green hemlock
in one place, and the maples, with their brilliant autumnal foliage
in another, grouped in such masses on the steep slopes of the hills,
as to produce a most agreeable effect. There were many birch
trees, with their white bark, and oaks, with red autumnal tints,
and an undergrowth of kalmia out of flower, but still conspicuous
by its shining leaves. The sweet fern (Comptonia) no longer
appeared on this high ground, and was replaced by the true fern,
called here " brake," being our common English species (Pteris
aquilind). On the low hills of granite were many huge angular
fragments of that rock, fifteen, and some of them twenty feet in
diameter, resting on heaps of sand. They were of a light gray
color, with large crystals of felspar, and reminded me of the
granite of Arran in Scotland. As we followed the windings of
the river Saco, I observed, in the bottom of the valley, alluvial
terraces, composed of clay, sand, gravel, and boulders, forming
flats at different elevations, as we see in many parts of Scotland,
and other mountain valleys in Europe.
Although we heard much talk of the late frost, there were still
abundant signs of the sun's power, such as large grasshoppers,
with red wings, called here shakers, and tortoises ( Testudo picta)
wandering from one pond to another. In the retired paths many
squirrels allowed us to pass very near to them without being
alarmed. The bear once extended, like the beaver, over the
whole of New England ; but the beaver has been every where
extirpated, and the bear driven into^the mountains. From these
retreats they still make annual depredations on the fields of Indian
corn, and the farmers retaliate, not only by thinning them with
their rifles, but by taking what some sportsmen would consider
a very unfair advantage over them. On the first spring-like day,
Bruin, who has been hybernating for several months in a cave,
ventures out, before the snow has quite melted, to take a look at
the country ; then retires again to his hiding place, which the
hunter discovers by following his foot tracks on the snow, and
CHAP. IV.] WILLEY SLIDE. 61
digs him out of his hole. Near Bartlett I was taken to see the
skeleton of a bear that had been lately killed. The farmers told
me that the racoons do much damage here, by devouring the In
dian corn, but the opossum does not extend so far to the north.
On the second day after leaving Conway we entered a wild
and narrow mountain pass, with steep declivities on both sides,
where the hills can not be less than 1000 or 1500 feet in vertical
height. Here the famous landslip, called the Willey Slide, oc
curred in August, 1826. The avalanche of earth, stones, and
trees occurring after heavy rains, was so sudden, that it over
whelmed all the Willey family, nine in number, who would have
escaped had they remained in their humble dwelling ; for, just
above it, the muddy torrent was divided into two branches by a
projecting rock. The day after the catastrophe a candle was
found on the table of their deserted room, burnt down to the
socket, and the Bible lying open beside it.
I was curious to examine the effects of this and other slides
of the same date in the White Mountains, to ascertain what effect
the passage of mud and heavy stones might have had in furrow
ing the hard surfaces of bared rocks over which they had passed ;
it having been a matter of controversy among geologists, how far
those straight rectilinear grooves and scratches before alluded to,*
might have been the result of glacial action, or whether they can
be accounted for by assuming that deluges of mud and heavy
stones have swept over the dry land. A finer opportunity of
testing the adequacy of the cause last mentioned can not be con
ceived than is afforded by these hills ; for, in consequence, appar
ently, of the jointed structure of the rocks and their decomposition
produced by great variations of temperature (for they are subjected
to intense summer heat and winter's cold in the course of the
year), there is always a considerable mass of superficial detritus
ready to be detached during very heavy rains, even where the
steep slopes are covered with timber. Such avalanches begin
from small points, and, after descending a few hundred yards, cut
into the mountain side a deep trench, which becomes rapidly
broader and deeper, and they bear down before them the loftiest
* Ante, p. 18.
62 SCRATCHES AND GROOVES ON ROCKS. [CHAP. IV.
trees, and the soil in which they are rooted. Some of these
masses have slid two or three miles, with an average breadth of
a quarter of a mile ; and so large are the rocky fragments, that I
found some of them, which came down in the Willey Slide, to
measure from fourteen to twenty feet in diameter. I also ascer-
trined that the steep slopes of bare rock over which they had
passed, were inclined, in some instances, at angles of twenty to
thirty degrees with the horizon. After clambering up more than
400 feet above the level of the Saco, on its right bank, I reached
a space of naked rock, fifteen feet square, over which my guide,
the elder Crawford, told me that the whole contents of the Willey
Slide had swept in 1826 ; which was indeed evident, for it lay
in the direct line of the great trench cut through the forest above
and below.
There is a small cataract at the spot, where a dyke of basalt
and greenstone, four or five feet wide, traverses the granite, all
the rocks being smoothed on the surface, and marked with some
irregular and short scratches and grooves ; but not such as re
semble in continuity, straightness, or parallelism, those produced
by a glacier, where hard stones, which grate along the bottom,
have been firmly fixed in a heavy mass of ice, so that they can
not be deflected from a rectilinear course.
I am aware that glaciers and icebergs are not the only means
by which the grooving and polishing of the faces of rocks may
be caused ; for similar effects may arise on the sides of fissures
where stony masses have been rent asunder, and moved upward
and downward, or made to vibrate during earthquakes, so that
the opposite walls are rubbed against each other. But we can
not attribute to this cause the superficial markings now commonly
referred to glacial action in Europe and North America ; and
what I saw at the Willey Slide, and other places in the White
Mountains, convinced me that a semi-fluid mass of mud and
stones must always have too much freedom of motion, and is too
easily turned aside by every obstacle and inequality in the shape
of the rocky floor, to enable it to sculpture out long and straight
furrows.
From the Willey Slide we continued our way along the bot-
CHAP. IV.] FOREST TREES. 63
torn of the narrow valley of the Saco, listening with pleasure to
the river as it foamed and roared over its stony bed, and admir
ing two water-falls, broken into sheets of white foam in their de
scent. The scene became more grand as we entered the defile
called the Notch, where, although the sun was high, the lofty
crags threw dark shadows across our path. On either hand were
wild and nearly perpendicular precipices, the road, on the side
overhanging the Saco, being usually protected by parapets of
stone or timber. A steep ascent led us up to a kind of pass or
water-shed, where there was an inn kept by one of the Crawford
family, well known in this region, which reminded me of some
of those hotels perched in similar wild situations in the Alps, as
on the Simplon and Grimsel. We learned that snow had fallen
here in the second week of September, and the higher hills had
been whitened for a time ; but they are now again uncovered.
Already the elevation has produced a marked change in the veg
etation — the hemlock, the spruce, the balm of Gilead fir (Pinus
bahamea), and the white pine, beginning to form, with the birch,
a large proportion of the forest trees. The white pine, called in
England the Weymouth pine (Pinus strobus), is the most mag
nificent in size. It sometimes attains a diameter of five feet, and
a height of 150 feet, both here and in other parts of New Hamp
shire and Maine ; but it is very rare to meet with such trees
now, the finest having been burnt down in the great fires which
have every where devastated the woods. I observed the boughs
of the spruce hung with a graceful white lichen, called Old
Man's Beard (Usnea barbata), a European species. The com
mon fern (Pteris aquilina), now covers the moist ground under
the dark shade of the woods, and all the rotting trunks of fallen
trees are matted over with a beautiful green carpet of moss,
formed almost entirely of the feathery leaves of one of the most
elegant of the tribe, also occurring in Scotland (Hypnum Crista
castremis). Several kinds of club moss (Lycopodium], which,
like the Hypnum, were in full fructification, form also a con
spicuous part of the herbage ; especially one species, standing
erect like a miniature tree, whence its name, L. dendroideum,
from six to eight inches high.
64 MOUNTAIN PLANTS.— ECHO. [CHAP. IV.
Oct. 5. — Penetrating still further into the mountains, we es
tablished ourselves in pleasant quarters for several days at Fa-
byan's Hotel, thirty-two miles from Conway, waiting for fine
weather to ascend Mount Washington. Whenever the rain
ceased for a few hours we explored the lower hills, and were for
tunate enough to have, as a companion in our walks, one of the
ablest botanists in America, Mr. William Oakes,^ of Ipswich,
Massachusetts, who is preparing for publication a fine work on
the Flora of the White Mountains. In one of our excursions
with him to see the falls of the river Amoonosuc, he showed us
several places where the Linncea borealis was growing, now in
fruit. I had seen this plant in flower in Nova Scotia in July,
1842, but was not prepared to find it extending so much farther
southward, having first known it as characteristic of Norway,
and of great Alpine heights in Europe. But I was still more
surprised when I learned, from Mr. Oakes, that it descends even
into the wooded plains of New Hampshire, under favor of a long
winter and of summer fogs, near the sea. What is most singu
lar, between Manchester and Cape Anne, lat 42° 30' N., it in
habits the same swamp with the Magnolia glauca. The arctic
Linncea, trailing along the ground and protected from the sun
by a magnolia, affords a curious example of the meeting of two
plants of genera characteristic of very different latitudes, each on
the extreme limits of its northern or southern range.
One evening, during our stay here, we enjoyed listening to the
finest mountain echo I ever heard. Our host, Fabyan, played a
few clear notes on a horn, which were distinctly repeated five
times by the echo, in softened and melodious tones. The third
repetition, although coming of course from a greater distance,
was louder than the two fi.rst, which had a beautiful effect, and
may be caused either by the concave form of the rocks being
more favorable to the reflection of sound, or from the place where
we stood being, in reference to that distant spot, more exactly in
the focus of the ellipse.
In the elevated plain at the foot of the mountains at Fabyan's
* Since writing the above, I have heard, with deep regret, of the death
of this amiable and accomplished naturalist.
CHAP. IV.] THE GIANT'S GRAVE. 65
there is a long superficial ridge of gravel, sand, and boulders,
having the same appearance as those mounds which are termed
" osar" in Sweden. It is a conspicuous object on the plain, and.
is called the Giant's Grave ; but in general such geological ap
pearances as are usually referred to the glacial or " drift" period
are rare in these mountains ; and I looked in vain for glacial
furrows and striae on a broad surface of smooth granite recently
exposed on the banks of the Saco, in a pit where gravel had been
taken out for the repair of the road. How far the rapid decom
position of the granite rocks, owing to the vast range of annual
temperature, may have destroyed, in this high region, any mark
ings originally imprinted on their surface, deserves consideration.
CHAPTER V.
Ascent of Mount "Washington. — Mr. Oakes. — Zones of Distinct Vegetation.
— Belt of Dwarf Firs. — Bald Region and Arctic Flora on Summit. — View
from Summit. — Migration of Plants from Arctic Regions. — Change of
Climate since Glacial Period. — Granitic Rocks of White Mountains. —
Franconia Notch. — Revival at Bethlehem. — Millerite Movement. — The
Tabernacle at Boston. — Mormons. — Remarks on New England Fanati
cism.
Oct. 7, 1845. — AT length, with a fair promise of brighter
weather, we started at eight o'clock in the morning for the sum
mit of Mount Washington. Its old Indian name of Agiocochook
has been dropped, as too difficult for Anglo-Saxon ears or memo
ries. Its summit is 6225 feet above the level of the sea ; and
we were congratulated on the prospect of finding it, at so late a
season, entirely free from snow. Our party consisted of nine, all
mounted on well-trained horses — Mr. Oakes, a gentleman and
his wife, tourists from Maine, a young New England artist, my
self, my wife, and three guides.
A ride of seven miles brought us to the foot of the mountain,
and we then began to thread the dark mazes of the forest, through
narrow winding paths, often crossing and re-crossing the bed of
the same torrent, and fording its waters, which occupied, in spite
of the late rains, a small part of their channel.
The first, or lowest zone of the mountain, extending from its
base to the height of about 2000 feet, and 4000 feet above the
level of the sea, is clothed with a great variety of wood. Besides
the hemlock, spruce, Weymouth, and other pines before men
tioned, there is the beech (Fagus ferrugined], three kinds of
birch, the black, the yellow, and the white (Betula lenta, B.
lutea, and B. papyracea) ; also the rock or sugar-maple (Acer sac-
cJiarinum), and the red maple (A. rubrum}, exhibiting autumnal
tints of every color, from orange to pale yellow, and from scarlet
to purple. The undergrowth was composed in part of a Guelder-
CHAP V.] VEGETATION.— DWARF FIRS. 67
rose (Viburnum lantanoides], the Mexican laurustinus, and the
service-tree (Sorbus americana), with Acer montanum and Acer
sPriatwn. On the ground we saw the beautiful dwarf dogwood
(Cornus canadensis), still in flower, also the fruit of the averin,
or cloud-berry, here called mulberry (Rubits chamcemorus), well
known on the Grampians, and the wood-sorrel (Oxalis acetosella),
in great quantity, with Gaultheria hispidula. There were
many large prostrate trees in various stages of decay, and out of
their trunks young fir-saplings, which had taken root on the bark,
were seen growing erect.
We put up very few birds as we rode along, for the woods
are much deserted at this season. A small lapwing, with a
note resembling the English species, flew up from some marshy
ground ; and we saw a blue jay and a brown woodpecker among
the trees, and occasionally a small bird like a tomtit (Pants
atrocapillus). I picked up one land-shell only (Helix tliyoides),
and was surprised at the scarcity of air-breathing testacea here
and elsewhere in New England, where there is so vigorous a
vegetation and so much summer heat. The absence of lime in
the granitic rocks is the chief cause ; but even in the calcareous
districts these shells are by no means as plentiful as in correspond
ing latitudes in Europe.
When we had passed through this lowest belt of wood the
clouds cleared away, so that, on looking back to the westward,
we had a fine view of the mountains of Vermont and the Camel's
Hump, and were the more struck with the magnificent extent of
the prospect, as it had not opened upon us gradually during our
ascent. We then began to enter the second region, or zone of
evergreens, consisting of the black spruce and the Pinus balsa-
mea, which were at first mixed with other forest trees, all
dwarfed in height, till at length, after we had ascended a few
hundred feet, these two kinds of firs monopolized the entire
ground. They are extremely dense, rising to about the height
of a man's head, having evidently been prevented by the cold
winds from continuing their upward growth beyond the level at
which they are protected by the snow. All their vigor seems
to have been exerted in throwing out numerous strong horizontal
68 BALD REGION. [CHAP. V.
or pendent branches, each tree covering a considerable area, ane»
being closely interwoven with others, so that they surround the
mountain with a formidable hedge about a quarter of a mrlo
broad. The innumerable dead boughs, which, after growing fox
a time, during a series of milder seasons, to a greater height,
have then been killed by the keen blast, present a singular ap
pearance. They are forked and leafless, and look like the antlers
of an enormous herd of deer or elk. This thicket opposed a
serious obstacle to those who first ascended the mountain thirty
years ago. Dr. Francis Boott, among others, whose description
of his ascent in 1816, given to me in London several years
before, made me resolve one day to visit the scene, was com
pelled, with his companion, Dr. Bigelow, to climb over the tops
and walk on the branches of these trees, until they came to the
bald region. A traveler now passes so rapidly through the open
pathway cut through this belt of firs, that he is in danger, while
admiring the distant view, of overlooking its peculiarities. The
trees become gradually lower and lower as you ascend, till at
length they trail along the ground only two or three inches high ;
and I actually observed, at the upper margin of this zone, that
the spruce was topped in its average height by the common rein
deer moss (Lichen range ferinus). According to Dr. Bigelow,^
the upper edge of the belt of dwarf firs is at the height of 4443
feet above the sea. After crossing it we emerged into the bald
region, devoid of wood, and had still to climb 1800 feet higher,
before arriving at the summit. Here our long cavalcade was
seen zigzagging its way in single file up a steep declivity of
naked rock, consisting of gneiss and mica schist, but principally
the latter rock intermixed with much white quartz. The masses
of quartz are so generally overgrown with that bright-colored
yellowish-green lichen, so common on the Scotch mountains
(Lichen geographicus), that the whole surface acquires a cor
responding tint, visible from a great distance. This highest
region is characterized by an assemblage of Alpine or Arctic
plants, now no longer in flower, and by a variety of mosses and
* See his excellent account of an ascent of Mount Washington in 1816,
Boston Medical Journal, vol. v. p. 321.
CHAP. V.] ARCTIC FLORA. 69
lichens specifically identical with those of Northern Europe.
Among these, we saw on the rocks the Parmelia centrifuga, a
lichen common in Sweden, but not yet met with in Great Britain,
of a greenish-white color, which, commencing its growth from a
point, gradually spreads on all sides, and deserts the central space.
It then assumes an annular form, and its reddish-brown shields
of fructification, scattered over the margin, remind one, though
on a miniature scale, of those " fairy rings" on our English lawns,
which appear to be unknown in America, and where fungi, or
mushrooms are seen growing in a circle.
The flora of the uppermost region of Mount Washington con
sists of species which are natives of the cold climate of Labrador,
Lapland, Greenland, and Siberia; and are impatient, says Bige-
low, of drought, as well as of both extremes of heat and cold ;
they are therefore not at all fitted to flourish in the ordinary
climate of New England. But they are preserved here, during
winter, from injury, by a great depth of snow, and the air in
summer never attains, at this elevation, too high a temperature,
while the ground below is always cool. When the snow melts,
they shoot up instantly with vigor proportioned to the length of
time they have been dormant, rapidly unfold their flowers, and
mature their fruits, and run through the whole course of their
vegetation in a few weeks, irrigated by clouds and mist.
Among other Alpine plants, we gathered on the summit
Menziesia cerulea, and Rhododendron laponicum, both out of
flower ; and not far below, Azalea procumbens. Mr. Oakes
pointed out to me, in a rent several hundred feet above the lower
margin of the bald region, a spruce fir growing in the cleft of a
rock, where it was sheltered from the winds, clearly showing
that the sudden cessation of the trees does not arise from mere
intensity of cold. We found no snow on the summit, but the
air was piercing, and for a time we were enveloped in a cloud
of dense white fog, which, sailing past us, suddenly disclosed a
most brilliant picture. On the slope of the mountain below us,
were seen woods warmly colored with their autumnal tints, and
lighted up by a bright sun ; and in the distance a vast plain,
stretching eastward to Portland, with many silver lakes, and
70 MIGRATION OF PLANTS. [CHAP. V
beyond these the ocean and blue sky. It was like a vision seen in
the clouds, and we were occasionally reminded of " the dissolving
views," when the landscape slowly faded away, and then, in a
few minutes, as the fog dispersed, regained its strength as gradual
ly, till every feature became again clear and well defined.
We at length returned to the hotel in the dusk of the evening,
much delighted with our excursion, although too fatiguing for a
lady, my wife having been twelve hours on horseback. If an
inn should be built at the foot of the mountain, the exploit will
be comparatively an easy one, and in a few years a railway from
Boston, only 150 miles distant (100 miles of it being already
completed), will enable any citizen to escape from the summer
heat, and, having slept the first night at this inn, enjoy, the next
morning, if he is a lover of botany, the sight of a variety of rare
and beautiful Arctic plants in full flower, besides beholding a suc
cession of distinct zones of vegetation, scarcely surpassed on the
flanks of Mount Etna or the Pyrenees.
If we attempt to speculate on the manner in which the pecu
liar species of plants now established on the highest summits of
the White Mountains, were enabled to reach those isolated spots,
while none of them are met with in the lower lands around, or
for a great distance to the north, we shall find ourselves engaged
in trying to solve a philosophical problem, which requires the
aid, not of botany alone, but of geology, or a knowledge of the
geographical changes which immediately preceded the present
state of the earth's surface. We have to explain how an Arctic
flora, consisting of plants specifically identical with those which
now inhabit lands bordering the sea in the extreme north of
America, Europe, and Asia, could get to the top of Mount
Washington. Now geology teaches us that the species living
at present on the earth are older than many parts of our existing
continents ; that is to say, they were created before a large part
of the existing mountains, valleys, plains, lakes, rivers, and seas
were formed. That such must be the case in regard to the
island of Sicily, I announced my conviction in 1833, after first
returning from that country.* And a similar conclusion is no
* Principles of Geology, 1st edition, vol. iii. chap. 9.
CHAP. V.] MIGRATION OF PLANTS. 71
less obvious to any naturalist who has studied the structure of
North America, and observed the wide area occupied by the
modern or glacial deposits before alluded to,* in which marine
fossil shells of living but northern species are entombed. It is
clear that a great portion of Canada, and the country surround
ing the great lakes, was submerged beneath the ocean when
recent species of mollusca flourished, of which the fossil remains
occur more than 500 feet above the level of the sea near Mon
treal. I have already stated that Lake Champlain was a gulf
of the sea at that period, that large areas in Maine were under
water, and, I may add, that the White Mountains must then
have constituted an island, or group of islands. Yet, as this
period is so modern in the earth's history as to belong to the
epoch of the existing marine fauna, it is fair to infer that the
Arctic flora now contemporary with man was then also estab
lished on the globe.
A careful study of the present distribution of animals and
plants over the globe, has led nearly all the best naturalists to
the opinion that each species had its origin in a single birth-place,
and spread gradually from its original center, to all accessible
spots fit for its habitation, by means of the powers of migration
given to it from the first. If we adopt this view, or the doctrine
of " specific centers," there is no difficulty in comprehending how
the crypto gamous plants of Siberia, Lapland, Greenland, andj
Labrador scaled the heights of Mount Washington, because the
sporules of the fungi, lichens, and mosses may be wafted through
the air for indefinite distances, like smoke ; and, in fact, heavier
particles are actually known to have been carried for thousands
of miles by the wind. But the cause of the occurrence of Arctic
plants of the phcenogamous class on the top of the New Hamp
shire mountains, specifically identical with those of remote Polar
regions, is by no means so obvious. They could not, in the
present condition of the earth, effect a passage over the inter
vening low lands, because the extreme heat of summer and cold
of winter would be fatal to them. Even if they were brought
from the northern parts of Asia, Europe, and America, and
# Ante, p. 33.
72 CHANGE OF CLIMATE. [CHAP. V.
thousands of them planted round the foot of Mount Washington,
they would never be able, in any number of years, to make their
way to its summit. We must suppose, therefore, that originally
they extended their range in the same way as the flowering
plants now inhabiting Arctic and Antarctic lands disseminate
themselves. The innumerable islands in the Polar seas are
tenanted by the sarme species of plants, some of which are con
veyed as seeds by animals over the ice when the sea is frozen in
winter, or by birds ; while a still larger number are transported
by floating icebergs, on which soil containing the seeds of plants
may be carried in a single year for hundreds of miles. A great
body of geological evidence has now been brought together, to
some of which I have adverted in a former chapter ,* to show
that this machinery for scattering plants, as well as for carrying
erratic blocks southward, and polishing and grooving the floor of
the ancient ocean, extended in the western hemisphere to lower
latitudes than the White Mountains. When these last still
constituted islands, in a sea jphilled by the melting of floating ice,
we may assume that they •vfrere covered entirely by a flora like
that now confined to the Uppermost or treeless region of the
mountains. As the}contin*fet grew by the slow upheaval of the
land, and the islands gai$p in height, and the climate around
their base grew milder/pfe Arctic plants would retreat to higher
and higher zones,, .awd finally occupy an elevated area, which
probably had been at first, or in the glacial period, always covered
with perpetual snow. Meanwhile the newly-formed plains around
the base of the mountain, to which northern species of plants
could not spread, would be occupied by others migrating from the
south, and perhaps by many trees, shrubs, and plants then first
created, and remaining to this day peculiar to North America.!
The period when the White Mountains ceased to be a group
of islands, or when, by the emergence of the surrounding low
* Ante, p. 17.
t For speculations on analogous botanical and geographical changes in
Europe, the reader may refer with advantage to an excellent essay by
Professor Edward Forbes, on the Origin of the British Fauna and Flora,
Memoirs of Geol. Survey of Great Britain, vol. i. p. 336. 1846.
CHAP. V.] GRANITE ROCKS 73
lands, they first became connected with the continent, is, as we
have seen, of very modern date, geologically speaking. It is,
in fact, so recent as to belong to the epoch when species now
contemporaneous with man already inhabited this planet. But
if we attempt to carry our retrospect still farther into the past,
and to go back to the date when the rocks themselves of the
White Mountains originated, we are lost in' times of extreme
antiquity. No light is thrown on this inquiry by embedded
organic remains, of which the strata of gneiss, mica schist, clay-
slate, and quartzite are wholly devoid. These masses are
traversed by numerous veins of granite and greenstone, which
are therefore newer than the stratified crystalline rocks which
they intersect ; and the abrupt manner in which these veins
terminate at the surface attests how much denudation or removal
by water of solid matter has taken place. Another question of
a chronological kind may yet deserve attention, namely, the epoch
of the movements which threw the beds of gneiss and the associ
ated rocks into their present bent, disturbed, and vertical positions.
This subject is also involved in considerable obscurity, although
it seems highly probable that the crystalline strata of New Hamp
shire acquired their internal arrangement at the same time as the
fossiliferous beds of the Appalachian or Alleghany chain : and
we know that they assumed their actual strike and dip sub
sequently to the origin of the coal measures, which enter so largely
into the structure of that chain.
From Fabyan's Inn, at the foot of Mount Washington, wo
traveled about twenty-five miles westward to Bethlehem, and
thence southward to the Franconia Notch, a deep and picturesque
ravine in the mountains of granite. On the way I conversed
with the driver of our carriage about the village churches, arid,
being very communicative, he told me he was a Free-will Baptist,
but had only become a Christian five years ago, when he was
awakened from a state of indifference by a revival which took
place near Bethlehem. This meeting, he said, was got up ,'j.ud
managed by the Methodists ; but some Baptists, and one ortho
dox (Independent or Congrcgationalist) minister had assisted, in.
all sixteen ministers, and for twenty-one days in succession there
VOL. T. D
74 REVIVAL AT BETHLEHEM. [CHAP. V.
had been prayers and preaching incessantly from morning to
night. I had already seen in a New York paper the following
advertisement : "A protracted meeting is now in progress at the
church in Street. There have been a number of
conversions, and it is hoped the work of grace has but just com
menced. Preaching every evening : seats free." I was surprised
to hear of the union of ministers of more than one denomination
on this occasion, and, on inquiry, was told by a Methodist, that
110 Episcopalians would join, " because they do not sufficiently
rely on regeneration and the new man." It appears, indeed, to
be essential to the efficacy of this species of excitement, that there
should be a previous belief that each may hope at a particular
moment " to receive comfort," as they term it, or that their con
version may be as sudden as was that of St. Paul. A Boston
friend assured me that when he once attended a revival sermon,
he heard the preacher describe the symptoms which they might
expect to experience on the first, second, and third day previous
to their conversion, just as a medical lecturer might expatiate to
his pupils on the progress of a well-known disease ; and " the
complaint," he added, " is indeed a serious one, and very con
tagious, when the feelings have obtained an entire control over
the judgment, and the new convert is in the power of the
preacher. He himself is often worked up to such a pitch of
enthusiasm, as to have lost all command over his own heated
imagination."
It is the great object of the ministers who officiate on these
occasions to keep up a perpetual excitement ; but while they are
endeavoring by personal appeals to overcome the apathy of dull,
slow, and insensible minds, they run the risk of driving others, of
weaker nerves and a more sensitive temperament, who are sitting
on " the anxious benches," to the very verge of distraction.
My friend, the driver, was evidently one of a slow and unexcit-
able disposition, and had been led for the first time in his life to
think seriously on religious matters by what he heard at the
great preaching near Bethlehem ; but it is admitted, and deplored
by the advocates of revivals, that after the application of such
violent stimulants there is invariably a leaction, and what the-)
CHAP. V.j MILLERITE MOVEMENT. 75
call a flat or dead season. The emotions are so strong as to
exhaust both the body and mind ; and it is creditable to the New
England clergy of all sects, that they have in general, of late
years, almost entirely discontinued such meetings.
At the Franconia hotel I first heard of the recent fanatical
movement of the Millerites, or followers of one Miller, who taught
that the millennium, or final destruction of the world, would
come to pass last year, or on the 23d day of October, 1844. A
farmer from the village of Lisbon told me that, in the course of
the preceding autumn, many of his neighbors would neither reap
their harvest of Indian corn and potatoes, nor let others take in
the crop, saying it was tempting Providence to store up grain for
a season that could never arrive, the great catastrophe being so
near at hand. These infatuated people, however, exerted them
selves very diligently to save what remained of their property
when the non-fulfillment of the prophecy dispelled their delusion.
In several townships in this and the adjoining States, the parochial
officers, or " select men," interfered, harvesting the crops at the
public expense, and requiring the owners, after the 23d October,
to repay them for the outlay.
I afterward heard many anecdotes respecting the Millerite
movement, not a few of my informants speaking with marked
indulgence of what they regarded simply as a miscalculation of
a prophecy which must be accomplished at no distant date. In
the township of Concord, New Hampshire, I was told of an old
woman, who, on paying her annual rent ibr a house, said, " I guess
this is the last rent you will get from me." Her landlord re
marked, " If so, I hope you have got your robes ready ;" alluding
to the common practice of the faithful to prepare white ascension
robes, " for going up into heaven." Hearing that there had been
advertisements from shops in Boston and elsewhere to furnish
any number of these robes on the shortest notice, I took for grant
ed that they were meant as a hoax ; but an English bookseller,
residing at New York, assured me that there was a brisk de
mand for such articles, even as far south as Philadelphia, and
that he knew two individuals in New York, who sat up all night
in their shrouds on the 22d of October.
76 MILLER1TE MOVEMENT. [CHAP. V.
A caricature, published at Boston, represented Miller, the
originator of the movement, ascending to heaven in his robes ;
but his chaplain, who was suspected of not being an enthusiast,
but having an eye to the dollars freely thrown into "the Lord's
Treasury," was weighed down by the money bags, and the devils
were drawing him in an opposite direction. To keep up the
excitement, several newspapers and periodicals were published in
the interest of this sect, and I was told of several Methodist
preachers who gave themselves up in full sincerity to the delu
sion. I asked an artisan who sat next me in a railway car in
Massachusetts, whether he had heard any talk of the millennium
in his district. " Certainly," he said ; " I remember a tonguey
jade coming down to our town, and many women, and even
some smart, likely men, were carried away by her preaching.
And, when the day was past, Miller explained how they had
made a miscalculation, and that the end of the world would
come three days later ; and after that it was declared it would
happen in the year 1847, which date was the more certain, be
cause all the previous computations had failed, and that era alone
remained to satisfy the prophecy."
In a subsequent part .of our tour, several houses were pointed
out to us, between Plymouth (Massachusetts) and Boston, the
owners of which had been reduced from ease to poverty by their
credulity, having sold their all toward building the Tabernacle,
in which they were to pray incessantly for six weeks previous to
their ascension. Among other stories which, whether true or
not, proved to me how much fraud was imputed to some of the
leaders, I was told of a young girl who, having no money, was
advised to sell her necklace, which had been presented to her by
her betrothed. The jeweler, seeing that she was much affected
at parting with her treasure, and discovering the object of the
sale, showed her some silver forks and spoons, on which he was
about to engrave the initials of the very minister whose dupe she
was, and those of the lady he was about to marry on a fixed day
after the fated 23d of October.
The Tabernacle, above alluded to, was planned for the accom
modation of between 2000 and 3000 persons, who were to meet,
CHAP. V.] THE TABERNACLE AT BOSTOiN. 77
pray, and "go up" at Boston; but, as it was intended merely
for a temporary purpose, the fabric Avould have been very slight
and insecure, had not the magistrates, fearing that it might fall
into the street and kill some of the passers-by, interposed in
good time, and required the architect to erect a substantial edi
fice. When the society of the Millerites was bankrupt, this
Tabernacle was sold and fitted up as a theater ; and there, in the
course of the winter, we had the pleasure of seeing Mr. and Mrs.
Kean perform Macbeth. Although under no apprehensions that
the roof would fall in, yet, as all the seats were stuffed with hay,
and there was only one door, we had some conversation during
the performance as to what might be our chance of escape in the
event of a fire. Only a few months later the whole edifice was
actually burned to the ground, but fortunately no lives were lost.
In one of the scenes of Macbeth, where Hecate is represented as
going up to heaven, and singing, " Now I'm furnished for the
flight — Now I fly," &c., some of our party told us they were
reminded of the extraordinary sight they had witnessed in that
room on the 23d of October of the previous year, when the walls
were all covered with Hebrew and Greek texts, and when a
crowd of devotees were praying in their ascension robes, in hourly
expectation of the consummation of all things.
I observed to one of my New England friends, that the num
ber of Millerite proselytes, and also the fact that the prophet of
the nineteenth century, Joseph Smith, could reckon at the lowest
estimate 60,000 followers in the United States, and, according
to some accounts, 120,000, did not argue much in favor of the
working of their plan of national education. " As for the Mor
mons," he replied, "you must bear in mind that they were largely
recruited from the manufacturing districts of England and Wales,
and from European emigrants recently arrived. They were drawn
chiefly from an illiterate class in the western states, where so
ciety is in its rudest condition. The progress of the Millerites,
however, although confined to a fraction of the population, re
flects undoubtedly much discredit on the educational and religious
training in New England; but since the year 1000, when all
Christendom believed that the world was to come to an end,
78 NEW ENGLAND FANATICISM. [CHAP. V.
there have never been wanting interpreters of prophecy, who
have confidently assigned some exact date, and one near at hand,
for the millennium. Your Faber on the Prophecies, and the
writings of Croly, and even some articles in the Quarterly Re
view, helped for a time to keep up this spirit here, and make it
fashionable. But the Millerite movement, like the recent exhi
bition of the Holy Coat at Treves, has done much to open men's
minds ; and the exertions made of late to check this fanatical
movement, have advanced the cause of truth." He then went
on to describe to me a sermon preached in one of the northeast
ern townships of Massachusetts, which he named, against the Mil
lerite opinions, by the minister of the parish, who explained the
doubts generally entertained by the learned in regard to some of the
dates of the prophecies of Daniel, entered freely into modern con
troversies about the verbal inspiration of the Old and New Tes
tament, and referred to several new works, both of German,
British, and New England authors, which his congregation had
never heard of till then. Not a few of them complained that
they had been so long kept in the dark, that their minister must
have entertained many of these opinions long before, and that he
had now revealed them in order to stem the current of a popular
delusion, and for expediency, rather than from the love of truth.
" Never," said they, " can we in future put the same confidence
in him again."
Other apologists observed to me, that so long as a part of the
population was very ignorant, even the well-educated would occa
sionally participate in fanatical movements ; " for religious en
thusiasm, being very contagious, resembles a famine fever, which
first attacks those who are starving, but afterward infects some
of the healthiest and best-fed individuals in the whole communi
ty." This explanation, plausible and ingenious as it may ap
pear, is, I believe, a fallacy. If they who have gone through
school and college, and have been for years in the habit of lis
tening to preachers, become the victims of popular fanaticism, it
proves that, however accomplished and learned they may be,
their reasoning powers have not been cultivated, their under
standings have not been enlarged, they have not been trained in
CHAP. V.] NEW ENGLAND FANATICISM. 79
habits of judging and thinking for themselves ; in fact, they arc
ill educated. Instead of being told that it is their duty care
fully to investigate historical evidence for themselves, and to
cherish an independent frame of mind, they have probably been
brought up to think that a docile, submissive, and child-like def
erence to the authority of churchmen is the highest merit of a
Christian. They have perhaps heard much about the pride of
philosophy, and how all human learning is a snare. In mat
ters connected with religion they have been accustomed blinclly
to resign themselves to the guidance of others, and hence are
prepared to yield themselves up to the influence of any new pre
tender to superior sanctity who is a greater enthusiast than
themselves.
-_,-,
( Library. ]
CHAPTER VI.
Social Equality. — Position of Servants. — War with England. — Coalition of
Northern Democrats, and Southern Slave-owners. — Ostracism of Wealth.
— Legislators paid. — Envy in a Democracy. — Politics of the Country
and the City. — Pledges at Elections. — Universal Suffrage. — Adventure
in a Stage Coach. — Return from the White Mountains. — Plymouth in
New Hampshire. — Congregational and Methodist Churches. — Theo
logical Discussions of Fellow-Travelers. — Temperance Movement. —
Post-Office Abuses. — Lowell Factories.
Oct. 10, 1845 — DURING our stay in the White Mountains,
we were dining one day at the ordinary of the Franconia hotel,
when a lawyer from Massachusetts pointed out to me "a lady"
sitting opposite to us, whom he recognized as the chambermaid
of an inn in the State of Maine, and he supposed "that her
companion with whom she was talking might belong to the same
station." I asked if he thought the waiters, who were as respect
ful to these guests as to us, were aware of their true position in
society. " Probably they are so," he replied ; " and, moreover,
as the season is now almost over in these mountains, I presume
that these gentlemen, who must have saved money here, will
very soon indulge in some similar recreation, and make some ex
cursion themselves." He then entered into conversation with
the two ladies on a variety of topics, for the sake of drawing
them out, treating them quite as equals ; and certainly succeeded
in proving to me that they had been well taught at school, had
read good books, and could enjoy a tour and admire scenery as
well as ourselves. "It is no small gratification to them," said
he, " to sit on terms of equality with the silver fork gentry,
dressed in their best clothes, as if they were in an orthodox
meeting-house." I complimented him on carrying out in prac
tice the American theory of sociul equality. As he had strong
anti-slavery feelings, and was somewhat of an abolitionist, he
said, " Yes, but you must not forget they have no dash of negro
CHAP. VI.] WAR WITH ENGLAND. 81
blood in their veins." I remarked, that I had always inferred
from the books of English travelers in the United States, that
domestic service was held as somewhat of a degradation in New
England. " I remember the time," he answered, " when such
an idea was never entertained by any one here ; but servants
formerly used to live with their master and mistress, and have
their meals at the same table. Of late years, the custom of
boarding separately has gained ground, and work in factories is
now preferred. These are so managed, that the daughters of
farmers, and sometimes of our ministers, look upon them as most
respectable places, where in three or four years they may earn a
small sum toward their dowry, or which may help to pay off a
mortgage or family debt."
As, during our stay here, the tone of the newspapers from
Washington was somewhat bellicose, and we were proposing to
make a tour of eight months in the southern states, I asked my
legal companion whether he was really apprehensive of a war
about Oregon. " No," he said, " there may be big words and
much blustering, and perhaps, before the storm blows over, a
war panic ; but there will be no rupture with England, because
it is against the interest of the slave-owners ; for you know, I
presume, that we are governed by the South, and our southern
chivalrv will put their veto on a war of which they would have
to bear the brunt." "If," said I, " you are ruled by the slave-
owning states, you may thank yourselves for it, the numerical,
physical, intellectual, and moral power being on the side of the
free states. Why do you knock under to them ?" " You may
well ask that question," he replied ; " and, as a foreigner, may
riot easily be made to comprehend the political thralldom in
which we, the majority of northerners, are still held, but which
can not, I think, last much longer. Hitherto the southern
planters have had more leisure to devote to politics than our
small farmers or merchants in the north. They are banded to
gether as one man in defense of what they call their property
and institutions. They have a high bearing, which, in Con
gress, often imposes on northern men much superior to them in
real talent, knowledge, and strength of character. They are
D*
82 OSTRACISM OF WEALTH. [CHAP. VI.
often eloquent, and have much political tact, and have formed a
league with the unscrupulous demagogues here, and, by uniting
with them, rule the country. For example, the mass of our
population were strongly opposed to the extension of slavery, and
voted at first against the annexation of Texas, yet they have
been cajoled into the adoption of that measure."
" Do the slave-owners," I asked, " give bribes to the chiefs of
your democratic party ?" " No, our electors have too much
self-respect and independence to accept of money bribes ; but, by
ioining with their southern allies, they get what one of their party
had recently the effrontery to call ' the spoils of the victor.'
They are promoted to places in the custom-house or post-office,
or sent on a foreign mission, or made district attorneys, or a
lawyer may now and then be raised even to the bench of the
Supreme Court ; not one who is positively incompetent, but a
man who, but for political services, would never have been se
lected for the highest honors in his profession."
I next told my friend that, when traveling in Maine, I had
asked a gentleman why his neighbor, Mr. A., a rich and well-
informed man, was not a member of their Legislature, and he
had replied, " Because he is known to have so much wealth,
both in land and money, that, if he were to stand, the people
would not elect him." " Is it then," I inquired, "an avowed
principle of the democracy, that the rich are to be ostracised ?"
and I went on to say that, in a club to which I belonged in
London, we had a servant who, though very poor, had a vote
as proprietor of a house, all the apartments of which he let out
to different lodgers. When he was questioned why, at two suc
cessive elections, he had voted for candidates of exactly opposite
opinions in politics, he explained by saying, " I make it a rule
always to vote with my first floor." " I presume that if he
migrated to New Hampshire or Maine, he would vote with his
garret, instead of his first floor ?"
" I have no doubt," said my companion, " that such an elector
would side with the powers that be ; and as the democracy has
the upper hand here, as in Maine, he would have paid as servile
a homage to the dominant party on this side of the Atlantic as
CHAP. VI.] LEGISLATORS PAID. 33
he did to the aristocracy of wealth in your country. Do you
desire to see our people regard wealth as a leading qualification
for their representatives ?"
" Surely," said I, " it is au evil that men of good abilities, of
leisure, and independent station, who have had the best means
of obtaining a superior education, should be excluded from public
life by that envy which seems to have so rank a growth in a
democracy, owing to the vain efforts to realize a theory of equal
ity. It must be a defect in your system, if there is no useful
career open to young men of fortune. They are often ruined, I
hear, for want of suitable employments."
" There are," he said, " comparatively few of them in the
United States, where the law of primogeniture no longer pre
vails ; and if we have good-for-nothing individuals among them,
it is no more than may be said of your own aristocracy." lie
then named an example or two of New Englanders, who, having
inherited considerable property, had yet risen to political distinc
tion, and several more (four of whom I myself knew), who,
having made large fortunes by their talents, had been members
either of the State Legislature of Massachusetts or of Congress.
He did not, however, deny that it is often good policy, in an
election, for a rich candidate to affect to be poorer than he is.
" Every one of our representatives," he added, " whether in the
State Legislatures or in Congress, receives a certain sum daily
when on duty, besides more than enough traveling money for
carrying him to his post and home again. In choosing a dele
gate, therefore, the people consider themselves as patrons who
are giving away a place ; and if an opulent man offers himself,
they are disposed to say, * You have enough already, let us help
some one as good as you who needs it.' "
During my subsequent stay in New England, I often con
versed with men of the working classes on the same subject, and
invariably found that they had made up their mind that it was
not desirable to choose representatives from the wealthiest class.
" The rich," they say, " have less sympathy with our opinions
and feelings ; love their amusements, and go shooting, fishing,
and traveling ; keep hospitable houses, and are inaccessible when
84 GENERAL JACKSON'S POLICY. [CHAP. VI.
we want to talk with them, at all hcmrs, and tell them how ice
wish them to vote" I once asked a party of New England
tradesmen whether, if Mr. B., already an eminent public man,
came into a large fortune through his wife, as might soon be ex
pected, he would stand a worse chance than before of being sent
to Congress. The question gave rise to a discussion among
themselves, and at last they assured me that they did not think
his accession to a fortune would do him any harm. It clearly
never struck them as possible that it could do him any good, or
aid his chance of success.
The chief motive, I apprehend, of preferring a poorer candi
date, is the desire of reducing the members of their Legislature
to mere delegates. A rich man would be apt to have an opinion
of his own, to be unwilling to make a sacrifice of his free agency ;
he would not always identify himself with the majority of his
electors, condescend to become, like the wires of the electric
telegraph, a mere piece of machinery for conveying to the Capitol
of his State, or to Washington, the behests of the multitude.
That there is, besides, a vulgar jealousy of superior wealth,
especially in the less educated districts and newer states, I satis
fied myself in the course of my tour ; but in regard to envy, we
must also bear in mind, on the other hand, that they who elevate
to distinction one of their own class in society, have sometimes
to achieve a greater victory over that passion than when they
confer the same favor on one who occupies already, by virtue of
great riches, a higher position.
In reference also to pledges exacted from representatives at an
election, I am bound to mention some spirited letters which I saw
published by Whig candidates in Massachusetts, who carried their
election in spite of them. From one of these I quote the follow
ing words ; "I must decline giving a direct reply to your specific
questions ; my general conduct and character as a public man,
must be your guarantee. My votes are on record, my speeches
are in print ; if they do not inspire confidence, no pledges or dec
larations of purpose ought to do so."
It was part of General Jackson's policy, openly avowed by him
in several of his presidential addresses, to persuade the small
CHAP. VI.] UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE. 85
farmers, mechanics, and laborers that they constituted the people,
were the bone and sinew of the country, the real possessors of the
national wealth, although in their hands it is subdivided into
small shares ; and he told them it was their business to make a
constant effort to maintain their rights against the rich capitalists
and moneyed corporations, who, by facilities of combining together,
could usually make their own class interests prevail against a
more numerous body, and one possessed in the aggregate of greater
wealth.
It seems that they were not slow in taking this advice, for
many merchants complained to me that the small farmers had
too great an ascendency. No feature, indeed, appeared to me
more contrasted in the political aspect of America and Great
Britain than this, that in the United States the democracy derives
its chief support from the landed interest, while the towns take
the more conservative side, and are often accused by the landed
proprietors of being too aristocratic. Every where the ambition
of accumulating riches without limit is so manifest, as to incline
me to adopt the opinion expressed to me by several rich Boston
friends, that wealth has in this country quite as many charms,
and confers as much distinction and influence, as it ought to do.
If a rich Englishman came to settle here, he would be disappointed
on finding that money gave him no facilities in taking a lead in
politics ; but the affluent natives do not pine for influence which
they never possessed or expected to derive from their riches.
The great evil of universal suffrage is the irresistible temptation
it affords to a needy set of adventurers to make politics a trade,
and to devote all their time to agitation, electioneering, and flat
tering the passions of the multitude. The natural aristocracy
of a republic consists of the most eminent men in the liberal
professions — lawyers, divines, and physicians of note, merchants
in extensive business, literary and scientific men of celebrity ; and
men of all these classes are apt to set too high a value on their
time, to be willing to engage in the strife of elections perpetually
going on, and in which they expose themselves to much calumny
and accusations, which, however unfounded, are professionally
injurious to them. The richer citizens, who might be more in-
86 ADVENTURE IN A STAGE-COACH. [CHAP. VI.
dependent of such attacks, love their ease or their books, and from
indolence often abandon the field to the more ignorant ; but I
met with many optimists who declared that whenever the country
is threatened with any great danger or disgrace, there is a right-
rninded majority whose energies can be roused effectively into
action. Nevertheless, the sacrifices required on such occasions
to work upon the popular mind are so great, that the field is in
danger of being left open, on all ordinary occasions, to the dema
gogue.
When I urged these and other objections against the working
of their republican institutions, I was sometimes told that every
political system has its inherent vices and defects, that the evil
will soon be mitigated by the removal of ignorance and the im
proved education of the many. Sometimes, instead of an argu
ment, they would ask me whether any of the British colonies are
more prosperous in commerce, manufactures, or agriculture, or are
doing as much to promote good schools, as some even of their most
democratic states, such as New Hampshire and Maine? "Let
our institutions," they said, "be judged of by their fruits." To
such an appeal, an Englishman as much struck as I had been
with the recent progress of things in those very districts, and
with the general happiness, activity, and contentment of all
classes, could only respond by echoing the sentiment of the Chan
cellor Oxenstiern, " Quam parva sapientia mundus gubernatur."
How great must be the amount of misgovernment in the world
in general, if a democracy like this can deserve to rank so high
in the comparative scale !
Oct. 10. — In the stage coach, between Franconia and Ply
mouth, in New Hampshire, we were at first the only inside
passengers ; but about half way we met on the road two men
and two women, respectably dressed, who might, we thought, have
come from some of the sea-ports. They made a bargain with the
driver to give them inside seats at a cheap rate. As we were
annoyed by the freedom of their manners and conversation, I told
the coachman, when we stopped to change horses, that we had
a right to protection against the admission of company at half
price, and, if they went on further, I must go on the outside with
CHAP. VI.] RETURN FROM THE WHITE MOUNTAINS. 87
my wife. He immediately apologized, and went up to the two
young men and gave them their choice to take their seats behind
him or be left on the road. To my surprise, they quietly accepted
the former alternative. The ladies, for the first half mile, were
mute, then burst out into a fit of laughter, amused at the ludicrous
position of their companions on the outside, who were sitting in a
pelting rain. They afterward behaved with decorum, and I
mention the incident because it was the only unpleasant adven
ture of the kind which we experienced in the course of all our
travels in the United States. In general, there is no country
where a woman could, with so much comfort and security, under
take a long journey alone.
As we receded from the mountains, following the banks of the
river Pemigewasset, the narrow valley widened gradually, till,
first, a small, grassy, alluvial flat, and, at length, some cultivated
fields, intervened between the stream and the boundary rocks of
mica schist and granite. Occasionally the low river-plain was
separated from the granite by a terrace of sand and gravel.
Usually many boulders, with a few large detached blocks, some
of them nine feet in diameter, were strewed over the granite
rocks. These, as generally throughout New England, break
out here and there, from beneath their covering of drift, in smooth
bosses, or rounded, dome-shaped forms, called in the Alps " roches
moutonnees." The contrast is very picturesque between the
level and fertile plain and the region of lichen-covered rock, or
sterile, quartzose sand, partially clothed with the native forest,
now in its autumnal beauty, and lighted up by a bright sun.
On the flat ground bordering the river, we passed many wagons
laden with yellow heads of Indian corn, over which were piled
many a huge pumpkin of a splendid reddish orange color. These
vehicles were drawn by oxen, with long horns spreading out
horizontally.
We stopped for the night in an inland village on which the
maritime name of Plymouth has been bestowed. Here we spent
a Sunday. There were two meeting-houses in the place, one
Congregational and the other Methodist, which shared between
them, in nearly equal proportions, the whole population of the
88 PLYMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE. [CHAP. VI
township. We went with our landlord first to one, and then,
in the afternoon, to the other. Each service lasted about seventy
minutes, and they were so arranged that the first began at hall-
past ten, and the second ended at two o'clock, for the convenience
of the country people, who came in vehicles of all kinds, many
of them from great distances. The reading, singing, and preach
ing would certainly not suffer by comparison with the average
service in rural districts in churches of the Establishment in
England. The discourse of the Methodist, delivered fluently
without notes, and with much earnestness, kept his hearers
awake ; and once, when my own thoughts were wandering,
they were suddenly recalled to the pulpit by the startling ques
tion — whether, if some intimate friend, whom we had lost,
should return to us from the world of spirits, his message would
produce more effect on our minds than did the raising of Lazarus
on the Jews of old ? He boldly affirmed that it would not. I
began to think how small would be the sensation created by a
miracle performed in the present day in Syria and many Eastern
countries, especially in Persia, where they believe in the power
of their own holy men occasionally to raise persons from the dead,
in comparison to its effect in New England ; and how readily he
Jews of old believed in departures from the ordinary course of
nature, by the intervention of evil spirits or the power of magic.
But I presume the preacher merely meant to say, and no doubt
his doctrine was true, that a voice or sign from Heaven would
no more deter men from sinning, than do the clear dictates of
their consciences, in spite of which they yield to temptation.
In the evening I walked on a roofed wooden bridge, resem
bling many in Switzerland, which here spans the Pemigewasset,
and the keeper of it told me how the whole river is frozen over
in winter, but the ice being broken by the falls above, does not
carry away the bridge. He also related how his grandfather,
who had lived to be an old man, had gone up the river with an
exploring party among the Indians, and how there was a bloody
battle at the forks above, where the Indians were defeated, after
great slaughter on both sides.
On entering the stage coach the next morning, on our way
CHAP. VI.] THEOLOGICAL DISCUSSION. 89
south, we had two inside fellow-travelers with us. One of
them was a blacksmith of Boston, and the other a glover of
Plymouth. After conversing on the price of agricultural imple
ments, they fell into a keen controversy on several biblical ques
tions. After mentioning instances of great longevity in New
Hampshire, the glover raised the question, whether the antedi
luvian patriarchs really lived seven or eight centuries, or wheth
er, as he supposed, we were to take these passages in a " myth
ical sense." " For his part, he thought we might, perhaps, in
terpret them to mean that the family stock, or dynasty, of a par
ticular patriarch, endured for those long periods." He also went
on to say, that the Deluge did not cover the highest mountains
literally, but only figuratively. Against these latitudinarian no
tions the blacksmith strongly protested, declaring his faith in the
literal and exact interpretation of the sacred record ; but at the
same time treating his antagonist as one who had a right to in
dulge his own opinions. As soon as there was a pause in the
conversation, I asked them if they approved of a frequent change
of ministers, such as I found to prevail in New England — the
Methodists remaining only two years, and the Congregationalists
only four or six at the utmost, in one parish. They seemed
much surprised to learn from me, that in England we thought a
permanent relation between the pastor and his flock to be nat
ural and desirable. Our people, they observed, are fond of va
riety, and there would always be danger, when they grew tired
of a preacher, of their running after others of a different sect.
" Besides," said the blacksmith, " how are they to keep up with
the reading of the day, and improve their minds, if they remain
forever in one town ? They have first their parish duties, then
they are expected to write two new sermons every week, usually
referring to some matters of interest of the day ; but if they have
a call to a new parish, they not only gain new ideas, but much
leisure, for they may then preach over again their old sermons."
He then told me that he had not visited New Hampshire for
ten years, and was much struck with the reform which, in that
interval, the temperance movement had worked in the hotels and
habits of the people. Mr. Mason, an eminent lawyer of Boston,
90 POST-OFFICE ABUSES. [CHAP. VI
since dead, with whom I afterward spoke on the same subject,
informed me that much stronger measures had been taken in
Massachusetts, where the Legislature first passed a law, that no
rum or ardent spirits should be sold without a license, and then
the magistrates in many townships resolved that within their
limits no licenses should be granted. " A most arbitrary pro
ceeding," he said, " and perhaps unconstitutional ; for the Fed
eral Government levies a duty on the importation of spirits, arid
this is a blow struck at their revenue. But you can have no
idea," he added, " how excess in drinking ruins the health in this
climate. I have just been reading the life of Lord Eldon, and
find that he was able, when in full work, to take with impunity
a bottle of port a day, which would kill any sedentary New
Englander in three years."
We left the stage when we reached the present terminus of
the Boston railway at Concord, and, anxious for letters from
England, went immediately to the post-office, where they told us
that the post-bag had been sent by mistake to Concord in Mas
sachusetts, the letters of that township having been forwarded to
this place. Such blunders are attributable to two causes, for
both of which the practical good sense of the American people
will, it is hoped, soon find a cure. Synonymous appellations
might be modified by additions of north and south, east and west,
&c. ; and the General Post-office might publish a directory, and
prohibit the future multiplication of the same names in a coun
try where not only new towns, but new states are every day start
ing into existence. The other evil is a political one ; the prac
tice first, I am told, carried out unscrupulously during the pres
identship of General Jackson, of regarding all placemen, down to
subordinate officials, such as the village post-master, as a body
of electioneering agents, who must support the Federal Govern
ment. They who happen, therefore, to be of opposite opinions,
must turn out as often as there is a change of ministry. On
more than one occasion I have known the stage make a circuit
of several miles in Massachusetts, to convey the mail to the
postmaster's residence, because, forsooth, in the said village, all
the houses which lay in the direct road belonging to trustworthy
CHAP. VI.] LOWELL FACTORIES. 91
men, were those of Whigs. In short, the mail, like the cabinet
at Washington, had to go out of its way to hunt up a respectable
democrat, and he, when found, has to learn, a new craft. By
leaving such places to the patronage of each state, this class of
abuses would be much lessened.
Oct. 14. — Next morning we received all our letters from
England, only a fortnight old, and had time to travel seventy-
five miles by railway to Boston before dark. When I took out
the tickets they told me we had no time to lose, saying, "Be as
spry as you can," meaning " quick," " active." From the cars
we saw the Merrimack at the rapids, foaming over the granite
rocks ; and, when I reflected on the extent of barren country
all round us, and saw many spaces covered with loose, moving
sands, like the dunes on the coast, I could not help admiring the
enterprise and industry which has created so much wealth in
this wilderness. We were told of the sudden increase of the
new town of Manchester, and passed Lowell, only twenty-five
years old, with its population of 2 0,000 inhabitants, and its
twenty-four churches and religious societies. Some of the man
ufacturing companies here have given notice that they will em
ploy no one who does not attend divine worship, and whose char
acter is not strictly moral. Most of the 9000 factory girls of
this place, concerning whom so much has been written, ought
not to be compared to those of England, as they only remain five
or six years in this occupation, and are taken in general from a
higher class in society. Bishop Potter, in his work entitled
" The School," tells us (p. 119) " that in the Boott factory there
were about 950 young women employed for five and a half years,
and that only one case was known of an illegitimate birth, and
then the mother was an Irish emigrant."
I was informed by a fellow-traveler that the joint-stock com
panies of Lowell have a capital of more than two millions ster
ling invested. "Such corporations," he said, "are too aristo
cratic for our ideas, and can combine to keep down the price of
wages." But one of the managers, in reply, assured me that
the competition of rival factories is great, and the work-people
pass freely from one company to another, being only required to
92 LOWELL FACTORIES. [CHAP. VI.
sign an agreement to give a fortnight's notice to quit. He also
maintained that, on the contrary, they are truly democratic insti
tutions, the shares being as low as 500 dollars, and often held
by the operatives, as some of them were by his own domestic
servants. By this system the work-people are prevented from
looking on the master manufacturers as belonging to a distinct
class, having different interests from their own. The holders of
small shares have all the advantages of partners, but are not
answerable for the debts of the establishment beyond their de
posits. They can examine all the accounts annually, when there
is a public statement of their affairs.
An English overseer told me that he and other foremen were
receiving here, and in other New England mills, two dollars and
two and a half dollars a day (8s. 6d. and 10s. 6d.),
CHAPTER VII.
Plymouth, Massachusetts. — Plymouth Beach. — Marine Shells. — Quicksand.
— Names of Pilgrim Fathers. — Forefathers' Day. — Pilgrim Relics. —
Their Authenticity considered. — Decoy Pond. — A Barn Traveling. —
Excursion to Salem. — Museum. — Warrants for Execution of Witches. —
Causes of the Persecution. — Conversation with Colored Abolitionists. —
Comparative Capacity of White and Negro Races. — Half Breeds and
Hybrid Intellects.
Oct. 15, 1845. — AFTER spending a day in Boston, we set
out by stage for Plymouth, Massachusetts, thirty-eight miles in
a southwest direction, for I wished to see the spot where the
Pilgrim Fathers landed, and where the first colony was founded
in New England. In the suburbs of Boston we went through
gome fine streets called the South Cove, the houses built on piles,
where I had seen a marsh only three years ago. It Avas a bright
day. and, as we skirted the noble bay, tho deep blue sea was seen
enlivened with the white sails of vessels laden with granite from
the quarries of Quincy, a village through which we soon after
ward passed.
When we had journeyed eighteen miles into the country I
was told we were in Adams-street, and afterward, when in a
winding lane with trees on each side, and without a house in
sight, that we were in Washington-street. But nothing could
surprise me again after having been told one day in New Hamp
shire, when seated on a rock in the midst of the wild woods, far
from any dwelling, that I was in the exact center of the town.
;' God made the country, and man mado the town,"
sang the poet Cowper : and I can well imagine how the village
pupils must be puzzled until the meaning of this verse has been
expounded to them by the schoolmaster.
On the whole, the scenery of the low granitic- region bordering
the Atlantic in New England preserves a uniform character over
a wide space, and is without striking features ; yet occasionally
the landscape is most agreeable. At one time we skirted a
94 PLYMOUTH BEACH. [CHAP. VII.
swamp bordered by red cedars ; at another a small lake, then
hills of barren sand, then a wood where the sumach and oak,
with red and yellow fading leaves, were mixed with pines ; then
suddenly a bare rock of granite or gneiss rises up, with one side
quite perpendicular, fifteen or twenty-five feet high, and covered
on its summit with birch, fir, and oak.
We admired the fine avenues of drooping elms in the streets
of Plymouth as we entered, and went to a small old-fashioned
inn called the Pilgrim House, where I hired a carriage, in which
the landlord drove us at once to see the bay and visit Plymouth
beach. This singular bar of sand, three miles long, runs across
part of the bay directly opposite the town, and, two miles distant
from it, serving as a breakwater to the port ; in spite of which the
sea has been making great inroads, and might have swept away all
the wharves but for this protection. As the bar was fast wasting
away, the Federal Government employed engineers to erect a wood
en framework, secured with piles, a mile long, which has been filled
with stones, and which has caused an accu'mulation of sand to take
place. This beach reminded me of the bar of Hurst Castle, in Hamp
shire ; and in both cases a stream enters the bay where the beach
joins the land. It is well known that the Plymouth bar was a
narrow neck of land eighty years ago ; and one of the inhabitants
told me that when a boy he had gathered nuts, wild grapes, and
plums there. Even fifty years ago some stumps of trees were
still remaining, whereas nothing now can be seen but a swamp,
a sea-beach, and some shoals adjoining them. Here I spent an
hour with my wife collecting shells, and we found eighteen species,
twelve peculiar to America, and six common to Europe ; namely,
Buccinum undatum, Purpura lapillus, Mya arenaria, Cyp-
rina islandica, Modiola papuana, and Mytilus edulis, all spe
cies which have a high northern range, and which, the geologist
will remark, are found fossil in the drift or glacial deposits both
of North America and Europe, and have doubtless continued to
inhabit both hemispheres from that era. South of Cape Cod the
mollusca are so different from the assemblage inhabiting the sea
north of that cape, that we may consider it as the limit of two
provinces of marine testacea.
CHAP. VIL] MARINE SHELLS.— QUICKSAND. 95
The most conspicuous shell scattered over the smooth sands
was the large and ponderous Mactra solidissima, some specimens
of which were six inches and a half in their greatest length, and
much larger and heavier than any British bivalve. The broad
and deep muscular impression in the interior of each valve is
indicative of a great power of clasping ; and I was assured by a
good zoologist of Boston that this mollusk has been known to
close upon the coot, or velvet duck (Fuligula fusca), and the
blue-winged teal (Anas discorsj, when they have been feeding
on them, holding these feathered enemies so fast by the beak or
claw, that the tide has come up and drowned them.
After we had been some time engaged in collecting shells, we
turned round and saw the horses of our vehicle sinking in a
quicksand, plunging violently, and evidently in the greatest terror.
For a few minutes our landlord, the driver, expected that they
and the carriage and himself would have been swallowed up ;
but he succeeded at last in quieting them, and after they had
rested for some time, though still trembling, they had strength
enough to turn round, and by many plunges to get back again to
a firm part of the beach.
The wind was bitterly cold, and we learned that on the even
ing before the sea had been frozen over near the shore ; yet it
was two months later when, on the 22d of December, 1620,
now called Forefathers' Day, the Pilgrims, consisting of 101
souls, landed here from the Mayflower. No wonder that half
of them perished from the severity of the first winter. They
who escaped seem, as if in compensation, to have been rewarded
with unusual longevity. We saw in the grave-yard the tombs
of not a few whose ages ranged from seventy-nine to ninety-nine
years. The names inscribed on their monuments are very char
acteristic of Puritan times, with a somewhat grotesque mixture
of other very familiar ones, as Jerusha, Sally, Adoniram, Consider,
Seth, Experience, Dorcas, Polly, Eunice, Eliphalet, Mercy, &c.
The New Englanders laugh at the people of the " Old Colony"
for remaining in a primitive state, and are hoping that the rail
road from Boston, now nearly complete, may soon teach them to
go a-head, But they who visit the town for the sake of old
06 PILGRIM FATHERS.— RELICS. [CHAP. VII.
associations, will not complain of the antique style of many of
the buildings, and the low rooms with paneled walls, and huge
wooden beams projecting from the ceilings, such as I never saw
elsewhere in America. Some houses built of brick brought from
Holland, notwithstanding the abundance of brick-earth in the
neighborhood, were pointed out to us in Leyden-street, so called
from the last town in Europe where the pilgrims sojourned after
they had been driven out of their native country by religious
persecution. In some private houses we were interested in
many venerated heir-looms, kept as relics of the first settlers,
and among others an antique chair of carved wood, which came
over in the Mayflower, and still retains the marks of the staples
which fixed it to the floor of the cabin. This, together with a
seal of Governor Winslow, was shown me by an elderly lady,
Mrs. Haywood, daughter of a Winslow and a White, and who
received them from her grandmother. In a public building,
called Pilgrim Hall, we saw other memorials of the same kind ;
as, for example, a chest or cabinet, which had belonged to Pere
grine White, the first child born in the colony, and which came
to him from his mother, and had been preserved to the fifth
generation in the same family, when it was presented by them
to the Museum. By the side of it was a pewter dish, also given
by the White family. In the same collection, they have a chair
brought over in the Mayflower, and the helmet of King Philip,
the Indian chief, with whom the first settlers had many a des
perate fight.
A huge fragment of granite, a boulder which lay sunk in the
beach, has always been traditionally declared to have been the
exact spot which the feet of the Pilgrims first trod when they
landed here ; and part of this same rock still remains on the
wharf, while another portion has been removed to the center of
the town, and inclosed within an iron railing, on which the
names of forty-two of the Pilgrim Fathers are inscribed. They
who can not sympathize warmly with the New Englanders for
cherishing these precious relics, are not to be envied, and it is a
praiseworthy custom to celebrate an annual festival, not only
here, but in places several thousand miles distant. Often at
CHAP. VII.] PEREGRINE WHITE. 97
New Orleans, and in other remote parts of the Union, we hear
of settlers from the North meeting on the 22d of December to
commemorate the birth-day of New England ; and when they
speak fondly of their native hills and valleys, and recall their
early recollections, they are drawing closer the ties which bind
together a variety of independent States into one great confeder
ation.
Colonel Perkins, of Boston, well known for his munificence,
especially in founding the Asylum for the Blind, informed me,
in 1846, that there was but one link wanting in the chain of
personal communication between him and Peregrine White, the
first white child born in Massachusetts, a few days after the
Pilgrims landed. White lived to an advanced age, and was
known to a man of the name of Cobb, whom Colonel Perkins
visited, in 1807, with some friends who yet survive. Cobb died
in 1808, the year after Colonel Perkins saw him. He was then
blind ; but his memory fresh for every thing which had happened
in his manhood. He had served as a soldier at the taking of
Louisbourg in Cape Breton, in 1745, and remembered when
there were many Indians near Plymouth. The inhabitants
occasionally fired a cannon near the town to frighten them, and
to this cannon the Indians gave the name of " Old Speakum."
When we consider the grandeur of the results w7hich have
been realized in the interval of 225 years, since the Mayflower
sailed into Plymouth harbor — how in that period a nation of
twenty millions of souls has sprung into existence and peopled a
vast continent, and covered it with cities, and churches, schools,
colleges, and railroads, and filled its rivers and ports with steam
boats and shipping — we regard the Pilgrim relics with that kind
of veneration which trivial objects usually derive from high an
tiquity alone. For we measure time not by the number of arith
metical figures representing years or centuries, but by the import
ance of a long series of events, which strike the imagination.
When I expressed these sentiments to a Boston friend, he asked
me, " Why, then, may we not believe in the relics of the early
Christians displayed at Rome, which they say the mother of
Constantine brought home from the Holy Land only three cen-
VOL. i. — E
98 AUTHENTICITY OF RELICS. [CHAP. VII.
turies after Christ — such, for example, as the true cross, the cradle
in which the infant Jesus lay, the clothes in which he was wrap
ped up, and the table on which the last Supper was laid ? The
Puritans also believed, as do their descendants, that they were
suffering in the cause of religious truth, and this feeling may have
imparted additional sanctity to all memorials of their exile and
adventures ; yet how incomparably greater must have been the
veneration felt by the early Christians for all that belonged to
their divine teacher !" These observations led me to dwell on
the relative authenticity of the relics in the two cases — the clear
ness of the historical evidence in the one, its worthlessness in the
other. It has been truly said that the strength of every chain
of historical testimony, like that of a chain of brass or iron, must
be measured by the force of its weakest link. The earliest links
in every traditional tale are usually the weakest ; but in the case
of the sacred objects said to have been obtained by Queen Helena,
there are more links absolutely wanting, or a greater chasm of
years without any records whatever, than the whole period which
separates our times from those of the Pilgrim Fathers. The
credulity of Helena, the notorious impostures of the monks of her
age, the fact that three centuries elapsed before it was pretended
that the true cross had been preserved, and another century be
fore it was proved to be genuine by miracles, and a still further
lapse of time before all doubt was set at rest by the resuscitation
of a dead person — the extravagance of supposing that the Chris
tians, when they escaped with difficulty from Jerusalem, just be
fore the siege, should have carried with them in their flight so
cumbersome a piece of furniture as the table, have all been well
exposed.^ But in regard to the genuineness of all the Pilgrim
treasures shown me at Plymouth and elsewhere I indulged entire
faith, until one day ray confidence was disturbed in the Museum
at Salem. A piece of furniture which came over in the May
flower was pointed out to me, and the antiquary who was my
guide remarked, that as the wood of the true cross, scattered over
Christendom, has been said to be plentiful enough to build a man-
of-war, so it might be doubted whether a ship of the line would
* Second Travels of an Irish Gentleman, 1833, vol. ii. p. 186
CHAP. VII.] DECOY POND. 99
contain all the heavy articles which freighted the Mayflower in
her first voyage, although she was a vessel of only 180 tons. I
immediately recollected a large heavy table, which I had seen in
1842, in the rooms of the Historical Society at Boston, which
they told me had come over in the Mayflower, and my attention
had been called to the marks of the staples which fixed it to the
cabin floor. I accordingly returned to that Museum, and found
there the sword of Elder Brewster, as well as that with which
Colonel Church cut off King Philip's ear, and the gun with which
that formidable Indian warrior was shot. The heavy table, too,
was there, measuring two feet six inches in height, six feet in
length, and five feet in breadth, and I asked Mr. Savage, the
President of the Society, how they obtained it. It had certainly
belonged, he said, to Governor Carver, but reasonable doubts
were entertained whether it had ever been brought to New En
gland in the Mayflower, especially in the month of December,
1620; "for you are aware," he added, "that the Mayflower
made several voyages, and at each trip imported many valuables
of this kind." In an instant, more than half my romance about
the Pilgrim relics was dispelled. They lost half the charms with
which my implicit faith had invested them, for I began to con
sider how many of the chairs and tables I had gazed upon with
so much interest, might have been "made to order," by cabinet
makers in the old country, and sent out to the new colonists.
Byron has said —
^r There's not a joy this world can give like that it takes away ;"
and some may think the same of certain lines of historical re
search. I must, however, declare my firm belief that some of
the articles shown me at Plymouth are true and genuine relics
of the olden time — treasures which really accompanied the heroic
band who first landed on the beach of Plymouth Bay, and which
deserve to be handed down with reverential care to posterity.
On our way back from Plymouth to Boston, we passed near
the village of East Weymouth, by a decoy pond, where eight
wild geese, called Canada geese, had been shot since the morn
ing. Swimming in the middle of a sheet of water was a tame
100 EXCURSION TO SALEM. [CHAP. VII.
goose, having one leg tied by a string to a small leaden weight ;
and near it were a row of wooden imitations of geese, the sight
of which, and the cries of the tame goose, attract the wild birds.
As soon as they fly down they are shot by sportsmen of a true
New England stamp, not like the Indian hunters, impatient of
a sedentary life or steady labor, but industrious cobblers, each sit
ting all day at his own door, with his loaded gun lying by his
side, his hands occupied in stitching " russet brogans" or boots
for the southern negroes, to be sold at the rate of twenty cents, or
tenpence a pair. After working an hour or two, he seizes his
gun, and down comes a goose, which may fetch in the Boston
market, in full season, two and a half dollars — the value of a
dozen pair of brogans.
As we approached the capital, we met a large wooden barn
drawn by twenty-four oxen. It was placed on rollers, which
were continually shifted from behind forward, as fast as the barn
passed over them. The removal of this large building had be
come necessary, because it stood directly in the way of the new
railway from Boston to Plymouth, which is to be opened in a few
weeks. A fellow-traveler told us of a wooden meeting-house in
Hadley, which had been transferred in like manner to a more
populous part of the township. " In English steeple-chases,"
said he, " the church itself, I believe, does not take part ?"
Nov. 6. — Made an excursion to the seaport of Salem, about
fourteen miles to the N.E. of Boston, a place of 17,000 inhab
itants, f
Dr. Wheatland, a young physician, to whom I had gone
without letters of introduction, politely showed us over the
Museum of Natural History, of which he was curator; and
over another full of articles illustrative of the arts, manners, and
customs of the East Indies, China, and Japan ; for this city is a
great resort of retired merchants and sea-captains. In both col
lections there are a variety of objects which may appear, on a
hasty view, to form a heterogeneous and unmeaning jurnble, but
which are really curious and valuable. Such repositories ought
to accompany public libraries in every large city, for they aflord
a kind of instruction which can not be obtained from books. To
CHAP. VIL] MUSEUM. 101
public lectures, which are much encouraged here, and are effective
means of stimulating the minds of all classes, especially the mid
dle and lower, they furnish essential aid. Among other specimens
of natural history, too large to be conveniently accommodated in
any private house, I was glad of an opportunity of examining the
great jaw-bones arid teeth of the Squalus serridens, from the
South Seas, which reminded me, by their serrated outline, of the
teeth of the fossil Zeuglodon, hereafter to be mentioned. I was
well pleased to observe that the shells of the neighboring coast
had not been neglected, for people are often as ignorant of the
natural history of the region they inhabit, especially of the lakes,
rivers, and the sea, as of the flora and fauna of the antipodes.
Many curious log-books of the early sea-captains of this port, who
ventured in extreme ignorance of geography on distant voyages,
are preserved here, and attest the daring spirit of those hardy
navigators. Some of them sailed to India by the Cape, without
a single chart or map, except that small one of the world, on
Mercator's projection, contained in Guthrie's Geography. They
used no sextants, but, working their dead-reckoning with chalk
on a plank, guessed at the sun's position with their hand at noon.
They had usually no capital, but started with a few beads and
trinkets, and in exchange for these trifles often obtained the skins
of sea-otters in the Oregon territory, each worth no less than 100
dollars. They also obtained sandal-wood in the Sandwich Islands,
and bartered these and other articles in China for tea. On such
slender means, and so lately as after the separation of the colonies
from England, at a time when there was not a single American
ship of war in the Indian or Chinese seas to protect their com
merce, did many merchants of Boston and Salem lay the founda
tions of the princely fortunes they now enjoy.
In the course of the day we visited the court-house at Salem,
where they keep the warrants issued by the judges to the high-
sheriff' in the years 1692 and 1693, for the execution of witches
condemned to death. Here we read the depositions of witnesses,
attesting such facts as that heifers and horses had died, and that
cats had been taken ill, and that a man had been pierced by a
knitting-needle to the depth of four inches, the wound healing
102 EXECUTION OF WITCHES. [CHAP. VII.
the instant the witch had been taken up. A bottle is preserved,
which had been handed in to the Court at the time of the trial,
full of pins, with which young women had been tormented. Some
of the girls, from whose bodies these pins had been extracted,
afterward confessed to a conspiracy. In the evening we walked
to the place called Gallows Hill, in the suburbs of the city, where
no less than nineteen persons were hanged as witches in the
course of fifteen months.
It is impossible not to shudder when we reflect that these
victims of a dark superstition were tried, so late as the year 1692,
by intelligent men, by judges who, though they may have been
less learned, are reputed to have been as upright as Sir Matthew
Hale, who, in England, condemned a witch to death in 1665.
The prisoners were also under the protection of a jury, and the
forms of law, copied from the British courts, so favorable to the
accused in capital offenses. We learn from history that an
epidemic resembling epilepsy raged at the time in Massachusetts,
and, being attributed to witchcraft, solemn fasts and meetings for
extraordinary prayers were appointed, to implore Heaven to avert
that evil, thereby consecrating and confirming the popular belief
in its alleged cause. As the punishment of the guilty was thought
to be a certain remedy for the disorder, the morbid imagination
of the patient prompted him to suspect some individual to be the
author of his sufferings, arid his evidence that he had seen spectral
apparitions of witches inflicting torments on him was received as
conclusive. One hundred and fifty persons were in prison await
ing trial, and two hundred others had been presented to the
magistrate, when the delusion was dissipated by charges being
brought against the wife of the Governor Phipps, and some of
the nearest relatives of Mather, an influential divine. It was
then found that by far the greater number of atrocities had been
prompted by fear ; for during this short reign of terror the popular
mind was in so disordered a state, that almost every one had to
choose between being an accuser or a victim, and from this motive
many afterward confessed that they had brought charges against
the innocent.* The last executions for witchcraft in England
* See " Graham's History," vol. i. ch. v. p. 392.
CHAP. VII.] CAUSES OF THE PERSECUTION. 103
were as late as 1716 ; but still later, in 1766, the Seceders in
Scotland published an act of their associate Presbytery, denounc
ing that memorable act of the English parliament which repealed
all the penal statutes against witchcraft.
The equal reverence paid by the Puritans and Scotch Seceders
to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures (if, indeed, they did not
hold the Old Testament in greater veneration than the New),
was the chief cause of the superstition which led to these judicial
murders. They had, indeed, in common with other Protestant
sects, rejected the miracles ascribed to the Christian saints of the
middle ages, because they were not supported by sufficient his
torical testimony. They had stood forward in the face of cruel
persecutions courageously to vindicate the right of private judg
ment ; arid they held it to be not only the privilege, but the duty,
of every Christian, layman or ecclesiastic, to exercise his reason,
and not yield himself up blindly to the authority of an earthly
teacher. Yet if any one dared, in 1692, to call in question the
existence of the witchcraft, he was stigmatized as an infidel, and
refuted by the story of the Witch of Endor evoking the ghost of
the dead Samuel. Against the recurrence of such dreadful
crimes as those perpetrated in the years 1602—93, society is now
secured, not by judges and juries of a more conscientious charac
ter or deeper sense of religious responsibility, but by the general
spread of knowledge, or that more enlightened public opinion,
which can never exist in the same perfection in the minds of the
initiated few, so long as the multitude with whom they must be
in contact are kept in darkness.
On our return from Salem to Boston, we found the seats im
mediately before us in the railway car occupied by two colored
men, who were laughing and talking familiarly with two negro
women, apparently servant maids. The women left us at th^
first station, and we then entered into conversation with the
men who, perceiving by our accent, that we were foreign
ers, were curious to know what we thought of their country.
Hearing that it was our intention to winter in the south, the
elder traveler " hoped we should not be tainted there." My
wife, supposing he alluded to the yellow fever, said, « We shall
101 COLORED ABOLITIONISTS. [CHAP. VII
be there in the cool season." He replied, "I was thinking of the
moral atmosphere of the southern states." His pronunciation and
expression were so entirely those of a well-educated white man, that
we were surprised, and, talking freely with him and his companion,
learnt that the elder, who was very black, but not quite a full negro,
was from Delaware, and had been educated at an " abolition college"
in Ohio. The younger, who was still darker, had been a slave in
Kentucky, and had run away. They were traveling to collect
funds for a school for runaway negroes, near Detroit, and expressed
great satisfaction that at Salem they had found " the colored and
white children all taught together in the same school, this not
being the case in Boston." I told them that I had just seen a
white landholder from Barbadoes, who had assured me that
emancipation had answered wrell in that island ; that there was
a colored man in the legislature, another in the executive council,
arid several in the magistracy, and that much progress had been
made in the general education of the blacks. The Delawarian
remarked that this was cheering news, because the recent bad
success of his race in Hayti had been used as an argument by
the southern planters against their natural capacity for civiliza
tion. He then descanted on the relative liberality of feeling to
ward colored men in the various free states, and was very severe
on Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio. I expressed surprise in regard to
Ohio ; but the KLentuckian affirmed that the law there afforded no
real equality of protection to the black man, as he could not give
evidence in courts of law, but must procure a white man as a
witness. There had been a scuffle, he said, lately between a man
of color and a white at Dayton, and, on the white being killed,
the mob had risen and pulled down the houses of all the other
black people. He went on narrating stories of planters shooting
their slaves, and other tales of Kentucky, the accuracy of which
my subsequent visit to that state gave me good reason to question.
But I could not help being amused with the patriotism of this
man ; for, however unenviable he may have found his condition
as a slave, he was still a thorough Kentuckian, and ready to
maintain that in climate, soil, and every other quality, that state
was immeasurably superior to the rest of the Union, especially
CHAP. VII.] WHITE AND NEGRO RACES. 105
to Ohio, emancipation alone being wanting to demonstrate this
fact to the world.
This adventure confirmed me in the opinion I had previously
formed, that if the colored men had fair play, and were carefully
educated, they might soon be safely intrusted with equality of
civil and political rights. Whatever may be their present infe
riority as a race, some of them have already shown superior
abilities to a great many of the dominant whites. Whether, in
the course of many generations, after the intense prejudices in
dulged against them have abated, they would come up to the
intellectual standard of Europeans, is a question which time
alone can decide. It has been affirmed by some anatomists that
the brain of an adult negro resembles that of a white child ; and
Tiedemann, judging by the capacity of the cranium, found the
brains of some of our uncivilized British ancestors not more de
veloped than the average sized negro's brain. He says, " there
is undoubtedly a very close connection between the absolute size
of the brain, and the intellectual powers and functions of the
mind." After a long series of observations and measurements,
he refutes the idea that the brain of a negro has more resem
blance to that of the orang-outang than the European brain.*1
Mr. Owen, having some years ago made a post-mortem exam
ination at St. Bartholomew's Hospital of the brain of an adult
Irish laborer, found that it did not weigh more than the average
brain of a youth from the educated classes of the age of fourteen ;
and he tells me, in a letter on this subject, that he is not aware
" of any modification of form or size in the negro's brain that
would support an inference that the Ethiopian race would not
profit by the same influences favoring mental and moral im
provement, which have tended to elevate the primitively barbar
ous white races of men."
The separation of the colored children in the Boston schools,
before alluded to, arose, as I afterward learned, not from an in
dulgence in anti-negro feelings, but because they find they can
in this way bring on both races faster. Up to the age of four
teen the black children advance as fast as the whites ; but after
* Phil. Trans. London, 1836, p. 497.
106 HALF BREEDS. [CHAP. VII.
that age, unless there be an admixture of white blood, it becomes
in most instances extremely difficult to carry them forward.
That the half breeds should be intermediate between the two
parent stocks, and that the colored race should therefore gain in
mental capacity in proportion as it approximates in physical
organization to the whites, seems natural ; and yet it is a won
derful fact, psychologically considered, that we should be able to
trace the phenomena of hybridity even into the world of intellect
and reason.
CHAPTER VIII.
Pretended Fossil Sea Serpent, or Zeuglodon, from Alabama. — Recent
Appearance of a Sea Serpent in Gulf of St. Lawrence. — In Norway, in
1845. — Near Cape Ann, Massachusetts, 1817. — American Descriptions.
— Conjectures as to Nature of the Animal. — Sea Snake stranded in the
Orkneys proved to be a Shark. — Dr. Barclay's Memoir. — Sir Everard
Home's Opinion. — Sea Serpent of Hebrides, 1808. — Reasons for con
cluding that Pontopiddan's Sea Snake was a basking Shark. — Capt.
M'Quhae's Sea Serpent.
DURING the first part of my stay in Boston, October, 1845,
we one day saw the walls in the principal streets covered with
placards, in which the words SEA SERPENT ALIVE figured con
spicuously. On approaching near enough to read the smaller
type of this advertisement, I found that Mr. Koch was about to
exhibit to the Bostonians the fossil skeleton of " that colossal and
terrible reptile the sea serpent, which, ivhen alive, measured
thirty feet in circumference." The public were also informed
that this hydrarchos, or water king, was the leviathan of the
Book of Job, chapter xli. I shall have occasion in the sequel,
when describing rny expedition in Alabama to the exact site
from whence these fossil remains were disinterred by Mr. Koch,
of showing that they belong to the zeuglodon, first made out by
Mr. Owen to be an extinct cetacean of truly vast dimensions,
and which I ascertained to be referable geologically to the
Eocene period.
In the opinion of the best comparative anatomists, there is no
reason to believe that this fossil whale bore any resemblance in
form, when alive, to a snake, although the bones of the vertebral
column, having been made to form a continuous series, more than
100 feet in length, by the union of vertebrae derived from more
than one individual, were ingeniously arranged by Mr. Koch in
a serpentine form, so as to convey the impression that motion
was produced by vertical flexures of the body.
At the very time when I had every day to give an answer to
108 SEA SERPENT IN GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE. [CHAP. VIII.
the question whether I really believed the great fossil skeleton
from Alabama to be that of the sea serpent formerly seen on the
coast near Boston, I received news of the reappearance of the
same serpent, in a letter from my friend Mr. J. W. Dawson, of
Pictou, in Nova Scotia. This geologist, with whom I explored
Nova Scotia in 1842, said he was collecting evidence for me of
the appearance, in the month of August, 1845, at Merigomish,
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, of a marine monster, about 100
feet long, seen by two intelligent observers, nearly aground in
calm water, within 200 feet of the beach, where it remained in
sight about half an hour, and then got off with difficulty. One
of the witnesses went up a bank in order to look down upon it.
They said it sometimes raised its head (which resembled that of
a seal) partially out of the water. Along its back were a num
ber of humps or protuberances, which, in the opinion of the ob
server on the beach, were true humps, while the other thought
they were produced by vertical flexures of the body. Between
the head and the first protuberance there was a straight part of
the back of considerable length, and this part was generally
above water. The color appeared black, and the skin had a
rough appearance. The animal was seen to bend its body
almost into a circle, and again to unbend it with rapidity. It
was slender in proportion to its length. After it had disappeared
in deep water, its wake was visible for some time. There were
no indications of paddles seen. Some other persons who saw it
compared the creature to a long string of fishing-net buoys
moving rapidly about. In the course of the summer, the fisher
men on the eastern shore of Prince Edward's Island, in the Gulf
of St. Lawrence, had been terrified by this sea monster, and the
year before, October, 1844, a similar creature swam slowly past
the pier at Arisaig, near the east end of Nova Scotia, and, there
being only a slight breeze at the time, was attentively observed
by Mr. Barry, a millwright of Pictou, who told Mr. Dawson he
was within 120 feet of it, and estimated its length at sixty feet,
and the thickness of its body at three feet. It had humps on
the back, which seemed too small and close together to be bends
of the body.
CHAP. VIII.] NORWEGIAN SEA SERPENT. 109
The body appeared also to move in long undulations, includ
ing many of the smaller humps. In consequence of this motion
the head and tail were sometimes both out of sight and some
times both above water, as represented in the annexed outline,
given from memory.
Drawing from memory of a sea serpent seen at Arisaig, Nova Scotia, Oct. 1844.
The head, a, was rounded and obtuse in front, and was never
elevated more than a foot above the surface. The tail was
pointed, appearing like half of a mackerel's tail. The color of
the part seen was black.
It was suggested by Mr. Dawson that a swell in the sea
might give the deceptive appearance of an undulating movement,
as it is well known " that a stick held horizontally at the surface
of water when there is a ripple seems to have an uneven outline."
But Mr. Barry replied that he observed the animal very atten
tively, having read accounts of the sea serpent, and feels confi
dent that the undulations were not those of the water.
This reappearance of the monster, commonly called the sea
serpent, was not confined to the Gulf of St. Lawrence ; for, two
months after I left Boston, a letter from one Captain Lawson
went the round of the American papers, dated February, 1846,
giving a description of a marine creature seen by him from his
schooner, when off the coast of Virginia, between Capes Henry
and Charles — body about 100 feet long, with pointed projections
(query, dorsal fins ?) on the back ; head small in proportion to
its length.
Precisely in the same years, in July, 1845, and August, 1846,
contemporaneous, and evidently independent accounts were col
lected iii Norway, and published in their papers, of a marine
animal, of " a rare and singular kind," seen by fishermen and
others, the evidence being taken down by clergymen, surgeons,
and lawyers, whose names are given, and some of whom de-
110 NORWEGIAN SEA SERPENT. [CHAP. VIII.
clared that they can now no longer doubt that there lives in
their seas some monster, which has given rise to the tales pub
lished by Pontopiddan, Bishop of Bergen, in his Natural History
of Norway (1752), who gave an engraving, which the living wit
nesses declare to be very like what they saw.
Fig. 2.
_ ...«_.. .*^L
Pontoppidan's figure of the Norwegian sea serpent, published 1752.
These appearances were witnessed in 1845, near Christian-
sand, and at Molde, and in the parish of Sund, the animal enter
ing fiords in hot weather, when the sea was calm. The length
of the creature was from sixty to one hundred feet ; color dark,
body smooth, and in thickness, like that of a stout man ; swim
ming swiftly with serpentine movement, both horizontally and
up and down, raising its blunted head occasionally above the
water ; its eyes bright, but these not perceived by some witnesses ;
its undulating course like that of an eel ; its body lay on the sea
like a number of " large kegs," the water much agitated by its
rapid movements, and the waves broke on the shore as when a
steam-boat is passing. From the back of the head a mane like
that of a horse commenced, which waved backward and forward
in the water. Archdeacon Deinboll says, that " the eye-witnesses,
whose testimony he collected, were not so seized with fear as to
impair their powers of observation ; and one of them, when
within musket shot, had fired at the monster, and is certain the
shots hit him in the head, after which he dived, but came up
again immediately."
In reading over these recent statements, drawn up by observers
on both sides of the Atlantic, it is impossible not to be struck
with their numerous points of agreement, both with each other
and with those recorded by the New Englanders between the
years 1815 and 1825, when the sea serpent repeatedly visited
the coast of North America. There is even a coincidence in
CHAP. VIII.] AMERICAN DESCRIPTIONS. Ill
most of the contradictions of those who have attempted to describe
what they saw of the color, form, and motion of the animal. At
each of these periods the creature was seen by some persons who
were on the shore, and who could take a leisurely survey of it,
without their imaginations being disturbed by apprehensions of
personal danger. On the other hand, the consternation of the
fishermen in Norway, the Hebrides, and America, who have
encountered this monster, is such, that we are entitled to ask the
question — Is it possible they can have seen nothing more than
an ordinary whale or shark, or a shoal of porpoises, or some other
known cetacean or fish ?
So great a sensation was created by the appearance of a huge
animal, in August, 1817, and for several successive years in the
harbor of Gloucester, Massachusetts, near Cape Ann, that the
Linnsean Society of Boston appointed a committee to collect
evidence on the subject. T am well acquainted with two of the
three gentlemen, Dr. Bigelow and Mr. F. C. Gray, who drew up
the report, which gives in detail the depositions of numerous wit
nesses who saw the creature on shore or at sea, some of them
from a distance of only ten yards. " The monster," they say,
" was from eighty to ninety feet long, his head usually carried
about two feet above water ; of a dark brown color ; the body
with thirty or more protuberances, compared by some to four-
gallon kegs, by others to a string of buoys, and called by several
persons bunches on the back ; motion very rapid, faster than
those of a whale, swimming a mile in three minutes, and some
times more, leaving a wake behind him ; chasing mackerel, her
rings, and other fish, which were seen jumping out of the water,
fifty at a time, as he approached. He only came to the surface
of the sea in calm and bright weather. A skillful gunner fired
at him from a boat, and, having taken good aim, felt sure he
must have hit him on the head ; the creature turned toward him,
then dived under the boat, and reappeared a hundred yards on
the other side."
Just as they were concluding their report, an unlucky accident
raised a laugh at the expense of the Linnsean Committee, and
enabled the incredulous to turn the whole matter into ridicule.
112 AMERICAN DESCRIPTIONS. [CHAP. VIII.
It happened that a common New England species of land snake
( Coluber constrictor}, full grown, and about three feet long, which
must have been swept out to sea, was cast ashore, and brought
to the committee. It had a series of humps on its back, caused
by the individual happening to have a diseased spine — a fact
which can no longer be disputed, for I have seen the identical
specimen, which is still preserved in spirits in the Museum of
New Haven. As many of the deponents declared this snake to
be an exact miniature of the great monster, the Committee con
cluded that it might be its young, and, giving a figure of it,
conferred upon it the high-sounding appellation of Scoliophys
AtloMicus, the generic name being derived from the Greek
OKokiog, scolios, flexible, and o<2l>£f, ophis, snake.
In addition to these published statements, Colonel Perkins, of
Boston, had the kindness to lay before me his notes, made in
July, 1817, when he saw the animal. He counted fourteen pro
jections, six feet apart, on the back, which he imagined to be
vertical flexures of the body when in motion ; but he also saw
the body bent horizontally into the figure of the letter S. It
was of a chocolate brown color, the head flat, and about a foot
across. A friend of his took a pencil sketch of it, which was
found to resemble Pontoppidan's figure.*' Respecting the length,
Mr. Mansfield, a friend of the Colonel, was driving a one-horse
vehicle on a road skirting Gloucester Bay, along the edge of a
cliff, fifty or sixty feet in perpendicular height, when he saw the
sea-serpent at the base of the cliff on the white beach, where
there was not more than six or seven feet water, and, giving the
reins to his wife, looked down upon the creature, and made up
his mind that it was ninety feet long. He then took his wife to
the spot, and asked her to guess its length, and she said it was
as long as the wharf behind their house, and this measured about
100 feet. While they were looking down on it, the creature
appeared to be alarmed, and started off. I asked another Bos-
tonian, Mr. Cabot, who saw the monster in 1818, whether it
might not have been a shoal of porpoises followirg each other in
a line, at the distance of one or two yards, and tumbling over so
* See "Silliman's Journal," vol. ii. p. 156.
CHAP. V1IL] AMERICAN DESCRIPTIONS. 113
as to resemble a string of floating barrels in motion. He said
that after this explanation had been suggested to him, he was
one of thirty persons who ran along the beach at Nahant, near
Boston, when the sea serpent was swimming very near the shore.
They were all convinced that it was one animal, and they saw
it raise its head out of the water. He added that there were at
that time two sea serpents fishing in the Bay at once.
Among many American narratives of this phenomenon -which
have been communicated to me, I shall select one given me by
my friend Mr. William M'llvaine of Philadelphia, because it
seems to attest the fact of the creature having wandered as far
south as Cape Hatteras, in North Carolina, lat. 35°. " Captain
Johnson, of New Jersey, was sailing, in the year 1806, from the
West Indies, on the inner edge of the gulf stream, in a deeply
laden brig, when they were becalmed, and the crew and passen
gers awe-struck by the sudden apparition of a creature having a
cylindrical body of great length, and which lifted up its head
eight feet above the water. After gazing at them for several
minutes it retreated, making large undulations like a snake."
The story had been so much discredited that the captain would
only relate it to intimate friends.
After the year 1817, every marvelous tale was called in the
United States a snake story ; and when Colonel Perkins went to
Washington twenty years ago, and was asked if he had ever
known a person who had seen the sea serpent, he answered that
he was one of the unfortunate individuals who saw it himself. I
confess that when I left America in 1846, I was in a still more
unfortunate predicament, for I believed in the sea serpent with
out having seen it. Not that I ever imagined the northern seas
to be now inhabited by a gigantic ophidian, for this hypothesis
has always seemed to me in the highest degree improbable, seeing
that, in the present state of the globe, there is no great develop
ment of reptile life in temperate or polar regions, whether in the
northern or southern hemisphere. When we enter high latitudes,
such as those in which the creature called a sea serpent most
frequently occurs, we find even the smaller reptilians, such as
frogs and newts, to grow rare or disappear ; and there are no
114 SEA MONSTER AT STRONSA. [CHAP. VIII.
representatives of the hydrophis or true water-snake, nor of tor
toises, nor of the batrachian or lizard tribes.
In like manner, in the geological periods, immediately ante
cedent to that when the present molluscous fauna came into
existence, there was a similar absence of large reptiles, although
there were then, as now, in colder latitudes, many huge sharks,
seals, narwals, and whales. If, however, the creature observed
in North America and Norway, should really prove to be some
unknown species of any one of these last-mentioned families of
vertebrata, I see no impropriety in its retaining the English
name of sea serpent, just as one of the seals is now called a sea
elephant, and a small fish of the Mediterranean, a sea horse ;
while other marine animals are named sea mice and urchins,
although they have only a fanciful resemblance to hedgehogs or
mice.
Some naturalists have argued that, if it were an undescribed
species, some of its bones must, ere this, have been washed ashc-re ;
but I question whether we are as yet so well acquainted with all
the tenants of the great deep as to entitle us to attach much
weight to this argument from negative evidence ; and I learn
from good zoologists that there are whales so rare as never to
have been seen since Sibbald described them in the middle of
the seventeenth century. There is also a great cetacean, about
thirty feet long, called Delphinorhyncus micropterus, of which
only three specimens have ever been met with. One of these
was thrown ashore forty years ago on the coast of Scotland, and
the other two stranded on the shores of Belgium and France, and
identified with the British species by Dr. Melville.
The doubts, however, which since my return from the United
States, I have been led to entertain respecting the distinct and
independent existence of the sea serpent, arise from a strong sus
picion that it is a known species of sea animal which has% actu
ally been cast ashore in the Orkneys, and that some of its bones
are now preserved in our museums, showing it to be of the
squaline family, and no stranger to some of the zoologists whom
it has perplexed, nor to many of the seafaring people whom it
has frightened. In the summer of the year 1808, the fishermen
CHAP. VIII.] SEA MONSTER AT STRONSA. 115
of the Hebrides were terrified by a monster of huge size and
unusual appearance, which created a great sensation in Scotland.
Three or four months after this apparition, the body of an enor
mous sea monster was washed ashore (Sept. 1808) on the outer
reefs at Rothesholm Head in Stronsa, one of the Orkneys, where
it was first observed while still entire, and its length measured
by two persons; after which, when somewhat decayed, it was
swept in by another storm, and stranded on the beach, and there
examined by others. Mr. Neill, well known as a naturalist,
who had been on a visit to Stronsa the same year, but had left
before this occurrence, immediately corresponded with friends on
the spot, among others with Mr. Laing, the historian, and with
a lawyer and physician, who collected evidence for him. Their
affidavits, taken in 1808, respecting the monster, were published
in the Transactions of the Wernerian Society, of which Mr.
Neill was secretary, and were accompanied by a drawing of the
skeleton, obviously ideal and very incorrect, with six legs and a
long tail curving several times vertically. The man who sketched
it reached the spot too late, and when scarcely any part of the
animal remained entire, and the outline is admitted to have been
taken by him and altered from a figure chalked out upon a table
by another man who had seen it, while one witness denied its
resemblance to what he had seen. But a carpenter, whose
veracity, I am informed by Mr. Neill (in a letter dated 1848),
may be trusted, had measured the carcass, when still whole, with
his foot-rule, and found it to be fifty-five long, while a person
who also measured it when entire, said it was nine fathoms long.
The bristles of the mane, each fourteen inches in length, and
described as having been luminous in the dark, were no doubt
portions of a dorsal fin in a state of decomposition. One said
that this mane extended from the shoulders to within two feet
and a half of the tail, another that it reached to the tail : a
variance which may entitle us to call in question the alleged con
tinuity of the mane down the whole back. So strong was the
propensity in Scotland to believe that the Stronsa animal was the
sea serpent of the Norwegians, that Mr. Neill himself, after draw
ing up for the Wernerian Society his description of it from the
116 SIR EVERARD HOME'S OPINION. [CHAP. VIII.
different accounts communicated to him, called it Halsydrus Pon-
toppidani.
Parts of the cranium, scapular arch, fin, and vertebral column
were sent to Dr. Barclay of Edinburgh, who had at that time
the finest museum of comparative anatomy north of the Tweed,
and he conceived them to belong to a new and entirely unknown
monster.
If the imagination of good zoologists could be so preoccupied
as to cause them at once to jump to the conclusion that the
Stronsa animal and the Norwegian sea serpent were one and the
same, we can not be surprised that the public in general placed
the most implicit faith in that idea. That they did so, is proved
by a passage recently published in Beattie's Life of Campbell,
where the poet writes thus, in a letter dated February 13th,
1809: —
" Of real life let me see what I have heard for the last fort
night : first, a snake — rny friend Telford received a drawing of it
— has been found thrown on the Orkney Isles ; a sea snake with
a mane like a horse, four feet thick, and fifty-five feet long. This
is seriously true. Malcolm Laing, the historian, saw it, and sent
a drawing of it to my friend."^
Now here we see the great inaccuracy of what may be styled
contemporaneous testimony of a highly educated man, who had
no motive or disposition to misrepresent facts. From the Wer-
rierian Transactions and Mr. Neill's letter, I learn distinctly that
Malcolm Laing never went to the shore of Stronsa to see the
monster.
Fortunately, several of the vertebrae were forwarded, in 1809,
to Sir Everard Home, in London, who at once pronounced them
to belong to the Squalus maximus, or common basking shark.
Figures of other portions sent to Edinburgh to Dr. Barclay, were
also published by him in the Wernerian Transactions, and agree
very Avell with Home's decision, although it is clear, from Bar
clay's Memoir, that he was very angry with the English anat
omist for setting him right, and declaring it to be a shark. It
was indeed very difficult to believe on any but the most con-
* Campbell's Life, vol. ii. p. 169, 170.
CHAP. VIII.] SEA SERPENT OF HEBRIDES. 117
vincing evidence that a carcass which was fifty-five feet long
could be referable to a species, the largest known individual of
which has never exceeded thirty-five or forty feet. But there
seems no escape from Home's verdict ; for the vertebrae are still
in the College of Surgeons, where I have seen them, quite entire,
and so identical with those of the Squalus vnaximus, that Mr.
Owen is unwilling to imagine they can belong to any other spe
cies of the same genus.
Mr. Neill tells me, in his letter, that the basking shark is by
no means uncommon in the Orkneys, where it is called the hock-
mar, and a large one was killed in Stromness Harbor in 1804,
when he was there ; yet it was agreed by all with whom he
spoke in 1808, that the Stronsa animal was double the length
of the largest hockrnar ever stranded in their times in Orkney.
Unfortunately, no one observed the habits and motions of the
monster before it was cast ashore ; but the Rev. Donald Maclean,
of Small Isles in the Hebrides, was requested to draw up a state
ment of what he recollected of the creature which had so much
alarmed the fishermen in the summer of the same year. Before
he penned his letter, which was printed as an appendix to Bar
clay's Memoir in 1809,^ he had clearly been questioned by per
sons who were under the full persuasion that what he had seen,
and the Stronsa animal, were identical with Pontoppidan's sea
serpent. Maclean informs us, that it was about the month of
June, 1808, when the huge creature in question, which looked
at a distance like a small rock in the sea, gave chase to his
boat, and he saw it first from the boat, and afterward from the
land.
Its head was broad, of a form somewhat oval ; its neck rather
smaller. It moved by undulations up and down. When the
head was above water, its motion was not so quick ; when most
elevated, it appeared to take a view of distant objects It direct
ed its " monstrous head," which still continued above water,
toward the boat, and then plunged violently under water in pur
suit of them. Afterward, when he saw it from the shore, " it
moved off with its head above water for about half a mile
* Wern. Trans. vOl, i. p. 444,
118 SEA SERPENT OF HEBRIDES. [CHAP. VIII.
before he lost sight of it. Its length he believed to be from
seventy to eighty feet." " About the same time the crews of
thirteen fishing boats, off the island of Canna, were terrified by
this monster ; and the crew of one boat saw it coming toward
them, between Rum and Canna, with its head high above
water."*
Mr. Maclean adds, evidently in answer to a question put by
his correspondent, thaft he saw nothing of the mane ; arid adds,
" when nearest to me it did not raise its head wholly above water,
so that the neck being under water, I could perceive no shining
filaments thereon, if it had any." And he also observes : "It
had 110 fin that I could perceive, and seemed to me to move
progressively by undulations up and down." Most of my read
ers are probably satisfied by this time, that if nothing had come
down to us but oral testimony, or even published accounts with
out figures respecting the creature seen in the Hebrides in 1808,
as well as that afterward stranded in Orkney, we should all of
us have felt sure that both of them were one and the same mon
ster, and no other than the sea snake of Pontoppidan, or that so
often seen on the eastern coast of North America. How much
delusion in this case has been dispelled by the preservation of a
few bones ! May we not then presume that other sea serpents
were also sharks ? If so, how are we to reconcile recorded ap
pearances with this hypothesis ? It was justly remarked by Dr.
Fleming, in his British Animals, 1828 (p. 174), that Maclean's
account of a creature, which raised its head above the water and
viewed distant objects, was opposed to the idea of its being refer
able to the class of cartilaginous fishes, for no shark lifts its head
out of the sea as it swims. E may also remark, that the de
scriptions commonly given, both by the Norwegians and North
Americans, would agree better with the appearance of a large
seal with a marie, chased by a shoal of porpoises, than with a shark.
But when we question the evidence more closely, we must
make great allowance for the incompetence of observers wholly
ignorant of zoology. In the first place, we must dismiss from
our minds the image of a shark as it appears when out of the
* Wern. Trans, Edinburgh, vol. i. p. 444,
CHAP. VIII.]
BASKING SHARK.
119
water, or as stuffed in a museum. The annexed figure represents
the outline of the Squalus maximus, of which when immersed,
but swimming near the surface, three points only could be seen
above water at the same time, namely, the prominence of the
back, with the first dorsal fin, a; secondly, the second dorsal fin,
b ; and thirdly, the upper lobe of the tail, c.
Fig. 3.
Squalus maximus, Basking Shark, or Hockinar.
a. First dorsal fin ; b. Second dorsal fin ; c. Caudal fin.
Dr. Melville informed me that he once saw a large species of
shark, swimming at the rate of ten miles an hour, in Torres
Strait, off Australia ; and, besides the lateral flexures of the tail,
which are the principal propelling power, the creature described
as it advanced a series of vertical undulations, not by the actual
bending of the body itself, but by the whole animal first rising
near to the surface and then dipping down again, so that the
dorsal fin and part of the back were occasionally lifted up to a
considerable height. Now it strikes me, that if a very huge
shark was going at the rate of twenty miles an. hour, as stated
by some of the observers, that portion of the back which emerged
in front might easily be taken for the head, and the dorsal fin
behind it for the mane ; and in this manner we may explain the
three projecting points, a, b, c, fig. 1, p. 109. given in the
drawing, sketched from memory, by Mr. Barry of Nova Scotia.
The smaller undulations seen by the same person, intervening be
tween the three larger, may very well be referred to a series of
waves raised in the water by a rapid passage through it of so
bulky a body. Indeed, some of the drawings which I have seen
120 SEA SNAKE A BASKING SHARK. [CHAP. VI1L
of the northern sea snake, agree perfectly with the idea of the
projecting back of a shark followed by a succession of waves,
diminishing in size as they recede from the dorsal prominence.
The parts before mentioned as alone visible above water would
form so small a portion of the whole body, that they might easily
convey the notion of narrowness as compared to great length ;
and the assertion of a few witnesses that the dorsal projections
were pointed, may have arisen from their having taken a more
accurate look at the shape of the fins, and distinguished them
better from the intervening waves of the sea. But, according to
this view, the large eyes seen in the " blunt head" by several
observers, must have been imaginary, unless in cases where they
may have really been looking at a seal. It can hardly be doubted
that some good marksmen, both in Norway and New England,
who fired at the animal, sent bullets into what they took to be
the head, and the fact that the wound seems never to have pro
duced serious injury, although in one case blood flowed freely,
accords perfectly with the hypothesis that they were firing at the
dorsal prominence, and not at the head of a shark. The opinion
of most of the observers that the undulations were coincident with
the rapid movements of the creature, agrees well with our theory,
which refers the greater number of the projections to waves of
the sea. On the other hand, as several of the protuberances are
real, consisting of three fins and a part of the back, the emergence
of these parts may explain what other witnesses beheld. Dr.
Melville has suggested to me, that if the speed were as great as
stated, and the progressive movement such as he has described,*"
the three fins would be first submerged, and then re-emerge in
such rapid succession, that the image of one set would be retained
on the retina of the eye after another set had become visible, and
they might be counted over and over again, and multiplied in
definitely. Although I think this explanation unnecessary in
most cases, such a confusion of the images seems very possible,
when we recollect that the fins would be always mingled •with
waves of the sea, which are s-aid, in the Norwegian accounts of
1845, to have been so great, that they broke on the coast in
* Ante, p, 119.
CKAP. VIII.] CAPT. M'QUHAE'S SEA SERPENT. 121
calm weather, when the serpent swam by, as if a steamer at full
speed was passing near the shore.
I conclude, therefore, that the sea serpent of North America
and the German Ocean is a shark, probably the Squalus maxl-
mus, a species which seems, from the measurements taken in
Orkney in 1808, to attain sometimes, when old, a much larger
size than had ever been previously imagined. It may be objected
that this opinion is directly opposed to a great body of evidence
which has been accumulating for nearly a century, derived partly
from experienced sea-faring men, and partly from observers on the
land, some of whom were of the educated class. I answer that
most of them caught glimpses only of the creature when in rapid
motion and in its own element, four-fifths or more of the body
being submerged ; and when, at length, the whole carcass of a
monster mistaken for a sea snake was stranded, touched, and
measured, and parts of it sent to the ablest anatomists and zo
ologists in Scotland, we narrowly escaped having transmitted to
us, without power of refutation, a tale as marvelous and fabulous
concerning its form and nature, as was ever charged against Pon-
toppidan by the most skeptical of his critics.^
* After the above was written, a letter appeared in the English news
papers, by Captain M'Quhae, R.N., of the Daedalus frigate, dated Oct. 7,
1848, giving an account of "the sea serpent" seen by him, Aug. 6, 1848,
lat. 24° 44' S. between the Cape and St. Helena, about 300 miles distant
from the western coast of Africa ; the length estimated at sixty feet, head
held four feet above water, with something like the mane of a horse on its
back which was straight and inflexible. Professor Owen has declared his
opinion, after seeing the drawing of the animal, sent to the Admiralty by
Captain M'Quhae, " that it may have been the largest of the seal tribe, the
sea-elephant of the southern whalers, Phoca proboscidea, which sometimes
attains a length of thirty feet, and individuals of which have been known to
have been floated by icebergs toward the Cape. This species has coarse
hair on the upper part of its inflexible trunk which might appear like a mane.
The chief impelling force would be the deeply immersed terminal fins and
tail, which would create a long eddy, readily mistakable for an indefinite
prolongation of the body."
Mr. Owen's conjecture appears to me very probable ; but, before I heard
\t, I had made up my mind that the creature seen by Captain M'Quhae dif
fered from the sea serpent of the Norwegians and New Epglanders, from
whose description it varies materially, especially in the absence, when at full
speed, of apparent undulations, or dorsal prominences.
VOL. I. — F
CHAPTER IX
Boston. — No Private Lodgings. — Boarding-houses. — Hotels. — Effects of the
Climate on Health. — Large Fortunes. — Style of Living. — Servants. —
Carriages. — Education of Ladies. — Marriages. — Professional Incomes.' —
Protectionist Doctrines. — Peculiarities of Language. — Literary Tastes.
— Cost of Living. — Alarms of Fire.
As we intended to pass nearly two months in Boston, we de
termined to look out for private lodgings, such as might be met
with in every large town in England, but which we found it
almost impossible to procure here. It does not answer to keep
houses, or even suites of apartments to let in a city where house-
rent is so dear, and well-trained servants so difficult to hire, even
at high wages. In this country, moreover, the mass of the peo
ple seem to set less value on the privilege of living in private than
we English do. Not only strangers and bachelors, but whole
families, reside in boarding-houses, usually kept by a widow who
has known better days, and is a good manager, and can teach and
discipline servants.
During a former tour, we had found it irksome to submit to
the rules of a boarding-house for any length of time ; to take every
meal at a public table, where you are expected to play the agree
able to companions often uncongenial, and brought together on
no principle of selection ; to join them in the drawing-room a short
time before dinner ; to call on them in their rooms, and to listen
to gossip arid complaints about the petty quarrels which so often
arise among fellow-boarders, as in a ship during a long voyage.
The only alternative is to get private rooms in an hotel, which
I at length succeeded in procuring at the Tremont House, after
I had failed in negotiating a treaty with several landlords to
whom I had been recommended. One of these, after showing
me his apartments, and stating his terms, ended by saying, "Ours
is a temperance house — prayers orthodox." I presume that my
countenance betrayed the amusement which this last piece of in-
CHAP* IX.] EXCESSIVE INDUSTRY. 123
telligence afforded me, for he instantly added, in an under tone,
" But if you and your lady should not attend prayers, it will not
be noticed."
A Bostonian, who had returned from a tour in England and
Ireland, much struck with the poverty of the lower classes, and
with the difficulties experienced by those who are struggling to
rise in the world, remarked to me, " We ought to be happier
than the English, although we do not look so." There is, in
fact, a care-worn expression in the countenances of the New
Englanders, which arises partly from their striving and anxious
disposition, and their habits of hard work, mental and bodily,
and partly from the effects of the climate.
One of their lawyers expressed to me his regret that the mem
bers of his profession, and their most eminent politicians, physicians,
and literary men, would not spare themselves, and give up some
time to relaxation. " They seem determined," he said, " to
realize the sentiment so finely expressed by Milton —
•
' To scorn delights, and live laborious days.'
Our ancestors had to work fifteen hours out of every twenty-four,
in order not to starve in the wilderness ; but we persist in strain
ing every nerve when that necessity has ceased." He then
reminded me how much more cheerful, plump, and merry the
young negro children looked in the South, than those of New
England, who had all the appearance of having been forced in
their education, and over-crammed at school.
I suspect, however, that the principal cause of the different
aspect of the Anglo-Saxon race in England and America is the
climate. During both our tours through the United States, my
wife and I enjoyed excellent health, and were delighted with the
clearness of the atmosphere, the bright sun, and the great num
ber of cloudless days ; but we were told that, if we staid a
second year, we should feel less vigorous. Many who have been
, bom in America, of families settled there for several generations,
find their health improved by a visit to England, just as if they
had returned to their native air ; and it may require several
centuries before a race becomes thoroughly acclimatized.
124 EFFECTS OF CLIMATE ON HEALTH. [CHAP. IX.
The great difference of the species of indigenous animals and
plants in North America, those of the middle and southern states
being almost all distinct from the European, points to a wide
diversity of climate, the atmosphere being drier, and there being
a much greater annual range of the thermometer than in cor
responding latitudes on the eastern side of the Atlantic. Even
BO cosmopolite a being as man may demand more than two
centuries and a quarter before he can entirely accommodate his
constitution to such altered circumstances, and before the succes
sive generations of parents can acquire themselves, and transmit
to their offspring, the new and requisite physiological peculiarities.
English travelers often ascribe the more delicate health of the
inhabitants here to their in-door habits and want of exercise.
But it is natural that they should shrink from exposing them
selves to the severe frosts and long-continued snows of winter,
and to the intense heat of the summer's sun. An Englishman
is usually recognized at once in a party, by a more robust look,
and greater clearness and ruddiness of complexion ; and it is
surprising how distinguishable he is even from persons born of
English parents in the United States. It is also a curious fact,
which seems generally admitted, that the native Anglo-Austra
lians bear a considerable resemblance to the Anglo-Americans in
look and manner of speaking, which is a mystery, for there is
certainly in that case no analogy between the climates of the
two countries.
^The number of persons in Boston who have earned in business,
or have inherited large fortunes, is very great. The Common,
a small park, which is by no means the only quarter frequented
by rich citizens, is surrounded by houses which might form two
fine squares in London, and the average value of which^in the
market, might bear a comparison with those in very fashionable
parts of our metropolis — sums of from 4000Z. to 20,000/. ster
ling having been paid for them. The greater part of these
buildings are the property of the persons who reside in them ;
and they are fitted up very elegantly, and often expensively.
fEntertainments in a sumptuous style are not rare ; but the small
number of servants in comparison with those kept in England by
CHAP. IX.] STYLE OF LIVING.— SERVANTS. 125
persons of corresponding income, and the want of an equipage,
impart to their mode of life an appearance of simplicity which
is perhaps more the result of necessity than of deference to a
republican theory of equalitjjj For to keep servants here for
mere show, would not only be thought absurd, but would be a
great sacrifice of comfort. To obtain a few efficient ones at any
price, and to put up with many inconveniences rather than part
with them — allowing them to continue in service after marriage,
is the practice of not a few of the richest people, who often keep
no more than four domestics where there would be at least nine
in London.^ In consequence of this state of things, the ladies are
more independent of being waited on than those of similar fortune
in England ; but we are sometimes amused when we hear them
express envy of the superior advantages enjoyed in Europe, for
they are under the delusion of supposing that large establish
ments give no trouble in " the old country." There are, indeed,
crowds of poor emigrants here, especially from Ireland, eager for
employment ; but for the most part so coarse, ignorant, and dirty
in their habits, that they can not gain admittance into genteel
houses. No mistress here ventures to interfere with the dress of
a servant maid, and girls wait at table with braided hair, which
is certainly more becoming to them when young, and are never
required to conceal with a cap their neatly arranged locks,
according to the costume approved of by English disciplinarians.
When raising the dust at their work, in sweeping the floors,
they cover the head with a handkerchief. The New England
servants are generally provident, for, besides the intelligence they
derive from their early school education, they have a reasonable
hope of bettering their condition, are well paid, and not kept >,,-
down in the world by a number of poor relations.
(Many of the wealthiest families keep no carriage, for, as I
before said, no one affects to live in style, and the trouble of
engaging a good coachman and groom would be considerable,
and also because the distances in Boston are small, and the
facilities of traveling by railway into the country in all directions
very great. But there are many livery stables, where excellent
carriages and horses are to be hired with well-dressed drivers.
126 EDUCATION OF LADIES. [CHAP. IX.
Some of their vehicles are fitted up with India-rubber tubes, to
enable those inside to communicate with the coachman without
letting down the glass, which, during a severe New England
frost, or a snow storm, must be no unmeaning luxury.
They who can not afford to live in the metropolis, reside with
their families at places often twenty-five miles distant, such as
Ipswich, and go into their shops and counting-houses every morn
ing, paying 100 dollars (or twenty guineas), for an annual ticket
on the railway, and being less than an hour at a time on the
road.
The usual hours of breakfasting and dining here are much earlier
than in London ; yet evening parties in the most fashionable
society do not begin till nine, and often ten o'clock, which appears
a senseless imitation of foreign manners, and calculated, if not
intended, to draw a line between those who can afford to turn
night into day. and those who can not.
In some houses the gentlemen go up after dinner with the
ladies, as in France, to the drawing-room ; but it is more com
mon, as in England, to stay a while and talk together. There
is very little drinking, and I scarcely ever heard any conversation
in which the women might not have joined with propriety.
Bachelor dinners are more frequent than in the highest circles
in London ; but there is beginning to be a change in this respect,
and certainly the ladies are well able to play their part, for no
care or expense is spared to give them, not only every female
accomplishment, but a solid education. The incomes made by
some men of superior scholarship and general knowledge, who
devote themselves entirely to the teaching of young ladies, and,
still more, the station held by these teachers in society, is a char
acteristic of Boston highly deserving of praise and imitation.
The influence of cultivated women in elevating and refining
the tone of society and the national mind, may nowhere be ren
dered more effective than where a large proportion of the men
are engaged in mercantile business, and belong to a class who
have too truly been said " to live in counting-houses that they
may sleep in palaces." Their wives and daughters have leisure
to acquire literary and scientific tastes, and to improve their
CHAP. IX.] MARRIAGES. 127
understandings, while the fathers, husbands, and brothers are
summing up accounts, attending to the minute details of business,
or driving bargains.
The impress of the strict morals of the Puritan founders of the
New England commonwealths on the manners of their descend
ants, is still very marked. Swearing is seldom heard, and duel
ing has been successfully discountenanced, although they are in
constant communication with the southern states, where both
these practices are common, though much less so than formerly.
The facility of getting on in the world, and marrying young,
is, upon the whole, most favorable to the morals of the commu
nity, although it sometimes leads to uncongenial and unhappy
unions. But, as a set-off to this evil, it should be stated, that
nowhere is there so much free choice in forming matrimonial
connections without regard to equality of fortune. It is un
avoidable that the aristocracy of taste, manners, and education
should create barriers, which can not be set at naught without
violence to the feelings ; but we had good opportunities of know
ing that parents would be thought far more unreasonable here
than in England, and in some other states of the Union, if they
discouraged alliances on the mere ground of one of the parties
being without fortune.
The most eminent medical men in Boston make, I am told,
about 9500 dollars (2000/.) a year, and their early career is one
of hard striving and small profits. The incomes made by the
first lawyers are much more considerable, and I hear that, when
a leading practitioner was invited to transfer his business from
Boston to New York, because he might be employed there by a
population of 400,000 souls, he declined, saying, that his clients
were drawn from a population nearly equal in numbers and ave
rage wealth, although not a fourth part of them were resident in
the city of Boston.
Bankruptcies are rarer than in any other mercantile community
in the Union of equal extent, and, when they do occur, larger
dividends are paid to the creditor. As most of the rich private
citizens live within their income, so the State is frugal, and al
though its credit stands so high that it could borrow largely, it
128 PROTECTIONIST DOCTRINES. [CHAP. IX
has contracted very little debt, it being thought advisable to
leave the execution of almost every kind of public work to pri
vate enterprise and capital.
In many of the southern and western states, the commercial
policy of Massachusetts was represented to me as eminently
selfish, the great capitalists wishing to monopolize the manufac
turing trade, and by a high tariff to exclude foreign capitalists,
so as to grow rich at the expense of other parts of the Union.
In conversing with the New Englanders, I became satisfied that,
in spite of the writings of the first political economists in Europe
and America, and the opinion of Channing, and some other of
their own distinguished men (not excepting Daniel Webster him
self in the early part of his career), they have persuaded them
selves that the doctrines of free trade are not applicable to the
present state of their country. The facility with which every
people conscientiously accommodate their speculative opinions to
their local and individual interests, is sufficiently demonstrated
by the fact, that each of the other states, and sections of states,
as they successively embark in the manufacture, whether of cot
ton, iron, or other articles, become immediately converts to pro
tectionist views, against which they had previously declaimed.
There is a general feeling of self-respect pervading all classes
in the New England states, which enables those who rise in the
world, whether in political life, or by suddenly making large for
tunes in trade, if they have true gentility of feeling, to take their
place in good society easily and naturally. Their power of ac
commodating themselves to their new position is greatly facilitated
by the instruction imparted in the free schools to all, however
humble in station, so that they are rarely in danger of betraying
their low origin by ungrammatical phrases and faulty pronun
ciation.
English critics are in the habit of making no allowance for
the slightest variations in language, pronunciation, or manners,
in any people descended from the Anglican stock. In the Ger
mans or French they may think a deviation from the British
standard odd or ridiculous, but in an American they set it down
at once as vulgar ; whereas it may be one of those conventional-
CHAP. IX.] PECULIARITIES OF LANGUAGE. 129
isms, respecting which every nation has a right to enforce its own.
arbitrary rules. The frequent use of the words, " sir" and
" ma'am," in the United States, like " oui, monsieur, oui, ma-
dame," in France, for the sake of softening the bald and abrupt
" yes" or "no," would sound to a Frenchman or Italian more
polite ; and if the Americans were to conform to the present
English model in such trifles, it might happen that in England
itself the fashion may soon change. There are also many gen
uine old classical phrases, which have grown obsolete in the
parent country, and which the Americans retain, and ought not
to allow themselves to be laughed out of. The title of Madam
is sometimes given here, and generally in Charleston (S. Carolina),
and in the South, to a mother whose son has married, and the
daughter-in-law is then called Mrs. By this means they avoid
the inelegant phraseology of old Mrs. A., or the Scotch, Mrs. A.
senior. Madam, in short, very commonly serves as the equiva
lent of dowager, as used in English titled families. There are
also some antique provincialisms handed down from the times of
the first settlers, which may -well deserve to be kept up, although
they may be subjects of diversion to English tourists. In one
of Shirley's plays, written just before the middle of the seven
teenth century, when the largest emigration took place from Old
to New England, we find the term, " I guess," for "I think," or
" I suppose," occurring frequently ; and if we look farther back,
it is. met with in the " Miller's Tale" and in the " Monk" of
Chaucer : —
..." For little heaviness
Is right enough for rauchel folk, I guess."
And in Spenser's " Faerie Queene" —
"It seemed a second Paradise, I guesse."*
Among the most common singularities of expression are the
following : — " I should admire to see him" for "I should like to
see him ;" "I want to know," and " Do tell," both exclamations
of surprise, answering to our " Dear me." These last, how
ever, are rarely heard in society above the middling class. Ocea-
* Canto x. 23.
F*
130 LITERARY TASTES. [CHAP. IX.
sionally I was as much puzzled as if I was reading Tarn o'Shanter,
as, for example, " out of kittel" means " out of order." The word
" sick" is used in New England in the same sense as it was in
the time of Shakspeare, or when the liturgy of the Church of
England was composed. The word " ill," which in Great
Britain means "not well," signifies in America "very ill."
They often speak here of a " lovely man," using the adjective in
a moral sense ; and say of a plain, shriveled old woman, that
she is " a fine and lovely woman," meaning that her character
and disposition are amiable. " Clever" is applied to a good-
natured and good-hearted person who is without talent and
quickness. At first we had many a good laugh when we dis
covered that we had been at cross purposes, on comparing notes
as to our opinions of English and American friends. On one
occasion I admitted that Mrs. A. might be " a fine and lovely
woman," but it could only be said of her by candlelight.
In the literary circles here we meet with several writers who
are keeping up an active correspondence with distinguished men
in all parts of Europe, but especially with English authors.
We are often amused to observe how much the conversation
turns on what is going on in London. One day I was asked
whether it were true that the committee for deciding on the
statues to be set up in the new House of Lords, had voted in
favor of Richardson, before they could make up their minds
whether they should honor Pope, Dryderi, Swift, and Fielding;
and whether Milton was at first black-balled, and how they could
possibly be disputing about the rival claims of Hume and Robert
son as historians, while a greater than either of them, Gibbon,
was left out of the question. They suggested that a tribunal of
literary Jews might soon be required to pronounce fairly on the
merits of Christian writers. " Do your countrymen," said one
of my friends to me, "mean to imitate the spirit of the king of
Bavaria, who excluded Luther from his Walhalla because he
was a Protestant, and instead of Shakspeare and Newton could
endure no representatives of British genius, save the orthodox
King Alfred and Roger Bacon ?" I was curious, when I got
home, to learn how much of this gossip about things in the old
CHAP. IX.] COST OF LIVING. 131
country was founded on correct information, and was relieved to
find that the six poets ultimately selected were Chaucer, Spenser,
Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope ; a result which, consid
ering that a single black ball excluded, did credit to the umpires,
and would, I am sure, be approved of by a literary jury in
Massachusetts. I was also glad to learn that in Bavaria, as
soon as political parties changed, a royal order was issued to
admit the bust of Luther into the Walhalla.
The Americans, in general, have more self-possession and self-
confidence than Englishmen, although this characteristic belongs
perhaps less to the Bostonians than to the citizens of most of the
other parts of the Union. On the other hand, the members of
the great republic are sensitive and touchy about their country,
a point on which the English are imperturbably indifferent,
being proud of every thing British, even to a fault, since con
tempt for the opinion of other nations may be carried so far as to
diminish the prospect of national improvement. It might be
better if each of the great branches of the Anglo-Saxon family
would borrow something from the qualities of the other, — if
John Bull had less mauvais honte, so as to care less for what
others were thinking of himself individually, and if Jonathan
cared less for what others are thinking of his country.
The expense of living in the northern states is, upon the
whole, decidedly more reasonable than in England, although the
dress, both of men and women, is somewhat dearer. In Boston,
also, the rent of houses is very high, but not so in the country.
Traveling is much cheaper, and so are food, newspapers, and
books. On comparing the average price of bread during the pre
sent year with that in England, we find that it is about twenty-
five per cent, cheaper, beef and mutton ten per cent, cheaper, and
the price of poultry extremely moderate. Why, in so old a city
as Boston, the supply of seamstresses, milliners, and dressmakers,
should be as inadequate to the demand as in some of our newly-
founded colonies when most progressive, I leave to political
economists to explain. My wife was desirous of having a dress
and bonnet made up in a week, but one milliner after another
declined to undertake the task. It would be a useful lesson to
132 ALARMS OF FIRE. [CHAP. IX
those who are accustomed to consider themselves as patrons
whenever they engage others to do work for them, to learn
how in reality, if things are in a healthy state, the obligation is
mutual ; but to discover that the usual relations of the employer
and employed are entirely reversed, and that the favor is by no
means conferred by the purchaser, would try the patience of most
travelers. Friends interceded, but in vain ; till, at last, a repre
sentation was made to one of these important personages, that my
wife was about to leave the city on a fixed day, and that being
a foreigner she ought, out of courtesy, to be assisted ; an appeal
which was successful, and the work was then undertaken and
sent home with strict punctuality, neatly made, and every spare
scrap of the material honestly returned, the charge being about
equal to that of the first London dressmakers.
We remarked in some of the country towns of Massachusetts,
where the income of the family was very moderate, that the
young ladies indulged in extravagant dressing — 40/., for example,
being paid for a shawl in one instance. Some of the richer class,
who had returned from passing a year or two in Germany and
England, had been much struck with the economical habits, in
dress and in the luxuries of the table, of persons in easy circum
stances there, and the example had not been lost on them.
Oct. 2 8 . — Night after night the church bells have been tolling
the alarm of fire, followed by the rattling of the heavy engines
under the windows of our hotel. When I last resided here
(1842), I was told that half of these conflagrations were caused
by incendiaries, partly by boys for the mere love of mischief; but
no suspicions of this kind are now entertained. Most of the
buildings are of wood, and it is hoped that the increasing use of
brick in the private, and of granite in the public, buildings will
lessen the evil. The combustibility of the wood of the white or
Weymouth pine {Pinus strobusj, largely employed in houses
here, is said to exceed that of other kinds of timber.
CHAPTER X.
Boston. — Blind Asylum and Laura Bridgeman. — Respect for Freedom of
Conscience. — Cemetery of Mount Auburn. — Channing's Cenotaph. —
Episcopal Churches. — Unitarian Congregations. — Eminent Preachers. —
Progress of Unitarians why slow. — Their Works reprinted in England. —
Nothingarians. — Episcopalian Asceticism. — Separation of Religion and
Politics.
DURING our stay at Boston we visited the Perkins' Institution, or
Asylum for the Blind, and found Laura Bridgman, the girl who
has been blind, deaf and dumb from infancy, much grown since
we saw her four years ago. She is now sixteen, and looks very
intelligent. She was reading when we entered, and we were
told that formerly, when so engaged and alone, she used to make
with one hand the signs of all the words which she felt out with
the other, just as an illiterate beginner speaks aloud each sentence
as he spells it. ' But the process of conveying the meaning of the
words to her mind is now far too rapid for such delay, and the
hand not occupied in reading remains motionless. We were
afterward delighted to watch her while she was following the
conversation of two other dumb children who were using the
modern single-hand alphabet. She was able to comprehend all
the ideas they were exchanging, and to overhear, as it were,
every word they said, by making her fingers play, with fairy
lightness, over theirs, with so slight a touch, as not in the least
degree to interfere with the freedom of their motions. We saw
her afterward talk with Dr. Howe, with great rapidity and
animation, pointing out accurately the places on a map while he
gave a lesson in geography. She indulged her curiosity in exam
ining my wife's dress, and, taking her hand, told her which was
her wedding ring, and then began to teach her the deaf and dumb
alphabet. She is always aware whether it is a lady's hand she
touches, and. is shy toward a stranger of the other sex. As she is
now in communication with no less than a hundred acquaintances,
she has grown much more like other children than formerly.
134 BLIND ASYLUM. [CHAP. X.
We learnt from Dr. Howe that the task of carrying on her
education has become more and more arduous, for she is naturally
clever, and her reflective powers have unavoidably ripened much
faster than the perceptive ; so that at an age when other children
would be satisfied to accumulate facts by the use of their eyes,
her chief curiosity is directed to know the causes of things. In
reading history, for example, where there is usually a continued
description of wTars and battles, she must be told the motives for
which men slaughter each other, and is so distressed at their
wickedness, that she can scarcely be induced to pursue the
study.
To be able to appreciate justly the judicious treatment of those
to whose training she owes her wonderful progress, it would be
necessary to be practically acquainted with the disappointments
of persons who undertake to teach pupils who are simply blind,
and not suffering, like Laura, under the double privation of the
senses of sight arid hearing.
Great pains had been taken to make one of the boys, whom
we saw, have a correct idea of a horse , he had got by rote a
long list of characteristics, and had felt the animal, and the
mortification of the master may be conceived on discovering that
after all the child could not be sure whether the creature had
three, four, or five legs. After a few days' intercourse with the
blind, we no longer marvel that precocious children, who begin
to read early and get by heart and recite long poems, or become
knowing by keeping company with grown-up people, are so often
overtaken or left behind by those who have been neglected, and
have spent their time at play. For when the truants are sup
posed to be most idle, they may, in reality, be storing their minds
with a multitude of facts, to give a detailed description of which
to a student, in or out of a blind asylum, would fill volumes.
Dr. Howe told us of a blind Frenchman in the establishment,
who could guess the age of strangers, by hearing their voices,
much more accurately than he and others who could see as well
as talk with them.
On looking over the annual reports of the trustees, I observed
that on Sunday the pupils, about a hundred in number, and
CHAP. X.] CEMETERY OF MOUNT AUBURN. 135
belonging to various sects, attend public worship in several
different churches, they themselves, or their parents, choosing
some particular church. " Many of them," says the report,
"attend Sabbath schools, and, as care is taken to exclude sect
arian doctrines from the regular course of instruction, the opinions
of the pupils respecting doctrinal matters in religion are formed
upon the basis prescribed by the parents."
The assurance here given to the public is characteristic of a
settled purpose, every where displayed by the New Englanders,
to prevent their charitable bequests, as well as their great educa
tional establishments, from becoming instruments of proselytizing,
or serving as bribes, to tempt parents, pupils, or the poor to
renounce any part of their hereditary creed for the sake of world
ly advantages. Such conduct, implying great delicacy of feeling
in matters of conscience, and a profound respect for the sacredness
of religious obligations, is worthy of the descendants of men who
went into exile, and braved the wilderness and the Indian tom
ahawk, rather than conform outwardly to creeds and rituals of
which they disapproved.
Oct. 29. — Went to Cambridge to visit the cemetery of Mount
Auburn, where a large extent of wild, unreclaimed, hilly ground,
covered with oak and pine, has been inclosed for a public burial-
place. From the highest eminence there is a fine view of the
surrounding country. Since I was here in 1842, a chapel has
been erected of granite, in the Gothic style, and in good taste,
with painted glass from Edinburgh in the windows, and a hand
some entrance gate. The chapel is to serve as a Westminster
Abbey, Pantheon, or Walhalla, to contain statues, busts, and
monuments of distinguished men. A cenotaph has been placed
in the grounds in honor of Dr. Channing, with an inscription
written by a friend, in a plain, unambitious style, such as Chan
ning himself would have wished. I rejoiced to hear that as his
funeral procession was passing through the streets of Boston, the
bell of the Roman Catholic chapel was tolled among the rest,
and I recollected with pleasure the conversations I had had
with him in 1841. They who witness the impulse given by
him to the cause of popular education, the increasing liberality of
136 EPISCOPAL CHURCHES. [CHAP. X
sentiment in New England on matters of religion, and the great
popularity of his works, might desire to inscribe on his tomb —
" E'en in his ashes live their wonted fires."
Some of the Episcopal churches in Boston are conducted on
the high, and others on the low church model ; and the Tracta-
rian movement has had the effect here, as in England, not of
establishing uniformity by a strict adherence to one rubric, but
of producing a much greater variety than formerly in the man
ner of performing public worship. If, besides striking out the
Athanasian Creed, the American Episcopal Church had omitted
the Nicene Creed, as they first proposed in 1785, and had con
densed and abridged the Thirty-nine Articles to twenty, measures
from which they were dissuaded by the English hierarchy, from
whose hands their first bishops required consecration, a schism
might probably have taken place when the Tractarian movement
occurred, and they might have separated into two churches far
more distinct than that of the Drummondites and their opponents,
or the partisans of the Scotch and English rubric north of the Tweed.
In the Stone, or King's Chapel, the English liturgy is used,
with such omissions and alterations as are required to suit the
opinions of Unitarians, for that chapel was transferred from the
Anglican to the Unitarian Church by the conversion of the
minister and majority of the pew-holders. But in almost all the
other Unitarian churches, the service resembles in form that of
the established church of Scotland. Before my £rst visit to
Boston, I had been led to believe that the majority of the
citizens were Unitarians ; whereas I found, on inquiry, that
although they may exceed in number any other single sect, and
comprise not a few of the richest citizens, they do not constitute
above one-fifth of the whole population, and scarcely more than
a tenth in Massachusetts generally. There is, however, another
sect, calling themselves Christians (pronounced Christians), pre
vailing largely in New England, which denies the doctrine of
the Trinity, and I am told that many who worship in other
" orthodox" congregations are heterodox on this point, although
they do not choose to become separatists. One of them observed
CHAP. X.] UNITARIAN CONGREGATIONS. 137
to me that he thought it nearly as presumptuous to acquiesce in.
the negative as in the affirmative of the propositions laid down
on this subject in the Athanasian Creed. " We are," he said,
" like children born blind, disputing about colors."
The prominent position occupied by the Unitarians arises, not
from their number, nor their wealth, however considerable this
may be, but from their talent, earnestness, and knowledge.
Many of the leading minds in the Union belong to this sect, and
among them, Channing, Sparks, Dewey, and other well-known
authors, have been converts from the Congregationalists.
To have no creed, no standard to rally round, no fixed canons
of interpretation of Scripture, is said to be fatal to their progress.
Yet one of their body remarked to me that they might be well
satisfied that they were gaining ground, when it could be said
that in the last thirty years (since 1815) the number of their
ministers had increased in a tenfold ratio, or from fifty to five
hundred, whereas the population had only doubled in twenty-five
years. He also reminded me that their ranks are scarcely ever
recruited from foreign emigrants, from whom the Romanists,
Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Episcopalians annually
draw large accessions. A more kindly feeling has of late years
sprung up between the Unitarians and Congregationalists, because
some of the most eminent writers of both sects have joined in
defending themselves against a common adversary, namely, those
rationalists who go so far as to deny the historical evidence of the
miracles related in the New Testament, and who, in some other
points, depart more widely from the Unitarian standard, than
does the latter from that of Rome itself. Norton, author of
" The Genuineness of the Gospels" may be mentioned, as one
of the celebrated Unitarian divines who has extorted from the
more liberal members of all " orthodox" denominations the praise
of being a defender of the faith.
In the course of my two visits to the United States, I enjoyed
opportunities of hearing sermons preached by many of the most
eminent Unitarians — among them were Channing, Henry Ware,
Dewey, Bellows, Putnam, and Gannet — and was much struck,
not only with their good sense and erudition, but with the fervor
138 EMINENT PREACHERS— CHANNING'S WORKS. [CHAP. X.
of their eloquence. I had been given to understand that I
should find a want of warmth in their discourses, that they were
too cold and philosophical, and wanting in devotional feeling ;
but, on the contrary, there were many of them most impressive,
full of earnestness and zeal, as well as of original views and
instruction. One of the chief characteristics was the rare allu
sion made to the Old Testament, or to controverted points of
doctrine, or to the mysteries of the Christian religion, and the
frequency with which they dwelt 011 the moral precepts and
practical lessons of the Gospels, especially the preaching of
Christ himself. Occasional exhortations to the faithful, cheer
fully to endure obloquy for the sake of truth, and to pay no court
to popularity, an undue craving for which was, they said, the
bane of a democracy, convinced me how much the idea of their
standing in a hostile position to a large numerical majority of the
community was present to their minds. On some occasions,
however, reference was naturally made to doctrinal points, par
ticularly to the humanity of Christ, his kindred nature, and its
distinctness from that of the eternal, omnipotent, and incorporeal
Spirit which framed the universe ; but chiefly on occasions when
the orator was desirous of awakening in the hearts of his hearers
emotions of tenderness, pity, gratitude, and love, by dwelling on
the bodily sufferings of the Redeemer on the cross. More than
once have I seen these appeals produce so deep a sensation, as to
move a highly educated audience to tears ; and I came away
assured that they who imagine this form of Christianity to be
essentially cold, lifeless, and incapable of reaching the heart, or
of powerfully influencing the conduct of men, can never have
enjoyed opportunities of listening to their most gifted preachers,
or had a large personal intercourse with the members of the sect.
When I wished to purchase a copy of the writings of Chan-
ning arid of Dewey in Boston, I was told that I could obtain
more complete and cheaper editions in London than in the Unit
ed States ; a proof, not only how much they are read in England,
but that the pecuniary interests of British authors are not the
only ones which suffer by the want of an international copyright.
On inquiring of the publishers at Boston, as to the extent of the
CHAP. X.] NOTHINGARIANS. 139
sale of Channing's works in the United States, I was informed
that several of them, published separately, had gone through
many editions, and no less than 9000 copies of the whole, in six
volumes, had been sold already (1845), and the demand for them
was on the increase, many copies having been recently ordered
from distant places in the West, such as St. Louis and Chicago.
A reprint of the same edition at Glasgow, has circulated widely
in England, and the reading of it in America is by no means
confined to Unitarians, the divines of other denominations,
especially the Calvinists, being desirous to know what has been
written against them by their great antagonist.
Having been informed by one of my friends that about a fifth
of all the New Eriglanders were " Nothingarians," I tried, but
with little success, to discover the strict meaning of the term.
Nothing seems more vague and indefinite than the mariner of its
application. I fancied at first that it might signify deists or in
fidels, or persons careless about any religious faith, or who were
not church-goers ; but, although it may sometimes signify one or
all of these, I found it was usually quite otherwise. The term
latitudinarian, used in a good sense, appeared most commonly to
convey the meaning ; for a Nothingarian, I was informed, was
indifferent whether he attended a Baptist, Methodist, Presbyte
rian, or Congregationalist church, and was often equally inclined
to contribute money liberally to any one or all of them. A Meth
odist writer of some eminence remarked to me, that the range of
doctrines embraced by these denominations, was not greater, if so
great, as that which comprehended within the same pale a high
tractarian and a low churchman, and that he who would indiffer
ently subscribe to these two forms of Episcopalianism, might with
equal propriety be styled a Nothingarian. In other cases I as~
certained that the term Nothingarian was simply used for persons
who, though they attended worship regularly in some church, had
never been communicants. One of the latter, an Episcopalian,
once said to me, " I have never joined any church ;" and then
in explanation added, " it would be hard at my age to renounce
society, dancing, and public amusements." I expostulated soon
afterward with an Episcopalian minister in Virginia, observing-
140 RELIGION AND POLITICS. [CHAP. X.
that such ideas of austerity and asceticism were not consistent
with the spirit of the Anglican Church. This he admitted, but
pleaded the absolute necessity of extreme strictness to enable them
to efface the stigma transmitted to them from colonial times ; for
in the Southern states, particularly in Virginia, the patronage of
the mother country, in filling up livings, was for a century scan
dalously abused, and so many young men of profligate and im
moral habits were sent out, as to create a strong prejudice against
the Established Church of England in the minds of the more
zealous and sincere religionists.
On one of my voyages home from America, an officer of rank
in the British army lamented that the governor of one of our col
onies had lately appointed as Attorney-General one who was an
atheist. T told him I knew the lawyer in question to be a zeal
ous Baptist. " Yes," he replied, " Baptist, Atheist, or something
of that sort." I have no doubt that if this gallant colonel should
visit New England, his estimate of the proportion of Nothinga
rians in the population would be very liberal.
Traveling as I did in 1845—6, through a large part of the
Union, immediately after the close of the protracted contest for
the Presidency, when the votes in favor of Mr. Clay and Mr.
Polk had been nearly balanced, I was surprised to find in the
north, south, and west, how few of the Americans with whom I
conversed as traveling companions, could tell me to what denom
ination of Christians these two gentlemen belonged. I at length
ascertained that one of them was an Episcopalian, and the other
a Presbyterian. This ignorance could by no means be set down
to indifFerentism. Had one of the candidates been a man of im
moral character, it would have materially affected his chance of
success, or probably if he had been suspected of indifference about
religion, and not a few of the politicians whom I questioned were
strongly imbued with sectarian feelings ; but it was clear that in
the choice of a first magistrate their minds had been wholly oc
cupied with other considerations, and the separation of religion
and politics, though far from being as complete as might be
wished, is certainly one of the healthy features of the working of
the American institutions
CHAPTER XI.
Boston. — Whig Caucus. — Speech of Mr. Webster. — Politics in Massachu
setts. — Election of Governor and Representatives. — Thanksgiving Day
and Governor's Proclamation. — Absence of Pauperism. — Irish Repeal
Meeting. — New England Sympathizer. — Visit to a Free School. — State
Education. — Pay and Social Rank of Teachers. — Importance of the Pro
fession. — Rapid Progress and Effects of Educational Movement. — Popu
lar Lectures. — Lending Libraries.
Nov. 10, 1845. — WENT to a great meeting of about 3500
people in Faneuil Hall, where they were discussing the election
of the governor and executive officers of the State. It was called
a Whig caucus, being only attended by persons of one political
party, or if others were present, they were there only by courtesy,
and expected to be silent, and not interrupt the harmony of the
proceedings. When I entered, I found Mr. Daniel Webster on
his legs. Since the arrival of the last mail steamer from Liver
pool fears had been entertained that the pretensions of the Cabi
net of Washington to the whole, or greater part of Oregon, must
end in a war between England and the United States. This
topic was therefore naturally uppermost in the minds of a peace-
loving and commercial community.. The cautious and measured
expressions of the Whig statesman when out of office, and his
evident sense of the serious responsibility incurred by one who
should involve two great nations in war, formed a striking con
trast to the unguarded tone of the late inaugural address of the
President of the Union on the same subject. I was amused to
hear frequent references made to the recent debate in the British
House of Commons, the exact words of Sir Robert Peel and
others being quoted and commented upon, just as if the discussion
had been simply adjourned from Westminster to Boston. The
orator rebuked the blustering tone of defiance, in which dema
gogues and newspapers in some parts of the Union were indulg
ing against England. He then condemned the new constitution
142 POLITICS IN MASSACHUSETTS. [CHAP. XI.
of Texas, which prohibits the Legislature from ever setting the
bondman free, and deprecated the diversion made from the ranks
of the Whigs by the Abolitionists, who, by setting up a candi
date of their own for the Presidentship, had enabled their oppo
nents to carry a man pledged to the annexation of Texas. At
the same time he gave this party the credit of being as conscien
tious as they were impracticable. He then alluded to another
" separate organization," as it is here called, namely, that of the
" Native Americans," which had in like manner defeated the
object they had in view, by dividing the Whigs, the majority of
whom agreed in thinking the present naturalization laws very
defective, and that a stop should be put to fraudulent voting.
The introduction of a long Latin quotation from Cicero showed
that the speaker reckoned on having a considerable number at
least of well-educated men in his large audience. The frequent
mention of the name of Governor George N. Briggs, the initial
letter only of the second appellative being pronounced, grated
strangely on my English ear ; for though we do not trouble our
selves to learn all the Christian names of our best actors, as Mr.
T. P. Cooke and Miss M. Tree, we are never so laconic and
unceremonious in dealing with eminent public men. I had asked
several persons what K. signified in the name of the President,
James K. Polk, before T ascertained that it meant Knox ; but,
in the United States, it might have no other signification than
the letter K. ; for, when first in Boston, I requested a friend to
tell me -what B. stood for in his name, and he replied, " For
nothing ; my surname was so common a one, that letters ad
dressed to me were often mis-sent, so I got the Post-Office to
allow me to adopt the letter B."
I came away from this and other public meetings convinced
that the style of speaking of Mr. Webster, Mr. Everett, Mr. Win-
throp, arid some others, would take greatly in England, both in
and out of parliament. It was also satisfactory to reflect, that
in Massachusetts, where the whole population is more educated
than elsewhere, arid more Anglo-American, having less of recent
foreign admixture, whether European or African, the dominant
party is against the extension of slavery to new regions like Texas,
CHAP. XL] ELECTION. 143
against territorial aggrandizement, whether in the north or south,
and against war. They are in a minority it is true : but each
state in the Union has such a separate and independent position,
that, like a distinct nation, it can continue to cherish its own
principles and institutions, and set an example to the rest, which
they may in time learn to imitate. The Whigs were originally
in favor of more centralization, or of giving increased power to
the federal executive, while the democratic party did all they
could to weaken the central power, and successfully contended for
the sovereign rights and privileges of each member of the confed
eration. In so doing they have perhaps inadvertently, and with
out seeing the bearing of their policy, guarded the older and more
advanced commonwealths from being too much controlled and
kept down by the ascendency of newer and ruder states.
A few days later, I went to see the electors give their votes.
Perfect order and good-humor prevailed, although the contest
was a keen one. As I approached the poll, the agents of differ
ent committees, supposing that I might be an elector, put into
my hands printed lists, containing the names of all the candidates
for the offices of Governor, Lieutenant-governor, five senators,
and thirty-five representatives. Every registered voter is entitled
to put one of these " tickets" into the balloting box. The real
struggle was between the Whigs and Democrats, the former of
whom carried the day ; but, besides their tickets, two others were
presented to me, one called the Native American, and the other
the Working Man's ticket. The latter had for its emblem a
naked arm, wielding a hammer, and for its motto, " The strong
right arm of labor." The five senators proposed in this list,
consisted of two printers, a carpenter, a blacksmith, and a sur
veyor, and among the representatives were four shoemakers, one
tailor, eight carpenters, four printers, an engineer, &c.
I heard Americans regret, that besides caucuses there are no
public meetings here where matters are debated by persons of
opposite parties and opinions, such as are sometimes held in En
gland. I was surprised to hear that such experiments were of
rare occurrence in a country where men opposed in politics
frequently argue with so much good temper, and where, in so
144 THANKSGIVING DAY. [CHAP. XI.
many hotels and taverns, newspapers of all shades of opinion are
taken in just as in our great club-houses in London, affording
opportunities of knowing what can be said on all sides of every
question. I have since learnt from correspondents, that, in a
period of political excitement, the people in many parts of Massa
chusetts have begun to engage different lecturers to explain to
them the opposite facts, views, and arguments adduced for and
against the chief subjects under discussion.
Nov. 27. — This day, Thanksgiving Day, and the 4th of July,
Independence Day, are the only two holidays in the American
calendar. The Governor has, they say, as usual, made a bad
guess in regard to weather, for there is a pelting rain. It was
indeed ascertained by actual measurement at Cambridge, that in
nineteen hours between yesterday evening and to-day, at four
o'clock, there has fallen no less than four and a half inches of
rain, or one-eighth part of the average of the whole year, which
amounts to thirty-six inches at Boston. By this unlucky accident
many a family gathering has been interrupted, and relatives have
been unable to come in from the country to join a merry meeting,
corresponding to that of an English Christmas Day. Many a
sermon, also, carefully prepared for the occasion, has been preached
to empty pews ; but the newspapers inform us, that some of
these effusions will be repeated on Sunday next. Sixteen states
have now adopted this New England custom of appointing a day
for thanksgiving, and it is spreading fast, having already reached
South Carolina, and even Louisiana. A month before, I had
heard with interest the Governor's proclamation, read in all the
churches, full of good feeling and good sense. He called on the
people of the state, now that the harvest was gathered in, to
praise the God of Heaven for his bounties, and in their cheerful
family circles to render to Him a tribute of thanksgiving for His
goodness : —
" Let us praise Him, that, under His protecting Providence, the institu
tions of state, of religion, of learning and education, established by the
prudence and wisdom of our fathers, under which their children have been
prosperous and happy, have come down to us unimpaired and in full
vigor :
" That the various classes of our citizens, under the mild and equal
CHAP. XL] ABSENCE OF PAUPERISM. 145
government of laws made by themselves, pursue, unmolested, upon the
land and upon the sea, their peaceful occupations :
" That although we have heard the distant rumor, and seen the prepar
ations for war our common country is yet at peace with the world."
In no part of the address was any claim set up to the peculiar
favor of God, or his special intervention in chastising the nation
for particular transgressions ; nothing to imply that He does not
govern the world by fixed and general laws, moral and physical,
which it is our duty to study and obey, and which, if we disobey,
whether from ignorance or willfulness, will often be made the
instruments of our punishment even in this world. The procla
mation concluded thus, in the good old style :
£: Given at the Council Chamber, in Boston, this 1st day of October, in the
year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty-five, and of the
Independence of the United States the seventieth.
" GEORGE N. BRIGGS.
"By his Excellency the Governor, with the advice and consent of the
Council- " JOHN G. PALFREY, Secretary.
" God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts."
The almost entire absence of pauperism even in the large
towns, except among the old and infirm, forms a striking point of
contrast between, the state of things in New England and in
Europe. One of my friends, who is serving on a committee in
Boston to see that the poor who are too old to work have all
necessary comforts, has just ordered, as one of the indispensables,
a carpet for the bed-side of an old woman. Yet, within five
miles of Boston, some of the newly arrived emigrants of the lower
class of Irish, may now be seen living in mud huts by the side
of railway cuttings, which they are employed to dig, who are
regarded by many of the native-born laborers with no small dis
gust, not only as the most ignorant and superstitious of mortals,
but as likely, by their competition, to bring down the general
standard of wages. The rich capitalists, on the other hand,
confess to me, that they know not how they could get on with
the construction of public works, and obtain good interest for their
money, were they deprived of this constant influx of foreign labo .
VOL. i. — G
146 IRISH REPEAL MEETING. [CHAP. XI.
They speak also with kindness of the Irish, saying they are
most willing to work hard, keep their temperance vows, and, in
spite of the considerable sums drawn from them by the Catholic
priests, are putting by largely out of their earnings into the
Savings Banks. It is also agreed that they are most generous to
their poor relations in Ireland, remitting money to them annually,
and sometimes enough to enable them to pay their passage across
the Atlantic. At the same time they confess, with much con
cern, that the efforts now making by the people at large, aided
by the wealthiest class, to establish a good system of state
instruction, and to raise the moral and intellectual character of
the millions, must be retarded by the intrusion of so many rude
and ignorant settlers. Among other mischiefs, the political
passions and party feelings of a foreign country are intruded into
the political arena, and a tempting field laid open to demagogues
of the lowest order.
Returning home one night after dark from a party, I heard
music in a large public building, and, being told it was a repeal
meeting held by the Irish, had the curiosity to look in. After a
piece of instrumental music had been performed, an orator, with
an Irish accent, addressed the crowd on the sufferings of the
Irish people precisely as if he had forgotten on which side of the
Atlantic he then was. He dwelt on the tyranny of the Saxons,
and spoke of repeal as the only means of emancipating their
country from British domination, and solicited money in aid of
the great cause. Seeing, with no small surprise, an industrious
native-born artisan of Boston, whom I knew, in the crowd, I
asked him, as we went out together, whether he approved of the
objects of the meeting. He belonged to the extreme democratic
party, and answered, very coolly and quite seriously, " We hope
that we may one day be able to do for Ireland what France did
for the United States in our great struggle for independence."
On my return home, I found that my pocket had been picked
of a purse containing fortunately a few dollars only, an accident
for which I got no commiseration, as my friends hoped it would
be a lesson to me to keep better company in future.
That a humble mechanic of Boston should be found who
CHAP. XL] VISIT TO A FREE SCHOOL. 147
indulged in wild projects for redressing the wrongs of the Hiber
nian race, ought not to create wonder, when I state that before
the end of the year 1845, a resolution was moved in Congress,
by Mr. M'Connell, one of the members for Alabama, after he
had been talking much about the spirit of Christian love and
peaceful brotherhood which distinguished the American republic,
to the following effect : — " That the Irish, ground down by
British misrule, have for centuries groaned under a foreign
monarchical yoke, and are now entitled to share the blessings of
our free institutions." I am happy to say, however, that this
absurd motion was not even seconded.
The population of Boston, exclusive of Charlestown, Roxbury,
and Cambridge (which may be regarded as suburbs), is at present
about 115,000, of which 8000 are Roman Catholics, chiefly of
Irish extraction ; but there are besides many Scotch and English
emigrants in the city. In order to prove to me how much may
be done to advance them in civilization in a single generation, I
was taken to a school where nine-tenths of all the children were
of parents who had come out from England or Ireland. It was
not an examination day, and our visit was wholly unexpected.
We entered a suite of three well-aired rooms, containing 550
girls. There were nine teachers in the room. The pupils were
all between the ages of nine and thirteen, the greater portion of
them the daughters of poor laborers, but some of them of parents
in good circumstances. Each scholar was seated on a separate
chair with a back to it, the chair being immovably fixed to the
ground to prevent noise. There was no uniformity of costume,
but evidently much attention to personal neatness, nearly all of
them more dressed than would be thought in good taste in chil
dren of a corresponding class in England. They had begun their
studies at nine o'clock in the morning, and are to be six hours at
school, studying fifty minutes at a time, and then being allowed
ten minutes for play in a yard adjoining. I observed some of the
girls very intent on their task, leaning on their elbows and in
other careless attitudes, and we were told by the masters that
they avoid as much as possible finding fault with them on minor
points when they are studying. The only punishments are a
143 STATE EDUCATION. [CHAP. XL
reprimand before the class, and keeping them back after school
hours. The look of intelligence in the countenances of the greater
number of them was a most pleasing sight. In one of the upper
classes they were reading, when we went in, a passage from Paley
" On Sleep," and I was asked to select at random from the school-
books some poem which the girls might read each in their turn.
I chose Gray's Elegy in a Churchyard, as being none of the
simplest for young persons to understand. They each read a
verse distinctly, and many of them most gracefully, and explained
correctly the meaning of nearly all the words and allusions on
which I questioned them.
We afterward heard the girls of the arithmetic class examined
in algebra, and their answers showed that much pains had been
taken to make them comprehend the principles on which the
methods of calculation depended. We then visited a boy's gram
mar school, and found there 420 Protestant and 100 Catholic
boys educated together. We remarked that they had a less re
fined appearance and were less forward in their education than
the girls whom we had just seen, of the same age, and taken
from the same class in society. In explanation I was told that
it is impossible to give the boys as much schooling, because they
can earn money for their parents at an earlier age.
The number of public or free schools in Massachusetts in
1845-6, for a population of 800,000 souls, was about 3500,
and the number of male teachers 2585, and of female 5000,
which would allow a teacher for each twenty-five or thirty chil
dren, as many as they can well attend to. The sum raised by
direct taxation for the wages and board of the tutors, and for
fuel for the schools, is upward of 600,000 dollars, or 120,000
guineas ; but this is exclusive of all expenditure for school-houses,
libraries, and apparatus, for which other funds are appropriated,
and every year a great number of newer and finer buildings are
erected.
Upon the whole about one million of dollars is spent in teach
ing a population of 800,000 souls, independently of the sums
expended on private instruction, which in the city of Boston is
supposed to be equal to the money levied by taxes for the free
CHAP. XL] PAY OF TEACHERS. 149
schools, or 260,000 dollars (55,000/.). If we were to enforce a
school-rate in Great Britain, bearing the same proportion to our
population of twenty-eight millions, the tax would amount annu
ally to more than seven millions sterling, and would then be far
less effective, owing to the higher cost of living, and the com
parative average standard of incomes among professional and
official men.
In Boston the master of the Latin School, where boys are fitted
for college, and the master of the High School, where they are
taught French, mathematics, and other branches preparatory to
a mercantile career, receive each 2400 dollars (500/.), the gov
ernor of the state having only 2500 dollars. Their assistants
are paid from 1800 to 700 dollars (37 Ql. to 150Z.). The
masters of the grammar schools, where boys and girls are taught
in separate school-houses English literature, general history, and
algebra, have salaries of 1500 dollars (315/.), their male assist
ants 600 (1251.), and their female 300 (651.). The mistresses
of schools, where children from four to seven years old are taught
to read, receive 325 dollars (70/.). In Salem, Roxbury, Lowell,
and other large towns, where living is more moderate, the salaries
are about one-third less ; and in rural districts, where the schools
are not kept open for the whole year, the wages of the teachers
are still smaller.
The county of Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, has a
population of about 100,000, and the number of schools in it is
about 543, the schools being kept open some four, others twelve
months, and on an average six months in the year. The male
teachers, of whom there are about 500, receive 30 dollars (61.
6s.) a month ; the women teachers, of whom there are 700,
about 13 dollars a month (21. 15s.).
Among other changes, we are told, in the State Reports, that
the number of female teachers has been augmented more rapidly
than that of the males, especially in schools where the youngest
pupils are taught, because the services of women cost less, and
are found to be equally, if not more, efficient. But my inform
ants in general were desirous that I should understand that the
success of their plan of national education does not depend so much
150 SOCIAL POSITION OF TEACHERS. [CHAP. XT.
on the number and pay of the teachers as on the interest taken
in it by the entire population, who faithfully d vote more time
and thought to the management of the schools than to any other
public duty.
The cost of living in New England may, on the whole, be
taken to be at least one-third less than in Great Britain ; and
the spirit of the political institutions, the frugal manner of conduct
ing the government, the habits of society, and a greater general
equality of fortunes, where the custom of primogeniture does not
prevail, causes the relative value of incomes such as those above
enumerated, to confer a more respectable social position than
they would do with us. I was assured that in the country
towns the schoolmasters associate with the upper class of citizens,
holding as good a place in society as the clergy and medical
men, but not ranking so high as the lawyers.
On this point, however (the relative position of the teachers),
I found great differences of opinion among my informants ; but
a general agreement that their pay and social rank ought to be
raised, so as to enable the state to command the services of men
and women of the best abilities and accomplishments.
Channing had, for many years before his death, insisted on
the want of institutions to teach the art of teaching. There are
now several of these normal schools in full activity, where a course
of three years' instruction is given. As yet, however, few can
afford to attend more than one year ; but even this short training-
has greatly raised the general standard of efficacy, and the bene
ficial influence has extended even to schoolmasters who have not
yet availed themselves of the new training. The people have,
in fact, responded generously to the eloquent exhortations of
Channing, not to economize, for the sake of leaving a fortune to
the rising generation, at the expense of starving their intellects
and impoverishing their hearts. It was a common prejudice, he
said, and a fatal error to imagine that the most ordinary abilities
are competent to the office of teaching the young. " Their voca
tion, on the contrary, is more noble even than that of the states
man, arid demands higher powers, great judgment, and a capacity
of comprehending the laws of thought arid moral action, arid the
CHAP. XL] HIGH OFFICE OF TEACHERS. 151
various springs and motives by which the child may be roused to
the most vigorous use of all its faculties." ^
Nevertheless, some of his most enthusiastic admirers confessed
to me that they could not assent to his doctrine, that "to teach,
whether by word or action, is the highest function on earth,"
unless young men and women, between the ages of seventeen and
twenty-two, are the pupils, instead of children between four and
sixteen. They expressed their misgivings and fears that the
business of the schoolmaster, who is to teach reading and writing
and the elements of knowledge, must check the development of
the mind, if not tend to narrow its powers. As the real friends
of progress, they had come reluctantly to this conclusion ; but
they admitted that to despond at present would be premature.
The experiment of promoting the teacher of every school to
that rank in society which the importance of his duties entitles
him to hold, and of training him in his art, has never yet been
tried.
We have yet to learn what may be the effect of encouraging
men of superior energy and talent, who have a natural taste for
the calling, to fit themselves for the profession. It must doubt
less entail, like, every other liberal calling, such as the legal,
medical, clerical, military, or mercantile, a certain amount of
drudgery and routine of business ; but, like all these depart
ments, it may afford a field for the enlargement of the mind, if
they who exercise it enjoy, in a like degree, access to the best
society, can exchange thoughts with the most cultivated minds
in their district, and have leisure allowed them for self-culture,
together with a reasonable hope, if they distinguish themselves,
of being promoted to posts of honor and emolument, not in other
professions, such as the clerical, but in their own. The high
schools of Boston, supported by the state, are now so well man
aged, that some of my friends, who would grudge no expense to
engage for their sons the best instructors, send their boys to them
as superior to any of the private establishments supported by the
rich at great cost. The idea has been recently agitated of pro
viding similar free-schools and colleges for girls, because they
* Glasgow Ed., vol i. p. 391.
152 EDUCATIONAL MOVEMENT. [CHAP. XL
could more easily be induced to stay until the age of sixteen.
Young men, it is said, would hate nothing so much as to find
themselves inferior in education to the women of their own age
and station.
Of late years the improvement of the schools has been so
rapid, that objects which were thought Utopian even when
Channing began his career, have been realized ; and the more
sanguine spirits, among whom Mr. Horace Mann, Secretary of
the Public Board of Education, stands pre-eminent, continue to
set before the eyes of the public an ideal standard so much more
elevated, as to make all that has hitherto been accomplished
appear as nothing. The taxes self-imposed by the people for
educational purposes are still annually on the increase, and the
beneficial effects of the system are very perceptible. In all the
large towns Lyceums have been established, where courses of
lectures are given every winter, and the qualifications of the
teachers who deliver them are much higher than formerly. Both
the intellectual and social feelings of every class are cultivated
by these evening meetings, and it is acknowledged that with the
increased taste for reading, cherished by such instruction, habits
of greater temperance and order, and higher ideas of comfort,
have steadily kept pace.
Eight years ago (1838) Channing observed that "millions,
wearied by their day's work, have been chained to the pages of
Walter Scott, and have owed some bright evening hours and
balmier sleep to his magical creations ;" and he pointed out how
many of the laboring classes took delight in history and biogra
phy, descriptions of nature, in travels and in poetry, as well as
graver works. In his Franklin Lecture, addressed, in 1838, to
a large body of mechanics and men earning their livelihood " by
manual labor," he says, " Books are the true levelers, giving to
all who will faithfully use them the society and spiritual pres
ence of the best and greatest of our race ; so that an individual
may be excluded from what is called good society, and yet not
pine for want of intellectual companionship."*
When I asked how it happened that in so populous and rich
* Channing, vol. ii. p. 378.
CHAP. XL] POPULAR LECTURES. 153
a city as Boston there was at present (October, 1845) no regular
theater, I was told, among other reasons, that if I went into the
houses of persons of the middle and even humblest class, I should
often find the father of a family, instead of seeking excitement in
a shilling gallery, reading to his wife and four or five children
one of the best modern novels, which he has purchased for twenty-
five cents ; whereas, if they could all have left home, he could
not for many times that sum have taken them to the play. They
often buy, in two or three successive numbers of a penny news
paper, entire reprints of the tales of Dickens, Bulwer, or other
popular writers.
Dana, now a lawyer in Boston, and whose acquaintance I
had the pleasure of making there, has, in his singularly interest
ing and original work, entitled " Two Years before the Mast,"
not only disclosed to us a lively picture of life in the forecastle,
but has shown incidentally how much a crew, composed of the
most unpromising materials, rough and illiterate, and recruited
at random from the merchant service of different nations, could
be improved by associating with a single well-educated messmate.
He was able, on one of the few holidays which were granted to
them in California by the most tyrannical of captains, to keep
them from going ashore, where they would have indulged in dis
sipation, by reading to them for hours Scott's historical tale of
" Woodstock." We ought scarcely, then, to wonder, after what
I have said of the common schools of this city, that crowded
audiences should be drawn night after night, through the whole
winter, in spite of frost and snow, from the class of laborers and
mechanics, mingled with those of higher station, to listen with
deep interest to lectures on natural theology, zoology, geology,
the writings of Shakspeare, the beauties of " Paradise Lost,"
the peculiar excellencies of " Comus" and " Lycidas," treated in
an elevated style by men who would be heard with pleasure by
the most refined audiences in London.
Still, however, I hear many complaints that there is a want
of public amusements to give relief to the minds of the multitude,
whose daily employments are so monotonous that they require,
far more than the rich, opportunities of innocent recreation, such
154 LENDING LIBRARIES. tCHAP. XI.
as concerts, dancing, and the theater might give, under proper
regulations ; for these are now usually discouraged by religion
ists, who can find no other substitute for them but sermons and
reiterated church services.
Among the signs of the times, and of the increasing taste for
reading, the great number of lending libraries in every district
must not be forgotten. Toward the purchase of these the State
grants a certain sum, if an equal amount be subscribed by the
inhabitants. They are left to their own choice in the purchase
of books ; and the best English poets and novelists are almost
always to be met with in each collection, and works of biography,
history, travels, natural history, and science. The selection is
carefully made with reference to what the people will read, and
not what men of higher education and station think they ought
to read.
CHAPTER XII.
Boston, Popular Education, continued. — Patronage of Universities and
Science. — Channing on Milton. — Milton's Scheme of teaching the Nat
ural Sciences. — New England Free Schools. — Their Origin. — First
Puritan Settlers not illiterate. — Sincerity of their Religious Faith. —
Schools founded in Seventeenth Century in Massachusetts. — Discouraged
in Virginia. — Sir W. Berkeley's Letter. — Pastor Robinson's Views of
Progress in Religion. — Organization of Congregational Churches. — No
Penalties for Dissent. — Provision made for future Variations in Creeds.
— Mode of Working exemplified. — Impossibility of concealing Truths
relating to Religion from an educated Population. — Gain to the Higher
Classes, especially the Clergy. — New Theological Colleges. — The Lower
Orders not rendered indolent, discontented, or irreligious by Education.
— Peculiar Stimulus to Popular Instruction in the United States.
IT was naturally to be apprehended that, in a pure democracy,
or where the suffrage is nearly universal, the patronage of the
state would be almost entirely confined to providing means for
mere primary education, such as reading, writing-, and ciphering.
But such is not the case in Massachusetts, although the annual
grants made to the three universities of Harvard, Amherst, and
Williams, are now becoming inadequate to the growing wants
of a more advanced community, and strenuous exertions are
making to enlarge them. In the mean time, private bequests
and donations have of late years poured in upon Harvard Uni
versity from year to year, some of them on a truly munificent
scale. Since my first visit to Cambridge, professorships of bot
any, comparative anatomy, and chemistry have been founded.
There was previously a considerable staff for the teaching of
literature, law, and medicine ; and lately an entire new depart
ment for engineering, natural philosophy, chemistry, geology,
mineralogy, and natural history, in their application to the arts,
has been instituted. One individual, Mr. Abbott Lawrence, a
gentleman still in the prime of life, has contributed no less a
sum than 100,000 dollars '20,000 guineas) toward the support
156 PATRONAGE OF SCIENCE. [CHAP. XU.
of this department. One of the new chairs is now filled by a
zoologist of the highest European reputation, Professor Agassiz.
A splendid bequest also, of equal amount (100,000 dollars), has
recently been made to the Cambridge Observatory, for which the
country had already obtained, at great cost, a large telescope,
which has resolved the great nebula in Orion, and has enabled
the astronomer, Mr. Bond, simultaneously with an English ob
server, Mr. Lassell, to discover a new satellite of Saturn.
That the State, however, will not be checked by any narrow
utilitarian views in its patronage of the university and the higher
departments of literature and science, we may confidently infer
from the grants made so long ago as March, 1830, by the frugal
Legislature of Massachusetts, for a trigonometrical survey, and
for geological, botanical, and zoological explorations of the coun
try, executed by men whose published reports prove them to have
been worthy of the trust. It was to be expected that some dem
agogues would attempt to persuade the people that such an ex
penditure of public money was profligate in the extreme, and that
as the universities have a dangerous aristocratic tendency, so these
liberal appropriations of funds for scientific objects were an evi
dence that the Whig party were willing to indulge the fancies
of the few at the charge of the many. Accordingly, one orator
harangued the fishermen of Cape Cod on this topic, saying that
the government had paid 1500 dollars out of the Treasury to
remunerate Dr. Storer — for what ? for giving Latin names to
some of the best known fish ; for christening the common cod
Morrhua americana, the shad Alosa vulgaris, and the fall her
ring Clupea vulgaris. His electioneering tactics did not suc
ceed ; but might they not have gained him many votes in certain
English constituencies? Year after year, subsequently to 1837,
the columns of " the leading journal" of Great Britain were filled
with attacks in precisely the same style of low and ignorant ridi
cule against the British Association, and the memoirs of some of
the ablest writers in Europe on natural history and science, who
were assailed with vulgar abuse. Such articles would not have
been repeated so perseveringly, nor have found an echo in the
" British Critic" and several magazines, had they not found sym-
CHAP. XII.] CIIANNING ON MILTON. 157
pathy in the minds of a large class of readers, who ought, by their
station, to have been less prejudiced, and who, in reality, have
no bigoted aversion to science itself, but simply dread the effects
of its dissemination among the peo*ple at large.
It is remarkable that a writer of such genius and so enlarged
a mind as Channing, who was always aiming to furnish the mul
titude with sources of improvement and recreation, should have
dwelt so little on the important part which natural history and
the physical sciences might play, if once the tastes of the million
were turned to their study and cultivation. From several passa
ges in his works, it is evident that he had never been imbued
writh the slightest knowledge or feeling for such pursuits ; and
this is apparent even in his splendid essay on Milton, one of the
most profound, brilliant, and philosophical dissertations in the
English language. Dr. Johnson, while he had paid a just hom
age to the transcendent genius of the great poet and the charms of
his verse, had allowed his party feelings and bigotry to blind him
to all that was pure and exalted in Milton's character. Chan
ning, in his vindication, pointed out how Johnson, with all his
strength of thought and reverence for virtue and religion, his vig
orous logic, and practical wisdom, wanted enthusiasm and lofty
sentiment. Hence, his passions engaged him in the unworthy
task of obscuring the brighter glory of one of the best and most
virtuous of men. But the American champion of the illustrious
bard fails to remark that Milton was also two centuries in ad
vance of the age in which he lived, in his appreciation of the
share which the study of nature ought to hold in the training of
the youthful mind. Of Milton's scheme for enlarging the ordi
nary system of teaching, proposed after he had himself been prac
tically engaged in the task as a schoolmaster, the lexicographer
spoke, as might have been anticipated, in terms of disparagement
bordering on contempt. He treated Milton, in fact, as a mere
empiric and visionary projector, observing that " it was his pur
pose to teach boys something more solid than the common litera
ture of schools, by reading those authors that treat of physical
subjects." — " The poet Cowley had formed a similar plan in his
imaginary college ; but the knowledge of external nature, and the
158 DR. JOHNSON. [CHAP. XII.
sciences which that knowledge requires, are not the great or the
frequent business of the human mind : and we ought not" he
adds, " to turn off attention* from life to nature, as if we were
placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the
stars."
That a violent shock had been given in the sixteenth century
to certain time-honored dogmas, by what is here slightingly called
" watching the motions of the stars," was an historical fact with
which Johnson was of course familiar ; but if it had been adduced
to prove that they who exercise their reasoning powers, in inter
preting the great book of nature, are constantly arriving at new
truths, and occasionally required to modify preconceived opinions,
or that when habitually engaged in such discipline, they often ac
quire independent habits of thought, applicable to other depart
ments of human learning, such arguments would by no means
have propitiated the critic, or have induced him to moderate his
disapprobation of the proposed innovations. In the mind of John
son there was a leaning to superstition, and no one was more con
tent to leave the pupil to tread forever in beaten paths, and to
cherish extreme reverence for authority, for which end the whole
system then in vogue in the English schools and colleges was ad
mirably conceived. For it confined the studies of young men, up
to the age of twenty-two, as far as possible to the non-progressive
departments of knowledge, to the ancient models of classical ex
cellence, whether in poetry or prose, to theological treatises, to
the history and philosophy of the ancients rather than the mod
erns, and to pure mathematics rather than their application to
physics. No modern writer was more free from fear of inquiry,
more anxious to teach the millions to think and reason for them
selves, no one ever looked forward more enthusiastically to the
future growth and development of the human mind, than Chan-
ning. If his own education had not been cast in an antique
mold, he would have held up Milton as a model for imitation,
not only for his love of classical lore and poetry, but for his wish
to cultivate a knowledge of the works of nature.
Certainly no people ever started with brighter prospects of
uniting the promotion of both these departments, than the people
CHAP. XII.] ORIGIN OF FREE SCHOOLS. 159
of New England at this moment. Of the free schools which
they have founded, and the plan of education adopted by them
for children of all sects and stations in society, they feel justly
proud, for it is the most original thing which America has yet
produced. The causes of their extraordinary success and recent
progress, well deserve more attention than they have usually
received from foreigners, especially as it seems singular at first
sight, and almost paradoxical, that a commonwealth founded by
the Puritans, whom we are accustomed to regard as the enemies
of polite literature and science, should now take so prominent a
lead as the patrons of both ; or that a sect which was so prone
to bibliolatry that they took their pattern and model of civil
government, and even their judicial code, from the Old Testament,
who carried their theory of the union of Church and State so far
as to refuse the civil franchise to all who were not in full com
munion with their Church, and who persecuted for a time some
non-conformists, even to the death, should nevertheless have set
an example to the world of religious toleration, and have been
the first to establish schools for popular education open to the
children of all denominations — Romanist, Protestant, and Jew.
If any one entertains a doubt that the peculiar character
stamped upon the present generation of New Englanders, in
relation to religious and political affairs, is derived directly and
indisputably from their Puritan ancestors, let them refer to the
history of Massachusetts. According to the calculation of Ban
croft, the first Puritan settlers of New England are the parents
of one-third of the whole white population of the United States.
Within the first fifteen years (and there never was afterward any
considerable increase from England) there came over 21,200
persons, or 4000 families. Their descendants, he says, are now
(1840) not far from 4,000,000. Each family has multiplied
on the average to 1000 souls, and they have carried to New
York and Ohio, where they constitute half the population, the
Puritan system of free schools, which they established from the
beginning. When we recollect that the population of all England
is computed to have scarcely exceeded five millions when the
chief body of the Puritans first emigrated to the New World, we
160 FIRST PURITAN SETTLERS. [CHAP. XII.
may look upon, the present descendants of the first colonists as
constituting a nation hardly inferior in numbers to what England
itse]f was only two centuries before our times. The development,
therefore, of the present inhabitants from a small original stock
has been so rapid, and the intermediate generations so few, that
we must be quite prepared to discover in the founders of the colony
of the seventeenth century, the germ of all the wonderful results
which have since so rapidly unfolded themselves.
Nor is this difficult. In the first place, before the great civil
war broke out in England, when the principal emigration took
place to Massachusetts, the Puritans were by no means an illit
erate or uncultivated sect. They reckoned in their ranks a
considerable number of men of good station and family, who had
received the best education which the schools and universities
then afforded. Some of the most influential of the early New
England divines, such as Cotton Mather, were good scholars, and
have left writings which display much reading and an acquaint
ance with the Greek and Latin languages. Milton's " Paradise
Lost" usually accompanied the Bible into the log-houses of the
early settlers, and with the " Paradise Lost" the minor poems
of the same author were commonly associated.
The Puritans who first went into exile, after enduring much
oppression in their native country, were men who were ready to
brave the wilderness rather than profess doctrines or conform to
a ritual which they abhorred. They were a pure and conscien
tious body. They might be ignorant or fanatical, but they were
at least sincere, and no hypocrites had as yet been tempted to
join them for the sake of worldly promotion, as happened at a
later period, when Puritanism in the mother country had become
dominant in the state. Full of faith, and believing that their
religious tenets must be strengthened by free investigation, they
held that the study and interpretation of the Scriptures should
not be the monopoly of a particular order of men, but that every
layman was bound to search them for himself. Hence they were
anxious to have all their children taught to read. So early as
the year 1647, they instituted common schools, the law declaring
" that all the brethren shall teach their children and apprentices
CHAP. XII.] SCHOOLS EARLY FOUNDED. 161
to read, and that every township of fifty householders shall ap
point one to teach all the children."^
Very different was the state of things in the contemporary
colony of Virginia, to which the Cavaliers and the members of
the Established Church were thronging. Even fifteen or twenty
years later, Sir William Berkeley, who was governor of Virginia
for nearly forty years, and was one of the best of the colonial
rulers, spoke thus, in the full sincerity of his heart, of his own
province, in a letter written after the restoration of Charles II. :
— "I thank God there are no free schools or printing, and I hope
we shall not have them these hundred years. For learning has
brought heresy and disobedience and sects into the world, and
printing has divulged them, and libels against the best govern
ment. God keep us from both."f
Sir William Berkeley was simply expressing here, in plain
terms, the chief motives which still continue to defeat or retard
the cause of popular education in some parts of the United States
and in many countries of Europe, England not excepted — a
dread of political change while the people remain in ignorance,
and a fear of removing that ignorance, lest it should bring on
changes of religious opinion. The New Englanders were from
the beginning so republican in spirit, that they were not likely to
share Governor Berkeley's apprehensions of a growing dislike to
" the best of governments," as he termed the political maxims of
the Stuarts ; and if, for a time, they cherished hopes of preserv
ing uniformity of religious opinion, and even persecuted some who
would not conform to their views, their intolerance was of short
duration, and soon gave way to those enlightened views of civil
and religious freedom which they had always professed, even
when they failed to carry them into practice.
If we contrast the principles before alluded to of the leading
men in Massachusetts with those of the more southern settlers,
in the early part of the seventeenth century, we learn without
surprise that at a time when there was not one bookseller's shop
in Virginia and no printing presses, there were several in Boston,
* Bancroft, vol. i. p. 458.
t Chalmers, cited by Graham, Hist, of U. S., vol. i. p. 103.
162 PROGRESS IN RELIGION. [CHAP. XII.
with no less than five printing-offices, a fact which reflects the
more credit on the Puritans, because at the same period (1724)
there were no less than thirty-four counties in the mother country,
Lancashire being one of the number, in which there was no
printer.^
When the Pilgrim Fathers were about to sail in the May
flower from Leyden, a solemn fast was held before they embarked,
and their pastor, Robinson, gave them a farewell address, in
which these memorable words are recorded : —
" I charge you, before God and his blessed angels, that you
follow rne no further than you have seen me follow the Lord
Jesus Christ. The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out
of his holy word. For my part, I can not sufficiently bewail
the condition of the reformed churches, who are come to a period
in religion, and will go at present no further than the instruments
of their first reformation. The Lutherans can not be drawn to
go beyond what Luther saw. Whatever part of His will our
good God has imparted and revealed unto Calvin, they will die
rather than embrace it. And the Calvinists, you see, stick fast
where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not
all things. This is a misery much to be lamented ; for, though
they were burning and shining lights in their times, yet they
penetrated not into the whole counsel of God : but, were they
now living, they would be as willing to embrace further light as
that which they first received. I beseech you to remember it ;
it is an article of your church-covenant, that you will be ready to
receive whatever truth shall be made known unto you from the
written word of God. Remember that and every other article
of your most sacred covenant."
It may be said that the spirit of progress, the belief in the
future discovery of new truths, and the expansion of Christianity,
which breathes through every passage of this memorable dis
course, did not characterize the New England Independents any
more than the members of other sects. Like the rest, they had
embodied their interpretations of Scripture in certain fixed and
definite propositions, and were .but little disposed to cherish the
* Macaulay, History of England, vol. i. p. 392, who cites Nichols.
CHAP. XII.] NO PENALTIES FOR DISSENT. 163
doctrine of the gradual development of Christianity. The Roman
ists had stopped short at the council of Trent, when the decrees
of a general council were canonized by the sanction of an infal
lible Pope. In like manner, almost every Protestant church has
acted as if religion ceased to be progressive at the precise moment
of time when their own articles of belief were drawn up, after
much dispute and difference of opinion.
But the precepts inculcated by Pastor Robinson were delivered
to a body of men whose form of ecclesiastical polity was very
peculiar ; who held that each congregation, each separate society
of fellow- worshipers, constituted within themselves a perfect and
independent church, whose duty it was to compose for itself and
modify at pleasure its rules of scriptural interpretation. In con
formity with these ideas, the common law of New England had
ruled, that the majority of the pew-holders in each church should
retain their property in a meeting-house, and any endowment
belonging to it, whatever new opinions they might, in the course
of time, choose to adopt. In other words, if, in the lapse of ages,
they should deviate from the original standard of faith, they
should not suffer the usual penalties of dissent, by being dispos
sessed of the edifice in which they were accustomed to worship,
or of any endowments given or bequeathed for a school-house or
the support of a pastor, but should continue to hold them ; the
minority who still held fast to the original tenets of the sect,
having to seek a new place of worship, but being allowed to
dispose of their pews, as of every other freehold, if purchasers
could be found.
Every year in some parts of New England, where the popu
lation is on the increase, the manner in which some one of these
new congregations starts into existence may be seen. A few
individuals, twenty perhaps, are in the habit of meeting together
on the Sabbath in a private dwelling, or in the school-house
already built for the children of all denominations in the new
village. One of the number offers a prayer, another reads a
chapter in the Bible, another a printed sermon, and perhaps a
fourth offers remarks, by way of exhortation, to his neighbors.
As the population increases, they begin to think of forming them-
164 CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. [CHAP. XTI.
selves into a church, and settling a minister. But first they
have to agree upon some creed or covenant which is to be the
basis of their union. In drawing up this creed they are usually
assisted by some neighboring minister, and it is then submitted
for approbation to a meeting of all the church members, and
is thoroughly discussed and altered till it suits the peculiar and
prevailing shades of opinion of the assembly. When at length
it is assented to, it is submitted to a council of neighboring
ministers, who examine into its scriptural basis, and who, accord
ing as they approve or disapprove of it, give or withhold " the
hand of fellowship."
The next step is to elect a pastor. After hearing several
candidates preach, they invite one to remain with them ; and,
after he has been ordained by the neighboring ministers, agree
on the salary to be insured to him, for the collection of which
certain members become responsible. It rarely exceeds 700
dollars, and more usually amounts in rural districts to 500 dol
lars, or 100 guineas annually.
By the Congregationalists, a church is defined to be a com
pany of pious persons, who voluntarily unite together for the
worship of God. Each company being self-created, is entirely
independent of every other, has the power to elect its own offi
cers, and to admit or exclude members. Each professes to regard
creeds and confessions of faith simply as convenient guides in the
examination of candidates, not standards of religious truth. They
may be the opinions of good and wise men, venerable by their
antiquity, but of no binding authority, and are to be measured
in each separate church by their conformity with Scripture. As
to the union of different churches, it is pure]y voluntary, and has
been compared to a congress of sovereign states, having certain
general interests in common, but entirely independent of each
other. There are no articles of union ; but if any old or new
society is thought to depart so widely from the other churches
that they can no longer be recognized as Christians, the rest
withhold or withdraw their fellowship.
Upon the whole, the separate congregational churches, both
in Old and New England, in all above 3000 in number, have
CHAP. XII.] CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES. 165
held together more firmly for two centuries, and have deviated
far less from the original standard of faith, than might have
been expected ; although in Massachusetts and some neighboring
States, more than a hundred meeting-houses, some of them hav
ing endowments belonging to them, have in the course of the
last forty years been quietly transferred, by the majority of the
pew-holders, to what may be said to constitute new denomina
tions. The change usually takes place when a new minister is
inducted. This system of ecclesiastical polity is peculiarly re
pugnant to the ideas entertained by churchmen in general, whose
elibrts are almost invariably directed, whether in Protestant or
Romanist communities, to inculcate a deep sense of the guilt of
schism, and to visit that guilt as far as possible with pecuniary
penalties and spiritual outlawry. The original contract is usually
based on a tacit assumption that religion is not, like other branch
es of knowledge, progressive in its nature ; and, therefore, instead
of leaving the mind unfettered and free to embrace and profess
new interpretations, as would be thought desirable where the
ivorks of God are the subjects of investigation, every precaution is
taken to prevent doubt, fluctuation, and change. It is even
deemed justifiable to exact early vows and pledges against the
teaching of any new doctrines ; and if the zealous inquirer should,
in the course of years and much reading, catch glimpses of truths
not embodied in his creed, riay, the very grounds of which could
not be known to him when he entered the church, nor to the
original framers of his articles of religion, no provision is made
for enabling him to break silence, or openly to declare that he
has modified his views. On the contrary, such a step must
usually be attended with disgrace, and often with destitution.
Nor does the intensity of this feeling seem by any means to
diminish in modern times with the multiplication of new sects.
It is even exhibited as strongly in bodies which dissent from old
establishments as in those establishments themselves. Wesley,
for example, took the utmost care that every Methodist chapel
should be so vested in the " General Conference," as to insure
the forfeiture of the building to the trustees, if any particular
congregation should deviate from his standard of faith, or even
166 FUTURE VARIATIONS IN CREEDS. [€HAP. XII,
should return to the Church of England, whose doctrines they
had never renounced. But the most signal instance of a fixed
determination to prevent any one congregation from changing its
mind in regard to any dogma or rite, until all the others associat
ed with it are ready to move on in the same direction, has been
exemplified in our times by the Free Kirk of Scotland. More
than a million of the population suddenly deserted the old estab
lishment, and were compelled to abandon hundreds of ecclesiasti
cal buildings, in which they had worshiped from their childhood.
Some of these edifices remained useless for a time, locked up,
and no service performed in them, because the minister and
nearly all the parishioners had joined in the secession. It was
necessary for the separatists to erect 700 or 800 new edifices
and school-houses, on which they expended several hundred
thousand pounds, having often no small difficulty to obtain new
sites for churches, so that their ministers preached for a time,
like the Covenanters of old, in the open air. It was under these
circumstances, and at the moment of submitting to such sacrifices,
that their new ecclesiastical organization was completed, provid
ing that if any one of several hundred congregations should here
after deviate, in ever so slight a degree, from any one of the
numerous articles of faith drawn up nearly three centuries ago,
under the sanction of John Knox, or from any one of the rules and
forms of church government then enacted, they should be dispos
sessed of the newly erected building, and all funds thereunto
belonging. Had any other contract been proposed, implying the
possibility of any future change or improvement in doctrine or
ceremony, not a farthing would have been contributed by these
zealous Presbyterians ; nor have they acted inconsistently, inas
much as they are fully persuaded that they neither participate in
an onward or backward movement, but are simply reverting to
that pure and perfect standard of orthodoxy of the middle of the
sixteenth century, from which others have so sinfully departed.
It is only in times comparatively modern, that the opinion has
gained ground in Europe, and very recently in Scotland, that in
the settlement of landed property there should be some limitation
of the power of the dead over the living, and that a testator can
CHAP. XII.] FUTURE VARIATIONS IN CREEDS. 167
not be gifted with such foresight as to enable him to know
beforehand in what manner, and subject to what conditions, his
wealth may be best distributed among his descendants, several
generations hence, for their own benefit or that of the community
at large. Whether, in ecclesiastical matters, also, there should
not be some means provided of breaking the entail without resort
ing to what is termed in Scotland " a disruption," so that devia
tions from theological formularies many centuries old, should not
be visited with pecuniary losses or disgrace — whether it be ex
pedient to allow the Romanist or Calvinist, the Swedenborgian
or Socinian, and every other sectary to enforce, by the whole
power of the wealth he may bequeath to posterity, the teaching
of his own favorite dogmas for an indefinite time, and when a
large part of the population on whom he originally bestowed his*
riches have altered their minds, are points on which a gradual
change has been taking place in the opinions of not a few of the
higher classes at least. Of this no one will doubt who remem
bers or will refer to the debates in both Houses of the British
Parliament in 1844,^ and the speeches of eminent statesmen of
opposite politics when the Dissenters' Chapel Bill was discussed.
But whatever variety of views there may still be on this sub
ject in Europe, it is now the settled opinion of many of the most
thoughtful of the New Englanders, that the assertion of the
independence of each separate congregation, was as great a step
toward freedom of conscience as all that had been previously
gained by Luther's Reformation ; and it constitutes one of those
characteristics of church government in New England, which,
whether approved of or not, can not with propriety be lost sight
of, when we endeavor to trace out the sources of the love of pro
gress, which has taken so strong a hold of the public mind in New
England, and which has so much facilitated their plan of national
education. To show how widely the spirit of their peculiar
ecclesiastical system has spread, I may state that even the
Roman Catholics have, in different states, and in three or foui
cases (one of which is still pending, in 1848—9), made an appeal
to the courts of law, and endeavored to avail themselves of the
* See the Debates on 7 & 8 Viet., ch. xlv, A D. 1844.
168 CONGREGATIONAL POLITY. [CHAP. XII.
principle of the Independents, so that the majority of a separate
congregation should be entitled to resist the appointment by their
bishop of a priest to whom they had strong objections. The
courts seem hitherto to have determined that, as the building
belonged to the majority of the pew-holders, they might deal
with it as they pleased ; but they have declined to pronounce
any opinion on points of ecclesiastical discipline, leaving the
members of each sect free, in this respect, to obey the dictates
of their own conscience.
But to exemplify the more regular working of the congrega
tional polity within its own legitimate sphere, I will mention a
recent case which came more home to my own scientific pursuits.
A. young man of superior talent, with whom I was acquainted,
who was employed as a geologist in the state survey of Pennsyl
vania, was desirous of becoming a minister of the Presbyterian
Church in that state ; but, when examined, previous to ordina
tion, he was unable to give satisfactory answers to questions
respecting the plenary inspiration of Scripture, because he con
sidered such a tenet, when applied to the first book of Gene
sis, inconsistent with discoveries now universally admitted, re
specting the high antiquity of the earth, and the existence of
living beings on the globe long anterior to man. The rejected
candidate, whose orthodoxy on all other points was fully admitted,
was then invited by an Independent congregation in New En
gland, to become their pastor ; and when he accepted the offer,
the other associated churches were called upon to decide whether
they would assist in ordaining one who claimed the right to teach
freely his own views on the question at issue. The right of the
congregation to elect him, whether the other churches approved
of the doctrine or not, was conceded ; and a strong inclination is
always evinced, by the affiliated societies, to come, if possible, to
an amicable understanding. Accordingly, a discussion ensued,
and is perhaps still going on, whether, consistently with a fair
interpretation of Scripture, or with what is essential to the faith
of a Christian, the doctrine of complete and immediate inspiration
may or may not be left as an open question.
Some of my readers may perhaps exclaim that this incident
CHAP. XII. ] CHURCHMEN ON PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 169
proves that the Congregationalists of New England are far behind
many orthodox divines of the Church of England, or even the
Church of Rome, as shown by Dr. Wiseman's lectures, in the
liberality of their opinions on this head, and that the establish
ment of the true theory of astronomy satisfied the Protestant
world, at least, that the Bible was never intended as a revelation
of physical science. No doubt it is most true, that within the
last forty years many distinguished writers and dignitaries of the
English Church have expressed their belief very openly in regard
to the earth's antiquity, and the leading truths established by
geology. " The Records of Creation," published in 1818, by the
present Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. Sumner), the writings of
the present Dean of Westminster (Dr. Buckland), those of the
Dean of LlandafF(Dr. Conybeare), and of the Woodwardian Pro
fessor of Cambridge (The Rev. A. Sedgwick), and others, might
be adduced in confirmation. All of these, indeed, have been
cited by the first teachers of geology in America, especially in the
" orthodox universities" of New England, as countenancing the
adoption of their new theories ; and I have often heard scientific
men in America express their gratitude to the English Church
men for the protection which their high authority afforded them
against popular prejudices at a critical moment, when many of
the State Legislatures were deliberating whether they should or
should not appropriate large sums of the public money to the pro
motion of geological surveys. The point, however, under dis
cussion in the Congregationalist Church, to which I have alluded,
is in reality a different one, and of the utmost importance ; for it
is no less than to determine, not whether a minister may publish
books or essays declaratory of his own individual views, respect
ing the bearing of physical science on certain portions of Scrip
ture, but whether he may, without reproach or charge of indis
cretion, freely and candidly expound to all whom he addresses,
rich and poor, from the pulpit, those truths on which few well-
informed men now any longer entertain a doubt. Until such
permission be fairly granted, the initiated may, as we well know,
go on for ages embracing one creed, while the multitude holds
fast to another, and looks with suspicion and distrust on the phi-
VOL: I.— H
170 BIBLICAL CONTROVERSY. [CHAP. XII.
losopher who unreservedly makes known the most legitimate de
ductions from facts. Such, in truth, is the present condition of
things throughout Christendom, the millions being left in the
same darkness respecting the antiquity of the globe, and the suc
cessive races of animals and plants which inhabited it before the
creation of man, as they were in the middle ages ; or, rather,
each new generation being allowed to grow up with, or derive
from Genesis, ideas directly hostile to the conclusions universally
received by all who have studied the earth's autobiography. Not
merely the multitude, but many of those who are called learned,
still continue, while beholding with delight the external beauty
of the rocks and mountains, to gaze on them as Virgil's hero ad
mired his shield of divine workmanship, without dreaming of its
historical import : —
" Dona parentis
Miratur, rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet."
The extent to which, in Protestant countries, and where there
is a free press, opinions universally entertained by the higher
classes, may circulate among them in print and may yet remain
a sealed book to the million as completely as if they were still in
sacerdotal keeping, is such as no one antecedently to experience
would have believed possible. The discoveries alluded to are by
no means confined to the domain of physical science. I may cite
as one remarkable example the detection of the spurious nature
of the celebrated verse in the First Epistle of John, chap. v. verse
7, commonly called "the Three Heavenly Witnesses." Luther,
in the last edition which he published of the Bible, had expunged
this passage as spurious ; but, shortly after his death, it was re
stored by his followers, in deference to popular prepossessions and
Trinitarian opinions. Erasmus omitted it in his editions of the
New Testament in the years 1516 and 1519; and after it had
been excluded by several other eminent critics, Sir Isaac Newton
wrote his celebrated dissertation on the subject between the years
1690 and 1700, strengthening the arguments previously adduced
against the genuineness of the verse. Finally, Porson published,
in 1788 and 1790, his famous letters, by which the question was
CHAP. XII.] BIBLICAL CONTROVERSY. 171
forever set at rest. It was admitted that in. all the Greek MSS.
of the highest antiquity, the disputed passages were wanting, and
Person enumerated a long list of Greek and Latin authors, in
cluding the names of many fathers of the Church, who, in their
controversies with Arians and Socinians, had not availed them
selves of the text in question, although they had cited some of
the verses which immediately precede and follow, which lend a
comparatively feeble support to their argument.
All who took the lead against the genuineness of the passage,
except Sir Isaac Newton, were Trinitarians ; but doubtless felt
with Person, that " he does the best service to truth who hinders
it from being supported by falsehood." Throughout the con
troversy, many eminent divines of the Anglican church have
distinguished themselves by their scholarship and candor, and it
is well known by those who have of late years frequented the
literary circles of Rome, that the learned Cardinal Mai was
prevented, in 1838, from publishing his edition of the Codex
Vaticanus, because he could not obtain leave from the late Pope
(Gregory XVI.) to omit the interpolated passages, and had
satisfied himself that they were wanting in all the most ancient
MSS. at Rome and Paris. The Pontiff refused, because he was
bound by the decrees of the Council of Trent, and of a Church
pretending to infallibility, which had solemnly sanctioned the
Vulgate, and the Cardinal had too much good faith to give the
authority of his name to what he regarded as a forgery. In Ox
ford, in 1819, the verse was riot admitted, by the examiners in
Divinity, as Scripture warranty for the doctrine of the Trinity ;
yet, not only is it retained in the English Prayer-Book, in the
epistle selected for the first Sunday after Easter, but the Protest
ant Episcopal Church in America, when finally revising their
version of the English Liturgy in 1801, several years after
Person's letters had been published, did not omit the passage,
although they had the pruning knife in their hand, and were lop
ping off several entire services, such as the Commination, Gun
powder Treason, King Charles the Martyr, the Restoration of
Charles II., and last, not least, the Athanasian Creed. What
is still more remarkable, Protestants of every denomination have
172 HOGARTH'S ELECTION FEAST. [CHAP. XII.
gone on year after year distributing hundreds of thousands of
Bibles, not only without striking out this repudiated verse, but
without even affixing to it any mark or annotation to show the
multitude that it is given up by every one who has the least
pretension to scholarship and candor.
'* Let Truth, stern arbitress of all,
Interpret that original,
And for presumptuous wrongs atone ; —
Authentic words be given, or none !"
It is from no want of entire sympathy with the sentiment
expressed in these lines of Wordsworth, and written by him on
a blank leaf of Macpherson's Ossian, that literary or scientific
men, whether Protestant or Catholic, European or American,
clergy or laity, abstain in general from communicating the results
of their scientific or biblical researches to the million, still less
from any apprehension that the essential truths of Christianity
would suffer the slightest injury, were the new views to be
universally known. They hesitate, partly from false notions of
expediency, and partly through fear of the prejudices of the vulgar.
They dare not speak out, for the same reason that the civil and
ecclesiastical rulers of England halted for one hundred and
seventy years before they had courage to adopt the reform in the
Julian calendar, which Gregory XIII., in accordance with astro
nomical observations, had effected in 1582.
Hogarth, in his picture of the Election Feast, has introduced
a banner carried by one of the crowd, on which was inscribed
the motto, " Give us back our eleven days," for he remembered
when the angry mob, irritated by the innovation of the new
style, went screaming these words through the streets of London.
In like manner, the acknowledged antiquity of Egyptian civil
ization, or of the solid framework of the globe, with its monu
ments of many extinct races of living beings, might, if suddenly
disclosed to an ignorant people, raise as angry a demand to give
them back their old chronology. Hence arises a habit of con
cealing from the unlettered public discoveries which might, it is
thought, perplex them, and unsettle their old opinions. This
method of dealing with the most sacred of subjects, may thus be
CHAP. XII.] LAY TEACHERS. 173
illustrated : — A few tares have grown up among the wheat ;
you must not pull them up, or you will loosen the soil and expose
the roofs of the good grain, arid then all may wither : moreover,
you must go on sowing the seeds of the same tares in the mind
of the rising generation, for you can not open the eyes of the
children without undeceiving and alarming their parents. Now
the perpetuation of error among the many, is only one part of
the mischief of this want of good faith, for it is also an abandon
ment by the few of the high ground on which their religion
ought to stand, namely, its truth. It accustoms the teacher to
regard his religion in its relation to the millions as a mere piece
of machinery, like a police, for preserving order, or enabling one
class of men to govern another.
If such a state of things be unsound and unsatisfactory, it is
not so much the clergy who are to blame as the laity ; for lay
men have more freedom of action, and can with less sacrifice of
personal interests take the initiative in a reform. The cure of
the evil is obvious ; it consists in giving such instruction to the
people at large as would make concealment impossible. What
ever is known and intelligible to ordinary capacities in science,
especially if contrary to the first and natural impressions deriv
able from the literal meaning, or ordinary acceptation of the text
of Scripture, whether in astronomy, geology, or any other depart
ment of knowledge, should be freely communicated to all. Lay
teachers, not professionally devoted and pledged to propagate the
opinions of particular sects, will do this much more freely than
ecclesiastics, and, as a matter of course, in proportion as the
standard of public instruction is raised ; and no order of men
would be such gainers by the measure as the clergy, especially
the most able and upright among them. Every normal school,
every advance made in the social and intellectual position of the
lay teachers, tends to emancipate, not the masses alone, but still
more effectually their spiritual guides, and would increase their
usefulness in a tenfold degree. That a clergy may be well
informed for the age they live in, and may contain among them
many learned and good men, while the people remain in dark
ness, we know from history ; for the spiritual instructors may
174 PAY OF CLERGY. [CHAP. XII.
wish to keep the multitude in ignorance, with a view of main
taining their own po\yer. But no educated people will ever
tolerate an idle, illiterate, or stationary priesthood. That this is
impossible, the experience of the last quarter of a century in
New England has fully proved. In confirmation of this truth,
I may appeal to the progress made by the ministers of the Meth
odist and Baptist churches of late years. Their missionaries
found the Congregationalists slumbering in all the security of an
old establishment, and soon made numerous converts, besides
recruiting their ranks largely from newly arrived emigrants.
They were able to send more preachers into the vineyard, be
cause they required at first scarcely any preparation or other
qualification than zeal. . But no sooner had the children of the
first converts been taught in the free schools under an improved
system, than the clergy of these very denominations, who had
for a time gloried in their ignorance and spoken with contempt
of all human knowledge, found it necessary to study for some
years in theological seminaries, and attend courses of church
history, the Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and German languages, the
modern writings of German and other biblical scholars, and
every branch of divinity. The Baptist college at Newton has
greatly distinguished itself among others, and that of the Meth
odists at Middletown in Connecticut ; while the Independents
have their theological college at Andover in Massachusetts, which
has acquired much celebrity, and drawn to it pupils from great
distances, and of many different denominations.
The large collections of books on divinity which are now seen
in the libraries of New England clergy, were almost unknown
a quarter of a century ago.
The average pay, also, of the clergy in the rural districts of
New England has increased. About the middle of the last
century, it was not more than 200 dollars annually, so that they
were literally " passing rich with forty pounds a year ;" whereas
now they usually receive 500 at least, and some in the cities
2000 or 3000 dollars. Nor can there be a doubt that, in pro
portion as the lay teachers are more liberally remunerated, the
scale of income required to command the services of men of
CHAP. XIL] POPULAR INSTRUCTION. 175
first-rate talent in the clerical profession, must and will be
raised.
Already there are many indications in Massachusetts that a
demand for higher qualifications in men educated for the pulpit
is springing up. It is no bad augury to hear a minister exhort
his younger brethren at their ordination not to stand in awe of
their congregations, but to remember they have before them sin
ful men who are to be warned, not critics who are to be propi
tiated. " Formerly," said Channing, " Felix trembled before
Paul ; it is now the successor of Paul who trembles :" — a saying
which, coming as it did from a powerful and successful preacher,
implies that the people are awaking, not that they are growing
indifferent about religious matters, but that the day of soporific
discourses, full of empty declamation or unmeaning common
places, is drawing to a close.
It will be asked, however, even by some who are favorable to
popular education, whether the masses can have leisure to profit
in after life by such a style of teaching as the government of
Massachusetts is now ambitious of affording to the youth of the
country, between the ages of four and fourteen. To this I may
answer, that in nations less prosperous and progressive it is ascer
tained that men may provide for all their bodily wants, may feed
and clothe themselves, and yet give up one-seventh part of their
time, or every Sabbath, to their religious duties. That their re
ligion should consist not merely in the cultivation of a devotional
spirit toward their Maker, but also in acquiring pure and lofty
conceptions of his attributes — a knowledge of the power and
wisdom displayed in his works — an acquaintance with his moral
laws — a just sense of their own responsibility, and an exercise of
their understandings in appreciating the evidences of their faith,
few of my readers will deny. To insure the accomplishment of
these objects, a preparatory education in good schools is indis
pensable. It is not enough to build churches and cathedrals, to
endow universities or theological colleges, or to devote a large
portion of the national revenues to enable a body of spiritual in
structors to discharge, among other ecclesiastical duties, that ot
preaching good sermons from the pulpit. Their seed may full
176 POPULAR INSTRUCTION. [CHAP. XII.
on a soil naturally fertile, but will perish if there has been no
previous culture of the ground. At the end of seventy years
men of good natural abilities, who have been attentive to their
religious observances, have given up ten entire years of their life,
a period thrice as long as is required for an academical course
of study, and at the close of such a career may, as we know, be
ignorant, sensual, and superstitious, and have little love or taste
for things intellectual or spiritual.
But granting that time and leisure may be found, it will still
be asked whether, if men of the humblest condition be taught to
enjoy the poems of Milton and Gray, the romances of Scott, or
lectures on literature, astronomy, and botany, or if they read a
daily newspaper and often indulge in the stirring excitement of
party politics, they will be contented with their situation in life,
and submit to hard labor. All apprehension of such consequences
is rapidly disappearing in the more advanced states of the Ameri
can Union. It is acknowledged by the rich that, where the free
schools have been most improved, the people are least addicted
to intemperance, are more provident, have more respect for prop
erty and the laws, are more conservative, and less led away by
socialist or other revolutionary doctrines. So far from indolence
being the characteristic of the laboring classes, where they are
best informed, the New Englanders are rather too much given to
overwork both body and brain. They make better pioneers,
when roughing it in a log-house in the backwoods, than the un
educated Highlander or Irishman ; and the factory girls of
Lowell, who publish their " Offering," containing their own
original poems and essays, work twelve hours a day, and have
not yet petitioned for a ten-hour bill.
In speculating on the probability of the other states in the
north, south, and west, some of them differing greatly in the de
gree of their social advancement, and many of them retarded by
negro slavery, adopting readily the example set them by the
New Englanders. and establishing free and normal schools, I
find that American enthusiasts build their hopes chiefly on that
powerful stimulus which they say is offered by their institutions
for popular education — a stimulus such as was never experienced
CHAP. XII.] POPULAR INSTRUCTION. 177
before in any country in the world. This consists not so much
in the absence of pauperism, or in the individual liberty enjoyed
by every one in civil and religious rights, but in the absence of
the influence of family and fortune — the fair field of competition,
freely open to all who aspire, however humble, to rise one day
to high employments, especially to official or professional posts,
whether lay or ecclesiastical, civil or military, requiring early
cultivation. Few will realize their ambitious longings ; but
every parent feels it a duty to provide that his child should not
be shut out from all chance of winning some one of the numerous
prizes, which are awarded solely on the ground of personal quali
fications, not always to the most worthy, but at least without
any regard to birth or hereditary wealth. It seems difficult to
foresee the limit of taxation which a population, usually very in
tolerant of direct taxes, will not impose on themselves to secure
an object in which they have all so great a stake, nor does any
serious obstacle or influence seem likely to oppose their will.
There is in no state, for example, any dominant ecclesiastical
body sufficiently powerful to thwart the maxims of those states
men who maintain that, as the people are determined to govern
themselves, they must be carefully taught and fitted for self-
government, and receive secular instruction in common schools
open to all. The Roman Catholic priests, it is true, in the state
of New York, where there are now 11,000 schools in a popula
tion of two millions and a half, have made some vigorous efforts
to get the exclusive management of a portion of the school funds
into their own hands, and one, at least, of the Protestant sects
has openly avowed its sympathy in the movement. But they
have failed from the extreme difficulty of organizing a combined
effort, where the leaders of a great variety of rival denominations
are jealous of one another ; and, fortunately, the clergy are be
coming more and more convinced that, where the education of
the million has been carried farthest, the people are most regular
in their attendance on public worship, most zealous in the de
fense of their theological opinions, and most liberal in contribut
ing funds for the support of their pastors and the building of
churches.
H*
CHAPTER XIII.
Leaving Boston for the South. — Railway Stove. — Fall of Snow. — New Haven,
and Visit to Professor Silliman. — New York. — Improvements in the
City. — Croton Waterworks. — Fountains. — Recent Conflagration. — New
Churches. — Trinity Church. — News from Europe of Converts to Rome. —
Reaction against Tractarians. — Electric Telegraph, its Progress in
America. — Morse and Wheatstone. — 11,000 Schools in New York for
Secular Instruction. — Absence of Smoke. — Irish Voters. — Nativism.
Dec. 3. 1 845. — HAVING resolved to devote the next six months
of my stay in America to a geological exploration of those parts
of the country which I had not yet visited, I left Boston just as
the cold weather was setting in, to spend the winter in the south.
The thermometer had fallen to 23° F., and on our way to the
cars we saw skaters on the ice in the common. Soon after we
started, heavy snow began to fall, but in spite of the storm we
were carried to Springfield, 100 miles, in five hours. We passed
a luggage train with twenty-two loaded cars, rolling past us in
the opposite direction, on 1 0 0 wheels, including those of the engine
and tender. In the English railways, the passengers often suffer
much from cold in winter. Here, the stove in the center of the
long omnibus is a great luxury, and I saw one traveler after an
other leave his seat, walk up to it and warm his feet on the fender.
As I was standing there, a gentleman gave me the President's
speech to read, which, by means of a railway express, had, for
the first time, been brought from Washington to Boston, 470
miles, in one day. It was read with interest, as all were
speculating on the probability of a war with England about
Oregon. While I was indulging my thoughts on the rapid
communication of intelligence by newspapers and the speed and
safety of railway traveling, a fellow-passenger interrupted my
pleasing reveries by telling me I was standing too near the iron
stove, which had scorched my clothes and burnt a hole in my
great coat, and immediately afterward I learnt at Springfield, that
CHAP. XIII. ] VISIT TO PROFESSOR SILLIMAN. 179
the cars on the line between that town and Albany, where there
is only one track, had run against a luggage train near Chester,
and many passengers were injured. Some say that two were
killed. According to others, one of the trains was five minutes
before its time ; but our informant took my thoughts back to
England, and English narratives of the like catastrophes by say
ing, " It has been ascertained that no one was to blame." We
had no reason to boast of our speed the next day, for we were
twelve hours in going sixty- two miles to New Haven. The delay
was caused by ice on the rail, and by our having to wait to let
the New York train pass us, there being only one line of rail.
A storm in the Sound had occasioned the New York cars to be
five hours behind their time. We saw many sleighs dashing
past and crossing our road. It was late before we reached the
hospitable house of Professor Silliman, who with his son gave me
jnany valuable instructions for my southern tour. Their letters
of introduction, however, though most useful, were a small part
of the service they did me both in this tour and during my former
visit to America. Every where, even in the states most remote
from New England, I met with men who, having been the pupils
of Professor Silliman, and having listened to his lectures when at
college, had invariably imbibed a love for natural history and
physical science.
In the morning, when we embarked in the steamer for New
York, I was amused at the different aspect of the New Haven
scenery from that which I remembered in the autumn of 1841.
The East Rock was now covered with snow, all but the bold
precipice of columnar basalt. The trees, several of which, espe
cially the willows, still retained many of their leaves, were bent
down beneath a weight of ice. I never saw so brilliant a spec
tacle of the kind, for every bough of the large drooping elms and
the smallest twigs of every tree and shrub were hung with trans
parent icicles, which, in the bright sunshine, reflected the pris
matic colors like the cut-glass drops of a chandelier. As we sailed
out of the harbor, which was crowded with vessels, we saw all
the ropes of their riggings similarly adorned with crystals of ice.
A stormy voyage of nine hours carried us through Long Island
180 CROTON WATERWORKS. [CHAP. XIII.
Sound, a distance of ninety miles, to New York. It is only three
years since we were last in this city, yet in this short interval we
see improvements equaling in importance the increase of the
population, which now amounts in round numbers to 440,000 ;
New York containing 361,000, and Brooklyn, which is con
nected with it "by a ferry, together with Williamsburg 79,000.
Among other novelties since 1841, we observe with pleasure the
new fountains in the midst of the city supplied from the Croton
waterworks, finer than any which I remember to have seen in
the center of a city since I was last in Rome. Two of them
are now, in spite of an intense frost, throwing up columns of water
more than thirty feet high, one opposite the City Hall, and an
other in Hudson Square ; but I am told that when we return in
the summer we shall see many others in action. A work more
akin in magnificence to the ancient and modern Roman aqueducts
has not been achieved in our times ; the water having been,
brought from the Croton river, a distance of about forty miles,
at the expense of about three millions sterling. The health of
the city is said to have already gained by greater cleanliness and
more wholesome water for drinking ; and I hear from an eminent
physician that statistical tables show that cases of infantine cholera
and some other complaints have sensibly lessened. The water can
be carried to the attics of every house, and many are introducing
baths and indulging in ornamental fountains in private gardens.
The rate of insurance for fire has been lowered ; and I could not
help reflecting as I looked at the moving water, at a season when
every pond is covered with ice, how much more security the city
must now enjoy than during the great conflagration in the winter
of 1835, when there was such a want of water to supply the
engines. Only five months ago (July 19th, 1845), another
destructive fire broke out near the battery, and when it was
nearly extinguished by the aid of the Croton water, a tremendous
explosion of saltpeter killed many of the firemen, and scattered
the burning materials to great distances, igniting houses in every
direction. A belief that more gunpowder still remained imex-
ploded checked for a time the approach of the firemen, so tnat a
large area was laid waste, and even now some of the ruins are
CHAP. XIII.] NEW CHURCHES. 181
smoking, there being a smoldering heat in cellars filled with
"dry goods." When the citizens of London rejected the splendid
plan which Sir Christopher Wren proposed for its restoration, he
declared that they had not deserved a fire, but the New Yorkers
seem to have taken full advantage of the late catastrophe. As
it was the business part of the city which the flames laid in
ruins, we could not expect much display of ornamental architec
ture ; but already, before the ashes have done smoking, we see
entire streets of substantial houses which have risen to their full
height, and the ground has been raised five feet higher than
formerly above the river, so a» to secure it from inundations,
which has so enhanced its value, that many of the sites alone
have sold for prices equal to the value of the buildings which
once covered them. Among the new edifices, we were shown
some which are fire-proof. Unfortunately, many a fine tree has
been burned, and they are still standing without their bark, but
the weeping willows bordering the river on the Battery have
escaped unsinged.
Among the new features of the city we see several fine church
es, some built from their foundations, others finished since 1841.
The wooden spires of several are elegant, and so solid, as to have
all the outward effect of stone. The two most conspicuous of
the new edifices are Episcopalian, Trinity and Grace Church.
The cost of the former has been chiefly defrayed by funds derived
from the rent of houses in New York, bequeathed long since to
the Episcopal Church. The expense is said to have equaled
that of erecting any four other churches in the city. It is entire
ly of stone, a fine-grained sandstone of an agreeable light-brown
tint. The top of the steeple is 289 feet from the ground. The
effect of the Gothic architecture is very fine, and the Episcopa
lians may now boast that of all the ecclesiastical edifices of this
continent, they have erected the most beautiful. Its position is
admirably chosen, as it forms a prominent feature in Broadway,
the principal street, and in another direction looks down Wall-
street, the great center of city business. It is therefore seen
from great distances in this atmosphere, so beautifully clear even
at this season, when every stove is lighted, and when the ther-
182 TRINITY CHURCH. [Cmu>. XIII.
mometer has fallen twenty degrees below the freezing point.
Where there is so much bright sunshine and no smoke, an archi
tect may well be inspired with ambition, conscious that the effect
of every pillar and other ornament will be fully brought out with
their true lights and shades. The style of the exterior of Trinity
Church reminds us of some of our old Gothic churches in Lin
colnshire and Northamptonshire. The interior is in equally good
taste, the middle aisle sixty-five feet high, but the clustered
columns will not have so stately an appearance, nor display
their true proportions when the wooden pews have been intro
duced round their base. An attempt was made to dispense
with these ; but the measure could not be carried ; in fact, much
as we may admire the architectural beauty of such a cathedral,
one can not but feel that such edifices were planned by the
genius of other ages, and adapted to a different form of worship.
When the forty-five windows of painted glass are finished, and
the white-robed choristers are singing the Cathedral service, to
be performed here daily, and when the noble organ peals forth
its swelling notes to the arched roof, the whole service will
remind us of the days of Romanism, rather than seem suitable
to the wants of a Protestant congregation. It is not the form
of building best fitted for instructing a large audience. To make
the whole in keeping, we ought to throw down the pews, and let
processions of priests in their robes of crimson, embroidered with
gold, preceded by boys swinging censers, and followed by a crowd
of admiring devotees, sweep through the spacious nave.
That the whole pomp and splendor of the ancient ceremonial
will gradually be restored, with no small portion of its kindred
dogmas, is a speculation in which some are said to be actually
indulging their thoughts, and is by no means so visionary an idea
as half a century ago it might have been thought. In the dio
cese of New York, the party which has adopted the views com
monly called Puseyite, appears to have gone greater lengths
than in any part of England. The newspapers published in
various parts of the Union bear testimony to a wide extension of
the like movement. We read, for example, a statement of a
bishop who has ordered the revolving reading-desk of a curate to
CHAP. XIII.] CONVERTS TO ROME. 183
be nailed to the wall, that he might be unable to turn with it
toward the altar. The offending clergyman has resigned for the
sake of peace, and part of his congregation sympathizing in his
views have raised for him a sum of 6000 dollars. In another
paper I see a letter of remonstrance from a bishop to an Episco
pal clergyman, for attending vespers in a Romanist church, and
for crossing himself with holy water as he entered. The epistle
finishes with an inquiry if it be true that he had purchased
several copies of the Ursuline Manual for young persons. The
clergyman, in reply, complains of this petty and annoying inqui
sition into his private affairs, openly avows that he is earnestly
examining into the history, character, claims, doctrines, and
usages of the Church of Rome, and desirous of becoming practi
cally acquainted with their forms of worship — that when present
for this purpose he had thought it right to conform to the usage
of the congregation, &c.
It would be easy to multiply anecdotes, and advert to contro
versial pamphlets, with which the press is teeming, in proof of
the lively interest now taken in similar ecclesiastical questions,
so that the reader may conceive the sensation just created here
by a piece of intelligence which reached New York the very day
of our arrival, and is now going the round of the newspapers,
namely, the conversion to the Romish -Church of the Rev. Mr.
Newman, of Oxford. Some of his greatest admirers are put to
confusion ; others are rejoicing in the hope that the event may
prove a warning to many who have departed from the spirit of
the Reformation ; and a third party, who gave no credit for sin
cerity to the leaders of a movement which they regarded as
retrograde, arid who still suspect that they who have joined in it
here are actuated by worldly motives, are confessing that they
did injustice to the great Oxford tractarian. One of them re
marked to me, " We are often told from the pulpit here that we
live in an age of skepticism, and that it is the tendency of our
times to believe too little rather than too much ; and yet Protest
ants of superior talent are now ready to make these great sacri
fices for the sake of returning to the faith of Rome !" I might
have replied, that reaction seems to be almost as much a princi-
184 THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. [CHAP. XIII.
pie of the moral as of the material world, and that we know,
from the posthumous writings of one who had lived on intimate
terms with the originators of the Tractarian movement in Oxford,
that a recoil from doubts derived from the study of the German
rationalists, led directly to their departure in an opposite direc
tion. " They flung themselves," says Blanco White, writing in
1837, "on a phantom which they called Church. Their plan
was to stop all inquiry," and " to restore popery, excluding the
pope."* Meanwhile, the attempt to revive the credulity of the
middle ages, and to resuscitate a belief in all the miracles of
mediaeval saints, has produced, as might naturally have been
expected, another reaction, giving strength to a party called the
anti-supernaturalists, who entirely reject all the historical evi
dence in favor of the Scripture miracles. Their leader in New
England, Mr. Theodore Parker, is the author of a work of great
erudition, originality, and earnestness (lately reprinted in England),
in which, while retaining a belief in the Divine origin of Chris
tianity, and the binding nature of its moral code, he abandons the
greater part of the evidences on which its truth has hitherto been
considered to repose. I heard this author, during my late stay
in Boston, preach to a congregation respectable for its numbers
and station.
Next to the new churches and fountains, the most striking
change observable in the streets of New York since 1841, is the
introduction of the electric telegraph, the posts of which, about
30 feet high and 100 yards apart, traverse Broadway, and are
certainly not ornamental. Occasionally, where the trees interfere,
the wires are made to cross the street diagonally. The success
ful exertions made to render this mode of communication popular,
and so to cheapen it as to bring the advantages of it within the
reach of the largest possible number of merchants, newspaper
editors, and private individuals, is characteristic of the country.
There is a general desire evinced of overcoming space, which
seems to inspire all their exertions for extending and improving
railways, lines of steam navigation, and these telegraphs. Agri
culturists and mercantile men in remote places, are eager to know
* Life of J. Blanco White, vol. ii. p. 355, and vol. iii. p. 106.
CHAP. XIII.] THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 185
every where, on the very day of the arrival of an Atlantic mail
steamer, the prices of grain, cotton, and other articles in the Euro
pean markets, so that they may speculate on equal terms with the
citizens of Boston and New York. The politician, who is am
bitious, not only of retaining all the states of the Union in one
powerful confederation, but of comprising the whole continent
under one empire, hails the new invention with delight, and
foresees at once its important consequences. Mr. Winthrop well
knew the temper of the people whom he addressed, when he
congratulated a large meeting, that they might now send intelli
gence from one end of the Union to the other with the rapidity
of thought, and that they had realized the promise of the King
of the Fairies, that he would "put a girdle round about the earth
in forty minutes." Already many paragraphs in the newspapers
are headed, " Received by lightning, printed by steam," and all
seem heartily to welcome the discovery as an instrument of prog
ress. When promoting such works, they may exclaim, without
boastfulness —
" These are imperial arts, and worthy kings."
After my return from America, I learned that the length of
line completed in 1846, amounted to above 1600 miles, and in
1848 there were more than 5000 miles of wire laid down. In
that year one of my English friends sent a message by tele
graph to Liverpool, in September, which reached Boston by
mail steamer, via Halifax, in twelve days, and was sent on im
mediately by electric telegraph to New Orleans, in one day, the
answer returning to Boston the day after. Three days were
then lost in waiting for the steam-packet, which conveyed the
message back to England in twelve days ; "so that the reply
reached London on the twenty-ninth day from the sending of the
question, the whole distance being more than 10,000 miles, which
had been traversed at an average rate exceeding 350 miles a day.
It is satisfactory to learn that the telegraph, although so often
passing through a wild country, in some places anticipating even
the railway, seems never yet to have been injured by the lovers
of mischief. The wires have also been often struck by light-
186 THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. [CHAP. XIII
ning, so frequent and vivid in this climate, without serious de
rangement of the delicate machinery. The telegraph generally
in use is the patent of Mr. Morse, whose invention combines the
power of printing a message simultaneously with its transmis
sion. As the magnetic force becomes extremely feeble when
conducted through a great length of wire, Morse employs it sim
ply to make a needle vibrate, and so open and close the galvanic
circuit placed in each office, where a local battery is set in mo
tion, which works the printing machine. The long wires,
therefore, may be compared to slender trains of gunpowder,
which are made to fire a distant cannon or mine. It is not the
battery in Philadelphia which works the instrument in Wash
ington, but a battery in the Washington office. This contrivance
is obviously nothing more than a new adaptation of the method
specified by Mr. Wheatstone, in his patent of June, 1837, for
ringing an alarum bell in each station by means of a local bat
tery, of which I saw him exhibit experiments in 1837.
In September of the same year Mr. Morse invented an in
genious mode of printing messages, by causing an endless scroll of
paper to roll off one cylinder on to another by means of clock
work, the paper being made to pass under a steel pen, which is
moved by electro-magnetism.
An agent of Mr. Morse explained to me the manner in which
the steel pen was made to indent the paper, which is not pierced,
but appears as if it had been pressed on by a blunted point, the
under surface being raised as in books printed for the blind. If
the contact of the pen be continued instead of making a dot, it
produces a short or a long line, according to the time of contact.
The following is a specimen : —
TheElectroMag netic
Telegraph.
In the latest improvements of the telegraph in England, the
magnetic force has been so multiplied by means of several thou
sand coils of wire, that they can send it direct, so as to move the
CHAP, XIII.] SCHOOLS IN NEW YORK. 187
needle at great distances without the aid of local batteries. The
use, however, of this instrument has been comparatively small in
Great Britain, the cost of messages being four times as great as
in the United States.
The population of the State of New York amounts, in the
present year (1845) to 2,604,495 souls. Of this number as
we learn by the report of the government inspector of schools, no
less than 807,200 children, forming almost one-third of the in
habitants, have received the benefit of instruction either for the
whole or part of the year. Of these, 31,240 attended private
schools, and 742,433 the common or public schools of the state.
We are also informed in the same official document, that the
number of public schools is now 11,003. The whole amount
of money received by the school trustees during the year for
teachers' wages, and district libraries, was 1,191,697 dollars,
equal to about 250,000/. This sum has been raised chiefly by
rates, and about one-third of it from the revenue of the school
fund, which produces a yearly income of 375,387 dollars. The
teachers in the common schools, both male and female, are
boarded at the public expense, arid, in addition to their board,
receive the following salaries : — Male teachers, during the winter
term, 1 4 dollars, 1 6 cents ; and during the summer term, 1 5
dollars, 77 cents per month, equal to about 5Ql. a year. Female
teachers, 7 dollars, 37 cents in the winter term, and 6 dollars,
2 cents in the summer term. In some counties, however, the
average is stated to be as high as 20, or even 26 dollars per
month for the male teachers, and from 9 to 1 1 for the female.
There are also district libraries in connection with most of the
schools.
All these 11,000 schools have been organized on what has
been styled in England, even by respectable members in the
House of Commons, the infidel or godless plan, which generally
means nothing more than that they are not under the manage
ment of the clergy. The Roman Catholic bishops and priests
command a vast number of votes at the elections in New York,
yet they failed, in 1842, to get into their exclusive control that
part of the public school money which might fairly be considered
188 SECULAR EDUCATION. [CHAP. XIII.
as applicable to the teaching of children of their own denomina
tion. Their efforts, however, though fortunately defeated, were
attended by some beneficial results. It is obviously the duty of
every government which establishes a national system of secular
education, to see that no books are used in the schools, containing
sectarian views, or in which the peculiar opinions of any sect
are treated with marked contempt. The Catholics complained
that some of the works put into the hands of children, especially
those relating to English history, were written with a strong
Protestant bias, and that, while the superstitions of popery and
the bigotry of Bloody Mary were pointedly dwelt upon, the per
secutions endured by Romanists at the hands of Protestant rulers
were overlooked, or slightly glanced at. The expunging of such
passages, both in the State of New York and in New England,
must have a wholesome tendency to lessen sectarian bitterness,
which, if imbibed at an early age, is so difficult to eradicate ;
and children thus educated will grow up less prejudiced, and
more truly Christian in spirit, than if the Romish or any other
clergy had been permitted to obtain the sole arid separate train
ing of their minds.
I have often mentioned the absence of smoke as a striking and
enviable peculiarity of the Atlantic cities. For my own part, I
never found the heat of a well-managed stove oppressive, when
vessels of water were placed over it for moistening the air by
free evaporation ; and the anthracite coal burns brightly in open
grates. Even in a moral point of view, I regard freedom from
smoke as a positive national gain, for it causes the richer and
more educated inhabitants to reside in cities by the side of their
poorer neighbors during a larger part of the year, which they
would not do if the air and the houses were as much soiled by
smoke and soot as Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, or Sheffield.
Here the dress and furniture last longer and look less dingy,
flowers and shrubs can be cultivated in town gardens, and all
who can afford to move are not driven into the country or some
distant suburb. The formation of libraries and scientific and
literary institutions, museums, and lectures, and the daily inter
course between the different orders of society — in a word, all
CHAP. XIII.] IRISH VOTERS. 189
that can advance and refine the mind and taste of a great popu
lation, are facilitated by this contact of the rich and poor. In
addition, therefore, to the importance given to the rniddb and
lower classes by the political institutions of America, I can not
but think it was a fortunate geological arrangement for the civil
ization of the cities first founded on this continent, that the an-
thracitic coal-fie]ds were all placed on the eastern side of the
Alleghany mountains, and all the bituminous coal-fields on their
western side.
One day, when we were dining at the great table of the Carl-
ton Hotel, one of the largest and most fashionable establishments
of the kind in New York, we were informed by an American
friend, that a young man and woman sitting opposite to us were
well known to him as work-people from a factory near Boston.
They scarcely spoke a word, but were conforming carefully to
the conventional manners of those around them.
Before we left New York, we witnessed an unforeseen effect of
the abundance of waste water recently poured into the city through
the new Croton aqueduct. In the lower streets near the river
the water in the open gutters had frozen in the course of the
night, and, next morning, the usual channels being blocked up
with ice, a stream poured down the middle of the street, and was
in its turn frozen there, so that when I returned one night from
a party, I wished I had been provided with skates, so continuous
was the sheet of ice. Then came a thaw, and the water of the
melted ice poured into the lower stories of many houses. The
authorities are taking active measures to provide in future against
the recurrence of this evil.
I suggested to one of my friends here that they had omitted,
among their numerous improvements, to exclude the pigs from
the streets. "It is not possible," said he, " for they all have
votes ; I mean their Irish owners have, and they turn the scale
in the elections for mayor and other city officers. If we must
have a war," he added, " about Oregon, it will at least be at
tended with one blessing — the stopping of this incessant influx
of hordes of ignorant adventurers, who pour in and bear down
our native population. Whether they call themselves ' the true
190 NATIVISM. [CHAP. XIII.
sons of Erin,' or the ' noble sons of Germany,' they are the dupes
and tools of our demagogues." He then told me that in the last
presidential election he had been an inspector, and had rejected
many fraudulent votes of newly arrived emigrants, brought to the
poll without letters of naturalization, and he had no doubt that
some other inspectors had been less scrupulous when the voters
were of their own political party. " But for the foreign vote,"
he affirmed, " Clay would have been elected." " Have you then
joined the native American party ?" " No ; because, by sepa
rating from the Whigs, they have weakened the good cause, and
nativism being chiefly anti-Irish, too often degenerates into relig
ious bigotry', or into a mere anti-popery faction."
CHAPTER XIV.
New York to Philadelphia. — Scenery in New Jersey. — War about Oregon,
— Protectionist Theories. — Income Tax and Repudiation. — Recrimina
tions against British Aggrandizement. — Irish Quarter and fraudulent
Votes. — Washington. — Congress and Annexation of Texas. — General
Cass for War. — Winthrop for Arbitration. — Inflated Eloquence. — Su
preme Court. — Slavery in District of Columbia. — Museum, Collection of
Corals. — Sculpture from Palenque. — Conversations with Mr. Fox. — A
Residence at Washington not favorable to a just Estimate of the United
States. — False Position of Foreign Diplomatists.
Dec. 9, 1845. — LEFT New York for Philadelphia by railway.
When crossing the ferry to New Jersey, saw Long Island and
Staten Island covered with snow. Between New York and New
ark, New Jersey, there is a deep cutting through a basaltic 01
greenstone rock, a continuation of the mass which forms the
columnar precipices, called the Palisades, on the Hudson river,
above New York. From the jagged face of the cliffs in this cut-,
ting, were hanging some of the largest icicles I ever beheld, re
minding me of huge stalactites pendent from the roofs of limestone
caverns in Europe.
In New Jersey we passed over a gently undulating surface of
country, formed of red marl and sandstone, resembling in appear
ance, and of about the same geological age, as the new red sand
stone (trias) of England. The soil in the fields is of a similar
red color, and all signs of recent clearings, such as the stumps of
trees, have nearly disappeared. The copses, formed of a second
growth of wood, and the style of the fences round the fields, gave
an English aspect to the country. We went by Newark, Eliza-
bethtown, Princeton, Trenton, Bordentown, and Burlington. In
some of these places, as at Elizabethtown, houses and churches
have grown up round the railway ; and we passed through the
middle of Burlington, a great source of convenience to the natives,
and of amusement to the passengers, but implying a slow rate of
traveling. Hereafter, to enable express trains to go at full speed
from north to south, there must be branch lines outside the towns.
192 WAR ABOUT OREGON, [CHAP. XIV.
As we passed Burlington, a fellow passenger told us that in an
Episcopalian college established there, called St. Mary's Hall, were
a hundred young girls, whom he called " the holy innocents," as
sembled from every part of the Union. Eighteen of them had.
in September last, taken their degrees in arts, receiving, from the
hands of the Bishop of New Jersey, diplomas, headed by an en
graving of the Holy Virgin and Child, and issued " in the name
of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." The session had ended
with the ceremony of laying and consecrating the corner-stone of
"the chapel of the Holy Innocents for the use of the scholars of
St. Mary's Hall."
Whether we took up a newspaper, or listened to conversation
in the cars, we found that the Oregon question, and a rupture
with England, were the all-engrossing topic of political specula
tion. The democratic party are evidently intoxicated with their
success in having achieved the annexation of Texas, and are bent
on future schemes of territorial aggrandizement. Some talk of
gaining the whole of Oregon, others all Mexico. I heard one
fellow-traveler say modestly, " We are going on too fast ; but
Mexico must in time be ours." On arriving at Philadelphia. I
found some of the daily journals written in a tone well-fitted to
create a war-panic, counting on the aid of France in the event
of a struggle with Great Britain ; boasting that if all the eastern
cities were laid in ashes by an English fleet, they would rebuild
them in five years, and extinguish all the debts caused by the
war in thirty years ; whereas England, borrowing as in the last
war many hundred millions sterling, must become bankrupt or
permanently crippled with taxation. I asked an acquaintance,
whether the editor of such articles secretly wished for war, or
wanted to frighten his readers into a pacific policy. " He has
lately gone over," said he, " to the protectionist party. Having
made large purchases of shares in an iron company, and fearing
that, should peace continue, the free-traders would lower the
tariff, he patriotically hopes for a war with England to enable
him to make a fortune. He is one of those philanthropic monop
olists who would have joined in a toast given some years ago at
a public dinner by one of our merchants, < May the wants of all
CHAP. XIV ] INCOME TAX. 193
nations increase, and may they be supplied by Pennsylvania.' "
" But will his war dreams be realized, think you ?" " Probably
•Hiot ; yet the mere anticipation of such a contingency is doing-
mischief, checking commercial enterprise, causing our state bonds
to fall in value, and awakening evil passions. You will scarcely
believe that I have heard men of respectable standing in the world
declare, that if a war breaks out, we shall at least be able to
sponge out our state debt !"
I found that the income tax laid on to pay the interest of this
debt, is weighing heavily on Pennsylvania, and many a citizen is
casting a wistful glance across the Delaware, at the untaxed
fields and mansions of New Jersey. Some manage to evade half
their burdens by taking houses in that state, and resorting in the
winter season to Philadelphia for the sake of society. One of the
Philadelphians assured me, that he and others paid sixteen per
cent, "on their income for state taxes ; and after honestly respond
ing to all the inquisitorial demands of the collectors, they had the
mortification of thinking that men who are less conscientious
escape half the impost. " Capital," he said, « is deserting this
city, and some thriving store-keepers, whom you knew here in
1842, have transferred their business to New York. In your
' Travels in America,' you were far too indulgent to the Petm-
sylvanian Whigs, who promoted the outlay of government money
on public works, which has been our ruin. The wealthy Ger
man farmers and democrats opposed that expenditure ; and it is
not German ignorance, as some Whigs pretend, which has en
tailed debt and disgrace on this state, but the extravagance of
the influential merchants, who were chiefly Whigs. You see by
the papers that the county of Lancaster, is 50,000 dollars in ar-
rear in the payment of state taxes, and the punishment inflicted
by government is to withhold the school-money from these de
faulters, thereby prolonging the evil, if it be ignorance which has
dulled their moral sense."
The reluctance to resort to coercive measures, on the part of
the men in power, for fear of endangering their popularity, is
striking ; and John Bull would smile at a circular just issued
and addressed by the state treasurer to counties, some of which
VOL, i. — I
194 BRITISH AGGRANDIZ EMENT. [CHAP. XIV.
are three years in arrear. He praises others for their cheerful
promptness in bearing their fair share of the public liabilities,
and exhorts the rest to follow their good example, for the honoj*
arid credit of the Commonwealth. The necessity of compulsory
measures is gently hinted at as a possible contingency, should
they continue to be defaulters. As a proof, however, that more
cogent methods of persuasion are sometimes resorted to, I see
advertisements of the sale of city property for the discharge of
taxes ; and it is fair to presume, that patriotic exhortations have
not always been without effect, or they would be thought too
ridiculous to be employed.
I observed to a friend, that when I left the New Englanders,
they were decidedly averse to war about Oregon. " Yes," he
rejoined, « but they are equally against free trade ; whereas, the
people in the West, who are talking so big about fighting for
Oregon, are in favor of a low tariff and more trade with En-
O '
gland, which would make war impossible. Which of these two,
think you, is practically the peace party ?"
In the leading articles of several of the papers, I read some
spirited recriminations in answer to English censures on the
annexation of Texas. Its independence, they say, had been
acknowledged by Great Britain, and its inhabitants had volun
tarily joined the Union. Some journals talk of following " the
classical example of the mother-country," and allude to the con
quest of Sinde, and the intended " annexation of Borneo." A
passage is also cited from a recent article in one of the leading
London journals, to the following effect : — " That as the Punjab
must eventually be ours, the sooner we take possession of it the
better, and the less blood and treasure will be spent in saving
from anarchy the richest part of India." But it is easier thus to
recriminate than to reply to the admirable protest published in
the beginning of the present year (January, 1845), by a con
vention of delegates from various and opposite political parties in
Massachusetts, which set forth, in strong terms, the unjustifiable
manner in which Texas was originally filched from Mexico, and
the tendency of such annexation to extend and uphold slavery,
and " probably to lead to a Mexican war."
CHAP. XIV.] FRAUDULENT VOTES. 195
During our stay in Philadelphia, we heard much regret ex
pressed at the establishment of what is called here an Irish
.quarter, entailing, for the first time, the necessity of keeping up
a more expensive police. In the riots of May 6, 1844, many
lives were lost, and a party has been formed of native Americans
to resist what they call " the papal garrison." Although much
sectarian feeling, mixed with the prejudice of race, may have
been betrayed against the Irish Romanists, I find it impossible
not to sympathize with the indignation cherished here in regard
to the interference of aliens with the elections, and the danger
which threatens the liberties of the country from fraudulent vot
ing. Originally a residence of five years was required to confer
the electoral franchise on a new settler, and the time did not
begin to count till after a regular notification of his intention to
settle and acquire the rights of citizenship, accompanied by for
swearing his allegiance to any other sovereignty. The federalists
imprudently extended the term to sixteen years, in the president
ship of John Adams, which excluded more than half of the popu
lation in some newly peopled districts. The original term of five
years after registration was again restored in Jefferson's president
ship, and continued till the contest between John Quincy Adarns
and Jackson, when Mr. Buchanan carried his proposition that,
instead of registration, two witnesses might depose on parole that
the candidate for naturalization had resided five years. This
regulation has led to much fraud and perjury ; and cases so
flagrant have occurred, that judges have been cashiered for con
niving at them. The same rules, however, are not binding in
all state elections, for in Virginia, at present, the right of citizen
ship demands a residence of seven years, while in Michigan, new
comers can vote two years after their arrival.
How many of the stories related of fraudulent voting may be
true, I can not pretend to decide ; but I was amused at their
number and variety. It came out, I am told, in evidence on a
late trial, that convicts had been carried to the poll at New York,
and then taken back to prison ; and that the dexterity of those
who manage the Irish vote often consists in making Paddy believe
that he is really entitled to the franchise, One of these dupe?
196 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. [CHAP. XIV.
having voted several times over for one candidate, was at length
objected to, and observed with 'naivete, " that it was hard that
his vote should at last be challenged, when so many inspectors
had taken it before that same day." An emigrant ship arrived
at Newcastle, on the Delaware, in the heat of an election for
governor ; the Irish emigrants were asked if they would support
the democratic candidate. " We are all for the opposition," they
replied ; and the ingenuity of the canvasser was taxed to make
them comprehend that the Ins in America, corresponded in their
politics with the Outs in Great Britain.
Such anecdotes prove indisputably that the purity of the elec
tions is at least impeached, and it must also be borne in mind that
the system of ballot precludes all scrutiny after the election is over.
Dec. 13. Washington. — Went into the House of Represent
atives ; the front seats in the gallery are reserved for ladies. We
found the member for Connecticut, Mr. Rockwell, on his legs,
delivering what seemed to me an admirable speech against the
annexation of Texas, especially that part of its new constitution
which prohibited the legislature from taking steps toward the
future abolition of slavery. Some of the representatives were
talking, others writing, none listening. The question was evi
dently treated as one gone by — mere matter of history, which the
course of events had consigned to the vault of all the Capulets.
Nevertheless, a feeling of irritation and deep disgust is pervading
the minds of the anti-slavery party at this sudden accession of
new territory, open to a slave population. A powerful reaction
has begun to display itself, so that the incorporation of Texas
into the Union may eventually be attended Math consequences
most favorable to the good cause, rousing the whole north to
make a stand against the future extension of slavery. Mr.
Winthrop has hailed this more hopeful prospect in the happiest
strain of eloquence, addressing " the lone star of Texas," as it
was called, in the words of Milton : —
'; Fairest of stars, last in the train of night,
If rather thou belong'st not to the dawn."
Crossing the Rotunda, we passed into the Senate, and heard
General Cass, of Michigan, delivering a set speech on the Oregon
CHAP. XIV.] ARBITRATION. 197
question. The recent acquisition of Texas, which we had heard
condemned in the other house as a foul blot on their national
policy, was boasted of by him as a glorious triumph of freedom.
He drew an animated picture of the aggrandizing spirit of Great
Britain with her 150 millions of subjects, spoke of her arrogance
and pride, the certainty of a war, if they wished to maintain
their just rights, and the necessity of an immediate armament.
"Great Britain," he said, "might be willing to submit the
Oregon question to arbitration, but the crowned heads, whom she
would propose as arbiters, would not be impartial, for they would
cherish anti-republican feelings." I thought the style of this
oration better than its spirit, and it was listened to with atten
tion ; but in spite of the stirring nature of the theme, none of the
senators betrayed any emotion.
When he sat down, others followed, some of whom read ex
tracts from the recently delivered speeches of Sir Robert Peel
and Lord John Russell on the Oregon affair, commenting freely
and fairly upon them, and pointing out that there was nothing
in the tone of the British Government, nor in the nature of their
demands, which closed the door against an amicable adjustment.
I came away from this debate much struck with the singular
posture of affairs ; for the executive and its functionaries seem to
be doing their worst to inflame popular- passions, while the legis
lature, chosen by universal suffrage, is comparatively calm, and
exhibits that sense of a dangerous responsibility, which a presi
dent and his cabinet might rather have been expected to display.
In reference to one of the arguments in General Cass's speech,
Mr. Winthrop soon afterward moved in the House of Represent
atives (Dec. 19, 1845), "That arbitration does not necessarily
involve a reference to crowned heads ; and if a jealousy of such
a reference is entertained in any quarter, a commission of able
and dispassionate citizens, either from the two countries con
cerned, or from the world at large, offers itself as an obvious and
unobj ectionable alternative. ' '
A similar proposition emanated simultaneously, and without
concert, from the English Cabinet, showing that they were
regardless of precedents, and relied on the justice of their cause.
198 RECRIMINATION. [CHAP. XIV.
Although it was declined, the mere fact of a great nation having
waived all punctilious etiquette, and offered to settle a point at
issue by referring the question to private citizens of high charac
ter and learned in international law, proves that the world is
advancing in civilization, and that higher principles of morality
are beginning to gain ground in the intercourse between nations.
" All who ought to govern," said a member of Congress to me,
" are of one mind as to Lord Aberdeen's overture ; but they who
do govern here, will never submit to arbitration."
The Senate consists at present of fifty-nine members, and will
soon be augmented by two from Texas and two from Iowa, the
Union consisting now of twenty-seven states, with a population
of about twenty millions.
The appearance of the members of the House of Representa
tives is gentlemanlike, although I doubt not that the scenes of
violence and want of decorum described by many travelers, are
correct pictures of what they witnessed. In this nation of read
ers they are so sensitive to foreign criticism, that amendment may
be confidently looked for. At this moment, the papers, by way
of retaliation, are amusing their readers with extracts from a
debate in the Canada House of Assembly. The following may
serve as an example : — " Our Canadian friends occasionally read
us a lecture on courtesy and order, we therefore cite from a report
of their legislative proceedings, what we presume they intend as
a model for our imitation. Mr. De B. appealed to the chair to
stop the member for Quebec, and threatened if he was not called
to order, that he must go over and pull his nose ; at which Mr.
A. rejoined, ' Come and do it, you scoundrel !' " Another exam
ple of recrimination that I have lately seen, consisted in placing
in two parallel columns, first an extract from the leading article
of the London Times, rating the Americans in good set terms
for their rudeness to each other in debate, and coarse abuse of
England ; arid, secondly, an account given by the same journal
of a disorderly discussion in the House of Commons on an Irish
question, in which, among other incidents, a young member of
the aristocracy (intoxicated let us hope) rose in the midst of the
hubbub, and imitated the crowing of a cock.
CHAP. XIV.] INFLATED ELOQUENCE. 199
A member of Congress, who frequented, when in London, the
gallery of the House of Commons, tells me he was struck with
what seemed an affectation of rusticity, members lolling in loung
ing attitudes on the benches with their hats on, speaking with
their hands thrust into their breeches pockets, and other acts, as
if in defiance of restraint. The English method of coughing
down a troublesome member is often alluded to here, and has, on
one occasion, been gravely recommended for adoption, as a par
liamentary usage which might advantageously be imitated, rather
than the limitation of each speaker to one hour, a rule now in
force, which has too often the effect of making each orator think
it due to himself to occupy the house for his full term.
It would be impossible to burlesque or caricature the ambitious
style of certain members of Congress, especially some who have
risen from humble stations, and whose schooling has been in the
back-woods. A grave report, drawn up in the present session
by a member for Illinois, as chairman of the Post-office Commit
tee, may serve as an example. After speaking of the American
republic as " the infant Hercules," and the extension of their
imperial dominion over the "northern continent and oriental
seas," he exclaims, " the destiny of our nation has now become
revealed, and great events, quickening in the womb of time,
reflect their clearly-defined shadows into our very eye-balls.
" Oh. why does a cold generation frigidly repel ambrosial gifts
like these, or sacrilegiously hesitate to embrace their glowing and
resplendent fate ?
" Must this backward pull of the government never cease, and
the nation tug forever beneath a dead weight, which trips its
heels at every stride ?"
From the Senate House we went to another part of the Capi
tol, to hear Mr. Webster plead a cause before the Judges of the
Supreme Court. These judges wear black gowns, and are, 1
believe, the only ones in the United States who have a costume.
The point at issue was most clearly stated, namely, whether the
city of New York had a legal right to levy a tax of one dollar
on every passenger entering that port, who had never before
visited any port of the Union. The number of emigrants being
200 WASHINGTON. [CHAP. XIV.
great, no less than 100,000 dollars had been annually raised by
this impost, the money being applied chiefly as an hospital fund.
It was contended that the Federal Government alone had the
right of imposing duties on commerce, in which light this passen
ger tribute ought to be viewed. The Court, however, ruled
otherwise.
It was pointed out to me, as a remarkable proof of the ascend
ency of the democratic party in the Federal Government for
many years past, that only one of all the judges now on the bench
had been nominated by the Whigs.
One day, as we were walking down Pennsylvania Avenue
with Mr. Winthrop, we met a young negro woman, who came
up to him with a countenance full of pleasure, saying it was
several years since she had seen him, and greeting him with
such an affectionate warmth of expression, that I began to con
trast the stiffness and coldness of the Anglo-Saxon mariners with
the genial flow of feeling of this southern race. My companion
explained to me, that she was a very intelligent girl, and was
grateful to him for an act of kindness he had once had an oppor
tunity of showing her. I afterward learnt, from some other
friends to whom I told this anecdote, that, three years before,
Mr. Winthrop and a brother member of Congress from the north
had been lodging in the house of this girl's mistress, and hearing
that she was sentenced to be whipped for some offense, had both
of them protested they would instantly quit the house if the mis
tress persevered. She had yielded, and at length confessed that
she had been giving way to a momentary fit of temper.
Washington is situated in the district of Columbia, comprising
an area of 1 0 0 square miles, borrowed from the neighboring states
to form an independent jurisdiction by itself. Several attempts
have been made to declare it free, but hitherto in vain, thanks
to the union of the northern democrats and southern slave-own
ers, aided by the impracticable schemes of the abolitionists.
The view of the city and the river Potomac from the hill on
which the Capitol stands is fine ; but, in spite of some new pub
lic edifices built in a handsome style of Greek architecture, we
are struck with the small progress made in three years since we
CHAP. XIV.] MUSEUM. 201
were last here. The vacant spaces are not filling up with private
houses, according to the original plan, so that the would-be me
tropolis wears still the air of some projector's scheme which has
failed. The principal hotels, however, have improved, and we
were not annoyed, as when last here, by the odors left in the
room by the colored domestics, who had no beds, but slept any
where about the stairs or passages, without changing their clothes.
With similar habits, in a hot climate, no servants of any race,
whether free or slave, African or European, would be endurable.
In the public museum at the Patent Office I was glad to see
a fine collection of objects of natural history, brought here by
the late Exploring Expedition, commanded by Captain Wilkes.
Among other treasures is a splendid series of recent corals, a good
description of which, illustrated by plates, will soon be publish
ed by Mr. Dana, at the expense of Government. These zoo
phytes are accompanied by masses of solid limestone, occasionally
including shells, recently formed in coral reefs, like those men
tioned by Mr. Darwin as occurring in the South Seas, some as
hard as marble, others consisting of conglomerates of pebbles and
calcareous sand. In several of the specimens I saw the imbedded
zoophytes and shells projecting from the weathered surface, as do
the petrifactions in many an ancient limestone where they have
resisted disintegration more than the matrix. Other fragments
were as white and soft as chalk ; one in particular, a cubic foot
in bulk, brought from one of the Sandwich Islands, might have
been mistaken for a piece of Shakspeare's Cliff, near Dover. It
reminded me that an English friend, a professor of political econ
omy, met me about fifteen years ago on the beach at Dover, after
he had just read my " Principles of Geology," and exclaimed,
" Show me masses of pure white rock, like the substance of
these cliffs, in the act of growing in the ocean over areas as
large as France or England, and I will believe all your theory
of modern causes." Since that time we have obtained data for
inferring that the growth of corals, and the deposition of chalk-
like calcareous mud, is actually going on over much wider areas
than the whole of Europe, so that I am now entitled to claim
my incredulous friend as a proselyte.
!*
202 SCULPTURp; FROM PALENQUE. [CHAP. XIV.
In one of the glass cases of the Museum I saw the huge skull
of the Megatherium, with the remains of other extinct fossil
animals found in Georgia — a splendid donation presented by Mr.
Hamilton Couper. In another part of the room were objects of
antiquarian interest, and among the rest some sculptured stories
from the ruins of Palenque, inscribed with the hieroglyphic or
picture-writing of the Aborigines, with which Stephen's lively
work on Central America, and the admirable illustrations of
Catherwood, had made us familiar. The camp-chest of General
Washington, his sword, the uniform worn by him when he re
signed his commission, and even his stick, have been treasured
up as relics in this national repository. If the proposition lately
made in the public journals, to purchase Washington's country
residence and negro-houses at Mount Vernon, and to keep them
forever in the state in which he left them, should be carried
into effect, it would not only be a fit act of hero-worship, but in
the course of time this farm would become a curious antiquarian
monument, showing to after generations the state of agriculture
at the period when the Republic was founded, and how the old
Virginian planters and their slaves lived in the eighteenth century.
Before leaving Washington we called, with Mr. Winthrop, at
the White House, the residence of the President. A colored
servant in livery came to the door, and conducted us to the re
ception-room, which is well-proportioned and well-furnished, not
in sumptuous style, but without any affectation of republican
plainness. We were politely received by Mrs. Polk, her hus
band being engaged on public business. I was afterward intro
duced to General Scott, to Captain Wilkes, recently returned
from his expedition to the South Seas, to Mr. Bancroft, Secretary
of the Navy, and called on our minister, Mr. Pakenham, and our
old friends, M. and Madame de Gerolt, the Prussian minister and
his wife. I also examined a fine collection of fossils belonging to
Mr. Markoe, who has taken an active part in founding an insti
tution here for the promotion of science arid natural history. The
day before our departure I had a long and agreeable conversation
with our ex-minister, Mr. Fox, whose sudden and unexpected
death happened a few months later. I told him that some En-
CHAP. XIV.] CONVERSATIONS WITH MR. FOX. 203
glish travelers wondered that I should set out on a long tour when
the English and American papers were descanting on the proba
bility of a war. He said, that "when Macleod was detained
prisoner in 1841, there was really some risk, because he might
have been hanged any day by the New Yorkers, in spite of the
desire of the Federal Government to save him ; but now there
is no war party in England, and all reasonable men here, includ
ing the principal officers of the army and navy, are against it.
Some of the western people may be warlike, for there are many
patriots who believe that it is their destiny to rise on the ruins
of the British empire ; but when the President, according to
treaty, shall have given notice of a partition of Oregon, there will
be time for negotiation. If one of two disputants threatens to
knock the other down eighteen months hence, would you appre
hend immediate mischief?" "They are not arming," said I.
"No augury can be drawn from that fact," he replied; "the
people are against large peace establishments, knowing that there
is no fear of hostile attacks from without unless they provoke
them, and satisfied that their wealth and population are annually
increasing. They are full of courage, and would develop extraor
dinary resources in a war, however much they would suffer at
the first onset."
We then conversed freely on the future prospects of civiliza
tion in the North American continent. He had formed far less
sanguine expectations than I had, but confessed, that though he
had resided so many years in the country, he knew little or noth
ing of the northern states, especially of New England. When
I dwelt on the progress I had witnessed, even in four years, in
the schools and educational institutions, the increase of readers
and of good books, and the preparations making for future scien
tific achievements, he frankly admitted that he had habitually
contemplated the Union from a somewhat unfavorable point of
view. I observed to him that Washington was not a metropo
lis, like London, nor even like Edinburgh or Dublin, but a town
which had not thriven, in spite of government patronage. The
members of Congress did not bring their families to it, because it
\vould often take them away from larger cities, where they were
204 FOREIGN DIPLOMATISTS. [CHAP. XIVr.
enjoying more refined and intellectual society. It was as if the
Legislature of the British empire, representing not only England,
Scotland, and Ireland, but Canada, Newfoundland, the West
Indies, Australia, the Cape, and all the other dependencies of the
British crown, were to meet in some third-rate town. Nor even
then would the comparison be a fair one, because if there be one
characteristic more than another which advantageously distin
guishes three-fourths of the American population, it is the high
social, intellectual, and political condition, relatively speaking, of
the working classes. The foreign diplomatist residing in Wash
ington lives within the borders of the slave territory, where the
laborers are more degraded, and perhaps less progressive, than in
any European state. Besides, the foreign embassador, in his offi
cial and political capacity, too often sees exposed the weak side
of the constitution of the Union, and has to deplore the power-
lessness of the federal executive to carry out its own views, and
to control the will of thirty independent states, or as many im-
peria in imperio. Just when he may have come to an under
standing with the leading statesmen on points of international
law, so that his negotiations in any other metropolis would have
been brought to a successful issue, he finds that the real difficul
ties are only beginning. It still remains to be seen whether the
government is strong enough to contend with the people, or has
the will so to act, or whether it will court popularity by yielding
to their prejudices, or even exciting their passions. Such is at
this moment the position of affairs, and of our minister at Wash
ington.
'Library
^-^ California
CHAPTER XV.
Washington to Richmond. — Legislature of Virginia in Session. — Substitu
tion of White for Slave Labor. — Progress of Negro Instruction. — Slave-
dealers. — Kindness to Negroes. — Coal of Oolitic Period near Richmond.
— Visit to the Mines. — Upright Fossil Trees. — Deep Shafts, and Thick
ness of Coal Seams. — Explosion of Gas. — Natural Coke. — Resemblance
of the more modern Coal-measures to old Carboniferous Rocks. — Whites
working with free Negroes in the Mines.
Dec, 16, 1845. — FROM Washington we went to Richmond,
and were glad to find that the great southern line of railway from
Acquia Creek had been completed since we were last here, by
which we escaped twelve miles of jolting over a rough road, de
scribed with so much humor by Dickens.
At Richmond T went into the Supreme Court of Appeal, and,
as I entered, heard the counsel who was pleading, cite a recent
decision of the English Court of Chancery as bearing on his case.
The Houses of Legislature of Virginia were in session, and I
heard part of a debate on a proposed railway from Baltimore to
the valley of the Great Kanawha, in Western Virginia. Much
jealousy was expressed lest the metropolis of Maryland, instead
of Richmond, should reap the chief fruits of this project, at which
I was not surprised ; for Virginia, with a population of 1,100,000
inhabitants, has no towns larger than Richmond and Norfolk.
Beverly, and the early writers on this state, say, " that the peo
ple were prevented from congregating in large towns by the en
joyment of an extensive system of river navigation, which ena
bled merchant ships to sail up every where to the warehouses of
each planter and receive their freight. Hence there was less
activity and enterprise, and a want of the competition, which the
collected life in cities promotes."^
One of the senators, whom I had met the day before at a din
ner party, conversed with me on the publication of the geological
* See "Graham's History," vol. i. p. 145.
206 VIRGINIA. [Cmp. XV.
maps and reports of the State Survey, which have been admira
bly executed under the direction of Professor W. B. Rogers.
The division of legislative duties between a central power, such
as I had just seen deliberating at Washington, and the separate
and independent states, such as that now in simultaneous action
here at Richmond, seems the only form fitted for a widely ex
tended empire, if the representative system is to prevail. The
present population of the different states may be compared, on an
average, to that of English counties, or, at least, to colonies of the
British empire. At the same period of the year, when each is
managing its own affairs in regard to internal improvements —
schools, colleges, police, railways, canals, and direct taxes — the
central parliament is discussing questions of foreign policy — the
division of Oregon; the state of the army and navy, questions of
free trade, and a high or low tariff.
By aid of railways, steamers, and the electric telegraph, it
might be possible to conduct all the business of the twenty-seven
states at Washington, but not with the same efficiency or econ
omy ; for, in that case, the attention of the members of the two
houses of Congress would be distracted by the number and variety
of subjects submitted to them, and the leading statesmen would
be crushed by the weight of official and parliamentary business.
While at Richmond, we saw some agreeable and refined so
ciety in the families of the judges of the Supreme Court and
other lawyers ; but there is little here of that activity of mind
and feeling for literature and science which strikes one in the
best circles in New England. Virginia, however, seems to be
rousing herself, and preparing to make an effort to enlarge her
resources, by promoting schools and internal improvements. Her
pride has been hurt at seeing how rapidly her old political
ascendency has passed away, and how, with so large and rich a
territory, she has been outstripped in the race by newer states,
especially Ohio. She is unwilling to believe that her negro
population is the chief obstacle to her onward march, yet can
not shut her eyes to the fact that the upper or hilly region of
the Alleghanies, where the whites predominate, has been ad
vancing in a more rapid ratio than the eastern counties. The
CHAP. XV.] WHITE AND SLAVE LABOR. 207
whites who live west of the Blue Ridge are about equal in
number to those who live east of it ; but the eastern division, or
lower country, owns a greater number of slaves, and in right of
them has more votes. The western men are talking loudly of
a convention to place them on a more equal footing, some even
desiring a separation into two states. There has also been a
suggestion, that it might be well to allow a single county to
declare itself free, without waiting for the emancipation of others.
Among other signs of approaching change, I am told that several
new settlers from the north have made a practical demonstration
that slave labor is less profitable, even east of the Blue Ridge,
than that of free whites. As we sailed down the Potomac from
Washington, a landed proprietor of Fairfax county pointed out
to me some estates in Virginia, on the right bank of the river, in
which free had been substituted for slave labor since I was here
in 1841. Some farmers came from New Hampshire and Con
necticut, and, having bought the land at five dollars an acre,
tilled it with their own hands and those of their family, aided in
some cases by a few hired whites. To the astonishment of the
surrounding planters, before the end of four years, they had raised
the value of the soil from five to forty dollars per acre, having
introduced for the first time a rotation of corn and green crops,
instead of first exhausting the soil, and then letting it lie fallow
for years to recover itself. They have also escaped the ruinous
expense of feeding large bodies of negroes in those seasons when
the harvest is deficient. They do not pretend to indulge in that
hospitality for which the old Virginians and North Carolinians
were celebrated, who often mortgaged their estates to pay the
annual salary of their overseer, till he himself became the pro
prietor. The master, in that case, usually migrated with part
of his negroes to settle farther south or southwest, introducing
into the new states more civilized habits and manners than would
have belonged to them had they been entirely peopled by adven
turers from the north or from Europe.
On Sunday, December the 21st, we attended service in a
handsome new Episcopal church, called St. Paul's, and heard
the rector announce to the congregation that a decision had just
203 NEGRO EDUCATION. [CHAP. XV.
been come to (by a majority of all the proprietors of the church,
as I was afterward informed), that one of the side galleries
should henceforth be set apart exclusively for people of color.
This resolution, he said, had been taken in order that they and
their servants might unite in the worship of the same God, as
they hoped to enter hereafter together into his everlasting king
dom, if they obeyed his laws. I inquired whether they would
not have done more toward raising the slaves to a footing of
equality in the house of prayer, if they had opened the same
galleries to negroes and whites. In reply, I was assured that,
in the present state of social feeling, the colored people would
gain less by such joint occupancy, because, from their habitual
deference to the whites, they would yield to them all the front
places. There were few negroes present ; but I am told that, if
I went to the Baptist or Methodist churches, I should find the
galleries quite full. There are several Sunday schools here for
negroes, and it is a singular fact thai, in spite of the law against
instructing slaves, many of the whites have been taught to read
by negro nurses. A large proportion of the slaves and free
colored people here are of mixed breed. The employment of
this class as in-door servants in cities arises partly from the in
terest taken in them by their white parents, who have manu-
mited them and helped them to rise in the world, and partly
because the rich prefer them as domestic servants, for their ap
pearance is more agreeable, and they are more intelligent.
Whether their superiority is owing to physical causes, and that
share of an European organization which they inherit in right
of one of their parents, or whether it may be referred to their
early intercourse and contact with the whites, — in other words,
to a better education, — is still matter of controversy.
Several Virginian planters have spoken to me of the negro
race as naturally warm-hearted, patient, and cheerful, grateful
for benefits, and forgiving of injuries. They are also of a relig
ious temperament, bordering on superstition. Even those who
think they ought forever to remain in servitude, give them a
character which leads one to the belief that steps ought long
ago to have been taken toward their gradual emancipation,
CHAP. XV.] NEGRO SLAVERY. 209
Had some legislative provision been made with this view before
the annexation of Texas, a period being fixed after which all the
children born in this state should be free, that new territory
would have afforded a useful outlet for the black population of
Virginia, and whites would have supplied the vacancies which
are now filled up by the breeding of negroes. In the absence
of such enactments, Texas prolongs the duration of negro slavery
in Virginia, aggravating one of its worst consequences, the in
ternal slave trade, and keeping up the price of negroes at home.
They are now selling for 500, 750, and 1000 dollars each, ac
cording to their qualifications. There are always dealers at
Richmond, whose business it is to collect slaves for the southern
market ; and, until a gang is ready to start for the south, they
are kept here well fed, and as cheerful as possible. In a court
of the jail, where they are lodged, I see them every day amusing
themselves by playing at quoits. How much this traffic is ab
horred, even by those who encourage it, is shown by the low social
position held by the dealer, even when he has made a large for
tune. When they conduct gangs of fifty slaves at a time across
the mountains to the Ohio river, they usually manacle some of the
men, but on reaching the Ohio river, they have no longer any
fear of their attempting an escape, and they then unshackle them.
That the condition of slaves in Virginia is steadily improving,
all here seem agreed. One of the greatest evils olf the system
is the compulsory separation of members of the same family.
Since my arrival at Richmond, a case has come to my knowl
edge, of a negro who petitioned a rich individual to purchase
him, because he was going to be sold, and was in danger of being
sent to New Orleans, his wife and child remaining in Virginia.
But such instances are far less common than would be imagined,
owing to the kind feeling of the southern planters toward their
" own people," as they call them. Even in extreme cases,
where the property of an insolvent is brought to the hammer,
public opinion acts as a powerful check against the parting of
kindred. We heard of two recent cases, one in which the pa
rents were put up without their children, and the mother being
in tears, no one would bid till the dealer put the children up
210 KINDNESS TO NEGROES. [CHAP. XV.
also. They then sold very well. Another, where the dealer
was compelled, in like manner, to sell a father and son to
gether. I learned with pleasure an anecdote, from undoubted
authority, very characteristic of the indulgence of owners of the
higher class of society here toward their slaves. One of the
judges of the Supreme Court at Richmond, having four or five
supernumerary negroes in his establishment, proposed to them to
go to his plantation in the country. As they had acquired town
habits, they objected, and begged him instead to look out for a
good master who would carry them to a city farther south, where
they might enjoy a warm climate. The judge accordingly made
his arrangements, and, for the sake of securing the desired con
ditions, was to receive for each a price below their market value.
Just as they were about to leave Richmond for Louisiana, one
of the women turned faint-hearted, at which all the rest lost
courage ; for their local and personal attachments are very strong,
although they seem always ready to migrate cheerfully to any
part of the world with their owners. The affair ended in the
good-natured judge having to repurchase them, paying the dif
ference of price between the sum agreed upon for each, and
what they would have fetched at an auction.
Great sacrifices are often made from a sense of duty, by re
taining possession of inherited estates, which it would be most
desirable to sell, and which the owners can not part with, because
they feel it would be wrong to abandon the slaves to an un
known purchaser. We became acquainted with the family of a
widow, who had six daughters and no son to take on himself the
management of a plantation, always a responsible, and often a
very difficult undertaking. It was felt by all the relatives and
neighbors to be most desirable that the property, situated in a
remote part of the country, near the sea, should be sold, in order
that the young ladies and their mother should have the benefit
of society in a large town. They wished it themselves, being
in very moderate circumstances, but were withheld by conscien
tious motives from leaving a large body of dependents, whom
they had known from childhood, and who could scarcely hope to
be treated with the same indulgence by strangers.
CHAP. XV.] COAL OF OOLITIC PERIOD. 211
I had stopped at Richmond on my way south, for the sake of
exploring geologically some coal mines, distant about thirteen
miles from the city to the westward. Some of the largest and
most productive of these, situated in Chesterfield County, belong
to an English company, and one of them was under the manage
ment of Mr. A. F. Gifford, formerly an officer in the British
army, and married to a Virginian lady. At their agreeable
residence, near the Blackheath mines, we were received most
kindly and hospitably. On our road from Richmond, we passed
many fields which had been left fallow for years, after having
been exhausted by a crop of tobacco. The whole country was
covered with snow, and, in the pine forests, the tall trunks of the
trees had a white coating on their windward side, as if one half
had been painted. I persevered, nevertheless, in my examination
of the mines, for my underground work was not impeded by the
weather, and I saw so much that was new, and of high scientific
interest in this coal-field, that I returned the following spring to
complete my survey.
There are two regions in the state of Virginia (a country
about equal in area to the whole of England proper), in which
productive coal-measures occur. In one of these which may be
called the western coal-field, the strata belong to the ancient
carboniferous group, characterized by fossil plants of the same
genera, arid, to a great extent, the same species, as those found
in the ancient coal-measures of Europe. The other one, wholly
disconnected in its geographical and geological relations, is found
to the east of the Appalachian Mountains, in the middle of that
granitic region, sometimes called the Atlantic Slope. * In con
sequence of the isolated position of these eastern coal-beds, the
lowest of which rest immediately on the fundamental granite,
while the uppermost are not covered by any overlying fossiliferous
formations, we have scarcely any means of determining their
relative age, except by the characters of their included organic
remains. The study of these, induced Professor W. B. Rogers,
in his memoir, published in 1842,f to declare his opinion that
* See geological map of the U. S. in my " Travels in North America,"
vol. i. and ii. p. 92. t Trans, of American Geologists, p. 298.
212 UPRIGHT FOSSIL TREES. [CHAP. XV.
this coal was of newer date than that of the Appalachians, and
was about the age of the Oolite or Lias, a conclusion which, after
a careful examination of the evidence on the spot, and of all the
organic remains which 1 could collect, appears to me to come
very near the truth. If we embrace this conclusion, these rocks
are the only ones hitherto known in all Canada and the United
States, which we can prove, by their organic remains, to be of
contemporaneous origin with the Oolitic or Jurassic formation of
Europe. The tract of country occupied by the crystalline rocks,
granite, gneiss, hornblende-schist, and others, which runs parallel
to the Alleghariy Mountains, and between them and the sea, is
in this part of Virginia about seventy miles broad. In the midst
of this area occurs the coal-field alluded to, twenty-six miles long,
and varying in breadth from four to twelve miles. The James
river flows through the middle of it, about fifteen miles from its
northern extremity, while the Appomattox river traverses it near
its southern borders. The beds lie in a trough (see section, fig.
4, p. 213), the lowest of them usually highly inclined where they
crop out along the margin of the basin, while the strata higher
in the series, occupying the central parts of the area, and which
are devoid of organic remains and of coal, are nearly horizontal.
A great portion of these coal-measures consists of quartzose
sandstone and coarse grit, entirely composed of the detritus of the
neighboring granitic and syenitic rocks. Dark carbonaceous
shales arid clays, occasionally charged with iron ores, abound in
the proximity of the coal-seams, and numerous impressions of
plants, chiefly ferns and Zarnites, are met with in shales, to
gether with flattened and prostrate stems of Calamites and Equi-
setum. These last, however, the Calamites and Equisetum, are
very commonly met with in a vertical position, more or less com
pressed perpendicularly. I entertain no doubt that the greater
number of these plants standing erect in the beds above and
between the seams of coal which I saw at points many miles
distant from each other, have grown in the places where they
are now buried in sand and mud, and this fact implies the
gradual accumulation of the coal-measures during a slow and
repeated subsidence of the whole region.
CHAP. XV.] THICKNESS OF COAL-SEAMS. 213
A great number of fossil fish, chiefly referable to two nearly
allied species of a genus very distinct from any ichthyolite hith
erto discovered elsewhere (a ganoid with a homocercal tail),
occur in the lower strata, with a few shells ; but they afforded
me no positive characters to determine whether the deposit was
of marine or fresh-water origin. Above these fossiliferous beds,
which probably never exceed 400 or 500 feet in thickness, a
great succession of grits, sandstone, and shales, of unknown depth,
occur. They have yielded no coal, nor as yet any organic re
mains. No speculator has been bold enough to sink a shaft
through them, and it is believed that toward the central parts of
the basin they might have to pass through 2000 or 2500 feet
of sterile rocks before reaching the fundamental coal-seams.
The next ideal section will show the manner in which I sup
pose the coal-field to be placed in a hollow in the granitic rocks,
the whole country having suffered by great denudation, and the
surface having been planed off almost uniformly, and at the same
time overspread by a deep covering of gravel with red and yellow
Section showing the Geological Position of the James River, or East Virginian
Coal-Field.
Fig. 4.
A. Granite, gneiss, &c. B. Coal-measures.
C. Tertiary strata. D. Drift or ancient alluvium.
clay, concealing the subjacent formation from view, so that the
structure of the region could not be made out without difficulty
but for artificial excavations. It will be seen by the section
that the tertiary strata first make their appearance at Rich
mond about thirteen miles from the eastern outcrop of the coal,
and they continue to occupy the lower country between that city
and the Atlantic.
The only beds of coal hitherto discovered lie in the lower part
214 VEGETABLE STRUCTURE OF COAL. [CHAP. XV.
of the coal-measures, and consequently come up to the surface all
round the margin of the basin. As the dip is usually at a con
siderable angle, vertical shafts, from 400 to 800 feet deep, are
required to reach the great seam, at the distance of a few hun
dred yards inside the edge of the basin. It is only, therefore, along
a narrow band of country that the coal can crop out naturally,
and even here it is rarely exposed, and only where a river or
valley has cut through the superficial drift, often thirty or forty
feet thick. The principal coal-seam occurs in greatest force at
Blackheath and the adjoining parts of Chesterfield county, where
the coal is for the most part very pure, and actually attains the
unusual thickness of between thirty or forty feet. I was not a
little surprised, when I descended, with Mr. Gifford, a shaft 800
feet deep, to find myself in a chamber more than forty feet high,
caused by the removal of the coal. Timber props of great
strength are required to support the roof, and although the use of
wood is lavish here, as in most parts of the United States, the
strong props are seen to bend under the incumbent weight. This
great seam is sometimes parted from the fundamental granite by
an inch or two of shale, which seems to have constituted the soil
on which the plants grew. At some points where the granite
floor touches the coal, the contact may have been occasioned by
subsequent disturbances, for the rocks are fractured and shifted in
many places. This more modern coal, as well as that of New
castle, and other kinds of more ancient date, exhibits under the
microscope distinct evidence of vegetable structure, consisting in
this case principally of parallel fibers or tubes, whose walls are
pierced with circular or elongated holes. See fig. 5. B. and F.
By analysis it is found that so far as relates to the proportions
of carbon and hydrogen, the composition of this coal is identical
with that of ordinary specimens of the most ancient coal of
America and Europe, although the latter has been derived from
an assemblage of plants of very distinct species. The bituminous
coal, for example, of the Ohio coal-field, and that of Alabama,
yields the same elements.
For many years the cities of New York and Philadelphia hava
been supplied with gas for lighting their streets and houses, from
CHAP. XV.]
EXPLOSION OF GAS.
215
Vegetable Structure of Mineral Charcoal from Clover-hill Mines, Virginia.
coal of the Blackheath mines, and the annual quantity taken by
Philadelphia alone, has of late years amounted to 10,000 tons.
We miufht have expected, therefore, that there would be danger
of the disengagement of inflammable gases from coal containing
so much volatile matter. Accordingly, here, as in the English
coal-pits, fatal explosions have sometimes occurred. One of these
happened at Blackheath, in 1839, by which forty-five negroes
and two white overseers lost their lives ; and another almost as
serious, so lately as the year 1844.
Before I examined this region, I was told that a strange
anomaly occurred in it, for there were beds of coke overlying
others consisting of bituminous coal. I found, on visiting the
various localities of this natural coke, that it was caused by the
vicinity or contact of volcanic rocks (greenstone and basalt),
which, coming up through the granite, intersect the coal-
measures, or sometimes make their way laterally between two
strata, appearing as a conformable mass. As in the Durham
coal-field in England (in the Has well collieries, for example), the
igneous rock has driven out all the gaseous matter, and, where
216 MODERN AND ANCIENT COAL-FIELDS. [CHAP. XV.
it overlies it, has deprived the upper coal of its volatile ingre
dients, while its influence has not always extended to lower
seams. In some spots, the conversion of coal into coke seems
to have been brought about, not so much by the heating agency
of the intrusive basalt, as by its mechanical effect in breaking up
and destroying the integrity of the beds, and rendering them
permeable to water, thereby facilitating the escape of the gases
of decomposing coal.
In conclusion, I may observe that I was much struck with
the general similarity of this more modern or Oolitic coal-field,
and those of ancient or Paleozoic date in England and in Europe
generally. I was especially reminded of the carboniferous rocks
near St. Etienne, in France, which I visited in 1843, These
also rest on granite, and consist of coarse grits and sandstone
derived from the detritus of granite. In both coal-fields, the
French and the Virginian, upright Calamites abound ; fossil
plants are met with in both, almost to the exclusion of other
organic remains, shells especially being absent. The character
of the coal is similar, but in the richness and thickness of the
seams the Virginian formation is pre-eminent. When we behold
phenomena so identical, repeated at times so remote in the earth's
history, and at periods when such very distinct forms of vegeta
tion flourished, we may derive from the fact a useful caution, in
regard to certain popular generalizations respecting a peculiar
state of the globe during the remoter of the two epochs alluded
to. Some geologists, for example, have supposed an atmosphere
densely charged with carbonic acid to be necessary to explain
the origin of coal — an atmosphere so unlike the present, as to be
unfit for the existence of air-breathing, vertebrate animals ; but
this theory they will hardly be prepared to extend to so modern
an era as the Oolitic or Triassic.^
During my visit to one of the coal-pits, an English overseer,
who was superintending the works, told me that within his
memory there had been a great improvement in the treatment
* See a paper on this coal-field, by the author, Quarterly Journal Geolog.
Soc., August, 1847, vol. iii. p. 261, and an accompanying memoir, descrip
tive of the fossil plants, by Charles J. F. Bunbury, For. S. G. S.
CHAP. XV.] NEGROES IN THE MINES. 217
of the negroes. Some years ago, a planter came to him with a
refractory slave, and asked him to keep him underground for a
year by way of punishment, saying, that no pay would be re
quired for his hire. The overseer retorted that he would be no
man's jailer. The British company at Blackheath having re
solved not to employ any slaves, and Mr. Gifford, having engaged
130 free^^roes, found he could preserve good discipline without
corpora^^Pnishment ; and he not only persuaded several newly
arrived laborers from England to work with the blacks, but old
Virginians, also, of the white race, engaged themselves, although
their countrymen looked down upon them at first for associating
with such companions. They confessed that, for a time, " they
felt very awkward," but it was not long before the proprietors
of other mines followed the example which had been set them.
VOL. i. — K
CHAPTER XVI.
Journey through North Carolina. — Wilmington. — Recent Firj^i Passports
for Slaves. — Cape Fear River and Smithfield. — Spanish IJHB^and Uses
of. — Charleston. — Anti-Negro Feeling. — Passage from Mulattoes to
Whites. — Law against importing free Blacks. — Dispute with Massachu
setts. — Society in Charleston. — Governesses. — War Panic. — Anti-English
Feeling caused by Newspaper Press. — National Arbitration of the Amer
icans. — Dr. Bachman's Zoology. — Geographical Representation of Spe
cies. — Rattle-Snakes. — Turkey Buzzards.
Dec. 23, 1845. — THE monotony of the scenery in the princi
pal route from the northern to the southern states is easily
understood by a geologist, for the line of railroad happens to run
for hundreds of miles on the tertiary strata, near their junction
with the granitic rocks. Take any road in a transverse direction
from the sea coast to the Alleghanies, and the traveler will meet
with the greatest variety in the scenery.^ In passing over the
tertiary sands and clays, we see Pine Barrens where the soil is
sandy, and a swamp, or cane-brake, where the argillaceous beds
come to the surface. The entire absence of all boulders and
stones, such as are observable almost every where in the New
England States and New York, is a marked geological peculiar
ity of these southern lowlands. Such erratic blocks and boulders
are by no means confined in the north to the granitic or second
ary formations, for some of the largest of them, huge fragments
of granite, for example, twenty feet in diameter, rest on the
newer tertiary deposits of the island of Martha's Vineyard, off
the coast of Massachusetts.
After leaving Richmond, I remarked that the railway from
Weldon to Wilmington, through North Carolina, had not im
proved in the last three years, nor the stations or inns where wo
stopped. I was told, in explanation, that this line would soon
* Sco iny " Travels in North America," voL i. p. 93 ; an<! the colored
^•eulo.'icrtl map, !
CHAP. XVI.] WILMINGTON. 219
be superseded, or nearly so, by a more inland road now making
through Haleigh. We reached Wilmington without much de
lay, in spite of the ice on the rails, and the running of our loco
motive engine against a cow. On approaching that town, we
were glad to see that the ground was not covered with snow as
every where to the northward, and our eyes were refreshed by
the sigl^pf verdure, caused by the pines, and by two kinds of
evergree»f oaks, besides magnolias, and an undergrowth of holly
and kalmia. In the streets and suburbs of Wilmington, the
Pride-of-India tree (Melia azedarach) is very conspicuous, some
of them twenty-five years old, having survived many a severe
frost, especially that of the autumn of the present year, the se
verest since 1835. There are also some splendid live oaks here
(Quercus virens), a tree of very slow growth, which furnishes
the finest timber for ship-building.
We reached Wilmington after the steamboat for Charleston
had departed, and I was not sorry to have a day to collect ter
tiary fossils in the cliffs near the town. The streets which had
just been laid in ashes when we were here four years ago, are
now rebuilt ; but there has been another fire this year, imputed
very generally to incendiaries, because it broke out in many
places at once. There had been a deficiency of firemen, owing
to the state having discontinued the immunity from militia duty,
formerly conceded to those who served the fire-engines. The
city, however, has now undertaken to find substitutes for young
men who will join the fire companies. A lady told me that,
when the conflagration burst forth very suddenly, she was with
a merchant whose house was not insured, and, finding him panic-
struck, and incapable of acting for himself, she had selected his
ledgers and other valuables, and was carrying them away to her
own house ; but on the way the civic guard stopped her in the
dark, and, suspecting her to be a person of color, required her to
show her pass. She mentioned this incidentally, as a serious
cause of delay when time was precious ; but it brought home
forcibly to our minds the extraordinary precautions which one
half the population here think it necessary to take against the
other half.
220 SMITHFIELD, NORTH CAROLINA. [CHAP. XVI.
A large export of turpentine is the chief business of this port,
and gashes are seen cut in the bark of the pines in the neighbor
ing forest, from which resin exudes. The half decayed wood of
these resinous pines forms what is called light wood, burning
with a most brilliant flame, and often used for candles, as well
as for reviving the fire. A North Carolinian is said to migrate
most unwillingly to any new region where this prime luxury of
life is wanting.
When we sailed for Charleston, the steamer first proceeded
thirty miles to the mouth of the Cape Fear river, and then an
chored there for several hours at a village called Smith field, in
North Carolina. Here I strolled along the shore, and in a few
minutes found myself in a wild region, out of sight of all human
habitations, and every sign of the work of man's hands. The
soil, composed of white quartzose sand, was hopelessly barren.
Coming to a marsh, I put up many peewits, which flew round
me, uttering a cry resembling that of our European species. The
evergreen oaks round the marsh were hung with Spanish moss,
or Tiilandsia, the pods of which are now full of downy seeds.
This plant is not a parasite like the misletoe, of which a species
is also common on the trees here, but simply supports itself on
trees, without sending any roots into them, or drawing nourish
ment from their juices. It is what the botanists call an epiphyte,
and is precisely the same species ( Tiilandsia usncoides), which
is also common in Brazil ; so that as we journey southward, this
flowering epiphyte, together with the palmetto, or fan-palm, may
be regarded as marking an approach toward a more tropical veg
etation. When dried, the outer soft part of the .Tillandsia de
cays and leaves a woody fiber in the middle, much resembling
horse-hair in appearance, and very elastic. It is used in the
United States, and exported to Liverpool, for stuffing mattresses.
In preparing it they first bury the moss, and then take it up
again when the exterior coating has rotted off. The birds also
select only the woody fiber of the withered or dead stems for
building their nests.
On the morning of Christmas-day, we reached Charleston, S.C.,
and found the interior of the Episcopal church of St. Philip
CHAP. XVI.] CHARLESTON. 221
adorned with evergreens and with artificial flowers, in imitation
of magnolias and asters. During the whole service the boys in
the streets were firing pistols and letting off fireworks, which re
minded me of the liberal expenditure of gunpowder indulged in
by the Roman Catholics in Sicily, when celebrating Christmas
in the churches. I once heard a file of soldiers at Girgenti fire
off their muskets inside a church. Here at least it was on the
outside ; but, as it was no part of the ceremony, it was a greater
interruption to the service. We saw some of the white race very
shabbily dressed, and several mulattoes in the church, separated
from the whites, in fashionable attire, which doubtless they were
fully entitled to wear, being much richer, j Instead of growing
reconciled to the strong line of demarkation drawn between the
two races, it appears to me more and more unnatural, for I some
times discover that my American companions can not tell me,
without inquiry, to which race certain colored individuals belong ;
and some English men and women, of dark complexion, might
occasionally be made to feel aivkward, if they were traveling with
us here. On one occasion, the answer to my query was, " If I
could get sight of his thumb nail I could tell you." It appears
that the white crescent, at the base of the nail, is wholly want
ing in the full blacks, and is that peculiarity which they acquire
the last as they approximate by intermixture, in the course of
generations, toward the whites.
I have just seen the following advertisement in a newspaper :
— " Runaway. — Reward. A liberal reward will be given for
the arrest of a boy named Dick. He is a bright mulatto — so
bright, that he can readily, as he has done before, pass himself
for a white. He is about thirty years of age," &c. Another ad
vertisement of a runaway negro; states, " his color is moderated
by in-door work."
So long as the present system continues, the idea of future
amalgamation must be repugnant to the dominant race. They
would shrink from it just as a European noble would do, if he
were told that his grandchild or great grandchild would inter
marry with the direct descendant of one of his menial servants.
That the alleged personal dislike of the two races toward each
222 DISPUTE WITH MASSACHUSETTS. [CHAP. XVI.
other, so much insisted upon by many writers, must arise chiefly
from prejudice, seems proved, not only by the mixture of the
races, but by the manner in which we see the Southern women,
when they are ill, have three or four female slaves to sleep on
the floor of their sick room, and often consign their babes to black
nurses to be suckled.
That the attainder of blood should outlast all trace of African
features, betrays a feeling allied to the most extravagant aristo
cratic pride of the feudal ages, and stands out in singular relief
and contrast here in the South, where the whites, high and low,
ignorant arid educated, are striving among themselves to main
tain a standard of social equality, in defiance of all the natural
distinctions which difference of fortune, occupation, and degrees
of refinement give rise to.
A few years ago a ship from Massachusetts touched at Charles
ton, having some free blacks on board, the steward and cook being
of the number. On their landing, they were immediately put
into jail by virtue of a law of South Carolina, not of very old
standing. The government of Massachusetts, in a state of great
indignation, sent a lawyer to investigate the case and remonstrate.
This agent took up his abode at the Charleston Hotel, where we
are now comfortably established. A few days after his arrival,
the hotel was surrounded, to the terror of all the inmates, by a
mob of " gentlemen," who were resolved to seize the New Erf*
gland envoy. There is no saying to what extremities they would
have proceeded, had not the lawyer's daughter, a spirited girl, re
fused to leave the hotel. The excitement lasted five days, and
almost every northern man in Charleston was made to feel him
self in personal danger. At length, by the courage and energy
of some of the leading citizens, Mr. H was enabled to es
cape, and then the most marked attentions were paid, and civili
ties offered, to the young lady, his daughter, by the families of
the very men who had thought it right, " on principle," to get
up this riot. The same law has given rise to some very awk
ward disputes with the captains of English vessels, whose color
ed, sailors have, in like mariner, been imprisoned. To obtain re
dress for the injury, in such cases, is impossible. The Federal
CHAP. XVI.] SOCIETY IN CHARLESTON. 223
Government is too weak to enforce its authority, and the sover
eign state is sheltered under the segis of the grand confederacy.
JBy virtue of a similar law, also, in force in Alabama, tho
crews of several vessels, consisting of free blacks, have been com
mitted to jail at Mobile, and the captains obliged to pay the costs,
and give bonds to carry them away.
I asked a New England merchant, who is here, why the city
of Charleston did not increase, having such a noble harbor. He
said, " There have been several great fires, and the rich are ab
sentees for half the year, flying from malaria. Besides, you will
find that large cities do not grow in slave states as in the North.
Few, if any of the ships, now in this harbor, belong to merchants
of Charleston."
We were as much pleased with what we saw of the society of
Charleston, during this short visit, as formerly, when we were
here in 1842. I have heard its exclusiveness much commented
on ; for there are many families here, whose ancestors started
from genteel English stocks in Virginia two hundred years ago,
and they and some of the eminent lawyers and others, who, by
their education and talents, have qualified themselves to be re
ceived into the same circle, do not choose to associate on intimate
terms with every one who may happen to come and settle in the
place. There is nearly as wide a range in the degrees of refine
ment of manners in American as in European society, and, to
counterbalance some unfavorable circumstances, the social system
has also some advantages. There is too great a predominance
of the mercantile class, and the democracy often selects rude and
unpolished favorites to fill stations of power ; but such men are
scarcely ever without some talent. On the other hand, mere
wealth is less worshiped than in England, and there is no rank
and title to force men of slender abilities, and without even agree
able manners, into good company, or posts of political importance.
The treatment in the southern states of governesses, who
usually come from the North or from England, is very kind and
considerate. They are placed on a much greater footing of
equality with the family in which they live, than in England.
Occasionally we find that the mother of the children has staid at
224 WAR-PANIC. [CHAP. XVI.
home, in order that the teacher may take her turn, and go out to
a party. This system implies a great sacrifice of domestic pri
vacy ; but when the monotony of the daily routine of lessons is
thus relieved to the instructress, the pupil must also be a gainer.
Their salaries are from 50 to 100 guineas, which is more than
they receive in the northern states.
The negroes here have certainly not the manners of an op
pressed race. One evening, when we had gone out to dine in
the suburbs, in a close carriage, the same coachman returned for
us at night with an open vehicle. It was very cold, the frost
having been more intense this year than any winter since 1835,
and I remonstrated strongly ; but the black driver, as he shut
the door, said, with a good-humored smile, " that all the other
carriages of his master were engaged ;" and added, " Never
mind, it will soon be over !"
One of the judges of the Admiralty Court tells me that, on
Christmas eve, the day we came here, at nine o'clock at night,
when he was just going to bed, an English resident came to him
whose mind was so full of the prevailing war-panic, that nothing
would satisfy him but the obtaining immediate letters of natural
ization. He seemed to think that hostilities with England
might break out in the course of the night, and that, in conse
quence, all his property would be confiscated. He was accord
ingly enrolled as a citizen, " although," said the judge, " we shall
not gain much by his courage, should we have to defend Charles
ton against a British fleet."
Some months ago a British post-office steam-ship sailed into
the harbor here, and took soundings in various places, and this
incident has given offense to many, although in reality the sur
vey was made under the expectation that the proposed scheme
for extending the line of British West India mail-steamers along
this coast would soon take effect.
I asked -a South Carolinian, a friend of peace, and one who
thinks that a war would ruin the maritime states, why so many
of the people betrayed so much sympathy with the hostile demon
stration got up by the press against England. " We have a set
of demagogues," he replied, « in this country, who trade on the
CHAP. XVI.] ANTI-ENGLISH FEELING. 305
article called < hatred to England/ as so much political capital,
just as a southern merchant trades in cotton, or a Canadian one
in lumber. They court the multitude by blustering and by
threatening England. There is a natural leaning in the South
toward Great Britain, as furnishing a market for their cotton,
and they are averse to the high tariff' which the northerners have
inflicted on them. But these feelings are neutralized by a dis
like of the abolitionist party in England, and by a strong spirit
of antagonism to Great Britain, which the Irish bring over here.
All these sources of estrangement, however, are as nothing in
comparison with the baneful effect of your press, and its persever
ing misrepresentation of every thing American. Almost every
white man here is a reader and a politician, and all that is said
against us in England is immediately cited in our newspapers,
because it serves to augment that political capital of which I
have spoken." I remarked that the nation arid its government
are not answerable for all the thoughtless effusions of anonymous
newspaper writers, and that the tone of the English journals,
since the agitation of the Oregon affair, had been temperate,
guarded, and even courteous. "It is very true," he said ; " the
Times, in particular, formerly one of the most insolent and ma
lignant. But the change has been too sudden, and the motive
too transparent. The English know that the world can never
suspect them of want of courage if they show a disinclination to
go to war. Not wishing to waste their blood and treasure for
so useless a possession as Oregon, they are behaving like a man
who, having insulted another, has no mind, when called out, to
fight a duel about nothing. He therefore makes an apology.
But such civility will not last, and if the anonymous abuse
habitually indulged in. were not popular, it would long ago have
ceased."
A short time after this conversation, I fell in with a young
officer of the American navy who was wishing for war, partly
for the sake of active service, but chiefly from intense nationality.
" We may get the worst of it," he said, "for a year or two, but
England will not come out of the struggle without being forced
to acknowledge that she has had to deal with a first-rate instead
K*
226 ANTI-ENGLISH FEELING. [CHAP. XVI.
of a second-rate power." Soon after this T met an English
sportsman, who had been traveling for his amusement in the
western states, where he had been well received, and liked the
people much, but many of them had told him, " We must have
a brush with the English before they will respect us."
This sentiment is strong with a certain party throughout the
Union, and would have no existence if they did not respect the
English, and wish in their hearts to have their good opinion.
It may be well for an old nation to propound the doctrine that
every people ought to rest on their own dignity, and be satisfied
with their place in the world without troubling themselves about
what others think of them, or running the risk of having applied
to them the character which Goldsmith ascribed to the French
of his times : —
" Where the weak soul within itself unblest,
Leans for support upon another's breast."
But they whose title to consideration is new, however real, will
rarely occupy their true place unless they take it ; whereas an
older nation has seldom to assert its claims, and they are often
freely conceded, long after it has declined from its former power.
To an ambitious nation, feeding its imagination with anticipations
of coming greatness, it is peculiarly mortifying to find that what
they have actually achieved is barely acknowledged. They grow
boastful and impatient to display their strength. When they
are in this mood, no foreign country should succumb to them ;
but, on the other hand, it is equally impolitic and culpable to
irritate them by disparagement, or by not yielding to them their
proper place among the nations. " You class us," said one of
their politicians to me in Washington, " with the South American
republics ; your embassadors to us come from Brazil and Mexico
to Washington, and consider it a step in their advancement to go
from the United States to Spain, or some second-rate German
court, having a smaller population than two of our large states.
Yet, in reality, where is there a people in the world, except
France, with which it so much concerns you to live in amity as
the United States, and with what other nation have you and
your chief colonies so much commercial intercourse ?"
CHAP. XVI.] DR. BACHMAN'S ZOOLOGY. 227
On listening to complaints against the English press, my
thoughts often recurred to Bonaparte's prosecution of the royalist
emigrant, Peltier, after the peace of Amiens, February, 1803,
and the appeal to the jury of Sir James Mackintosh, as counsel
for the defendant, on the want of dignity on the part of the First
Consul, then in reality the most powerful sovereign in Europe,
in persecuting a poor, defenseless, and proscribed exile, for abusive
editorial articles. The court and jury were probably of the same
mind ; but the verdict of guilty showed that they deemed it no
light matter that the peace of two great nations should be dis
turbed, by permitting anonymous libels, or a continued outpour
ing of invective and vituperation, calculated to provoke the ruler
of a friendly country. In America the sovereign people read
every thing written against them, as did Napoleon to the last,
and, like him, with unmitigated resentment.
Before leaving Charleston I called on Dr. Bachman, whose
acquaintance I had made in 1842, and was glad to see on his
table the first volumes of a joint work by himself and Audubon,
on the land quadrupeds of North America. These authors will
give colored figures and descriptions of no less than 200 mam
malia, exclusive of cetacea, all inhabiting this continent between
the southern limits of the Arctic region and the Tropic of Cancer,
for they now include Texas in the United States. Not more
than seventy-six species are enumerated by preceding naturalists,
and several of these are treated by Bachman and Audubon not
as true species but mere varieties. Their industry, however, in
augmenting the list of new discoveries, is not always welcomed
by the subscribers, one of whom has just written to say, " if you
describe so many squirrels, I can not go on taking in your book."
The tribe alluded to in this threatening epistle, especially the
striped species, is most fully represented in North America, a
continent so remarkable for its extent of woodland and the variety
of its forest trees. Yet, after traveling so much in the woods, I
had never got sight of more than three or four species, owing, I
am informed, to their nocturnal habits. I regretted that I had
not yet seen the flying squirrel in motion, and was surprised to
hear that Dr. Bachman had observed about a hundred of them
228 DR. BACHMAN'S ZOOLOGY. [CHAP. XVI.
every evening, for several weeks, near Philadelphia, on two tall
oaks, in the autumn, when acorns and chestnuts were abundant,
and when they had spare time for play. They were amusing
themselves by passing from one tree to another, throwing them
selves off from the top of one of the oaks, and descending at a
considerable angle to near the base of the other ; then inclining
the head upward just before reaching the ground, so as to turn and
alight on the trunk, which they immediately climbed up to repeat
the same mano3uvre. In this way there was almost a continuous
flight of them crossing each other in the air between the two trees.
I had heard much of the swamp-rabbit, which they hunt near
the coast in South Carolina and Georgia, and was glad to see a
stuffed specimen. It is an aquatic hare (Lepus palustris), diving
most nimbly, and outswimming a Newfoundland dog.
Dr. Bachman pointed out to me ten genera of birds, and ten
of quadrupeds, all peculiar to North America, but each repre
sented on the opposite side of the Rocky Mountains by distinct
species. The theory of specific centers, or the doctrine that the
original stock of each species of bird and quadruped originated in
one spot only, may explain in a satisfactory manner one part of
this phenomenon ; for we may assume that a lofty chain of
mountains opposed a powerful barrier to migration, and that the
mountains were more ancient than the introduction of these par
ticular quadrupeds and birds into the planet. But the limitation
of peculiar generic types to certain geographical areas, now ob
served in so many parts of the globe, points to some other and
higher law governing the creation of species itself, which in the
present state of science is inscrutable to us, and may, perhaps,
remain a mystery forever. The adaptation of peculiar forms,
instincts, qualities, and organizations to the present geography
and climate of a region, may be a part only of the conditions
which govern in every case the relations of the animate beings
to their habitations. The past condition and changes of the
globe and its inhabitants, throughout the whole period when the
different beings were entering, each in succession, upon the scene,
and all the future conditions and changes to the end of vast
periods, during which they may be destined to exist, ought to be
CHAP. XVI.] RATTLE-SNAKES. 229
known, before we can expect to comprehend why certain types
were originally selected for certain areas, whether of land or water.
In the museum of the Medical College, Professor Shepard
showed me a fine specimen of the large rattle-snake of South
Carolina (Crotalm adamantinus), preserved in spirits. It
was said to have been nine years old, having six rattles, the
tail acquiring one annually after the third year. When brought
into the laboratory in winter in a torpid state, an electric shock
had been communicated to it, which threw it into a state of
extreme excitement. Two tortoises, nearly torpid, were also
put by the professor into a glass bell filled with laughing gas, and
they immediately began to leap about with great agility, arid con
tinued in this state of muscular excitement for more than an hour.
In both my tours in America, I heard stories not only of dogs,
which had died suddenly from the bite of rattle-snakes, but men
also ; and the venom is said to be more virulent in the south. I re
joiced, therefore, that I had chosen the coldest season for my visit
to these latitudes ; but it seemed singular that in my wanderings
to explore the rocks in various states, I had never yet got sight of
a single snake, or heard its rattle. That they make a much greater
figure in books of travels than in real life, I can not but suspect.
Almost all the best houses in Charleston are built with veran
dahs, and surrounded with gardens. In some of the streets we
admired the beautiful evergreens, and remarked among them the
Prunus virginiana, with black cherries hanging to it, and Mag
nolia grandiflora. The number of turkey buzzards is surprising.
I have seen nine of them perched side by side, like so many
bronze statues, breaking the long line of a roof in the clear blue
sky, while others were soaring in the air, each feather, at the
extremity of their extended wings, being spread out, so as to be
seen separate from the rest. A New England friend, whom we
met here, seeing my interest in these birds, told me they are the
sole scavengers of the place, and a fine of five dollars is imposed
on any person who kills one. " You are lucky in being here in
a 3old season ; if you should come back in summer, you would
think that these vultures had a right to the whole city, it stinks
so intolerably."
CHAPTER XVII.
Charleston to Savannah. — Beaufort River, or Inland Navigation in South
Carolina. — Slave Stealer. — Cockspur Island. — Rapid Growth of Oysters.
— Eagle caught by Oyster. — Excursion from Savannah to Skiddaway
Island. — Megatherium and Mylodon. — Cabbage Palms, or Tree Palmet
tos. — Deceptive Appearance of Submarine Forest. — Alligators swallow
ing Flints. — Their Tenacity of Life when decapitated. — Grove of Live
Oaks. — Slaves taken to Free States.
Dec. 28, 1845. — A FINE steam-ship, the General Clinch,
conveyed us to Savannah. I was surprised, when sailing out
of the beautiful harbor of Charleston, on a bright scorching day,
to see a cloud of smoke hanging over the town, and learned that
they burn here not a little of what is called Liverpool coal.
Among others on board, was a female passenger from one of the
western states, who, having heard rne make inquiries for my
wife, went up to her in the ladies' cabin and said, " Your old
man is mighty eager to see you ;" " old man," as we afterward
found, being synonymous with husband in the West. We were
to go by the inland navigation, or between the islands and the
coast. After passing Edisto Point, we ran aground at the en
trance of St. Helena's Sound, in mid-passage, and were detained
some hours till the tide floated us off to the westward, through
the winding mazes of a most intricate channel, called the Beau
fort River. We passed between low sandy islands, and an
equally low mainland, covered with evergreen oaks, and long-
leaved pines and palmettos, six or seven feet high. Sometimes
we sailed by a low bluff or cliff of white sand, two or three feet
in height, then by a cotton plantation, then by large salt marshes
covered with reeds, on which the cattle are supported when fod
der is scarce in winter. The salt water in this narrow channel
was as calm as a lake, and perfectly clear. Numerous wild
ducks were diving as our steamboat approached, and beds of
oysters were uncovered between high and low water mark. It
CHAP. XVII.] BEAUFORT. 231
was a novel and curious scene, especially when we approached
Beaufort, a picturesque town composed of an assemblage of villas,
the summer residences of numerous planters, who retire here
during the hot season, when the interior of South Carolina is un
healthy for the whites. Each villa is shaded by a verandah,
surrounded by beautiful live oaks and orange trees laden with
fruit, though with leaves slightly tinged by the late severe frost.
It is hoped that these orange trees will not suffer as they did in
February, 1835, for then the cold attacked them much later in
the season, and after the sap had risen. The Pride-of-India tree,
with its berries now ripe, is an exotic much in favor here. A
crowd of negroes, in their gay Sunday clothes, came down to
look at our steamboat, grinning and chattering, and looking,
as usual, perfectly free from care, but so ugly, that although
they added to the singularity and foreign aspect of the scene,
they detracted greatly from its charms.
Had it not been for the dense beds of oysters between high
and low water mark, hundreds of which adhere to the timbers of
the pier at Beaufort, as barnacles do in our English ports, I might
have supposed the channel to be really what it is called, a river.
An old Spanish fort, south of Beaufort, reminded me that this
region had once belonged to the Spaniards, who built St. Augus
tine, still farther to the south, the oldest city in the United
States, and I began to muse on the wonderful history of the
Anglo-Saxon race in settling these southern states. To have
overcome and driven out in so short a time Indians, Spaniards,
and French, arid yet, after all, to be doomed to share the terri
tory with three millions of negroes !
Of this latter race, we had not a few passengers on board.
Going into the steerage to converse with some of them, my curi
osity was particularly attracted to a group of three, who were
standing by themselves. The two younger, a girl and a lad,
were very frank, and willing to talk with me, but I was imme
diately joined by a young white man, not ill-looking, but who
struck me as having a very determined countenance for his age.
" These colored people," he said, " whom you have been speaking
to, belong to me, and they have probably told you that I have
232 SLAVE STEALER. [CHAP. XVII.
brought them by railway from Augusta to Charleston. I hope
to dispose of them at Savannah, but if not, I shall take them to
Texas, where I may sell them, or perhaps keep them as laborers
and settle there myself." He then told me he had fought in the
wars for the independence of Texas, which I afterward found was
quite true, and, after telling me some of his adventures, he said,
" I will take 450 dollars for the girl, and 600 for the boy ; they
are both of pure blood, would stand a hot climate well ; they can
not read, but can count up to a thousand." By all these quali-
ities, negative and positive, he evidently expected to enhance in
my eyes the value of the article which he meant me to buy ; and
no sooner did he suspect, by one of my questions, that I was a
foreigner traveling for my amusement, than he was off the sub
ject, and I attempted in vain to bring him back to it and to learn
why the power of counting was so useful, while that of reading
was undesirable. About three weeks after this incident, when
we were at Macon in Georgia, there was a rme and cry after a
thief who had stolen five negroes near Augusta, and had taken
them to Savannah, in the General Clinch, where he had sold one
of them, a girl, for 450 dollars. From Savannah he had been
traced with the remaining four, by railway, to Macon, whence it
was supposed he had gone south. The description of the delin
quent left me no doubt that he was my former fellow-traveler,
and I now learnt that he was of a respectable family in Georgia,
the spoiled child of a widowed mother, self-willed and unmanage
able from his boyhood, and who had gone off against the wishes
of his relations to fight in Texas. I recollected that when we
were at Beaufort, none of his negroes had gone ashore, and that
he had kept his eye always anxiously on them during our stay
there. I also remarked, that the planters on board, who, for the
most part, were gentlemanlike in their manners, shunned all in
tercourse with this dealer, as if they regarded his business as
scarcely respectable. A vast majority of the slave-owners acqui
esced originally in the propriety of abolishing the external slave-
trade ; but the internal one can not, they say, be done away
with, without interfering with the free circulation of labor from
fin overpeopled district to another where hands are scarce. To
CHAP. XVII.] EAGLE CAUGHT BY AN OYSTER. 233
check this, they maintain, would injure the negroes as much as
their masters. When they are forced to part with slaves, they
usually sell one to another, and are unwilling to dispose of them
to a stranger. It is reckoned, indeed, quite a disgrace to a negro
to be so discarded. When the former master bids for one of his
" own people," at a sale of property forced on by debt, the public
are unwilling to bid against him. It is clear, therefore, that a
dealer must traffic in the lowest and most good-for-nothing class
of laborers, many of whom, in Europe, would be in the hands of
policemen, or in convict ships on their way to a penal settlement.
I heard of one of these dealers, who, having made a large fortune,
lived sumptuously in one of the towns on the Mississippi after
retiring from business, but in spite of some influential connections,
he was not able to make his way into the best society of the place.
At the mouth of the Savannah River we passed Cockspur
Island, where there is a fort. The sea is said to have encroach
ed many hundred yards on this island since 1740, as has hap
pened at other points on this low coast ; but there has been also
a gain of land in many places. An officer stationed at the fort
told me, that when a moat was dug and the sea-water admitted,
oysters grew there so fast, that, at the end of two years, they
afforded a regular supply of that luxury to the garrison. The
species of oyster which is so abundant here (Ostrea virginica)
resembles our European Ostrea edulis in shape, when it lives
isolated and grows freely under water ; but those individuals
which live gregariously, or on banks between high and low
water, lose their round form and are greatly lengthened. They
are called racoon oysters, because they are the only ones which
the racoons can get at when they come down to feed at low tide.
Capt. Alexander, of the U.S. artillery, told me that, in the sum
mer of 1844, he saw a large bald-headed eagle, Aquila leucoce-
phala, which might measure six feet from tip to tip of its ex
tended wings, caught near the bar of the Savannah river by one
of these racoon oysters. The eagle had perched upon the shell
fish to prey upon it, when the mollusk suddenly closed its valves
and shut in the bird's claw, and would have detained its enemy
till the rising tide had come up and drowned it, had not the cap-
234 EXCURSION TO SKIDDAWAY. [CHAP. XVII
tain in his boat secured it with a noose, and disengaged it from
the oyster. He flapped his wings violently as they approached,
but could not escape.
Dec. 29. — Savannah has a population of 12,000 souls, but
seems rather stationary, though some new buildings are rising.
The mildness of its climate is attributed partly to the distance
to which the Alleghany Mountains retire from the sea coast in
this latitude, and partly to the proximity of the Gulf-stream. But
many of the northern invalids, who are consumptive, and had
hoped to escape a winter by taking refuge in this city, are com
plaining of the frost, and say that the houses are inadequately
protected against cold. The sun is very powerful at mid-day,
and we see the Camellia Japonica in the gardens flowering in
the open air ; but the leaves of the orange trees look crisp and
frost-bitten, and I am told that the thermometer lately fell as low
as 17° Fahr., so that even the salt water froze over in some of
the marshes.
While at Savannah I made a delightful excursion, in com
pany with Dr. Le Conte, Captain Alexander, and Mr. Hodgson,
to Skiddaway, one of the sea-islands, which may be said to form
part of a great delta on the coast of Georgia, between the mouths
of the Savannah and Ogeechee rivers. This alluvial region con
sists of a wide extent of low land elevated a few feet above high
water, and intersected by numerous creeks and swamps. I gave
some account in my former tour of my visit to Heyner's Bridge,*
where the bones of the extinct mastodon and mylodon were found.
Skiddaway is five or six miles farther from Savannah in the same
southeast direction, and is classical ground for the geologist, for,
on its northwest end, where there is a low cliff from two to six
feet in height, no less than three skeletons of the huge Megathe
rium have been dug up, besides the remains of the Mylodon,
Elephas primigenius, Mastodon giganteus, and a species of the
ox tribe. The bones occur in a dark peaty soil or marsh mud,
above which is a stratum, three or four feet thick, of sand, charged
with oxide of iron, and below them and beneath the sea level,
occurs sand containing a great number of marine fossil shells, all
* Travels in North America, vol. i. p. 163.
CHAP. XVII.]
CABBAGE PALM.
235
belonging to species which still inhabit the neighboring coast,
showing how modern is the date, geologically speaking, of the ex
tinct animals, since they were evidently posterior to the existing
molluscous fauna of the sea.
The scenery of the low flat island of Skiddaway had more of
a tropical aspect than any which I had yet seen in the United
States. Several distinct species of palmetto, or fan palm, were
common, as also the tree, or cabbage palm, a noble species, which
Fig. 6.
Charruerops Palmetto.
Cabbage Palm, or Tall Palmetto, Skiddaway Island, Georgia.
I had never seen before. In some of the cotton-fields many in
dividuals were growing singly, having been planted at regular in
tervals to the exclusion of all other trees, and were from twenty-
five to forty feet in height. The trunk bulges at the base, above
which it is usually about one foot in diameter, and of the same
size throughout, or rather increasing upward. At the top the
236 BIRDS. [CHAP. XVII.
leaves spread out on all sides, as in other fan palms. Those
which have fallen off do not leave separate scars on the trunk,
but rings are formed by their bases. The cabbage of the young"
palm is used as a vegetable, but when this part is cut off", the
plant is killed. I saw sections of the wood, and the structure of
it resembles that of true palms. It is said by Elliott to be inval
uable for submarine construction, as it is never attacked by the
ship-worm, or Teredo tiavalis. This tree flourishes in a clay
soil, and is of slow growth. It requires the sea air, and has not
suffered from the late severe frost. We saw some plants twelve
years old, and others which in fifty years had attained a height
of about twenty or twenty-five feet. Such as have reached forty
feet are supposed to be at least a century old. In those fields
where the negroes were at work, and where the cotton plants
were still standing five or six feet high, with no other trees ex
cept these palms, I could well imagine myself in the tropics.
We put up many birds, the names of which were all familiar to
Dr. Le Conte ; among others the Virginian partridge (Ortyx
mrginiana), the rook (Corvus americanus), nearly resembling
our European species, not only in plumage but in its note, the
marsh hawk (Circus cyaneus), the snowy heron (Ardea can-
didissima), the bald-headed eagle, the summer duck, and meadow
lark. We also heard the mocking-bird in the woods. As we
were entering a barn, a screech-owl (Bubo asio, Lin.) flew out
nearly in the face of one of the party. When we came to a tree
partially barked by lightning, I asked Dr. Le Conte whether he
adopted the theory that this decortication was caused by steam ;
the sap or juices of the tree, immediately under the bark, being
suddenly converted by the heat of the electric fluid into vapor.
He said that lightning was so common here, that he had had
opportunities of verifying this hypothesis by observing that the
steam, or small cloud of smoke, as it is commonly called, which
is produced when a tree is struck, disappears immediately, as if
by condensation.
There are decided proofs on the coast of Georgia of changes in
the level of the land, in times geologically modern, and I shall
afterward mention the stumps of trees below the sea-level, at the
CHAP. XVII.] ALLIGATORS. 237
mouth of the Altamaha river, in proof of a former subsidence ;
but a stranger is in great danger of being deceived, because the
common pine, called the loblolly (Pinus tceda), has tap-roots as
large as the trunk, which run down vertically for seven or eight
feet, without any sensible diminution in size. At the depth of
about ten feet below the surface this root sends off numerous
smaller ones horizontally, and when the sea has advanced and
swept away the enveloping sand from such tap-roots, they remain
erect, and become covered with barnacles and oysters. When so
circumstanced, they have exactly the appearance of a submarine
forest, caused by the sinking down of land. A geologist, who is
on his guard against being deceived by the undermining of a cliff,
and the consequent sliding down and submergence of land covered
with trees which remain vertical, may yet be misled by finding
these large tap-roots standing upright under water.
As the alligators are very abundant in the swamps near the
mouth of the Savannah, I heard much of their habits, and was
surprised to learn that pebbles are often met with in their stom
achs, which they have swallowed to aid their digestion, as birds
eat sand and gravel to assist the mechanical action of the gizzard.
The peculiar conformation of the alligator's stomach confirms
this view. On the site of some of the old Indian villages whole
baskets full of flint arrow-heads have been picked up, and some
of these, much worn and rubbed, have been taken out of the
stomachs of these reptiles.
The extraordinary tenacity of life manifested by the alligator
when seriously mutilated, led Dr. Le Conte to make a series of
experiments, with a view of throwing light on the philosophy of
the nervous system in man as compared to the lower animals.
A young alligator was decapitated at the point where the neck
or atlas articulates with the occiput. Not more than two ounces
of blood flowed from the wound. The jaws of the detached head
still snapped at any thing which touched the tongue or lining
membrane of the mouth. After the convulsions produced by de
capitation had subsided, the trunk of the animal remained in a
state of torpor resembling profound sleep. But when pricked or
pinched on the sides, the creature would scratch the spot, some-
238 GROVE OF LIVE OAKS. [CHAP. XVII.
times with the fore, and sometimes with the hind foot, according
to the situation of the injury inflicted. These movements of the
limbs were promptly and determinately performed, and were
always confined to the members on the side of the irritating
cause. If touched below the posterior extremity on the thick
portion of the tail, he would slowly and deliberately draw up
the hind foot, and scratch the part, and would use considerable
force in pushing aside the offending object. These experiments
were repeatedly performed, and always with the same results,
appearing to prove that the creature could not have been totally
devoid of sensation and consciousness. Dr. Le Conte concludes,
therefore, that, although in man and the more highly organized
vertebrata, volition is seated in the brain, or encephalus, this
function in reptiles must extend over the whole spinal cord, or
cerebro-spinal axis. Some, however, may contend that the mo
tions observed are merely spasmodic and involuntary, like sneez
ing, the necessary results of certain physical conditions of the
nervous system, and not guided in any way by the mind. If so,
it can not be denied that they have all the appearance of being
produced with a perfect knowledge of the end in view, and to be
directed peculiarly to that end ; so that, if we embrace the hy
pothesis that they supervene simply on the application of stimuli,
without any sensations being carried to the brain, and without
any co-operation of the mind, must we not in that case suspect
that a large proportion of the actions of quadrupeds, usually
attributed to the control of the will, may in like manner be per
formed without consciousness or volition ?*
When we got back to Savannah, I found my wife just returned
from Bonaventure, about four miles distant, where she had ac
companied a lady on a drive to see a magnificent grove of live
oaks, the branches of which, arching over head, form a splendid
aisle. It was formerly the fashion of the planters of the Caro-
lirias and Georgia, to make summer tours in the northern
states, or stay in watering-places there ; but they are now in the
habit of visiting the upland region of the Alleghanies in their
* See a paper by J. Le Conte, New York Journal of Medicine, Nov.
1845, p. 335.
CHAP. XVII.] SLAVES TAKEN TO FREE STATES. 239
own states, and speak enthusiastically of the beauty and grandeur
of the scenery. Their intercourse with the north was useful in
giving them new ideas, and showing them what rapid progress
civilization is making there ; but they have been deterred from
traveling there of late, owing, as they tell me, to the conduct of
the abolitionists toward the negro servants whom they take with
them,
Sometimes a writ of Habeas Corpus is served, and the colored
servant is carried before a magistrate, on the plea that he or she
are detained against their will. Even where they have firmly
declared their wish to return to their owners, they have been
often unsettled in their ideas, and less contented afterward with
their condition.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Savannah to Darien. — Anti-Slavery Meetings discussed. — War with En
gland. — Landing at Darien. — Crackers. — Scenery on Altamaha River.
— Negro Boatmen singing. — Marsh Blackbird in Rice Grounds. — Hospi
tality of Southern Planters. — New Clearing and Natural Rotation of
Trees. — Birds. — Shrike and Kingfisher. — Excursion to St. Simon's
Island. — Butler's Island and Negroes. — Stumps of Trees in Salt Marshes
proving Subsidence of Land. — Alligator seen. — Their Nests and Habits.
Their Fear of Porpoises. — Indian Shell Mound on St. Simon's Island. —
Date-palm, Orange, Lemon, and Olive Trees. — Hurricanes. — Visit to
outermost Barrier Island. — Sea Shells on Beach. — Negro Maid-Servants.
Dec. 31, 1845. — ON the last day of the year we sailed in a
steamer from Savannah to Darien, in Georgia, about 125 miles
farther south, skirting a low coast, and having the Gulf-stream
about sixty miles to the eastward of us. Our fellow-passengers
consisted of planters, with several mercantile men from northern
states. The latter usually maintained a prudent reserve on
politics ; yet one or two warm discussions arose, in which not
only the chances of war with England, and the policy of the
party now in power, but the more exciting topic of slavery, and
the doings at a recent anti-slavery meeting in Exeter Hall,
London, were spoken of. I was told by a fellow-passenger, that
some of the Georgian planters who are declaiming most vehe
mently against Mr. Polk for so nearly drawing them into a war
with Great Britain, were his warmest supporters in the late
presidential election. " They are justly punished," he said, " for
voting against their principles. Although not belonging to the
democratic party, they went for Polk in order that Texas might
be annexed ; and now that they have carried that point, their
imaginations are haunted with the image of the cotton trade
paralyzed, an English fleet ravaging the coast and carrying away
their negroes, as in the last war, and, worst of all, the abolition
ists of the north looking on with the utmost complacency at their
ruin." One of the most moderate of the planters, with whom I
conversed apart, told me that the official avowal of the English
CHAP. XVIII.] ANTI-SLAVERY MEETINGS. 241
government, that one of the reasons for acknowledging the inde
pendence of Texas was its tendency to promote the abolition of
slavery, had done much to alienate the planters, and increase the
anti-English feeling in the south. He also observed, that any
thing like foreign dictation or intermeddling excited a spirit of
resistance, and asked whether I thought the emancipation of the
West Indian slaves would have been accelerated by meetings in
the United States or Germany to promote that measure. He
then adverted to the letters lately published by Mr. Colman, on
English agriculture, in which the poverty, ignorance, and sta
tionary condition of the British peasantry are painted in most
vivid colors. He also cited Lord Ashley's speeches on the mise
ries endured underground by women and boys in coal-mines, and
said that the parliamentary reports on the wretched state of the
factory children in England had been largely extracted from in
their papers, to show that the orators of Exeter Hall might find
abuses enough at home to remedy, without declaiming against
the wrongs of their negroes, whose true condition and prospects
of improvement were points on which they displayed consummate
ignorance. Finding me not disposed to controvert him, he
added, in a milder tone, that, for his part, he thought the south
ern planters owed a debt of gratitude to England for setting the
example to American philanthropists of making pecuniary com
pensation to those whose slaves they set free.
When I had leisure to think over this conversation, and the
hint conveyed to my countrymen, how they might best devote
their energies toward securing the progress of the laboring classes
at home, it occurred to me that some of Channing's discourses
against slavery might be useful to a minister who should have
the patriotism to revive the measure for educating the factory
children, proposed in 1843 by Sir James Graham, and lost in
consequence of the disputes between the Church and the Dissent
ers. It would be easy to substitute employer for owner, and
laborer for slave, and the greater part of the eloquent appeal of
the New England orator would become appropriate : —
" Mutato nomine de te
Fabula narratur."
VOL. I. — L
242 WAR WITH ENGLAND. [CHAP. XV111.
" Every man," says Charming, in his argument against slavery,
" has a right to exercise and invigorate his intellect, and who
ever obstructs or quenches the intellectual life in another, inflicts
a grievous and irreparable wrong."* " Let not the sacredness
of individual man be forgotten in the feverish pursuit of property.
It is more important that the individual should respect himself,
and be respected by others, than that national wealth, which is
not the end of society, should be accumulated.''! " He (the
slave) must form no plans for bettering his condition, whatever
be his capacities ; however equal to great improvements of his
lot, he is chained for life to the same unwearied toil. That he
should yield himself to intemperance we must expect, unused to
any pleasures but those of sense." " We are told," says the
same author, "that they are taught religion, that they hear the
voice of Christ, and read in his cross the unutterable worth of
their spiritual nature ; but the greater part are still buried in
heathen ignorance.":}:
"They may be free from care, and sure of future support, but
their future is not brightened by images of joy ; it stretches be
fore them sterile and monotonous, sending no cheering whisper of
a better lot."§
An inhabitant of one of the six New England States, or of
New York, where, in a population of five millions of souls, one
teacher is now supplied for every thirty children, may be en
titled to address this language to the southern slave owner ;
but does the state of the working classes, whether in Great
Britain or the West Indies, authorize us to assume the same
tone ?
A merchant from New York told me, that in « The Union," a
semi-official journal published at Washington, and supposed to
represent the views of the cabinet, an article had just appeared,
headed, " The whole of Oregon or none," which for the first time
gave him some uneasiness. " A war," he said, might seem too
absurd to be possible ; but a few months ago he had thought the
election of Mr. Polk equally impossible, and the President might
* Channing's Works, vol. ii, p. 35. t Vol. ii. p. 44.
t Vol. ii, p. 94, § Vol. ii. p. 89,
CHAP. XVIIL] LANDING AT DARIEN. 243
go on tampering with the popular passions, till he could not con
trol them. The presidential election would have ended differ
ently," he affirmed, " but for 5000 fraudulent votes given in the
city of New York." I asked if he thought the people would
enter with spirit into a war for which they had made no prep
aration. " It would depend," he said, " on the policy of En
gland. If she made predatory and bucaniering descents upon
the coast, as in the last war, or attacked some of the great east
ern sea-ports, she might stir up the whole population to a state
of frenzied energy, and cause them to make great sacrifices ; but
if she put forth the whole strength of her fleets against the com
merce of the Union, and stood on the defensive in Canada, so as
to protract the campaign, and cripple their revenues derived from
customs, the people, remembering that when the war commenced,
the cabinet of St. James's and the English press were pacific
and willing to come to a compromise about Oregon, would be
come impatient of direct taxation, and turn against the party
which had plunged them into hostilities."
Dec, 31. — At the end of a long day's sail, our steamer land
ed us safely at the village of Darien, on the sandy banks of
the river Altamaha (which is pronounced Altamaha, the a's
broad). The sky was clear, and the air mild, but refreshing,
and we were told that we must walk to the inn, not far off.
Five negroes were very officious in offering their services, and
four of them at length adjusted all our packages on their backs.
The other, having nothing else to do, assumed the command of
the party, having first said to me, "If you not ready, we will
hesitate for half an hour." We passed under some of the noblest
evergreen oaks I had yet seen, their large picturesque roots spread
ing on all sides, half out of the loose, sandy soil, and their boughs
hung with unusually long weepers of Spanish moss. When I had
paid our four porters, the one who had gone first, assuming an
air of great importance, " hoped I would remember the pilot."
As the inn was almost in sight from the landing, and our course
a direct one in a bright moonlight night, and all the men quite
familiar with every step of the way, we were not a little diverted
at the notion of paying for a guide, bxit the good-humored coun-
244 SCENERY ON ALTAMAHA. [CHAP. XVIII.
tenance of the pilot made his appeal irresistible. The bed at our
humble inn was clean, but next morning we were annoyed by
having to sit down to breakfast with a poor white family, to
whom the same compliment could not be paid — a man and his
wife and four children, belonging to the class called " crackers"
in Georgia. The etymology of this word is rather uncertain,
some deriving it from the long whips used by the wagoners.
They are a class of small proprietors, who seem to acquire slov
enly habits from dependence on slaves, of whom they can main
tain but few.
The next morning, while we were standing on the river's
bank, we were joined by Mr. Hamilton Couper, with whom I
had corresponded on geological matters, and whom I have already
mentioned as the donor of a splendid collection of fossil remains
to the museum at Washington, and, I may add, of other like
treasures to that of Philadelphia. He came down the river to
meet us in a long canoe, hollowed out of the trunk of a single
cypress, and rowed by six negroes, who were singing loudly, and
keeping time to the stroke of their oars. He brought us a packet
of letters from England, which had been sent to his house, a
welcome New Year's gift ; and when we had glanced over their
contents, we entered the boat and began to ascend the Alta-
maha.
The river was fringed on both sides with tall canes and with
the cypress (Cupressus disticha), and many other trees, still
leafless, which, being hung with gray moss, gave a somber tone
to the scenery at this season, in spite of the green leaves of sev
eral species of laurel, myrtle, and magnolia. But wherever there
was a break in the fringe of trees, which flourished luxuriantly
in the swamps bordering the river, a forest of evergreen pines
was seen in the back ground. For many a mile we saw no
habitations, and the solitude was profound ; but our black oars
men made the woods echo to their song. One of them taking
the lead, first improvised a verse, paying compliments to his mas
ter's family, and to a celebrated black beauty of the neighbor
hood, who was compared to the '• red bird." The other five
then joined in chorus, always repeating the same words Occa-
CHAP. XVIIL] SOUTHERN PLANTERS. 245
sionally they struck up a hymn, taught them by the Methodists,
in which the most sacred subjects were handled with strange
familiarity, and which, though nothing irreverent was meant,
sounded oddly to our ears, and, when following a love ditty, al
most profane.
Darien is on the left or northern bank of the Altamaha.
About fifteen miles above it, on the opposite bank, we came to
Hopetori, the residence of Mr. II. Couper, having first passed
from the river into a canal, which traversed the low rice fields.
Here we put up prodigious flights of the marsh blackbird (Aje-
laius phceniceus), sometimes called the red-winged starling, be
cause the male has some scarlet feathers in the upper part of his
wing. When several thousands of them are in rapid motion at
once, they darken the air like a cloud, and then, when the whole
of them suddenly turn their wings edgeways, the cloud vanishes,
to reappear as instantaneously the next moment. Mr. Couper
encourages these birds, as they eat up all the loose grains of rice
scattered over the field after the harvest has been gathered in.
If these seeds are left, they spring up the year following, pro
ducing what is called volunteer rice, always of inferior quality to
that which is regularly sown. From the rice grounds we walked
up a bank to a level table land, composed of sand, a few yards
above the river, and covered with pines and a mixture of scrub
oa,k. Here, in this genial climate, there are some wild flowers
in bloom every day of the year. On this higher level, near the
slope which faces the rice fields and the river, stands the house
of Hopeton, where we spent our time very agreeably for a fort
night. Much has been said in praise of the hospitality of the
southern planter, but they alone who have traveled in the south
ern states, can appreciate the perfect ease and politeness with
which a stranger is made to feel himself at home. Horses, car
riages, boats, servants, are all at his disposal. Even his little
comforts are thought of, and every thing is done as heartily and
naturally as if no obligation were conferred. When northerners
who are not very rich receive guests in the country, where do
mestic servants are few and expensive, they are often compelled,
if they would insure the comfort of their visitors, to perform me-
246 ROTATION OF TREES. [CHAP. XVIII.
nial offices themselves. The sacrifices, therefore, made by the
planter, are comparatively small, since he has a well-trained es
tablishment of servants, and his habitual style of living is so free
and liberal, that the expense of a few additional inmates in the
family is scarcely felt. Still there is a warm and generous open
ness of character in the southerners, which mere wealth and a
retinue of servants cannot give ; and they have often a dignity of
manner, without stiffness, which is most agreeable.
The landed proprietors here visit each other in the style of
English country gentlemen, sometimes dining out with their
families and returning at night, or, if the distance be great, re
maining to sleep and coming home the next morning. A con
siderable part of their food is derived from the produce of the
land ; but, as their houses are usually distant from large towns,
they keep large stores of groceries and of clothing, as is the
custom in country houses in some parts of Scotland.
Near the house of Hopeton there was a clearing in the forest,
exhibiting a fine illustration of that natural rotation of crops,
which excites, not without reason, the surprise of every one who
sees it for the first time, and the true cause of which is still im
perfectly understood. The trees which had been cut down were
full-grown pines (Pinus australis), of which the surrounding
wood consists, and which might have gone on for centuries, one
generation after another, if their growth had not been interfered
with. But now they are succeeded by a crop of young oaks,
and we naturally ask, whence came the acorns, and how were
they sown here in such numbers ? It seems that the jay (G-ar-
rulus cristatus) has a propensity to bury acorns and various
grains in the ground, forgetting to return and devour them. The
rook, also (Corvus americanus), does the same, and so do some
squirrels and other Rodentia ; and they plant them so deep, that
they will not shoot unless the air and the sun's rays can pene
trate freely into the soil, as when the shade of the pine trees has
been entirely removed. It must occasionally happen, that birds
or quadrupeds, which might otherwise have returned to feed on
the hidden treasure, are killed by some one of their numerous
enemies. But as the seeds of pines must be infinitely more
CHAP. XVIII.] SHRIKE AND KINGFISHER. 247
abundant than the acorns, we have still to explain what prin
ciple in vegetable life favors the rotation. Liebig adopts De
Candolle's theory, as most probable. He supposes that the roots
of plants imbibe soluble matter of every kind from the soil, and
absorb many substances not adapted for their nutrition, which
are subsequently expelled by the roots, and returned to the soil
as excrements. • Now, as excrements cannot be assimilated by
the plant which ejected them, the more of these matters the soil
contains, the less fertile must it become for plants of the same
species. These exudations, however, may be capable of assimi
lation by another perfectly different kind or family of plants,
which would flourish while taking them up from the soil, and
render the soil, in time, again fertile for the first plants. " Dur
ing a fallow," says Liebig, " the action of the sun and atmos
phere, especially if not intercepted by the growth of weeds,
causes the decomposition of the excrementitious matters, and
converts the soil into humus or vegetable mold, restoring fer
tility."*
In one part of the pine forest I saw the Liquidambar tree
growing vigorously fifty feet high, with a bark resembling cork.
The bird of brightest plumage was the one called the red bird,
or red cardinal (Loxia cardinalis), which has a full, clear, and
mellow note, though no variety of song. It frequents bushes, in
the neighborhood of houses, where it comes to be fed, but will
not thrive in captivity. One day, a son of Mr. Couper's brought
us a hen cardinal bird and a wild partridge, both taken unin
jured in a snare. It was amusing to contrast the extreme fierce
ness of the cardinal with the mildness and gentleness of the
partridge. That insects, birds, and quadrupeds, of the same
genera, but of distinct species, discharge similar functions in
America arid Europe, is well known. My attention was called
here to some thorny bushes, on which the shrike or loggerhead
(Lanius ludovicianus) had impaled small lizards, frogs, and
beetles, just as I have seen mice and insects fixed on thorns by
our English shrikes. Here, also, the marshes near the river are
frequented by the belted kingfisher (Alcedo alcyori), resembling
* Liebig's Organic Chemistry, pt. i. ch. 8.
248 VISIT TO ST. SIMON'S. [CHAP. XVIII.
in plumage, though not so brilliant as the English kingfisher,
which yet lingers, in spite of persecution, in the reedy islands of
the Thames above London. Mr. Couper tells rne, that the
American bird dives after its prey, like that of Europe, and will
often carry a fish, not much smaller than itself, and beat it
against the stump of a tree, first on one side, then on the other,
till every bone in its body is broken ; it can then swallow it. in
spite of its size.
A few days after our arrival (January 4, 1846), Mr. Couper
took us in a canoe down the river from Hopeton to one of the
sea-islands, called St. Simon's, fifteen miles distant, to visit his
summer residence, and to give me an opportunity of exploring
the geology of the coast and adjoining low country. We saw,
on the banks of the river, the Magnolia glauca, attaining a
height of thirty feet, instead- of being only ten feet high, as in
the swamps of New England. The gum tree (Nyssa aquatica),
out of leaf at this season, was conspicuous, from the manner in
which the smooth trunk swells out at the base, being partially
hollow in the interior, so that it is often used by the negroes
for bee-hives. Jays and blue-birds were very abundant, and
there were several large hawks' nests on the tops of tall dead
trees.
Among the zoological characteristics of the North American
rivers, none is more remarkable than the variety of species of
shells of the genus Unio, or fresh- water mussel, which inhabit
them. Every great stream yields some new forms, and Mr.
Couper has already discovered in the Altamaha no less than
sixteen species before unknown ; one of these, Unio spinoszis,
has a singular appearance, being armed with spines, standing
out horizontally from the shell, and probably acting as a defense
against some enemy.
On our way we landed on Butler's Island, where the banks
of the river, as is usual in deltas, are higher than the ground
immediately behind them. They are here adorned with orange
trees, loaded with golden fruit, and very ornamental. We saw
ricks of rice raised on props five feet high, to protect them from
the sea, which, during hurricanes, has been known to rise five or
CHAP. XVIII. ] BUTLER'S ISLAND. 249
six feet. The negro houses were neat, and whitewashed, all
floored with wood, each with an apartment called the hall, two
sleeping-rooms, and a loft for the children ; but it is evident that
on these rice farms, where the negroes associate with scarcely
any whites, except the overseer and his family, and have but
little intercourse with the slaves of other estates, they must re
main far more stationary than where, as in a large part ot
Georgia, they are about equal in number to the whites, or even
form a minority. The negroes, moreover, in the interior, are
healthier than those in rice plantations, and multiply faster, al
though the rice grounds are salubrious to the negroes as com
pared to the whites. In this lower region the increase of the
slaves is rapid, for they are wrell fed, fitted for a southern cli
mate, and free from care, partly, no doubt, because of their low
mental development, and partly because they and their children
are secured from want. Such advantages, however, would be
of no avail, in rendering them prolific, if they were overworked
and harshly treated.
As we approached the sea and the brackish water, the wood
bordering the river began first to grow dwarfish, and then,
lowering suddenly, to give place entirely to reeds ; but still we
saw the buried stumps and stools of the cypress and pine con
tinuing to show themselves in every section of the bank, main
taining the upright position in which they originally grew. The
occurrence of these in the salt marshes clearly demonstrates that
trees once flourished where they would now be immediately killed
by the salt water. There must have been a change in the rel
ative level of land and sea, to account for their growth, since,
even above the commencement of the brackish water, similar
stumps are visible at a lower level than the present high tide,
and covered by layers of sedimentary matter, on which tall cy-
prosses and other trees are now standing. From such phenomena
we may infer the following sequence of events : — first, an ancient
forest was submerged several feet, and the sunk trees were killed
by the salt water ; they then rotted away down to the water
level (a long operation), after which layers of sand were thrown
down upon the stumps ; and finally, when the surface had been
L*
950 TREES IN SALT MARSHES. [CHAP. XVIII.
raised "by fluviatile sediment, as in a delta, a new forest grew up
over the ruins of the old one.
I have said that the decay of such timber is slow, for I saw
cypresses at Hopeton, which had been purposely killed by girdling
or cutting away a ring of bark, which stood erect on the borders
of the rice grounds after thirty years, and bid fair to last for
many a year to come. It does no small credit to the sagacity
of Bartram, the botanist, that he should have remarked, when
writing in 1792, that the low, flat islands on the coast, as well
as the salt marshes arid adjoining sandy region, through which
so many rivers wind, and which afford so secure a navigation for
schooners, boats, and canoes, may be a step in advance gained
by the continent on the Atlantic in modern times. " But if so,"
he adds, "it is still clear that, at a period immediately preceding,
the same region of low land stretched still farther out to sea."
On the latter subject his words are so much to the point, as to
deserve being quoted : —
" It seerns evident, even to demonstration, that those salt
marshes adjoining the coast of the main, and the reedy and
grassy islands and marshes in the rivers, which are now over
flowed at every tide, were formerly high swamps of firm land,
affording forests of cypress, tupelo, magnolia grandiflora, oak,
ash, sweet bay, and other timber trees, the same as are now
growing on the river swamps, whose surface is two feet or more
above the spring tides that flow at this day. And it is plainly
to be seen by every planter along the coast of Carolina, Georgia,
and Florida, to the Mississippi, when they bank in these grassy
tide marshes for cultivation, that they can not sink their drains
above three or four feet below the surface, before they come to
strata of cypress stumps and other trees, as close together as they
now grow in the swamps."*
When our canoe had proceeded into the brackish water, where
the river banks consisted of marsh land covered with a tall reed-
like grass, we came close up to an alligator, about nine feet long,
basking in the sun. Had the day been warmer, he would not
* W. Bartram's Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia,
&c. London, 1792.
CHAP. XVIII.] ALLIGATOR'S NEST AND HABITS. 251
have allowed us to approach so near to him ; for these reptiles
are much shyer than formerly, since they have learnt to dread
the avenging rifle of the planter, whose stray hogs and sporting
dogs they often devour. About ten years ago, Mr. Couper tells
us, that he saw 200 of them together in St. Mary's River, in
Florida, extremely fearless. The oldest and largest individuals
on the Altamaha have been killed, and they are now rarely
twelve feet long, and never exceed sixteen and a half feet. As
almost all of them have been in their winter retreats ever since
the frost of last month, I was glad that we had surprised one in
his native haunts, and seen him plunge into the water by the
side of our boat. When I first read Bartram's account of alli
gators more than twenty feet long, and how they attacked his
boat and bellowed like bulls, and made a sound like distant
thunder, I suspected him of exaggeration ; but all my inquiries
here and in Louisiana convinced me that he may be depended
upon. His account of the nests which they build in the marshes
is perfectly correct. They resemble haycocks, about four feet
high, and five feet in diameter at their bases, being constructed
with mud, grass, arid herbage. First they deposit one layer of
eggs on a floor of mortar, and having covered this with a second
stratum of mud and herbage eight inches thick, lay another set
of eggs upon that, and so on to the top, there being commonly
from one hundred to two hundred eggs in a nest. With their
tails they then beat down round the nest the dense grass and
reeds, five feet high, to prevent the approach of unseen enemies.
The female watches her eggs until they are all hatched by the
heat of the sun, and then takes her brood under her care, de
fending them, and providing for their subsistence.* Dr. Luzen-
berger, of New Orleans, told me that he once packed up one of
these nests, with the eggs, in a box for the Museum of St. Peters-
burgh, but was recommended, before he closed it, to see that there
was no danger of any of the eggs being hatched on the voyage.
On opening one, a young alligator walked out, arid was soon after
followed by all the rest, about a hundred, which he fed in his house,
where they went up and down the stairs, whining and barking
* Bartram, p. 126,
INDIAN SHELL MOUND. [CHAP. XVIII
like young puppies. They ate voraciously, yet their growth was
so slow, as to confirm him in the common opinion, that individ
uals which have attained the largest size are of very great age ;
though whether they live for three centuries, as some pretend,
must be decided by future observations.
Mr. Couper told me that, in the summer of 1845, he saw a
shoal of porpoises coming up to that part of the Altamaha where
the fresh and salt water meet, a space about a mile in length,
the favorite fishing ground of the alligators, where there is brack
ish water, which shifts its place according to the varying strength
of the river and the tide. Here were seen about fifty alligators,
each with head and neck raised above water, looking down the
stream at their enemies, before whom they had fled, terror-
stricken, and expecting an attack. The porpoises, no more than
a dozen in number, moved on in two ranks, and were evidently
complete masters of the field. So powerful, indeed, are they,
that they have been known to chase a large alligator to the bank,
and, putting their snouts under his belly, toss him ashore.
We landed on the northeast end of St. Simon's Island, at Can
non's Point, where we were gratified by the sight of a curious
monument of the Indians, the largest mound of shells left by the
aborigines in any one of the sea islands. Here are no less than
ten acres of ground elevated in some places ten feet, and on an
average over the whole area, five feet above the general level,
composed throughout that depth of myriads of cast-away oyster-
shells, with some mussels, and here and there a modiola and
helix. They who have seen the Monte Testaceo near Rome,
know what great results may proceed from insignificant causes,
where the cumulative power of time has been at work, so that a
hill may be formed out of the broken pottery rejected by the pop
ulation of a large city. To them it will appear unnecessary to
infer, as some antiquaries have done, from the magnitude of these
Indian mounds, that they must have been thrown up by the sea.
In refutation of such an hypothesis, we have the fact, that flint
arrow-heads, stone axes, and fragments of Indian pottery have
been detected throughout the mass. The shell-fish heaped up at
Cannon's Point, must, from their nature, have been caught at a
CHAP. XVIII.] MR. COUPER'S VILLA. 253
distance, on one of the outer islands ; and it is well known that
the Indians were in the habit of returning with what they had
taken, from their fishing excursions on the coast, to some good
hunting ground, such as St. Simon's afforded.
We found Mr. Couper's villa, near the water's edge, shaded
by a verandah and by a sago tree. There were also many lemon
trees, somewhat injured by the late frost ; but the olives, of
which there is a fine grove here, are unharmed, and it is thought
they may one day be cultivated with profit in the sea islands.
We also admired five date palms, which bear fruit. They were
brought from Bussora in Persia, and have not suffered by the
cold. The oranges have been much hurt. Some of the trees
planted by Oglethorpe's troops in 1742, after flourishing for ninety-
three years, were cut off in February, 1835, and others, about a
century and a half old, shared the same fate at St. Augustine in
Florida. So long a period does it require to ascertain whether the
climate of a new country is suitable to a particular species of plant.
The evergreen or live oaks are truly magnificent in this island ;
some of them, 73 feet in height, have been found to stretch with
their boughs over an area 63 feet in diameter. I measured one
which was thirty-five years old, and found the trunk to be just
35 inches in diameter near the base, showing an annual gain of
three inches in circumference. Another, growing in a favorable
situation, forty-two years old, was nine feet six inches in girth at
the height of one and a half foot above the ground.
The island of St. Simon's is so low, that the lower part of it
was under water in 1804 and 1824, when hurricanes set in
with the wind from the northeast. Nearly the entire surface
was submerged in 1756. In that year the sea rose, even as far
north as Charleston, to the height of six feet above its ordinary
level, and that city might have been destroyed, had the gale last
ed in the same direction a few hours longer.
I went with Mr. Couper to Long Island, the outermost bar
rier of land between St. Simon's and the ocean, four miles long,
and about half a mile wide, of recent formation, and consisting of
parallel ranges of sand dunes, marking its growth by successive
additions. Some of the dunes on this coast have been raised by
254 LONG ISLAND. [CHAP. XVIII,
the wind to the height of 40 or 50 feet, and inclose evergreen
oaks ( Quercus virens), the upper branches of which alone pro
trude above the surface. Between the parallel sand dunes were
salt marshes, where we collected the plant-eating shell called
Auricula bidentata, of a genus peculiar to such littoral situa
tions. On the sea-beach, we gathered no less than twenty -nine
species of marine shells, and they were of peculiar interest to me,
because they agreed specifically with those which I had obtained
from the strata lying immediately below the megatherium and
other fossils in Skiddaway Island, and which occur below similar
remains presently to be mentioned near Hopeton. In some places
we found bivalves only of the genera Pholas, Lutraria, Sole-
curtus, Petricola, Tellina, Donax, Venus, Cardium, Area,
Pinna, and Mytilus, just as in the fossil group. On other parts
of the beach there was a mixture of univalves, Oliva, Pyrula
(Fulgur), JBuccinum, &c. Besides these shells we found, scat
tered over the sands, a scutella and cases of the king crab (Li-
mulus"), and fragments of turtles, with bones of porpoises.
Every geologist who has examined strata consisting of alter
nations of sandstone and shale, must occasionally have observed
angular or rounded pieces of the shale imbedded in the sand
stones, a phenomenon which seems at first sight very singular,
because we might almost say that the formation is in part made
up of its own ruins, and not derived wholly from pre-existing
rocks. On the exposed coast of this " frontier island," I saw a
complete explanation of the manner in which this structure orig
inates. Deposits of sand and beds of clay are formed alternately
at different seasons, arid at the time of our visit the sea was
making great inroads on an argillaceous mass, washing out
pieces of the half-consolidated clay, and strewing them over the
sands, some flat, others angular, or rolled into various sized peb
bles. These, when carried out into the adjoining parts of the
sea, must be often included in the sand, which may be eventually
converted into sandstone.
Among the numerous sea birds, I particularly admired one called
the sheer-water, with its shrill clear note, and most rapid flight.
On my return to Cannon's Point, I found, in the well-stored
CHAP. XVIII.] MENDICITY. 255
library of Mr. Couper, Audubon's Birds, Michaud's Forest Trees,
and other costly works on natural history ; also Catherwood's
Antiquities of Central America, folio edition, in which the supe
rior effect of the larger drawings of the monuments of Indian
architecture struck me much, as compared to the reduced ones,
given in Stephens's Central America, by the same artist, although
these also are very descriptive.
During our excursion to the sea-beach, my wife had been vis
ited by some ladies well acquainted with relations of her own,
who formerly resided in this part of Georgia, and who, when
they returned to England, had taken back with them an old
negress. One of the colored maid-servants of the ladies, feeling
no doubt that Mrs. W , although she had recrossed the At
lantic, would be as much interested as ever in her history, sent
innumerable messages, beginning with, "Pray tell her that Mrs.
A. has given me and my children to Mrs. B." They were all
very curious to know about their former friend, Delia, the black
maid, and how she had got on in England. On being told that
she had been shocked at seeing so many beggars, and had scold
ed them for not working, they laughed heartily, saying it was so
like her to scold ; but they also expressed astonishment at the
idea of a white mendicant, there being none, so far as they knew,
white or colored, in Georgia. One of the ladies explained the
term " beggar" to signify in England, a " mean white person ;"
and said to an attendant who had once accompanied her to the
north, " Do you not remember some mean white men, who asked
me for money ?" Talking over this story in Alabama, I was
told that mendicity is not so entirely unknown in the south ; that
a superannuated negress, having a love of rambling, and wishing
to live by begging, asked her master to set her free, "for when I
beg, every one asks me why I do not go to my owner." " What
will you do in winter," said he, " when you can not travel about ?"
" I will come back to you then," she replied, " and you will take
care of me in the cold weather."
The sea islands produce the finest cotton, and we saw many
women employed in separating the cotton from the seeds with
their fingers, a neat and clean occupation.
CHAPTER XIX.
Rivers made turbid by the Clearing of Forests. — Land rising in successive
Terraces. — Origin of these. — Bones of extinct Quadrupeds in Lower
Terrace. — Associated Marine Shells. — Digging of Brunswick Canal. —
Extinction of Megatherium and its Contemporaries. — Dying out of rare
Species. — Gordonia Pubescens. — Life of Southern Planters. — Negroes
on a Rice Plantation. — Black Children. — Separate Negro Houses. —
Work exacted. — Hospital for Negroes. — Food and Dress. — Black
Driver. — Prevention of Crimes. — African Tom. — Progress of Negroes
in Civilization. — Conversions to Christianity. — Episcopalian, Baptist, and
Methodist Missionaries. — Amalgamation and Mixture of Races.
WE returned from St. Simon's to Hopeton, much pleased with
our expedition. As our canoe was scudding through the clear
waters of the Altamaha, Mr. Couper mentioned a fact which
shows the effect of herbage, shrubs, and trees in protecting the
soil from the wasting action of rain and torrents. Formerly,
even during floods, the Altamaha was transparent, or only stained
of a darker color by decayed vegetable matter, like some streams
in Europe which flow out of peat mosses. So late as 1841, a
resident here could distinguish on which of the two branches of
the Altamaha, the Oconee or Ocmulgee, a freshet had occurred,
for the lands in the upper country, drained by one of these (the
Oconee) had already been partially cleared and cultivated, so that
that tributary sent down a copious supply of red mud, while the
other (the Ocmulgee) remained clear, though swollen. But no
sooner had the Indians been driven out, and the woods of their
old hunting-grounds begun to give way before the ax of the new
settler, than the Ocmulgee also became turbid. I shall have
occasion, in the sequel, to recur to this subject, when speaking of
some recently-formed ravines of great depth and width in the
red mud of the upland country near Milledgeville in Georgia.
The low region bordering the Atlantic, comprising the sea-
islands, such as St. Simon's, and the flat or nearly level plains
CHAP. XIX ] SUCCESSION OF TERRACES. 257
of the main land immediately adjoining, has an average height
of from ten to twenty feet, although there are a few places where
it reaches forty feet, above the sea. It extends twenty miles in
land, and consists of sand and clay of very modern formation, as
shown by the included marine shells, which are like those of
Skiddaway, before mentioned,^ all identical with living species.
This superficial deposit, although chiefly marine, contains, in some
parts, beds of fresh-water origin, in which the bones of extinct
mammalia occur. The whole group would be called by geolo
gists fluvio-marine, and is of small depth, resting immediately on
Eocene, or lower tertiary strata, as I ascertained by examining
the shells brought up from several wells. Going inland twenty
miles, we corne to the termination of this lower terrace, and as
cend abruptly to an upper platform, seventy feet above the lower
one, the strata composing which belong to the Eocene period.
This upper terrace also runs back about twenty miles to the ab
rupt termination of a third table-land, which is also about seventy
feet higher, and consists of Eocene strata, by the denudation of
which all these terraces arid escarpments (or ancient sea-cliffs)
have been formed. Bartram has, with his usual accuracy, al
luded to these steps, or succession of terraces, as an important
geographical feature of the country, each of them being marked
by its own botanical characters, the prevailing forest-trees, as well
as the smaller plants, being different in each.
To return to the first platform, or lowest land, from ten to
forty feet above the level of the sea, it consists of a modern de
posit, which extends 400 miles northward to the Neuse in North
Carolina, and probably farther, in the same direction, along the
Atlantic border. How far it stretches southward, I am not in
formed. I conceive it to have been accumulated in a sea, into
which many rivers poured during a gradual subsidence of the
land, and that the strata, whether fresh-water or marine, formed
during the sinking of the bottom of the sea, have been since
brought up again to their present elevation. Throughout this
low, flat region, the remains of extinct quadrupeds are occasion
ally met with, and the deposit appears to be very analogous to
* Ante, p. 234.
258 BRUNSWICK CANAL. [CHAP. XIX.
the great Pampean formation on the borders of the Atlantic in
South America, as described by Mr. Darwin. Here and in the
Pampas the skeletons of many quadrupeds of the same genera,
such as the Megatherium, Megalonyx, Mylodon, Mastodon,
and Equm occur. In both cases it has been proved that tlio
mammalia, all of which differ specifically, and most of them gener-
ically, from those now living, nourished, nevertheless, at a time
when the Atlantic was inhabited by the existing species of mol-
lusca, and when the climate, therefore, of the ocean at least,
could not have varied materially from that now prevailing in
these latitudes.
Through part of the region occupied by the modern deposits
above mentioned, a canal was cut in 1838—39, nine miles in
length, called the Brunswick Canal, to unite the navigation of
the Altamaha and Turtle rivers ; a rash undertaking of some
speculators from the northern states, which, had the work been
completed, could not have repaid the outlay. About 200,000/.
(900,000 dollars) were expended, a sum which might have gone
far toward obtaining geological surveys of many of the southern
states, whereas the only good result was the discovery of some
valuable fossil remains ; and even these fruits of the enterprise
would never have been realized, but for the accidental presence,
energy, and scientific knowledge of Mr. Hamilton Couper. Part
of the skeleton of a megatherium, dug out in cutting the canal,
was so near the surface, that it was penetrated by the roots of a
pine-tree. It occurred in clay, apparently a fresh-water deposit,
and underneath it were beds of sand, with marine shells of recent
species. It was also covered with sand, probably marine, but
without shells. So many parts of the same skeleton were found
in juxtaposition as to suggest the idea that a whole carcass had
been floated by the river to the spot, and even where the bones
were slightly scattered they were not injured by being rolled.
The remains of other quadrupeds associated with this gigantic
sloth, consisted of mylodon, mastodon, elephant, equus, and bos,
besides a fossil, to which Mr. Owen has given the name of Har-
lanus americanus, a new genus, intermediate between Lophiodon
and Toxodon. It had been supposed that the hippopotamus and
CHAP. XIX.] FOSSIL REMAINS. 259
BUS were among this assemblage of fossil genera : but this was a
mistake ; nor have either of these genera been as yet met with,
fossil or recent, in any part of America, although the swine intro
duced by man, have multiplied so fast. The horse {Equus curv-
idens) was a species having teeth in the upper jaw more curved
than any living horse, ass, zebra, or quagga ; and it is singular
that, although there was no wild representative of the horse tribe
on the American continent, north or south, when discovered by
the Europeans, yet two other fossil horses were found by Mr.
Nuttall on the banks of the Neuse, fifteen miles below Newbern,
in North Carolina.^ The shells and bones of a large extinct
species of tortoise were also found to accompany the above-men
tioned fossil quadrupeds of Georgia ; and I myself picked up
many fragments of this Chelonian strewed over the banks of
earth cast up from the Brunswick Canal.
In another part of the excavations made in digging the canal,
the ribs and vertebrae of a whale much rolled, and with barnacles
attached to them, were discovered belonging to the subjacent
marine formation. In this sand the shells, as before stated, are
of recent species, and Mr. Hamilton Couper has collected no less
than forty-five distinct species exclusive of Echinoderms.
In what manner, then, has the destruction of these quadrupeds,
once so widely spread over the American continent, been brought
about ? That they were exterminated by the arrows of the In
dian hunter, is the first idea presented to the mind of almost
every naturalist. But the investigations of Lund and Clausen
in the limestone caves of Brazil have established the fact, that
with the large mammalia there were associated a great many
smaller quadrupeds, some of them as diminutive as field mice,
which have all died out together, while the land shells, once their
contemporaries, still continue to exist in the same countries. We
must look, therefore, to causes more general and powerful than
the intervention of man, to account for the disappearance of the
ancient fauna, an event the more remarkable, as many of the
* Mr. Conrad intrusted me with Mr. Nuttall's collection, and Mr. Owen
has found among them the three species of Equidse here alluded to, Equus
curvidens, E. plicidens^ and a third species of the size of E. asinus.
260 EXTERMINATING CAUSES. [CHAP. XIX.
species had a very wide range, and must therefore have been
capable of accommodating themselves to considerable variations
of temperature. The same species of megatherium, for example,
ranged from Patagonia and the river Plata in South America,
between latitudes 31° and 50° south, to corresponding latitudes
of the northern continent, and was also an inhabitant of the in
termediate country of Brazil, in the caves of which its fossil re
mains are met with. The extinct elephant also of Georgia (Ele-
yrfias primigenius) has been traced in a fossil state northward
from the Altamaha to the Polar regions, and then south westward
through Siberia to the south of Europe.
As to the exterminating causes. I agree with Mr. Darwin,
that it is the height of presumption for any geologist to be aston
ished that he can not render an account of them. No naturalist
can pretend to be so well acquainted with all the circumstances
on which the continuance upon the earth of any living species
depends, as to be entitled to wonder if it should diminish rapidly
in number or geographical range. But if his speculations should
embrace a period in which considerable changes in physical geog
raphy are known to have occurred, as is the case in North and
South America since the megatherium flourished, how much
more difficult would it be to appreciate all the effects of local
modifications of climate, and changes in the stations of contempo
rary animals and plants, on all which, and many other condi
tions, the permanence of a species must depend. Until we un
derstand the physiological constitutions of organic beings so well
that we can explain why an epidemic or contagious disease may
rage for months or years, and cut off a large proportion of the
living individuals of one species while another is spared, how can
we hope to explain why, in the great struggle for existence, some
species are multiplying, while others are decreasing in number ?
" If," says Darwin, " two species of the same genus, and of closely
allied habits, people the same district, and we can not say why
one of them is rare and the other common, what right have we to
wonder if the rarer of the two should cease to exist altogether ?"
In illustration of this principle, I may refer to two beautiful
evergreens flourishing in this part of Georgia, species of Gordonia
CHAP. XIX.] GORDONIA FUBESCENS. 261
(or Franklinia of Bartram), a plant allied to the camellia. One
of these I saw every where in the swamps near the Altamaha,
where it is called the loblolly bay (Gordonia lasianthus), forty
feet high, and even higher, with dark green leaves, and covered,
T am told, in the flowering season, with a profusion of milk-
white, fragrant blossoms. This plant has a wide range in the
southern states, whereas the other, G. pitbcscens, often seen in
greenhouses in England, about thirty feet high, is confined, as I
am informed by Mr. Couper, to a very limited area, twenty
'miles in its greatest length, the same region where Bartram first
discovered it, seventy years ago, near Barrington Ferry, on the
Altamaha.^ In no other spot in the whole continent of Amer
ica has it ever been detected. If we were told that one of these
two evergreens was destined in the next 2000 or 3000 years to
become extinct, how could we conjecture Avhich of them would
endure the longest ? We ought to know first whether the area
occupied by the one has been diminishing, and that of the other
increasing, and then which of the two plants has been on the
advance. But even then we should require to foresee a count
less number of other circumstances in the animate and inanimate
world affecting the two species, before we could make a probable
guess as to their comparative durability. A single frost more
severe than that before alluded to, which cut off the orange-trees
in Florida after they had lasted a century and a half, might
baffle all our calculations ; or the increase of some foe, a minute
parasitic insect perhaps, might entirely alter the conditions on
which the existence of these or any other trees, shrubs, or quad
rupeds depend.
During a fortnight's stay at Hopeton, we had an opportunity
of seeing how the planters live in the south, and the condition
and prospects of the negroes on a well-managed estate. The
relation of the slaves to their owners resembles nothing in the
northern states. There is an hereditary regard and often attach
ment on both sides, more like that formerly existing between
lords and their retainers in the old feudal times of Europe, than
to any thing now to be found in America. The slaves identify
* Bartram, pp. 159, 465,
262 NEGROES ON A RICE PLANTATION. [CHAP. XIX.
themselves with the master, and their sense of their own import
ance rises with his success in life. But the responsibility of
the- owners is felt to be great, and to manage a plantation with
profit is no easy task ; so much judgment is required, and such a
mixture of firmness, forbearance, and kindness. The evils of
the system of slavery are said to be exhibited in their worst light
when new settlers come from the free states ; northern men, who
are full of activity, and who strive to make a rapid fortune, will
ing to risk their own lives in an unhealthy climate, and who can
not make allowance for the repugnance to continuous labor of
the negro race, or the diminished motive for exertion of the slave.
To one who arrives in Georgia direct from Europe, with a vivid
impression on his mind of the state of the peasantry there in
many populous regions, their ignorance, intemperance, and im
providence, the difficulty of obtaining subsistence, and the small
chance they have of bettering their lot, the condition of the black
laborers on such a property as Hopeton, will afford but small
ground for lamentation or despondency. I had many opportu
nities, while here, of talking with the slaves alone, or seeing
them at work. I may be told that this was a favorable speci
men of a well-managed estate ; if so, I may at least affirm that
mere chance led me to pay this visit, that is to say, scientific
objects wholly unconnected with the " domestic institutions" of
the south, or the character of the owner in relation to his slaves ;
arid I may say the same in regard to every other locality or pro
prietor visited by me in the course of this tour. I can but relate
what passed under my own eyes, or what I learnt from good
authority, concealing nothing.
There are 500 negroes on the Hopeton estate, a great many
of whom are children, and some old and superannuated. The
latter class, who would be supported in a poor-house in England,
enjoy here, to the end of their days, the society of their neigh
bors arid kinsfolk, and live at large in separate houses assigned
to them. The children have no regular work to do till they are
ten or twelve years old. We see that some of them, at this
season, are set to pick up dead leaves from the paths, others to
attend the babies When the mothers are at work, the young
CHAP. XIX.] NEGRO HOUSES. 263
children are looked after by an old negress, called Mom Diana.
Although very ugly as babies, they have such bright, happy
faces when three or four years old, and from that age to ten or
twelve have such frank and confiding manners, as to be very en
gaging. Whenever we met them, they held out their hands to
us to shake, and when my wife caressed them, she was often
asked by some of the ladies, whether she would not like to bring
up one of the girls to love her, and wait upon her. The parents
indulge their own fancies in naming their children, and display
a singular taste ; for one is called January, another April, a third
Monday, and a fourth Hard Times. The fisherman on the estate
rejoices in the appellation of " Old Bacchus." Quash is the name
of the favorite preacher, and Bulally the African name of another
negro.
' The out-door laborers have separate houses provided for them ;
even the domestic servants, except a few who are nurses to the
white children, live apart from the great house — an arrangement
not always convenient for the masters, as there is no one to an
swer a bell after a certain hour. But if we place ourselves in
the condition of the majority of the population, that of servants,
we see at once how many advantages we should enjoy over the
white race in the same rank of life in Europe. In the first place,
all can marry ; and if a mistress should lay on any young woman
here the injunction so common in English newspaper advertise
ments for a maid of all work, " no followers allowed," it would
be considered an extraordinary act of tyranny. The laborers
begin work at six o'clock in the morning, have an hour's rest at
nine for breakfast, and many have finished their assigned task by
two o'clock, all of them by three o'clock. In summer they di
vide their work differently, going to bed in the middle of the day,
then rising to finish their task, and afterward spending a great
part of the night in chatting, merry-making, preaching, and
psalm-singing. At Christmas they claim a week's holidays,
when they hold a kind of Saturnalia, and the owners can get
no work done. Although there is scarcely any drinking, the
master rejoices when this season is well over without mischief.
The negro houses are as neat as the greater part of the cottages
264 HOSPITAL FOR NEGROES. [CHAP. XIX.
in Scotland (no flattering' compliment it must be confessed), are
provided always with a back door, and a hall, as they call it, in
which is a chest, a table, two or three chairs, arid a few shelves
for crockery. On the door of the sleeping apartment they keep
a large wooden padlock, to guard their valuables from their
neighbors when they are at work in the field, for there is much
pilfering among them. A little yard is often attached, in which
are seen their chickens, and usually a yelping cur, kept for their
amusement.
The winter, when the whites enjoy the best health, is the
trying season for the negroes, who are rarely ill in the riqe-
grounds in summer, which are so fatal to the whites, that when
the planters who have retreated to the sea-islands revisit their
estates once a fortnight, they dare not sleep at home. Such is
the indifference of the negroes to heat, that they are often found
sleeping with their faces upward in a broiling sun, instead of
lying under the shade of a tree hard by. We visited the hos
pital at Hopeton, which consists of three separate wards, all per
fectly clean and well- ventilated. One is for men, another for
women, and a third for lying-in women. The latter are always
allowed a month's rest after their confinement, an advantage
rarely enjoyed by hard-working English peasants. Although
they are better looked after and kept more quiet, on these occa
sions, in the hospital, the planters are usually baffled ; for the
women prefer their own houses, where they can gossip with their
friends without restraint, and they usually contrive to be taken
by surprise at home.
The negro mothers are often so ignorant or indolent, that they
can not be trusted to keep awake and administer medicine to
their own children ; so that the mistress has often to sit up all
night with a sick negro child. In submitting to this, they are
actuated by mixed motives- — a feeling of kindness, and a fear of
losing the services of the slave; but these attentions greatly at
tach the negroes to their owners. In general, they refuse to
take medicine from any other hands but those of their master or
mistress. The laborers are allowed Indian meal, rice, and milk,
and occasionally pork and soup, As their rations are more than
CHAP. XIX.J WORK EXACTED. 265
they can eat, they either return part of it to the overseer, who
makes them an allowance of money for it at the end of the week,
or they keep it to feed their fowls, which they usually sell, as
well as their eggs, for cash, to buy molasses, tobacco, and other
luxuries. When disposed to exert themselves, they get through
the day's task in five hours, and then amuse themselves in fish
ing, and sell the fish they take ; or some of them employ their
spare time in making canoes out of large cypress trees, leave
being readily granted them to remove such timber, as it aids the
landowner to clear the swamps. They sell the canoes for about
four dollars, for their own profit.
If the mistress pays a visit to Savannah, the nearest town,
she is overwhelmed with commissions, so many of the slaves
wishing to lay out their small gains in various indulgences, espe
cially articles of dress, of which they are passionately fond. The
stuff must be of the finest quality, and many instructions are
given as to the precise color or fashionable shade. White mus
lin, with figured patterns, is the rage just now.
One day, when walking alone, I came upon a " gang" of ne
groes, who were digging a trench. They were superintended by
a black " driver," who held a whip in his hand. Some of the
laborers were using spades, others cutting away the roots and
stumps of trees which they had encountered in the line of the
ditch. Their mode of proceeding in their task was somewhat
leisurely, and eight hours a day of this work are exacted, though
they can accomplish the same in five hours, if they undertake it
by the task. The digging of a given number of feet in length,
breadth, and depth is, in this case, assigned to each ditcher, and
a deduction made when they fall in with a stump or root. The
names of gangs and drivers are odious, and the sight of the whip
was painful to me as a mark of degradation, reminding me that
the lower orders of slaves are kept to their work by mere bodily
fear, and that their treatment must depend on the individual
character of the owner or overseer. That the whip is rarely
used, and often held for weeks over them, merely in terrorem, is,
I have no doubt, true on all well governed estates ; and it is not
that formidable weapon which I have seen exhibited as formerly
VOL. I M
266 AFRICAN TOM. [CHAP. XIX.
iri use in the West Indies. It is a thong of leather, half an inch
wide and a quarter of an inch thick. No ordinary driver is
allowed to give more than six lashes for any offense, the head
driver twelve, and the overseer twenty-four. When an estate
is under superior management, the system is remarkably effective
in preventing crime. The most severe punishment required in
the last forty years, for a body of 500 negroes at Hopeton, was
for the theft of one negro from another. In that period there
has been no criminal act of the highest grade, for which a delin
quent could be committed to the penitentiary in Georgia, and
there have been only six cases of assault and battery. As a race,
the negroes are mild and forgiving, and by no means so prone to
indulge in drinking as the white man or the Indian. There
were more serious quarrels, and more broken heads, among the
Irish in a few years, when they came to dig the Brunswick
Canal, than had been known among the negroes in all the sur
rounding plantations for half a century. The murder of a hus
band by a black woman, whom he had beaten violently, is the
greatest crime remembered in this part of Georgia for a great
length of time.
Under the white overseer, the principal charge here is given
to " Old Tom," the head driver, a man of superior intelligence
and higher cast of feature. He was the son of a prince of the
Foulah tribe, and was taken prisoner, at the age of fourteen, near
Timbuctoo. The accounts he gave of what he remembered of
the plants and geography of Africa, have been taken down in
writing by Mr. Couper, and confirm many of the narratives of
modern travelers. He has remained a strict Mahometan, but his
numerous progeny of jet-black children and grandchildren, all of
them marked by countenances of a more European cast than
those of ordinary negroes, have exchanged the Koran for the Bible.
During the last war, when Admiral Cockburn was off this
coast with his fleet, he made an offer of freedom to all the slaves
belonging to the father of my present host, and a safe convoy to
Canada. Nearly all would have gone, had not African Tom, to
whom they looked up with great respect, declined the proposal.
He told them he had first known what slavery was in the West
CHAP. XIX.] BLACK MECHANICS. 267
Indies, and had made up his mind that the English were
masters than the Americans. About half of them, therefore,
determined to stay in St. Simon's Island, and not a few of the
others who accepted the offer and emigrated, had their lives
shortened by the severity of the climate in Canada.
The slave trade ceased in 1796, and but few negroes were
afterward smuggled into Georgia from, foreign countries, except
indirectly for a short time through Florida before its annexation ;
yet one fourth of the population of this lower country is said to
have come direct from Africa, and it is a good sign of the prog
ress made in civilization by the native-born colored race, that
they speak of these " Africanians" with much of the contempt
with which Europeans talk of negroes. v
I was agreeably surprised to see the rank held here by the
black mechanics. One day I observed a set of carpenters put
ting up sluices, and a lock in a canal of a kind unknown in this
part of the world. The black foreman was carrying into execu
tion a plan laid down for him on paper by Mr. Couper, who had
observed it himself many years ago in Holland. I also saw a
steam-engine, of fifteen horse power, made in England by Bolton
and Watt, and used in a mill for threshing rice, which had bee,:
managed by a negro for more than twelve years without an acci
dent. When these mechanics come to consult Mr. Couper 01
business, their manner of speaking to him is quite as independen
as that of English artisans to their employers. Their aptitude
for the practice of such mechanical arts may encourage every
philanthropist who has had misgivings in regard to the progress
ive powers of the race, although much time will be required to
improve the whole body of negroes, and the movement must be /
general. One planter can do little by himself, so long as educa
tion is forbidden by law. I am told that the old colonial statutes
against teaching the slaves to read were almost in abeyance, and
had become a dead letter, until revived by the reaction against
the Abolition agitation, since wrhich they have been rigorously
enforced and made more stringent. Nevertheless, the negroes
are often taught to read, and they learn much in Sunday schools,
and for the most part are desirous of instruction.
268 PROGRESS OF NEGROES. [CHAP. XIX.
In the hope of elevating the character of some of his negroes,
and giving them more self-dependence, Mr. Couper, by way of
experiment, set apart a field for the benefit of twenty -five picked
men, and gave up to them half their Saturday's labor to -till it.
In order that they might know its value, they were compelled to
work on it for the first year, and the product, amounting to 1500
dollars, was divided equally among them. But when, at length,
they were left to themselves, they did nothing, and at the end of
two years the field was uncultivated. But there appears to me
nothing disheartening in this failure, which may have been chiefly
owing to their holding the property in common, a scheme which
was found not to answer even with the Pilgrim Fathers when
they first colonized Plymouth — men whom certainly none will
accuse of indolence or a disposition to shrink from continuous
labor. The " dolee far niente" is doubtless the negro's paradise,
and I once heard one of them singing with much spirit at Will-
iamsburg an appropriate song : —
" Old Virginia never tire.
Eat hog and hominy, and lie by the fire ;"
and it is quite enough that a small minority should be of this
mind, to make all the others idle and unwilling to toil hard for
the benefit of the sluggards.
When conversing with different planters here, in regard to
the capabilities and future progress of the black population, I find
them to agree very generally in the opinion that in this part of
Georgia they appear under a great disadvantage. In St. Simon's
island it is admitted, that the negroes on the smaller estates are
more civilized than on the larger properties, because they asso
ciate with a greater proportion of whites. In Glynn County,
where we are now residing, there are no less than 4000 negroes
to 700 whites ; whereas in Georgia generally there are only
281,000 slaves in a population of 691,000, or more whites than
colored people. Throughout the upper country there is a large
preponderance of Anglo-Saxons, and a little reflection will satisfy
the reader how much the education of a race which starts orig
inally from so low a stage of intellectual, social, moral, and
CHAP. XLX.] CONVERSION OF NEGROES. 269
spiritual development, as the African negro, must depend not on
learning to read and write, but on the amount of familiar inter
course which they enjoy with individuals of a more advanced
race. So long as they herd together in large gangs, and rarely
come into contact with any whites save their owner and over
seer, they can profit little by their imitative faculty, and can
not even make much progress in mastering the English language,
that powerful instrument of thought and of the communication
of ideas, which they are gaining in exchange for the limited vo
cabulary of their native tribes. Yet, even in this part of Georgia,
the negroes are very far from stationary, and each generation is
acquiring habits of greater cleanliness and propriety of behavior,
while some are learning mechanical arts, and every year many
of them becoming converts to Christianity.
Although the Baptist and Methodist missionaries have been
the most active in this important work, the Episcopalians have
not been idle, especially since Dr. Elliott became Bishop of
Georgia, and brought his talents, zeal, and energy to the task.
As he found that the negroes in general had no faith in the effi
cacy of baptism except by complete immersion, he performed the
ceremony as they desired. Indeed, according to the old English
rubric, all persons were required to be immersed in baptism, ex
cept when they were sick, so that to lose converts by not com
plying with this popular notion of the slaves, would hardly have
been justifiable. It may be true that the poor negroes cherish a
superstitious belief that the washing out of every taint of sin de
pends mainly on the particular manner of performing the rite,
and the principal charm to the black women in the ceremony of
total immersion consists in decking themselves out in white robes,
like brides, and having their shoes trimmed with silver. They
well know that the waters of the Altamaha are chilly, and that
they and the officiating minister run no small risk of catching
cold, but to this penance they most cheerfully submit.
Of dancing and music the negroes are passionately fond. On
the Hopeton plantation above twenty violins have been silenced
by the Methodist missionaries, yet it is notorious that the slaves
were not given to drink or intemperance in their merry-makings.
270 SEPARATION OF CHURCHES. [CHAP. XIX.
At the Methodist prayer-meetings, they are permitted to move
round rapidly in a ring, joining hands in token of brotherly love,
presenting first the right hand and then the left, in which ma-
nceuvre, I am told, they sometimes contrive to take enough exer
cise to serve as a substitute for the dance, it being, in fact, a kind
of spiritual boulanger, while the singing of psalms, in and out of
chapel, compensates in no small degree for the songs they have
been required to renounce.
However much we may feel inclined to smile at some of these
outward tokens of conversion, and however crude may be the no
tions of the Deity which the poor African at first exchanges for
his belief in the evil eye and other superstitious fears, it is never
theless an immense step in his progress toward civilization that
he should join some Christian sect. Before he has time to ac
quire high conceptions of his Creator, or to comprehend his own
probationary state on earth, and his moral and religious duties, it
is no small gain that he should simply become a member of the
same church with his master, and should be taught that the
white and colored man are equal before God, a doctrine calcu
lated to raise him in his own opinion, and in that of the dominant
race.
Until lately the humblest slave who joined the Methodist or
Baptist denomination could feel that he was one of a powerful
association of Christians, which numbered hundreds of thousands
of brethren in the northern as well as in the southern states.
He could claim many schools and colleges of high repute in New
England as belonging to his own sect, and feel proud of many
celebrated writers whom they have educated. Unfortunately, a
recent separation, commonly called " the north and south split,"
has severed these bonds of fellowship and fraternity, and for the
sake of renouncing brotherhood with slave-owners, the northern
churches have repudiated all communion with the great body of
their negro fellow Christians. What effect can such estrange
ment have on the mind, whether of master or slave, favorable to
the cause of emancipation ? The slight thrown on the aristo
cracy of planters has no tendency to conciliate them, or lead them
to assimilate their sentiments to those of their brethren in the
CHAP. XIX.] MIXTURE OF RACES. 271
faith, with whom formerly, throughout the northern and free
states, they had so intimate a connection ; and as for the slaves,
it is to them a positive loss to be thus rejected and disowned.
The rank and position of-the negro preachers in the south, whether
Baptist or Methodist, some of them freemen, and of good abili
ties, is decidedly lowered by the severance of the northern churches,
which is therefore adverse to the gradual advancement of the
African race, which can alone fit them for manumission.
Some of the planters in Glynn County have of late permitted
the distribution of Bibles among their slaves, and it was curious
to remark that they who were unable to read were as anxious to
possess them as those who could. Besides Christianizing the
blacks, the clergy of all sects are doing them incalculable service,
by preaching continually to both races that the matrimonial tie
should be held sacred, without respect to color. To the domi
nant race one of the most serious evils of slavery is its tendency
to blight domestic happiness ; and the anxiety of parents for their
sons, and a constant fear of their licentious intercourse with slaves,
is painfully great. We know but too much of this evil in free
countries, wherever there is a vast distance between the rich and
poor, giving a power to wealth which insures a frightful amount
of prostitution. Here it is accompanied with a publicity which
is keenly felt as a disgrace by the more refined of the white
women. The female slave is proud of her connection with a
white man, and thinks it an honor to have a mulatto child, hop
ing that it will be better provided for than a black child. Yet
the mixed offspring is not very numerous. The mulattoes alone
represent nearly all the illicit intercourse between the white man
and negro of the living generation. I am told that they do not
constitute more than two and a half per cent, of the whole popu
lation. If the statistics of the illegitimate children of the whites
born here could be compared with those in Great Britain, it might
lead to conclusions by no means favorable to the free country.
Here there is no possibility of concealment, the color of the child
stamps upon him the mark of bastardy, and transmits it to great-
grand-children born in lawful wedlock ; whereas if, in Europe,
there was some mark or indelible stain betraying all the delin-
272 MORAL CONDITION OF NEGROES. [CHAP. XIX.
quencies and frailties, not only of parents, but of ancestors for
three or four generations back, what unexpected disclosures should
we not witness !
There are scarcely any instances of mulattoes born of a black
father and a white mother. The colored women who become the
mistresses of the white men are neither rendered miserable nor
degraded, as are the white women who are seduced in Europe,
and who are usually abandoned in the end, and left to be the
victims of want and disease. In the northern states of America
there is so little profligacy of this kind, that their philanthro
pists may perhaps be usefully occupied in considering how the
mischief may be alleviated south of the Potomac ; but in Great
Britain there is so much need of reform at home, that the whole
thoughts and energies of the rich ought to be concentrated in such
schemes of improvement as may enable us to set an example of
a higher moral standard to the slave-owning aristocracy of the
Union.
On one of the estates in this part of Georgia, there is a mulatto
mother who has nine children by a full black, and the difference
of shade between them and herself is scarcely perceptible. If the
white blood usually predominates in this way in the second gen
eration, as I am told is the case, amalgamation would proceed
very rapidly, if marriages between the races were once legal
ized ; for we see in England that black men can persuade very
respectable white women to marry them, when all idea of the
illegality and degradation of such unions is foreign to their
thoughts.
Among the obstacles which the Christian missionaries encount
er here when they teach the virtue of chastity, I must not omit
to mention the loose code of morality which the Africans have in
herited from their parents. My wife made the acquaintance of
a lady in Alabama, who had brought up with great care a col
ored girl, who grew up modest and well-behaved, till at length
she became the mother of a mulatto child. The mistress re
proached her very severely for her misconduct, and the girl at
first took the rebuke much to heart ; but having gone home one
day to vi?it her mother, a native African, she returned, saying,
CHAP. XIX.] MORAL CONDITION OF NEGROES. 273
that her parent had assured her she had done nothing wrong, and
had no reason to feel ashamed. When we are estimating, there
fore, the amount of progress made by the American negroes since
they left their native country, we ought always to bear in mind
from how low a condition, both morally and intellectually consia-
ered, they have had to mount up.
END Or THE FIRST VOLUME.
A SECOND VISIT
THE UNITED STATES
NORTH AMERICA.
BY SIR CHARLES LYELL, F.R.S.,
PRESIDENT OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OK LONDON, AUTHOR OF "THE PRINCIPLES
OF GEOLOGY," AND "TRAVELS IN NORTH AMERICA."
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
NE W YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.
LONDON: JOHN MURRAY.
1849.
CONTENTS
THE SECOND VOLUME.
CHAPTER XX.
PA(3E
Darien to Savannah. — Black Baptist Church and Preacher. — Negro
Prayer. — Negro Intelligence. — Bribery of Irish Voters. — Dirt-Eaters.
— Railway Expedition on Hand-Car. — Geology of Georgia. — Negroes
more progressive in Upper Country. — Indifference of Georgians to
Winter Cold. — Want of Elbow-Room in Pine-Barrens 13
CHAPTER XXL
Indian Mounds and Block-house at Macon, Georgia. — Fashionists. —
Funeral of Northern Man. — Geology and silicified Corals and Shells
— Stage Traveling to Milledgeville. — Negro Children. — Home-made
Soap. — Decomposition of Gneiss. — Deep Ravines recently excavated
after clearing of Forest. — Man shot in a Brawl. — Disappointed Place-
Hunter. — Lynch Law in Florida. — Repeal of English Corn-Laws. —
War Spirit abating ..........
CHAPTER XXII.
Macon to Columbus by Stage. — Rough Traveling
River. — Columbus. — Recent Departure of Creek Indians. — Falls of the
Chatahoochie. — Competition of Negro and White Mechanics. — Age
CONTENTS.
PAGE
of Pine Trees. — Abolitionist "Wrecker" in Railway Car. — Runaway
Slave.— Sale of Novels by News-boys.— Character of Newspaper
r Press. — Geology and Cretaceous Strata, Montgomery. — Curfew. — Sun-
xlay School for Negroes. — Protracted Meeting 34
CHAPTER XXIII.
Voyage from Montgomery to Mobile. — Description of a large River
Steamer. — Shipping of Cotton at Bluffs. — Fossils collected at Land
ings. — Collision of Steamer with the Boughs of Trees. — Story of a Ger
man Stewardess. — Emigration of Stephanists from Saxony. — Perpetu
ation of Stephanist and Mormon Doctrines. — Distinct Table for Colored
and White Passengers. — Landing at Claiborne by Torchlight. — Fossil
Shells. . 44
CHAPTER XXIV.
Claiborne, Alabama. — Movers to Texas. — State Debts and Liabilities. —
Lending .Money to half-settled States.---Rumors of War with England.
— Macon, Alabama. — Sale of Slaves] — Drunkenness in Alabama. —
Laws against Dueling. — Jealousy of Wealth. — Emigration to the West.
— Democratic Equality of Whites. — Skeleton of Fossil Whale or Zeu-
glodon. — Voyage to Mobile
CHAPTER XXV.
Voyage from Mobile to Tuscaloosa. — Visit to the Coal-field of Alabama.
— Its Agreement in Age with the ancient Coal of Europe. — Absen
teeism in Southern States. — Progress of Negroes. — Unthriftiness of
Slave-Labor. — University of Tuscaloosa. — Churches. — Bankruptcies.
— Judges and Law Courts. — Geology on the Tombeckbee River. —
Artesian Wells. — Limestone Bluff of St. Stephens. — Negro shot by
Overseer. — Involuntary Efforts of the Whites to civilize the Negroes.
— New Statute in Georgia against Black Mechanics. — The Effects of
speedy Emancipation and the free Competition of White and Black
Laborers considered .......... 67
CONTENTS. vii
CHAPTER XXVI.
PAGE
Return to Mobile. — Excursion to the Shores of the Gulf of Mexico. —
View from Lighthouse. — Mouth of Alabama River. — Gnathodon in
habiting Brackish Water. — Banks of these Fossil Shells far Inland. —
Miring of Cattle. — Yellow Fever at Mobile in 1839. — Fire in same
Year. — Voyage from Mobile to New Orleans. — Movers to Texas. —
Lake Pontchartrain. — Arrival at New Orleans. — St. Louis Hotel.
— French Aspect of City. — Carnival. Procession of Masks . . 84
CHAPTER XXVII.
Catholic Cathedral, New Orleans. — French Opera. — Creole Ladies. —
v Quadroons. — Marriage of Whites with Quadroons. — St. Charles
Theater. — English Pronunciation. — Duelist's Grave, — Ladies' Ordina
ry . — Procession of Fire Companies. — Boasted Salubrity of New Orleans.
— Goods selling at Northern Prices. — Mr. W'ilde. — Roman Law. —
Shifting of Capital to Baton Rouge. — Debates in Houses of Legisla-
lature. — Convention and Revision of the Laws. — Policy of Periodical
State Conventions. — Judges cashiered. — Limitation of their Term of
Office . , 93
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Negroes not attacked by Yellow Fever. — History of Mr. Wilde's Poem.
The Market, New Orleans. — Motley Character of Population. — Levee
and Steamers. First sight of Mississippi River. — View from the Cupola
of the St. Charles. — Site of new Orleans. — Excursion to Lake Pont
chartrain. — Shell Road. — Heaps of Gnathodou. — Excavation for Gas-
Works. — Buried upright Trees. — Pere Antoine's Date-palm . . 102
CHAPTER XXIX.
Excursion from New Orleans to the Mouths of the River. — Steamboat
Accidents. — River Fogs. — Successive growths of Willow on River
Bank. — Pilot-Station of the Balize. — Lighthouse destroyed by Hurri
cane. — Reeds, Shells, and Birds on Mud-banks. — Drift-wood. — Diffi
culty of estimating the annual Increase of Delta. — Action of Tides and
viii CONTENTS.
PAGE
Currents. — Tendency in the old Soundings to be restored. — Changes
of Mouths in a Century inconsiderable. — Return to New Orleans. —
Battle-ground. — Sugar-Mill. — Contrast of French and Anglo-American
Races. — Causes of Difference. — State and Progress of Negroes in Lou
isiana ..... .... .111
CHAPTER XXX.
Voyage from New Orleans to Port Hudson. — The Coast, Villas, and
Gardens. — Cotton Steamers. — Flat Boats. — Crevasses, Inundations. —
Decrease of Steamboat Accidents. — Snag-Boat. — Musquitoes. — Natural
Rafts. — Bartram on buried Trees at Port Hudson. — Dr. Carpenter's
Observations. — Landslip described. — Ancient Subsidence in the Delta
followed by an upward Movement, deducible from the buried Forest
at Port Hudson . . . . . . . . . .129
CHAPTER XXXI.
Fontania near Port Hudson. — Lake Solitude. — Floating Island. — Bony
Pike. — Story of the Devil's Swamp. — Embarking by Night in Steam-
Boat. — Literary Clerk. — Old Levees undermined. — Succession of up
right Trees in Bank. — Raccourci Cut-off. — Bar at Mouth of Red River.
— Shelly Fresh- water Loam of Natchez. — Recent Ravines in Table-
Land. — Bones of extinct Quadrupeds. — Human Fossil Bone. — Ques
tion of supposed co-existence of Man with extinct Mammalia discussed.
— Tornado at Natchez. — Society, Country Houses, and Gardens. —
Landslips. — Indian Antiquities 148
CHAPTER XXXII.
Natchez. — Vidah'a and Lake Concordia. — Hybernations of Aligator. —
Bonfire on Floating Raft. — Grand Gulf. — Magnolia Steamer. — Vicks-
burg to Jackson (Mississippi) by Railway. — Fossils on Pearl River. —
Ordinary at Jackson. — Story of Transfer of State-House from Natchez.
—Vote by Ballot. — Popular Election of Judges.— Voyage from Vicks-
burg to Memphis. — Monotony of River Scenery. — Squall of Wind. —
Actors on Board. — Negro mistaken for White. — Manners in the Back
woods. — Inquisitiveness. — Spoilt Children. — Equality and Leveling.
—Silence of English Newspapers on Oregon Question. . . .155
CONTENTS. ix
CHAPTER XXXIII.
PAGE
Bluffs at Memphis. — New Madrid. — No Inn. — Undermining of River
Bank. — Examination of Country shaken by Earthquake of lSll-1'2. —
Effects of Passage of Waves through Alluvial Soil. — Circular Cavities
or Sand-Bursts. — Open Fissures. — Lake Eulalie drained by Shocks. —
Borders of Sunk Country, west of New Madrid. — Dead Trees stand
ing erect. — A slight Shock felt. — Trade in Peltries increased by Earth
quake. — Trees erect in new formed Lakes. — Indian Tradition of
Shocks. — Dreary Forest Scene. — Rough Quarters. — Slavery in Mis*1
souri . 171
CHAPTER XXXIV,
Alluvial Formations of the Mississippi, ancient and modern. — Delta de
nned. — Great Extent of Wooded Swamps. — Deposits of pure Veget
able Matter. — Floors of Blue Clay with Cypress Roots. — Analogy to
Ancient Coal-measures. — Supposed " Epoch of existing Continents." —
Depth of Fresh-water Strata in Deltas. — Time required to bring down
the Mud oft he Mississippi. — New Experiments and Observations re
quired. — Great Age of buried and living Cypress-trees. — Older and
newer Parts of Alluvial Plain. — Upraise i Terraces of Natchez, &c.,
and the Ohio, the Monuments of an older Alluvial Formation. — Grand
Oscillation of Level. — The ancient Valleys inhabited by Quadrupeds
now extinct. — Land shells not changed. — Probable Rate of Subsidence
and Upheaval. — Relative Age of the ancient Alluvium of the Missis
sippi, and the Northern Drift 183
CHAPTER XXXV.
Departure from New Madrid. — Night-watch for Stecimers. — Scenery of
the Ohio River. — Mount Vernon, Ornithology. — No Undergrowth in
Woods. — Spring Flowers. — Visit to Dr. Dale Owen, New Harmony. —
Fossil Forest of erect Trees in Coal-measures. — Movers migrating
Westward.— Voyage to Louisville.— Professional Zeal of one of " the
Pork Aristocracy." — Fossil Coral-reef at the Falls of the Ohio, Louis
ville. — Fossil Zoophites as perfect as recent Stone-corals . . . 200
CONTEXTS.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
PACK
Louisville. — Noble Site for a Commercial City. — Geology. — Medical
Students. — Academical Rotation in Office. — Episcopal Church. —
Preaching against the Reformation. — Service in \Black Methodist
Church. — Improved Condition of Negroes in KefK^cky. — A colored
Slave married as a free White/— Voyage to Cincinnati. — Naturalized
English Artisan gambling. — Sources of Anti-British Antipathies. —
Progress of Cincinnati. — Increase of German Settlers. — Democracy of
Romanists. — Geology of Mill Creek. — Land Tortoises. — Observatory.
— Cultivation of the Vine. — Sculp ture by Hiram Powers . . .210
CHAPTER XXXVII.
Cincinnati to Pittsburg. — Improved Machinery of Steamer. — Indian
Mound. — Gravel Terraces.— Pittsburg Fire. — Journey to Greensburg.
Scenery like England. — Oregon War Question. — Fossil Foot-prints of
Air-breathing Reptile in Coal Strata. — Casts of Mud-cracks. — Foot
prints of Birds and Dogs sculptured by Indians. — Theories respecting
the Geological Antiquity of highly organized Vertebrata. — Prejudices
opposed to the Reception of Geological Truths. — Popular Education
the only Means of preventing a Collision of Opinion between the
Multitude and the Learned 223
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Greensburg to Philadelphia. — Crossing the Alleghany Mountains.—
Scenery. — Absence of Lakes. — Harrisburg. — African Slave-trade. —
Railway Meeting at Philadelphia. — Borrowing Money for Public
Works. — Negro Episcopal Clergyman. — Washington. — National Fair
and Protectionist Doctrines. — Dog-wood in Virginia. — Excursion with
Dr. Wyman. — Natural History. — Musk-rats. — Migration of Humming
birds to New Jersey 239
CHAPTER XXXIX.
New York, clear Atmosphere and gay Dresses. — Omnibuses. — Naming of
Streets. — Visit to Audubon.— Croton Aqueduct.— Harpers' Printing
Establishment. — Lar^e Sale of Works by English and American
CONTENTS. xi
PAGE
Authors. — Cheapness of Books. — International Copyright. — Sale of
Eugene Sue's Wandering Jew. — Tendency of the Work. — Mr. Galla-
tin on Indian Corn. — War with Mexico. — Facility of raising Troops. —
Dr. Dewey preaching against War. — Cause of Influence of Unitarians.
— Geological Excursion to Albany. — Helderberg War. — Voting Thanks
to the Third House. — Place-hunting. — Spring Flowers. — Geology and
Taconic System 248
CHAPTER XL.
Construction and Management of Railways in America. — Journey by
Long Island from New York to Boston. — Whale Fishery in the Pacific.
— Chewing Tobacco. — Visit to Wenham Lake. — Cause of the superior "
Permanence of Wenham Lake Ice. — Return to Boston. — Skeletons of
Fossil Mastodon. — Food of these extinct Quadrupeds. — Anti-war De
monstration. — Voyage to Halifax. — Dense Fog. — Large Group of Ice
bergs seen on the Ocean. — Transportation of Rocks by Icebergs. —
Danger of fast Sailing among Bergs. — Aurora Borealis. — Connection
of this Phenomenon with Drift Ice. — Pilot with English Newspapers.
—Return to Liverpool. ... 264
/**
Li&rwn
u -»-" •• \,
A SECOND VISIT
TO
THE UNITED STATES,
CHAPTER XX.
Darien to Savannah. — Black Baptist Church and Preacher. — Negro Prayer.
— Ne^ro Intelligence. — Bribery of Irish Voters. — Dirt Eaters. — Railway
Expedition on Hand-Car. — Geology of Georgia. — Negroes more pro
gressive in Upper Country. — Indifference of Georgians to Winter Cold. —
Want of Elbow-Room in Pine-Barrens.
Jan. 9, 1846. — WHEN I had finished my geological exami
nation of the southern and maritime part of Georgia, near the
mouth of the Altamaha river, I determined to return northward
to Savannah, that I might resume my survey at the point where
I left off in 1842,* and study the tertiary and cretaceous strata
between the Savannah and Alabama rivers.
On our way back from Hopeton to Darien, Mr. Couper and
his son accompanied us in a canoe, and we passed through the
General's Cut. a canal so called because, according to tradition,
Oglethorpe's soldiers cut it out with their swords in one day.
We met a great number of negroes paddling their canoes on their
way back from Darien, for it was Saturday, when they are gen
erally allowed a half holiday, and they had gone to sell on their
own account their poultry, eggs, and fish, 'and were bringing back
tobacco, clothes, and other articles of use or luxury.
Having taken leave of our kind host, we waited some hours at
Darien for a steamer, which was to touch there on its way from
St. Augustine in Florida, and which conveyed us speedily to Sa-
* See "Travels in North America," vol. i. pp. 155-174.
14 BLACK BAPTIST PREACHER. [Cn^p. XX.
vannah. Next day, I attended afternoon service in a Baptist
church at Savannah, in which I found that I was the only white
man, the congregation consisting of about COO negroes, of various
shades, most of them very dark. As soon as I entered I was
shown to a seat reserved for strangers, near the preacher. First
the congregation all joined, both men and women, very harmoni
ously in a hymn, most of them having evidently good ears for
music, and good voices. The singing was followed by prayers,
not read, but delivered without notes by a negro of pure African
blood, a gray-headed venerable-looking man, with a fine sonor
ous voice, named Marshall. He, as I learnt afterward, has the
reputation of being one of their best preachers, and he concluded
by addressing to them a sermon, also without notes, in good style,
and for the most part in good English ; so much so, as to make
me doubt wrhether a few ungramrnatical phrases in the negro
idiom might not have been purposely introduced for the sake of
bringing the subject home to their family thoughts. He got very
successfully through one flight about the gloom of the valley of
the shadow of death, and, speaking of the probationary state of
a pious man left for a while to his own guidance, and when in
danger of failing saved by the grace of God, he compared it to an
eagle teaching her newly fledged offspring to fly, by carrying it
up high into the air, then dropping it, and, if she sees it falling
to the earth, darting with the speed of lightning to save it before
it reaches the ground. Whether any eagles really teach their
young to fly in this manner, I leave the ornithologist to decide ;
but when described in animated and picturesque language, yet by
no means inflated, the imagery was well calculated to keep the
attention of his hearers awake. He also inculcated some good
practical maxims of morality, and told them they were to look to
a future state of rewards and punishments in which God would
deal impartially with " the poor and the rich, the black man and
the wrhite."
I went afterward, in the evening, to a black Methodist church,
where I and two others were the only white men in the whole
congregation ; but I was less interested, because the service and
preaching was performed by a white minister. Nothing in my
CHAP. XX.] NEGRO BAPTISTS. 15
whole travels gave me a higher idea of the capabilities of the
negroes, than the actual progress which they have made, even in
a part of a slave state, where they outnumber the whites, than
this Baptist meeting. To see a body of African origin, who had
joined one of the denominations of Christians, and built a church
for themselves — who had elected a pastor of their own race, and
secured him an annual salary, from whom they were listening to
a good sermon, scarcely, if at all, below the average standard of
the compositions of white ministers — to hear the whole service
respectably, and the singing admirably performed, surely marks
an astonishing step in civilization.
The pews were well fitted up, and the church well ventilated,
and there was no disagreeable odor in either meeting-house. It
was the winter season, no doubt, but the room was warm and
the numbers great. The late Mr. Sydney Smith, when he had
endeavored in vain to obtain from an American of liberal views,
some explanation of his strong objection to confer political and
social equality on the blacks, drew from him at length the reluc
tant confession that the idea of any approach to future amalga
mation was insufferable to any man of refinement, unless he had
lost the use of his olfactory nerves. On hearing which Mr.
Smith exclaimed —
" ' Et si non alium late jactaret odorem
Civis erat !' *
And such, then, are the qualifications by which the rights of
suffrage and citizenship are to be determined !"
A Baptist, missionary, with whom I conversed on the capacity
of the negro race, told me that he was once present when one of
their preachers delivered a prayer, composed by himself, for the or
dination of a minister of his sect, which, said he, was admirable
in its conception, although the sentences were so ungrammatical,
that they would pass, with a stranger, for mere gibberish. The
prayer ran thus : —
" Make he good, like he say,
Make he say, like he good,
Make he say, make he good, like he God."
* Virgil, Georg. ii. 133.
16 NEGRO INTELLIGENCE. [CHAP. XX.
Which may be thus interpreted : — Make him good as his doc
trine, make his doctrine as pure as his life, and may both be in
the likeness of his God.
This anecdote reminds me of another proof of negro intelli
gence, related to me by Dr. Le Conte, whose black carpenter
came to him one day, to relate to him, with great delisrht, a grand
discovery he had made, namely, that each side of a hexagon was
equal to the radius of a circle drawn about it. When informed
that this property of a hexagon had long been known, he re
marked that if it had been taught him, it would have been prac
tically of great use to him in his business.
There had been " a revival" in Savannah a short time before
my return, conducted by the Methodists, in the course of which
a negro girl had been so much excited, as to be thrown into a
trance. The physician who attended her gave me a curious de
scription of the case. If the nerves of only one or two victims
are thus overwrought, it is surely more than questionable whether
the evil does not counterbalance all the good done, by what is
called "the awakening" of the indifferent.
I inquired one day, when conversing with some of the citizens
here, whether, as New York is called the Empire State, Penn
sylvania the Keystone State, Massachusetts the Bay State, and
Vermont, when the question of its separation from New Hamp
shire was long under discussion, " the Future State," in short, as
almost all had some name, had they any designation for Georgia ?
It ought, they said, to be styled the Pendulum state, for the
Whigs and Democrats get alternately possession of power ; so
that each governor is of opposite politics to his predecessor. The
metropolis, they added, imitates the example of the State, elect
ing the mayor and aldermen of Savannah one year from the Dem
ocratic and the next from the Whig party. It has been of late
a great point, in electioneering tactics, to secure the votes of fifty
or sixty Irish laborers, who might turn the scale here, as they
have so often done in New York, in the choice of city officers.
In the larger city they were conciliated for some years by em
ployment in the Croton waterworks, so that " pipe-laying" be
came the slang term for this kind of bribery ; here, it ought to
CHAP. XX.] DIRT-EATERS. 17
be called " reed-cutting," for they set the Hibernians to cut down
a dense crop of tall reeds (Sesbania vesicaria), which covers the
canal and the swamps round the city, growing to the height of
fifteen feet, and, like the city functionaries, renewed every year.
Some members of the medical college, constituting a board of
health, have just come out with a pamphlet, declaring, that by
giving to the sun's rays, in summer, free access to the mud in
the bogs, and thus promoting the decay of vegetable matter, the
cutting down of these reeds has caused malaria.
In the course of all my travels, I had never seen one opossum
in the woods, nor a single racoon, their habits being nocturnal,
yet we saw an abundant supply of both of them for sale in the
market here. The negroes relish them much, though their flesh
is said to be too coarse and greasy for the palate of a white
man. The number of pine-apples and bananas in the market,
reminded us of the proximity of the West Indies. We ob
served several negroes there, whose health had been impaired
by dirt-eating, or the practice of devouring aluminous earth — a
diseased appetite, which, as I afterward found, prevails in sev
eral parts of Alabama, where they eat clay. I heard various
speculations on the origin of this singular propensity, called
" geophagy" in some medical books. One author ascribes it to
the feeding of slaves too exclusively on Indian corn, which is too
nourishing, and has not a sufficiency in it of inorganic matter,
so that when they give it to cattle, they find it best to grind up
the cob and part of the stalk with the grain. But this notion
seems untenable, for a white person was pointed out to me, who
was quite as sickly, and had a green complexion, derived from
this same habit ; and I was told of a young lady in good circum
stances, who had never been stinted of her food, yet who could
not be broken of eating clay.
Jan. 13. — From Savannah we went by railway to Macon in
Georgia, a distance of 191 miles, my wife going direct in a 1
train which carried her in about twelve hours to her destination,
accompanied by one of the directors of the railway company, I
who politely offered to escort her. The same gentleman sup- \
plied me with a hand-car and three negroes, so that I was able !
to perform the journey at my leisure, stopping at all the recent
18 EXPEDITION ON HAND-CAR. [CHAP. XX.
cuttings, and examining the rocks and fossils on the way. I
was desirous of making these explorations, because this line of
road traverses the entire area occupied by the tertiary strata be
tween the sea and the borders of the granitic region, which com
mences at Macon, and the section was parallel to that previously
examined by me on the Savannah river in 1842. When I
came to low swampy grounds, or pine-barrens, where there were
no objects of geological interest, my black companions propelled
me onward at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, by turning
a handle connected with the axis of the wheels. Their motions
were like those of men drawing water from a well. Through
out the greater part of the route, an intelligent engineer accom
panied me. As there Avas only one line of rail, and many
curves, and as the negroes can not be relied on for caution, he
was anxious for my safety, while I was wholly occupied with
my geology. I saw him frequently looking at his watch, and
''often kneeling down, like "Fine-ear" in the fairy tale, so as to
place his ear in contact with the iron rails to ascertain whether
a passenger or luggage-train wrere within a mile or two. We
went by Parramore's Hill, where the sandstone rocks detained
me some time, and, at the ninety-fifth mile station from Savan
nah, I collected fossils, consisting of marine shells and corals.
These were silicified in the burr-stone, of which mill-stones are
manufactured. Near Sandersville I saw a limestone from which
Eocene shells and corals are procured, as well as the teeth of
sharks and the bones of the huge extinct cetacean called Zeug-
lodon. Here I had ample opportunities of confirming the opin
ion I had previously announced as the result of my labors in
1842, that this burr-stone, with its red, yellow, and white sands,
and its associated porcelain clays or kaolin, constitutes one of the
members of the Eocene group, overlying the great body of cal
careous rock, once supposed by some to be cretaceous, but which
really belongs to the same tertiary period.^ Although the sum
mit level of the railway attains an elevation of about 500 feet,
descending afterward somewhat abruptly to Macon, which is
only 300 feet above the sea, it is surprising how we stole imper
ceptibly up this ascent, as if on a perfectly level plain, every
* See Quarterly Journ. of Geol. Society, 1845, p. 563.
CHAP. XX.] NEGROES IN UPPER COUNTRY. 19
where covered with wood, following chiefly the swampy valley
of the Ogeechee River, in such a manner as to miss seeing all
the leading features in the physical geography of the country.
Had I not, when at Hopeton, seen good examples of that suc
cession of steps, or abrupt escarpments, by which a traveler in
passing from the sea-coast to the granite region ascends from one
great terrace to another, I should have doubted the accuracy of
Bartram's description.*
I had many opportunities, during this excursion, of satisfying
myself of the fact for which I had been prepared by the plant
ers " on the sea-board," that the intelligence of the colored race
increased in the interior and upland country in proportion as
they have more intercourse with the whites. Many of them
were very inquisitive to know my opinion as to the manner in
which marine shells, sharks' teeth, sea-urchins, and corals could
have been buried in the earth so far from the sea and at such a
height. The deluge had occurred to them as a cause, but they
were not satisfied with it, observing that they procured these
remains not merely near the surface, but from the bottom of
deep wells, and that others were in flint stones. In some
places, when I left the railway and hired a gig to visit planta
tions far from the main road, the proprietor would tell me he
was unable to answer my questions, his well having been sunk
ten or twelve years ago. In that period the property had
changed hands two or three times, the former owners having
settled farther south or southwest ; but the estate had remained
under the management of the same head negro, to whom I was
accordingly referred. This personage, conscious of his import
ance, would begin by enlarging, with much self-complacency, on
the ignorance of his master, who had been too short a time in
those parts to understand any thing I wished to know. When
at length he condescended to come to the point, he could usually
give me a clear account of the layers of sand, clay, and limestone
they had passed through, and of fishes' teeth they had found,
some of which had occasionally been preserved. In proportion
as these colored people fill places of trust, they are involuntarily
treated more as equals by the whites. The prejudices which
# Ante, vol. i. p. 257.
20 NEGROES IN UPPER COUNTRY. [CHAP. XX
keep the races asunder would rapidly diminish, were they no1
studiously kept up by artificial barriers, unjust laws, and the re
action against foreign interference. In one of the small farms,
where I passed the night, I was struck with the good manners
and pleasant expression of countenance of a young woman of
color, who had no dash of white blood in her veins. She man
aged nearly all the domestic affairs of the house, the white chil
dren among the rest, and, when next day I learnt her age, from
the proprietor, I expressed surprise that she had never married.
" She has had many offers," said he, " but has declined all, for
they were quite unworthy of her, — rude and uncultivated coun
try people. I do not see how she is to make a suitable match
here, though she might easily do so in a large town like Savan
nah." He spoke of her just as he might have done of a white
free maid-servant.
If inter-marriages between the colored and white races were
not illegal here, how can we doubt that as Englishwomen some
times marry black servants in Great Britain, others, who came
out here as poor emigrants, would gladly accept an offer from a
well-conducted black artisan or steward of an estate, a man of
intelligence and sober habits, preferable in so many respects to
the drunken and illiterate Irish settlers, who are now so unduly
raised above them by the prejudices of race !
In one family, I found that there were six white children and
six blacks, of about the same age, and the negroes had been taught
to read by their companions, the owner winking at this illegal
proceeding, and seeming to think that such an acquisition would
rather enhance the value of his slaves than otherwise. Unfor
tunately, the whites, in return, often learn from the negroes to
speak broken English, and, in spite of losing much time in un
learning ungrammatical phrases, well-educated people retain some
of them all their lives.
As I stopped every evening at the point where my geological
work for the day happened to end, I had sometimes to put up
with rough quarters in the pine-barrens. It was cold, and none
of my hosts grudged a good fire, for large logs of blazing pine-
wood were freely heaped up on the hearth, but the windows and
doors were kept wide open. One morning, I was at breakfast
CHAP. XX.] INDIFFERENCE TO COLD. 21
with a large family, at sunrise, when, the frost was so hard, that
every pool of water in the road was incrusted with ice. In the
course of the winter, some ponds, they said, had borne the weight
of a man and horse, and there had been a coroner's inquest on
the body of a man, lately found dead on the road, where the
question had been raised whether he had been murdered or frozen
to death. They had placed me in a thorough draught, and, un
able to bear the cold any longer, I asked leave to close the win
dow. My hostess observed, that " I might do so, if I preferred
sitting in the dark." On looking up, I discovered that there was
no glass in the windows, and that they were furnished with large
shutters only. For my own part, I would willingly have been
content with the light which the pine-wood gave us, but seeing
the women and girls, with bare necks and light clothing, perfectly
indifferent to the cold, I merely asked permission to put on my
great coat and hat. These Georgians seemed to me, after their
long summer, to be as insensible to the frost as some Englishmen
the first winter after their return from India, who come back
charged, as it were, with a superabundant store of caloric, and
take time, like a bar of iron out of a furnace, to part with their
heat.
A farmer near Parramore's Hill, thinking I had come to settle
there, offered to sell me some land at the rate of two dollars an
acre. It was well timbered, and I found that the wood growing
on this sandy soil is often worth more than the ground which it
covers. Another resident in the same district, told me he had
bought his farm at two and a half dollars (or about half-a-guinea)
an acre, and thought it dear, and would have gone off to Texas,
if he were not expecting to reap a rich harvest from a thriving
plantation of peach trees and nectarines, just coming into full
bearing. A market for such fruit had recently been opened by
the new railway, from Macon to Savannah. He complained of
want of elbow-room, although I found that his nearest neighbor
was six or seven miles distant ; but, he observed, that having a
large family of children, he wished to lay out his capital in the
purchase of a wider extent of land in Texas, and so be the better
able to provide for them.
CHAPTER XXI.
Indian Mounds and Block-house at Macon, Georgia. — Fashionists. — Fune
ral of Northern Man. — Geology and silicified Corals and Shells. — Stage
traveling to Milledgeville. — Negro Children. — Home-made Soap. — De
composition of Gneiss. — Deep Ravines recently excavated after clearing
of Forest. — Man shot in a Brawl. — Disappointed Place-Hunter. — Lynch
Law in Florida. — Repeal of English Corn-Laws. — War Spirit abating.
Jan. 15, 1846. — WHEN I was within twenty miles of Macon,
I left the hand-car and entered a railway-train, which carried me
in one hour into the town. About a mile south of the place we
passed the base of two conical Indian mounds, the finest monu
ments of the kind I had ever seen. The first appearance of a
large-steam vessel ascending one of the western tributaries of the
Mississippi, before a single Indian has been dispossessed of his
hunting grounds, or a single tree of the native forest has been
felled, scarcely affords a more striking picture of a wilderness in
vaded by the arts of civilized life, than Macon, in Georgia, re
sounding to the sound of a locomotive engine. On entering1 the
town, my eye was caught by a striking object, a wooden edifice
of very peculiar structure and picturesque form, crowning one of
the hills in the suburbs. This, I was told, on inquiry, was a
block-house, actually in use against the Indians only twenty-five
years ago, before any habitations of the white men were to be
seen in the forest here. It was precisely one of those wooden
forts so faithfully described by Cooper in the " Path-finder."
After the mind has become interested with such antiquities, it is
carried back the next moment to the modern state of things by
an extraordinary revulsion, when a fellow-passenger, proud of the
sudden growth of his adopted city, tells you that another large
building, also conspicuous on a height, is a female seminary lately
established by the Methodists, " where all the young ladies take
degrees ;" and then, as you pace the streets with your baggage
to the hotel, another says to you, " There go two of our fashion-
CHAP. XXL] FUNERAL OF NORTHERN MAN. 23
ists," pointing to two gayly-dressed ladies, in the latest Parisian
costume.
I had seen, in the pale countenances of the whites in the pine-
woods I had lately traveled through, the signs of much fever and
ague prevalent in the hot season in Georgia, but at Macon we
heard chiefly of consumptive patients, who have fled from the
northern states in the hope of escaping the cold of winter. The
frost, this year, has tried them severely in the south. Two days
before I reached Macon, a young northern man had died in the
hotel where my wife was staying, a melancholy event, as none
of his friends or relatives were near him. Lucy, the chamber
maid of the hotel, an intelligent bright mulatto, from Maryland,
who expressed herself as well as any white woman, carne to tell
my wife that the other ladies of the house were to be present at
the funeral, and invited her to attend. She found the two
drawing-rooms thrown into one, and the coffin placed on a table
between the folding doors, covered with a white cloth. There
were twenty or thirty gentlemen on the one side, and nearly as
many ladies and children on the other, none of them in mourn
ing. The Episcopal clergyman who officiated, before reading
the usual burial service, delivered a short and touching address,
alluding to the stranger cut off in his youth, far from his kindred,
and exhorting his hearers not to defer the hour of repentance to
a death-bed, when their reason might be impaired or taken from
them. After the prayers, six of the gentlemen came forward to
carry the coffin down stairs, to put it into a small hearse drawn
by a single horse, and three carriages followed with as many as
they could hold, to the cemetery of Rose Hill. This burial-
ground is in a beautiful situation on a wooded hill, near the banks
of the Ocmulgee arid overlooking the Falls.
These falls, like so many of those on the rivers east of the Alle-
ghanies, are situated on the line of junction of the granitic and
tertiary regions.^ The same junction may also be seen at the
bridge over the Ocmulgee, at Macon, the red loam of the tertiary
formation resting there on mica schist. At the distance of one
mile southeast of the town, a railway cutting has exposed a series
* See "Travels in N. America," vol. i. p. 132. -jrf
24 SILICIFIED SHELLS AND CORAL. [CHAP. XXI.
of beds of yellow and red clay, with accompanying- sands of ter
tiary formation, and, at the depth of forty feet, I observed a large
fossil tree converted into lignite, the concentric rings of annual
growth being visible. Receding from the granitic rocks, six or
eight miles still farther to the southeast, I found at Brown Mount
ain, a bluff on the Ocmulgee River, and at other places in the
neighborhood, a great many siliceous casts of fossil shells and
corals, and among others a large nautilus, the whole indicating
that these beds of cherty sandstone and impure limestone belong
to the Eocene period.
As there is much kaolin in this series of chert and burr-stone
strata, I have little doubt that the petrifaction of fossil- wood, and
of shells and corals, has taken place in consequence of the decom
position of the imbedded felspathic rocks and crystals of felspar,
taking place simultaneously with the putrefaction of the organic
bodies. The silex, just set free from its chemical combination in
the felspar, would replace each organic particle as fast as it de
cayed or was resolved into its elements.
From Macon I went to Milledgeville, twenty-five miles to the
northeast, the capital of Georgia. Instead of taking the direct
road, we made a detour, going the first thirty miles on the Sa
vannah railway, to a station called Gordon, where we found a
stage-coach ready to drag us through the deep sands of the pine-
barrens, or to jolt us over corduroy roads in the swamps. As
we were traversing one of the latter, at the rate of half a mile
an hour, I began to contrast the speed of the new railway with
stage-traveling. Our driver maintained that he could go as fast
as the cars. " How do you make that out ?" said I. " Put a
locomotive," he replied, " on this swamp, and. see which will get
on best. The most you can say is, that each kind of vehicle runs
fastest on its own line of road."
We were passing some cottages on the way-side, when a group
of children rushed out, half of them white and half negro, shout
ing at the full stretch of their lungs, and making the driver fear
that his horses would be scared. They were not only like chil
dren in other parts of the world, in their love of noise and mis
chief, but were evidently all associating on terms of equality, and
CHAP. XXI.] THE "EXECUTIVE MANSION." 25
had not yet found out that they belonged to a different caste in.
society. One of our passengers was a jet black youth, about ten
years old, who got down at a lone house in the woods, from the
door of which two mulatto boys a year or two younger ran out.
There was much embracing and kissing, and mutual caressing,
with more warmth of manner than is usually shown by the
whites. We were glad to see the white mistress of the house,
probably the owner of them and their parents, looking on with
evident pleasure and interest at the scene.
Milledgeville, a mere village, though the capital of the state,
is provided with four neat and substantial wooden churches, clus
tered together, the Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Episco
palian. In the latter we found there was to be no service, as
the clergyman had been recently " called" to a larger church,
newly built, at Savannah. The Presbyterian minister was from
New England, and an excellent preacher. He exhorted his con
gregation to take the same view of their short sojourn on this
globe, which the emigrant takes of his journey to the far west,
bearing patiently great hardships and privations, because, how
ever severe at the time, he knows they will soon end, and prove
momentary in their duration, in comparison with the longer period
which he hopes to spend in a happier land.
At our hotel apologies were made to us by a neatly-dressed
colored maid, for the disorderly state of our room, the two beds
having been recently occupied by four members of the Legisla
ture, who, according to her, " had turned the room into a hog
pen, by smoking and spilling their brandy and wine about the
floor."
While I was geologizing in the suburbs, the Governor's lady
called on my wife and took her to her residence, called here the
" Executive Mansion," as appears by the inscription over the
door. It contained some handsome reception-rooms newly fur
nished by the last governor, but the white ground of a beautiful
Axminster carpet had been soiled and much damaged the first
evening after it was put down, at a levee, attended by several
hundred men, each walking in after a heavy rain with his shoes
covered with mud.
VOL. IT. — B
26 HOME-MADE SOAP. [CHAP. XXI.
When the governor's wife paid us a second visit, our landlady
made herself one of the party just as if we were all visitors at
her house. She was very much amused at my wife's muff, hav
ing never seen one since she was a girl, half a century before, at
Baltimore, yet the weather was now cold enough to make such
an article of dress most comfortable. Among other inquiries, she
said to my wife, " Do tell me how you make your soap in En
gland." Great was her surprise to hear that ladies in that coun
try were in the habit of buying the article in shops, and would
be much puzzled if called upon to manufacture it for themselves.
As it was evident she had never studied Adam Smith on the Di
vision of Labor, she looked upon this fine-lady system of purchas
ing every article at retail stores, as very extravagant. " That's-
the way they do in the north," said she, " though I never could
understand where all their money comes from." She then ex
plained how economically she was able to supply herself with
soap. " First, there is the wood, which costs nothing but the
trouble of felling the trees ; and, after it has served for fuel, it
yields the ashes, from which we get the potash. This is mixed
with the fat of sixty hogs, which costs nothing, for what else
could I do with all this fat at killing time ? As for the labor, it
is all done by my own people. I have nine maids, and they
make almost every thing in the house, even to the caps I wear."
Touching the soap, she observed, we must be careful to select the
ashes of the oak, hickory, ash, and other hard wood, for the pines
yield no potash ; a remark which led me to speculate on the lux
uriant growth of the long-leaved pines in the purely siliceous ter
tiary soils, from which it would have been difficult to conceive
how the roots of the trees could extract any alkaline matter,
whereas the soil of the " hickory grounds" is derived from the
disintegration of granitic rocks, which are very felspathic here,
and are decomposing in situ.
Having occasion to hire a horse, I found that the proprietor
of the livery stables was a colored man, who came himself to
bargain about the price, which was high compared to that asked
in the north.
The site of Milledgeville is 577 feet above the level of the
CHAP. XXI. J BLOCKS OF GRANITE AND GNEISS. 27
sea, and, like Macon, it stands on the boundary of the tertiary
and granitic region. Dr. J. R. Cotting, who had been employ
ed by the state to make a geological survey of part of Georgia,
showed me in the State House some fossils collected by him, and
he accompanied me in an excursion into the neighborhood of the
capital. It is well worthy of remark, that here, as every where
in Georgia and Alabama, there are loose blocks of granite and
gneiss strewed over the granitic area ; but no fragments of them
are ever seen to cross the boundary into the area composed of the
tertiary strata, where small pebbles only are seen washed out of
the sands. Farther to the north, in Massachusetts, for example,
and the island of Martha's Vineyard, we see enormous erratics of
granite, twenty-five and thirty feet in diameter, which must have
come from the north, probably from the mountains of New Hamp
shire, resting on the tertiary clays and rocks ;* and in Long
Island (New York), a variety of transported blocks repose upon,
or are interstratified with very modern deposits. In the south
ern states the same causes have not been in action, and if we
suppose icebergs to have been the transporting power in the north,
it seems natural that their action should not have extended to
the southern states, so as to carry fragments of crystalline rocks
out of the granitic region. Yet it is striking around Milledge-
ville, to see so many large detached and rounded boulders of
granite lying on the surface of the soil, and all strictly confined
within the limits of the granitic region. One of these, on the
slope of a hill three miles from the town, resting on gneiss, meas
ured twelve feet in its longest diameter, and was four feet high.
I presume that these boulders are nearly in situ ; they may have
constituted " tors" of granite, like those in Cornwall, fragments
of masses, once more extensive, left by denudation at a period
when the country was rising out of the sea, and fragments may
have been occasionally thrown down by the waves, and swept
to a small distance from their original sites. The latitude of
Milledgeville is 32° 20' north, or considerably to the south of
the most southern limits to which the northern drift with its
erratics has hitherto been traced in the United States.
* Travels in N. America, vol. i. p. 259, chap. xii.
23 MODERN RAVINES. [CHAP. XXI.
Another most singular phenomenon in the environs of Milledge-
ville is the depth to which the gneiss and mica schist have de
composed iii situ. Some very instructive sections of the disinte
grated rocks have been laid open in the precipices of recently
formed ravines. Were it not that the original intersecting veins
of white quartz remain unaltered to show that the layers of sand,
clay, and loam are mere laminae of gneiss and mica schist, re
solved into their elements, a geologist would suppose that they
were ordinary alternations of sandy arid clayey beds with occa
sional cross stratification, the whole just in the state in which
they were first deposited. Now and then, as if to confirm the
deception, a large crystal of felspar, eight or ten inches long, is
seen to retain its angles, although converted into kaolin. Simi
lar crystals, almost as perfect, may be seen washed into the ter
tiary strata south of the granitic region, where white porcelain
clays, quartzose gravel, sand, and micaceous loam are found, evi
dently derived from the waste of decomposed crystalline rocks. I
am not surprised, therefore, that some geologists should have con
founded the ancient gneiss of this district, thus decomposed in
situ, with the tertiary deposits. Their close resemblance con
firms me in the opinion, that the arrangement of the gneiss and
mica schist in beds with subordinate layers, both horizontal and
oblique, was originally determined, in most cases at least, by
aqueous deposition, although often modified by subsequent crys
talline action.
The surprising depth of some of the modem ravines, in the
neighborhood of Milledgeville, suggests matter of curious specula
tion. At the distance of three miles and a half due west of the
town, on the direct road to Macon, on the farm of Pomona, is
the ravine represented in the annexed wood-cut (p. 29). Twenty
years ago it had no existence ; but when the trees of the forest
were cut down, cracks three feet deep were caused by the sun's
heat in the clay ; and, during the rains, a sudden rush of water
through these cracks, caused them to deepen at their lower ex
tremities, from whence the excavating power worked backward,
till, in the course of twenty years, a chasm, measuring no less
than 55 feet in depth, 300 yards in length, and varying in width
CHAP. XXL] RAVINE NEAR MILLEDGEVTLLE.
Fig- 7.
Ravine on the Farm of Pomona, near Milledgeville, Georgia. January, 184G.
Excavated in the last twenty years, 55 feet deep, and 180 feet broad.
30 MODERN RAVINES. [CHAP. XXL
from 20 to 180 feet was the result. (See fig. 7, p. 29.) The
high road has been several times turned to avoid this cavity, the
enlargement of which is still proceeding, and the old line of road
may be seen to have held its course directly over what is now
the widest part of the ravine. In the perpendicular walls of this
great chasm appear beds of clay and sand, red, white, yellow,
and green, produced by the decomposition in situ of hornbleridic
gneiss, with layers and veins of quartz, as before-mentioned, and
of a rock consisting of quartz and felspar, which remain entire to
prove that the whole mass was once crystalline.
In another place I saw a bridge thrown over a recently formed
gulley, and here, as in Alabama, the new system of valleys and
of drainage, attendant on the clearing away of the woods, is a
source of serious inconvenience and loss.
I infer, from the rapidity of the denudation caused here by
running water, after the clearing or removal of wood, that this
country has been always covered with a dense forest, from the
remote time when it first emerged from the sea. However long
may have been the period of upheaval required to raise the ma
rine tertiary strata to the height of more than 600 feet, we rnay
conclude that the surface has been protected by more than a mere
covering of herbage from the effects of the sudden flowing off of
the rain water.
I know it may be contended that, when the granite and gneiss
first rose as islands out of the sea, they may have consisted en
tirely of hard rock, which resisted denudation, and therefore that
we can only affirm that the forest has been continuous from the
time of the decomposition and softening of the upper portion of
these rocks. But I may reply, that similar effects are observable,
even on a grander scale, in recently excavated ravines seventy or
eighty feet deep, in some newly cleared parts of the tertiary re
gions of Alabama, as in Clarke County, for example, and also in
some of the cretaceous strata of loose gravel, sand, and clay, in
the same state at Tuscaloosa. These are at a much greater
height above the sea, and must, from the first, have been as de
structible as they are now.
We returned to Macon by our former route, through the pine
CHAP. XXT.] DISAPPOINTED PLACE-HUNTER. 31
woods, and when we stopped to change horses, a lady, who was
left for a time alone in the coach with my wife, informed her,
that a young man who had been sitting opposite to them, had,
the day before, shot an Irishman in a tavern, and was flying
from justice. A few days later we learnt that the wounded
man had not died, but as it was a Penitentiary offense, it was
prudent for the culprit to keep out of the way for a time. On
hearing this, I asked one of my companions how it was possible,
when such affairs were occurring, and the police was so feeble,
we could travel night and day, and feel secure from personal
violence. {i There is no danger here," he said, " of robbery, as
in Europe, for we have none who are poor, or rendered vicious
and desperate by want. No murders are committed here except
in personal quarrels, and are almost always the act of restless
and unquiet spirits, who seek excitement in gambling and drink.
The wars in Texas relieved us of many of these dare-devils."
One of our fellow-travelers seemed to be a disappointed place-
hunter, who had been lobbying the House of Legislature in vain
for the whole session. He was taking his revenge by telling
many a story against an assembly, which had been so obtuse as
not to discover his merits. Twelve of them, he said, from the
upper country, could not even read, and one of these happening,
when in the House, to receive an invitation to the Governor's
annual dinner, rose, and, holding the card in his hand, with the
writing upside down, said, " Mr. Speaker, I am determined to
oppose this resolution." Another, when they were debating
whether they should move the Capital, or seat of legislature,
from Milledgeville to Macon, went out, and, on resuming his
seat, declared they were wasting their time, for he had measured,
and made a rough estimate of the weight of the building (which
was of stone), and found, on calculation, that all the oxen in
Georgia could not drag it a single mile !
There was much talk here of a recent exhibition on the frori
tiers of Georgia, of what is commonly called Lynch law, which
invalidated the assertion of my companion in regard to the ab
sence of robbers. Many people having been plundered of their
property, especially their negroes, organized a private association
32 LYNCH LAW IN FLORIDA. [CHAP. XXI.
for putting down the thieves, who came from Florida, and hav
ing arrested one of them, named Yoermans, they appointed a
committee of twelve to try him. Witnesses having been sworn,
a verdict of guilty was returned, and the punishment of death
decided upon, by a vote of six to one. They then crossed from
Georgia into Florida, where the prisoner confessed, under the
gallows, that he was a murderer and robber, and called upon a
preacher of the gospel, three or four of whom were present, as
well as a justice of the peace, to pray for him, after which he
was hung.
I expressed my horror at these transactions, observing that
Florida, if in so rude and barbarous a state, ought not to have
been admitted into the Union. My companions agreed to this,
but said they believed the man had fair play on his trial, and
added, " If you were a settler there, and had no other law to
defend you, you would be glad of the protection of Judge
Lynch."
The news had just reached Milledgeville and Macon of the
English premier's speech in favor of the free importation of
foreign corn, a subject discussed here with as much interest as
if it were a question of domestic policy. The prospect of in
creased commercial intercourse with England, is regarded by all
as favorable to peace, especially as the western states, the most
bellicose in the whole Union, will be the chief gainers. Even
before this intelligence arrived, the tone of the public mind was
beginning to grow somewhat less warlike. The hero in a new
cornic piece, on the stage at New York, personifies the member
for Oregon, and talks big about " our destiny," and " the whole
of Oregon or none." "We also observe an extract from the
" North American Review" going the round of the newspapers,
in which the Oregon dispute is compared to Dandie Dinrnont's
famous law-suit with Jock o'Dawston about the marches of their
farms, and Counsellor Pleydell's advice to his client is recom
mended for imitation.
" We should have a war to-morrow," said a Whig politician
to me at Macon, " if your democracy were as powerful as ours,
for the most radical of your newspapers are the most warlike.
CHAP. XXL] WAR SPIRIT ABATING. 33
Your ministers seem more free from anti- American prejudices
than the ordinary writers of travels, reviews, or newspaper
articles, and they have a great advantage over our government
at Washington. One of our statesman, a late candidate for the
presidentship, is said to have declared, that when so many mil
lions are admitted into the cabinet, it is scarcely possible to
manage a delicate point of foreign policy with discretion."
CHAPTER XXII.
Macon to Columbus by Stage. — Rough Traveling. — Passage of Flint River.
— Columbus. — Recent Departure of Creek Indians. — Falls of the Chata-
hoochie. — Competition of Negro and White Mechanics. — Age of Pine
Trees. — Abolitionist "Wrecker" in Railway Car. — Runaway Slave. —
Sale of Novels by Newsboys. — Character of Newspaper Press. — Geology
and Cretaceous Strata, Montgomery. — Curfew. — Sunday School for
Negroes. — Protracted Meeting.
Jan. 21, 1846. — HITHERTO we had traveled from the north
by railway or steam ship, but from Macon, on our way south,
we were compelled to resort to the stage coach, and started first
for Columbus. For the first time we remarked that our friends,
on parting, wished us a safe journey, instead of a pleasant one,
as usual. There had been continued rains, and the roads were
cut up by wagons bringing heavy bales of cotton to the Savannah
railroad. We passed Knoxville, a small and neat town, and,
after dark, supped at a small roadside inn, on pork chops, waffles,
and hominy, or porridge made of Indian meal. Here we were
told that the stage of the night before had been water-bound by
the rising of the rivers. We went on, however, to the great
Flint River, where the stage drove into a large flat-boat or raft.
The night was mild, but dark, and the scene which presented
itself very picturesque. A great number of negroes were stand
ing on both banks, chattering incessantly, and holding in their
hands large blazing torches of pine-wood, which threw a red
light on the trees around. The river was much swollen, but we
crossed without impediment. It was the first stream we had
come to of those flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Our coach was built on a plan almost universal in America,
and like those used in some parts of France, with three seats,
the middle one provided with a broad leather strap, to lean back
upon. The best places are given to the ladies, and a husband
is seated next his wife. There are no outside passengers, except
CHAP. XXIL] ROUGH TRAVELING. 35
occasionally one sitting by the driver's side. We were ofter
called upon, on a sudden, to throw our weight first on the right,
and then on the left side, to balance the vehicle and prevent an
upset, when one wheel was sinking into a deep rut. Sometimes
all the gentlemen were ordered to get out in the dark, and walk
in the wet and muddy road. The coachman would then whip
on his steeds over a fallen tree or deep pool, causing tremendous
jolts, so that my wife was thrown first against the roof, and then
against the sides of the lightened vehicle, having almost reason
to envy those who were merely splashing through the mud. To
sleep was impossible, but at length, soon after daybreak, we found
ourselves entering the suburbs of Columbus ; and the first sight
we saw there was a long line of negroes, men, women, and boys,
well dressed and very merry, talking and laughing, who stopped
to look at our coach. On inquiry, we were told that it was a
gang of slaves, probably from Virginia, going to the market to
be sold.
Columbus, like so many towns on the borders of the granitic
and tertiary regions, is situated at the head of the navigation of
a large river, and the rapids of the Chatahoochie are well seen
from the bridge by which it is here spanned. The vertical rise
and fall of this river, which divides Georgia from Alabama,
amounts to no less than sixty or seventy feet in the course of the
year ; and the geologist should visit the country in November,
when the season is healthy and the river low, for then he may
see exposed to view, not only the horizontal tertiary strata, but
the subjacent cretaceous deposits, containing ammonites, baculites,
and other characteristic fossils. These organic remains are met
with some miles below the town, at a point called " Snake's
Shoals ;" and Dr. Boykin showed us a collection of the fossils,
at his agreeable villa in the suburbs. In an excursion which I
made with Mr. Pond to the Upotoy Creek, I ascertained that
the cretaceous beds are overlaid every where by tertiary strata,
containing fossil wood and marine shells.
The last detachment of Indians, a party of no less than 500,
quitted Columbus only a week ago for Arkansas, a memorable
event in the history of the settlement of this region, and part
35 NEGRO AND WHITE MECHANICS. [CHAP. XXII.
of an extensive and systematic scheme steadily pursued by the
Government, of transferring the aborigines from the eastern states
to the far west.
Here, as at Milledgeville, the clearing away of the woods,
where these Creek Indians once pursued their game, has caused
the soil, previously level and unbroken, to be cut into by torrents,
so that deep gulleys may every where be seen ; and I am assured
that a large proportion of the fish, formerly so abundant in the
Chatahoochie, have been stifled by the mud.
•r The water-power at the rapids has been recently applied to
some newly-erected cotton mills, and already an anti-free-trade
party is beginning to be formed. The masters of these factories
hope, by excluding colored men — or, in other words, slaves —
from all participation in the business, to render it a genteel
employment for white operatives ; a measure which places in a
strong light the inconsistencies entailed upon a community by
slavery and the antagonism of races, for there are numbers of
colored mechanics in all these southern states very expert at
trades requiring much more skill and knowledge than the func
tions of ordinary work-people in factories. Several New England-
ers, indeed, who have come from the north to South Carolina and
Georgia, complain to me that they can not push on their children
here, as carpenters, cabinet makers, blacksmiths, and in other
such crafts, because the planters bring up the most intelligent of
their slaves to these occupations. The landlord of an inn con
fessed to me, that, being a carrier, he felt himself obliged to have
various kinds of work done by colored artisans, because they were
the slaves of planters who employed him in his own line. " They
interfere," said he, " with the fair competition of white mechan
ics, by whom I could have got the work better done."
These northern settlers are compelled to preserve a discreet
silence about such grievances when in the society of southern
slave-owners, but are open and eloquent in descanting upon them
to a stranger. They are struck with the difficulty experienced
in raising money here, by small shares, for the building of mills.
" Why," say they, " should all our cotton make so long a journey
to the north, to be manufactured there, arid come back to us at
CHAP. XXII.] AGE OF PINE TREES. 37
so high a price ? It is because all spare cash is sunk here in
purchasing negroes. In order to get a week's work done for you,
you must buy a negro out and out for life."
From Columbus we traveled fifty-five miles west to Chehaw,
to join a railway, which was to carry us on to Montgomery.
The stage was drawn by six horses, but as it was daylight we
were not much shaken. We passed through an undulating
country, sometimes on the tertiary sands covered with pines,
sometimes in swamps enlivened by the green palmetto and tall
magnolia, and occasionally crossing into the borders of the grani
tic region, where there appeared immediately a mixture of oak,
hickory, and pine. There was no grass growing under the pine
trees, and the surface of the ground was every where strewed
with yellow leaves, and the fallen needles of the fir trees. The
sound of the wind in the boughs of the long-leaved pines always
reminded me of the waves breaking on a distant sea-shore, and it
was agreeable to hear it swelling gradually, and then dying away,
as the breeze rose and fell. Observing at Chehaw a great many
stumps of these firs in a new clearing, I was curious to know
how many years it would take to restore such a forest if once de
stroyed. The first stump I examined measured two feet five
inches in diameter at the height of three feet from the ground,
and I counted in it 1 2 0 rings of annual growth ; a second meas
ured less by two inches in diameter, yet was 260 years old ; a
third, at the height of tAVO feet above the ground, although 180
years old, was only two feet in diameter ; a fourth, the oldest I
could find, measured, at the height of three feet above its base,
four feet, and presented 320 rings of annual growth ; and I could
liave counted a few more had the tree been cut down even with
the soil. The height of these trees varied from 70 to 120 feet.
From the time taken to acquire the above dimensions, we may
confidently infer that no such trees will be seen by posterity, after
the clearing of the country, except where they may happen to be
protected for ornamental purposes. I once asked a surveyor in
Scotland why, in planting woods with a view to profit, the oak
was generally neglected, although I had found many trunks of
very large size buried in peat-mosses. He asked if I had ever
58 RUNAWAY SLAVE. [CHAP. XXII.
counted the rings of growth in the buried trees, to ascertain their
age, and I told him I had often reckoned up 300, and once up
ward of 800 rings ; to which he replied, " Then plant your shil
lings in the funds, and you will see how much faster they would
grow."
Before reaching Chehaw, we stopped to dine at a small log-
house in the woods, and had prepared our minds, from outward
appearances, to put up with bad fare ; but, on entering, we saw
on the table a wild turkey roasted, venison steaks, and a part
ridge-pie, all the product of the neighboring forest, besides a large
jug of delicious milk, a luxury not commonly met with so far
south.
The railway cars between Chehaw and Montgomery consisted,
like those in the north, of a long apartment, with cross benches
and a middle passage. There were many travelers, and among
them one rustic, evidently in liquor, who put both his feet on one
of the cushioned benches, and began to sing. The conductor
told him to put his feet down, and afterward, on his repeating the
offense, lifted them off. On his doing it a third time, the train
was ordered to stop, and the man was told, in a peremptory tone,
to get out immediately. He was a strong-built laborer, and
would have been much more than a match for the conductor,
had he resisted ; but he instantly complied, knowing, doubtless,
that the officer's authority would be backed by the other passen
gers, if they were appealed to. We left him seated on the
ground, many miles from any habitation, and with no prospect
of another train passing for many a long hour. As we go south
ward, we see more cases of intoxication, and hear more swearing.
At one of the stations we saw a runaway slave, who had been
caught and handcuffed ; the first I had fallen in with in irons in
the course of the present journey. On seeing him, a New En-
glander, who had been with us in the stage before we reached
Chehaw, began to hold forth on the miserable condition of the
negroes in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and some other states
which I had not yet visited. For a time I took for granted all
he said of the sufferings of the colored race in those regions, the
cruelty of the overseers, theijr opposition to the improvement and
CHAP. XXII.] ABOLITIONIST " WRECKER." 39
education of the blacks, and especially to their conversion to
Christianity. I began to shudder at what I was doomed to wit
ness in the course of my further journeyings in the south arid
west. He was very intelligent, and so well informed on politics
and political economy, that at first I thought myself fortunate in
meeting with a man so competent to give me an unprejudiced
opinion on matters of which he had been an eye-witness. At
length, however, suspecting a disposition to exaggerate, and a
party-feeling on the subject, I gradually led him to speak of dis
tricts with which I was already familiar, especially South Caro
lina and Georgia. I immediately discovered that there also he
had every where seen the same horrors and misery. He went
so far as to declare that the piny woods all around us were full
of hundreds of runaways, who subsisted on venison and wild
hogs ; assured me that I had been deceived if I imagined that
the colored men in the upper country, where they have mingled
more with the whites, were more progressive ; nor was it true
that the Baptists and Methodists had been successful in making
proselytes. Few planters, he affirmed, had any liking for their
negroes ; and, lastly, that a war with England about Oregon, un
principled as would be the measure on the part of the democratic
faction, would have at least its bright side, for it might put an
end to slavery. " How in the world," asked I, " could it effect
this object ?" " England," he replied, " would declare all the
slaves in the south free, and thus cripple her enemy by promoting
a servile war. The negroes would rise, and although, no doubt,
there would be a great loss of life and property, the south would
nevertheless be a gainer by ridding herself of this most vicious
and impoverishing institution." This man had talked to me so
rationally on a variety of topics so long as he was restrained by
the company of southern fellow-passengers from entering on the
exciting question of slavery, that I now became extremely curious
to know what business had brought him to the south, and made
him a traveler there for several years. I wras told by the con
ductor that he was " a wrecker ;" and I learnt, in explanation
of the term, that he was a commercial agent, and partner of a
northern house which had great connections in the south. To
40 NEWS-BOYS. [CHAP. XXII.
him had been assigned the unenviable task, in those times of
bankruptcy and repudiation which followed the financial crisis of
1839—40, of seeking out and recovering bad debts, or of seeing
what could be saved out of the wreck of insolvent firms or the
estates of bankrupt planters. He had come, therefore, into con
tact with many adventurers who had been overtrading, and spec
ulators who had grown unscrupulous, when tried by pecuniary
difficulties. Every year, on revisiting the free states, he had
contrasted their progress with the condition of the south, which
by comparison seemed absolutely stationary. His thoughts had
been perpetually directed to the economical and moral evils of
slavery, especially its injuriousness to the fortunes and characters
of that class of the white aristocracy with which he had most to
do. In short, he had seen what was bad in the system through
the magnifying and distorting medium of his own pecuniary losses,
and had imbibed a strong anti-negro feeling, which he endeavor
ed to conceal from himself, under the cloak of a love of freedom
and progress. While he was inveighing against the cruelty of
slavery, he had evidently discovered no remedy for the mischief
but one, the hope of which he confessedly cherished, for he was
ready to precipitate measures which would cause the Africans to
suffer that fate which the aboriginal Indians have experienced
throughout the Union.
When I inquired if, in reality, there were hundreds of runa
way slaves in the woods, every one laughed at the idea. As a
general rule, they said, the negroes are well fed, and, when they
are so, will very rarely attempt to escape unless they have com
mitted some crime : even when some punishment is hanging over
them, they are more afraid of hunger than of a whipping.
Although we had now penetrated into regions where the
schoolmaster has not been much abroad, we observe that the rail
way cars are every where attended by news-boys, who, in some
places, are carried on a whole stage, walking up and down " the
middle aisle" of the long car. Usually, however, at each station,
they, and others who sell apples and biscuits, may be seen calcu
lating the exact speed at which it is safe to jump off, and taking,
with the utmost coolness, a few cents in chansre a moment before
CHAP. XXII.] CRETACEOUS STRATA. 41
they know that the rate acquired by the train will be dangerous.
T never witnessed an accident, but as the locomotive usually runs
only fifteen miles an hour, and is some time before it reaches half
that pace, the urchins are not hurried as they would be in En
gland. One of them was calling out, in the midst of the pine-
barren between Columbus and Chehaw, " A novel, by Paul le
Koch, the Bulwer of France, for twenty-five cents — all the go !
— more popular than the Wandering Jew," &c. Newspapers
for a penny or two-pence are bought freely by the passengers ; and,
having purchased them at random wherever we went in the
northern, middle, southern, arid western states, I came to the
conclusion that the press of the United States is quite as respect
able as our own. In the present crisis the greater number of
prints condemn the war party, expose their motives, and do jus
tice to the equitable offers of the English ministry in regard to
Oregon. A large portion of almost every paper is devoted to lit
erary extracts, to novels, tales, travels, and often more serious
works. Some of them are specially devoted to particular relig
ious sects, and nearly all of this class are against war. There
are also some " temperance," and, in the north, " anti-slavery"
papers.
We at length arrived at Montgomery, on the river Alabama,
where I staid a few days to examine the geology of the neighbor
hood. From the high ground near the town there is a distant
view of the hills of the granitic region around Wetumpka. But
the banks of the river at Montgomery are composed of enormous
beds of unconsolidated gravel, thirty feet thick, alternating with
red clay and sand, which I at first supposed to be tertiary, from
their resemblance to strata near Macon and Augusta in Georgia.
The fossil shells, however, of the accompanying marls (Inocera-
mus and Rostellaria arenarum), soon convinced me that they
belonged to the cretaceous formation. About three miles south
of the town there is a broad zone of calcareous marl, constituting
what is called the prairie, or cane-brake country, bare of natural
wood, and where there is so great a want of water, that it was
at first difficult for settlers to establish themselves upon it, until,
by aid of the Artesian auger, they obtained an abundant supply
42 CRKTACEOUS STRATA.— CURFEW. [CHAP. XXII.
from a depth of 300, and often 500 feet, derived from the un
derlying gravelly and sandy beds. Farther from the outcrop of
these gravelly beds borings have been made 800 feet deep with
out success. The temperature of the water was found to increase
in proportion to the depth of the wells. A proprietor told me
he had found it very difficult to get trees to grow on the prairie
land, but he had succeeded, with great care, in rearing a few
mulberries.
The common name for the marlite, of which this treeless soil
is composed, is " rotten limestone." I found many lumps on the
surface, much resembling white chalk, and containing shells of
the genera, Inoceramus, Baculite, Ammonite, Hippurite, and that
well-known fossil of the English chalk, Ostrea vesicularis.
In the market-place of Montgomery, I saw an auctioneer sell
ing slaves, and calling out, as I passed, "Going for 300 dollars."
The next day another auctioneer was selling horses in the same
place. Nearly the same set of negroes, men, women, and boys,
neatly dressed, were paraded there, day after day. I was glad
to find that some settlers from the north, who had resided here
many years, were annoyed at the publicity of this exhibition.
Such traffic, they say, might as well be carried 011 quietly in a
room. Another resident, who had come from Kentucky, was
forming a party, who desire to introduce into Alabama a law,
like one now in force in Kentucky, that no negroes shall hence
forth be imported. By that statute, the increase of slaves has,
he says, been checked. A case had lately occurred, of a dealer
who tried to evade the law by bringing forty slaves into Ken
tucky, and narrowly escaped being fined 600 dollars for each,
but had the ingenuity to get off by pretending that he was ignor
ant of the prohibition, and was merely passing through with them
to Louisiana. " By allowing none to come in, while so many
are emigrating to the west and Texas, we may hope," he said,
" very soon to grow white."
Every evening, at nine o'clock, a great bell, or curfew, tolls in
the market-place of Montgomery, after which no colored man is
permitted to be abroad without a pass. This custom has, I un
derstand, continued ever since some formidable insurrections,
CHAP. XXII.] PROTRACTED MEETING. 43
•which happened many years ago, in Virginia and elsewhere. I
was glad to find that the Episcopal clergyman at Montgomery
had just established a Sunday school for the negroes. I also hear
that a party in. this church, already comprising a majority of the
clergy, are desirous that the negro congregations should be rep
resented in their triennial conventions, which would be an im
portant step toward raising the black race to a footing of equality
with the whites. In these times when many here are entertain
ing a hostile feeling toward Great Britain, and when the gov
ernment is lending itself to the excitement, I find the ministers
of the Episcopal Church peculiarly free from such a spirit, and
cherishing a desire for peace and a friendly disposition toward the
English. The Methodists had just been holding a protracted
meeting in Montgomery, and such is the effect of sympathy and
of the spirit of competition, that the religious excitement had
spread to all the other sects.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Voyage from Montgomery to Mobile. — Description of a large River Steam
er. — Shipping of Cotton at Bluffs. — Fossils collected at Landings. — Col
lision of Steamer with the Boughs of Trees. — Story of a German Stew-
nrdess. — Emigration of Stephanists from Saxony. — Perpetuation of Ste-
phaiiist and Mormon Doctrines. — Distinct Table for Colored and White
Passengers. — Landing at Claiborne by Torchlight. — Fossil Shells.
Wednesday, Jan. 28, 1846. — THE steamer Amaranth was
lying at the bluff at Montgomery on the Alabama River, and was
advertised to sail for Mobile, a navigation of more than 300
miles, at ten o'clock in the morning. From information obtained
here, I had determined to follow up my geological inquiries by
going next to Tuscaloosa, on the Black Warrior River, about 100
miles distant by land, in a northwesterly direction. Every one
agreed, however, that it was better for me to go 800 miles by
water, half of it against the stream, instead of taking the direct
road ; so I determined to go first to Mobile, due south, and then
up the Tombecbee to the capital of Alabama, being assured that
I should gain, both in time and money, by this great detour.
Should I attempt the straight road at this season, no one could
insure my making two miles an hour, so tenaciously does the
marlite of the cretaceous formation, when it is wet, hold the car
riage wheels which sink into it.
Accustomed to the punctuality of northern steamers, we got
down with our luggage to the landing at the hour appointed, but
were told they were not ready. I re-examined a good geological
section in the bluff, till a friend came to me, and regretted I had
come down to the boat so early, for perhaps she might not sail
till the next day. I was much annoyed at this intelligence,
although I had been forewarned that much less value was set on
time in the southern states than in the north. At length we
went on board, and, having engaged a good private cabin, made
up our minds to read and write there, arid consider it as our inn.
CHAP. XXIII.] SOUTHERN STEAMBOAT. 45
It was the first of these magnificent southern river boats \ve had
seen, fitted up for the two-fold purpose of carrying as many bales
of cotton as can be heaped upon them without their sinking, and
taking in as many passengers as can enjoy the luxuries which
southern mariners and a hot climate require, especially spacious
cabins, abundance of fresh air, and protection from the heat of
the sun. We afterward saw many larger steam vessels, arid some
of them fitted up in finer style, but none which made such an
impression on our minds as the Amaranth. A vessel of such
dimensions makes a grand appearance in a river so narrow as the
Alabama at Montgomery ; whereas, if she were a third longer,
she would be comparatively insignificant on the Mississippi. The
principal cabins run the whole length of the ship on a deck above
that on which the machinery is placed, and where the cotton is
piled up. This upper deck is chiefly occupied with a handsome
saloon, about 200 feet long, the ladies' cabin at one end, opening
into it with folding doors. Sofas, rocking-chairs, tables, and a
stove are placed in this room, which is lighted by windows from
above. On each side of it is a row of sleeping apartments, each
communicating by one door with the saloon, while the other leads
out to the guard, as they call it, a long balcony or gallery, cov
ered with a shade or verandah, which passes round the whole
boat. The second class, or deck passengers, sleep where they
can on the lower floor, where, Jbesides the engine and the cotton,
there are prodigious heaps of wrood, which are devoured with
marvelous rapidity by the furnace, and are as often restored at
the different landings, a set of negroes being purposely hired for
that work.
These steamers, notwithstanding their size, draw very little
water, for they are constructed for rivers which rise and fall very
rapidly. They can not quite realize the boast of a western cap
tain, " that he could sail wherever it was damp ;" but I was
assured that some of them could float in two feet water. The
high-pressure steam escapes into the air, by a succession of explo
sions alternately from the pipes of the two engines. It is a most
unearthly sound, like that of some huge monster gasping for
breath ; and when they clear the boilers of the sediment collected
46 SHIPPING COTTON AT BLUFFS. [Cn^p. XXIII.
from the river-water, it is done by a loud and protracted discharge
of steam, which reminded us of the frightful noise made by the
steam gun exhibited at the Adelaide Gallery in London. Were
it not for the power derived from the high-pressure principle, of
blowing out from the boilers the deposit collected in them, the
muddiness of the American rivers would soon clog the machinery.
Every stranger who has heard of fatal accidents by the bursting
of boilers believes, the first time he hears this tremendous noise,
that it is all over with him, and is surprised to see that his com
panions evince no alarm. Habit soon reconciled us to the sound ;
and I was amused afterward to observe that the \vild birds
perched on the trees which overhung the river, looked on with
indifference while the paddle-wheels were splashing in the water,
and the steam-pipes puffing and gasping loud enough to be heard
many miles off.
After we had been on board a great part of the day, \ve at
length got under weigh in the afternoon ; but what was my sur
prise when I actually discovered that we were ascending the
stream instead of sailing down toward Mobile. On asking the
meaning of this proceeding, the mate told me, very coolly, that
the captain had just heard of some cotton ready for exportation
some miles above Montgomery. To this higher landing we re
paired ; but news being sent that a rival steamboat was making
her way up the river, the Amaranth set off down stream in good
earnest, moving by aid of her powerful engines and the force of
the mid-current with such velocity, that I could readily believe
that 800 miles by river was shorter than 100 by land.
The pilot put into my hands a list of the landings on the Ala
bama River from Wetumpka to Mobile, no less than 200 of them
in a distance of 434 miles. A small part only of these consisted
of bluffs, or those points where the high land comes up to the
river's edge — in other words, where there is no alluvial plain be
tween the great stream and the higher country. These spots,
being the only ones not liable to inundation, and which can there
fore serve as inland ports when the river is full, or when the
largest boats can sail up and down, are of great importance in
the inland navigation of the country. A proprietor whose farm
CHAP. XXIII.] FOSSILS COLLECTED AT LANDINGS. 47
is thus advantageously situated, usually builds a warehouse, not
only for storing up for embarkation the produce of his own land,
but large enough to take in the cotton of his neighbors. A long
and steeply-inclined plane is cut in the high bank, down which
one heavy bale after another is made to slide. The negroes show
great dexterity in guiding these heavy packages ; but occasionally
they turn over and over before reaching the deck of the boat, and
sometimes, though rarely, run off the course and plunge into the
river, where they float till recovered. Had I not been engaged
in geological inquiries, I should probably have had my patience
severely tried by such repeated stoppings at every river cliff; but
it. so happened that the captain always wanted to tarry at the
precise points where alone any sections of the cretaceous and ter
tiary strata were visible, and was often obliged to wait long
enough to enable me to make a tolerably extensive collection of
the most characteristic fossils. In the present instance — and I
shall have by-and-by to mention other similar ones — Captain
Bragdon was not only courteous, but perfectly understood, and
entered into my pursuits, and had himself collected organic re
mains for a friend in the college of Louisville, Kentucky ; so that
while the cotton or wood were taking on board, he would often
assist me in my labors. Were it not for one serious drawback,
a cruise in a cotton steamer would be the paradise of geologists.
Unfortunately, in the season when the water is high, and when
the facilities of locomotion are greatest, the base of every bluff is
many feet, and sometimes fathoms, under water, and the lo\ver
portion of a series of horizontal strata is thus entirely concealed
from view. The bluffs which I first examined consisted of a
marlite divided into horizontal layers as regular as those of the
lias of Europe, and which might have been taken for lias but for
the included fossils, which prove them to belong to the creta
ceous formation. At Centerport these unctuous marls or calca
reous clays are called by the people soap-stone, and form cliffs
150 feet in perpendicular height, in which, as well as at Selma,
I collected the large Gryphcea costata and the Ostrea falcata,
more than one species of Inoceramus, and other characteristic
fossil shells. At White Bluff, where the blue marlite whitens
48 COLLISION WITH TREES. [CHAP. XXIII.
when exposed to the air, a fine range of precipices covered with
wood forms a picturesque feature in the scenery ; but I obtained
the richest harvest of cretaceous fossils far below, at a landing
called Prairie Bluff.
The banks of the Alabama, like those of the Savannah and
Altarnaha rivers, are fringed with canes, over which usually tow
ers the deciduous cypress, covered with much pendent moss. The
mistletoe enlivens the boughs of several trees, still out of leaf, and
now and then, through an opening in the thicket bordering the
river, the evergreen pine-forest appears in the back-ground. Some
of the largest trees on the banks are sycamores (Platanus occi-
dentalis), called button-wood, one of which I measured, and found
it to be eighteen feet in circumference. The old bark is contin
ually peeling off, and the new is as white as if the trunk of the
tree had been painted.
When it was growing dusk, and nearly all had retired to their
cabins, and some to their beds, we were startled by a loud crash,
as if parts of the woodwork of the steamer were giving way over
our heads. At the same moment a shower of broken glass came
rattling down on the floor of the cabin. As I expected to land
in the course of the night at Claiborne, I had not taken off my
clothes, so I rushed immediately on deck, and learnt from the
captain that there was no danger. I then went down to tell the
passengers, especially the women, who were naturally in no small
alarm, that all was safe. I found them, in great consternation,
crowded together at the door of the ladies' cabin, several mothers
with children in their arms. When I returned to see what had
happened, a most singular and novel scene presented itself. Crash
after crash of broken spars and the ringing of shattered window-
glasses were still heard, and the confusion and noise were inde
scribable. " Don't be alarmed ; we have only got among the
trees," said the captain. This, I found, was no uncommon oc«
currence when these enormous vessels are sweeping down at full
speed in the flood season. Strange as it may seem, the higher
the waters rise the narrower is the river channel. It is true that
the adjoining swamps and low lands are inundated far and wide ;
but the steamers must all pass between two rows of tall trees
CHAP. XXIIL] CABIN PASSENGERS. 49
which adorn the opposite banks, and as the branches of these
table trees stretch half way over the stream, the boat, when the
river has risen forty or sixty feet, must steer between them. In
the dark, when they are going at the rate of sixteen miles an hour
or more, and the bends are numerous, a slight miscalculation car
ries the woodwork of the great cabin in among the heads of the
trees. In this predicament I found the Amaranth when I got
on deck. Many a strong bough had pierced right through the
cabin windows on one side, throwing down the lights, and smash
ing the wooden balustrade and the roof of the long gallery, and
tearing the canvas awning from the verandah. The engine had
been backed, or its motion reversed, but the steamer, held fast
by the trees, was swinging round with the force of the current.
A large body of men were plying their axes freely, not only cut
ting off boughs, but treating with no respect the framework of the
cabin itself. I could not help feeling thankful that no branch had
obtruded itself into our berths. At length we got off, and the
carpenters and glaziers set to work immediately to make repairs.
The evening before this adventure we had been sitting for
some hours enjoying the privacy of our own state-room, from the
windows of which we had a good view of the river's bank, when
at length my wife had thought it polite to visit the ladies' cabin,
as they might otherwise think her unsociable. She found there
a young Irish milliner who had come out from the county of
Monaghan, and was settled at Selma, one of the towns on this
river, where she said she was getting on extremely well. There
was also a cracker family, consisting of a squalling child and its
two parents, who were " moving to the Washita river in Louisi
ana." The young mother was smoking a pipe, which her husband,
a rough-looking back-woodsman, had politely lighted for her. As
this practice was against the regulations, my wife joined the
other ladies in remonstrating, and she immediately went out to
smoke in the open air on the guard. I had been before amused
by seeing a girl, about nine years old, employed, by way of imi
tating her elders, in smoking a paper cigar on the deck, and a
mother, after suckling an infant of two years, give it some to
bacco to chew.
VOL. n. — C
50 EMIGRATION OF STEPHANISTS. [CHAP. XXIII.
Another inmate of the ladies' cabin was a German stewardess,
who soon found out that my wife understood her mother tongue,
and, being in great want of sympathy, poured out her tale of suf
fering in the New World with the simplicity of character and
unreservedness of her countrywomen. Seven years ago she had
been a happy and contented peasant at Chemnitz in Saxony, one
of a united family of Lutherans, when she was persuaded by a
priest to embrace the opinions of Martin Stephan, a preacher of
Dresden, who taught that all theological study should be confined
to the Bible ; that literature and the fine arts, being of human
origin and worldly in their nature, ought to be despised ; that no
one could enjoy freedom of conscience in Germany ; and that the
only path to salvation was to follow him, and emigrate to North
America. He himself was to be their temporal and spiritual
chief, and to him they were to deliver up all their property. In
November, 1838, 700 victims of this impostor embarked from
Bremen, including six pastors and four schoolmasters. One of
the transports, the Amelia, carrying about sixty emigrants, in
cluding children, a crazy old ship, was never heard of again, and
doubtless foundered on the Atlantic. The other carried Stephan
and the rest of his followers to New Orleans, from whence they
ascended the Mississippi, and founded a settlement, called Witt
enberg, on a rich, aguish flat, bordering the Missouri, above St.
Louis. Here one-fourth of their number were swept off by fever,
and Stephan, who had deserted a wife and nine children in Ger
many, was detected carrying on a licentious intercourse with some
of the women of the new community. Before, however, this
scandal became notorious, he contrived to make off with all the
money which had been intrusted to him to buy land for the new
colony. Hanne Rottgen, the young woman who related this
story, went, as soon as she recovered from the ague, to St. Louis,
her eyes having at length been opened, like those of many other
Stephanists, to the fraud of which they had been the dupes. She
was immediately employed to attend a hospital filled with num
bers of her poor country people of both sexes, who had been
scalded by the bursting of the boiler of a large steam-boat. After
witnessing the terrible sufferings and death of not a few of these
CHAP. XXIII.] STEPHANISTS AND MORMONS. 51
emigrants, she had engaged herself as stewardess in several ves
sels, and at length in the Amaranth. " But what became of
Stephan ?" asked my wife. " He escaped entirely," she said,
" for you know, madam, there is no law in this country as there
i-s in Saxony ; but for all that, this is the land for the poor to
thrive in. They pay me twenty dollars a month, and I am sav
ing money fast ; for, though home-sick, I can not, after all my
follies, return and throw myself penniless on my relations." Here
she began to shed tears and to be much affected, wondering
whether her mother was still alive. She had written to ask her
forgiveness, as she had been her darling, and in spite of her pray
ers and entreaties had left her almost heart-broken. " I thought
it my duty to go ; for how should we poor peasants not be de
ceived when so many of our clergy were led astray by the cun
ning of that artful man ? I have written to my two sisters to
tell them how bitterly I repent, and to ask them to pardon me."
When I afterward talked of this adventure in a steamer on
the Mississippi, a fellow traveler exclaimed, " But would you be
lieve it, there are still many Stephanists ?" " Why not," said I,
" are there not also many thousand Mormons ? The fraud of
Stephan was not more transparent than that of Joseph Smith or
his vision, and the story he related so circumstantially of records
engraven on metallic plates, shining like gold, which were deliv
ered to him by the angel of the Lord on the 22d day of Septem
ber, 1827."
Are we then to despair of the progress of the human mind in
inquiries in which it must ever take the deepest interest, because
in a land where there are so many schools, and so many millions
of readers, a free press, and religious toleration, it is so hard to
extinguish a belief in the grossest impostures ? By no means —
in the doctrines taught by Stephan and Smith there was a mix
ture of some fiction with much truth; they adopted nearly all
the highest truths of theology common to the prevailing religions
of the world, with the addition of nearly all which Christians be
lieve. In each sect the difficulty consists in clearing away a
greater or less amount of human error and invention from the di
vine truths which they obscure or conceal. The multitude are
52 DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. [CHAP. XXIII
taught by their spiritual guides in three-fourths of Christendom,
that they are riot to inquire for themselves. Even of the Protest
ant minority, who profess that it is their right and duty to exer
cise their own judgment, how many are there who annex the
condition "provided they arrive at the conclusions to which the
Church has come, without which they cannot be saved !" What
more would a Stephanist or a Mormon preacher ask, than the
privilege of borrowing and inculcating these maxims ? — and how,
if the use of them be freely granted, and they have motives for
perpetuating some peculiar sectarian dogmas, is the delusion ever
to end ?
In a southern steamer abundant opportunities are afforded of
witnessing the inconveniences arising out of the singular relation
subsisting between the negroes, whether free or slave, and the
white race. The succession of breakfasts, dinners, and suppers
entailed by it appears endless. In a northern boat, after the
passengers and officers of the ship have dined, the few servants
who waited on them have their meal ; but here \ve had five dis
tinct repasts set out, one after the other. First, the cabin passen
gers dine ; then come the white nurses, children, and officers of
the ship ; thirdly, the deck passengers, being white, answering to
our steerage ; fourthly, the white waiters, waited upon by colored
men ; fifthly, colored passengers, free or slave, and colored wait
ers. It sometimes happens that a free negro who has made a
good deal of money is on board ; he must wait till all the white
aristocracy, including the waiters, are served, and then take his
turn with the lowest of the blacks. To a European this exclu-
siveness seems the more unnatural and offensive in the southern
states, because they make louder professions even than the north
erners of democratic principles and love of equality. I must do
them the justice, however, to admit, that they are willing to carry
out their principles to great lengths when the white race alone is
concerned. I heard of a newly-arrived Irish ditcher at Chehaw,
who was astonished when invited to sit down at table with his
employer, a proprietor in the neighborhood, who thought it neces
sary to recognize him as an equal. On one occasion when I
visited a lawyer at his country-house in Alabama — one accus-
CHAP. XXITI.] LANDING AT CLAIBORNE. 51
tomed to the best society of a large city, and the ladies of whose
family were refined and cultivated — he felt it incumbent on him,
to my great discomfiture, to invite the driver of my gig, a half-
caste Indian, who traveled without any change of clothes, to sit
down with us at table. He was of a dark shade, but the blood
was Indian not African, ancHie was therefore one of the southern
aristocracy. TJje man was modest and unobtrusive, and scarce
ly spoke ; but it need scarcely be said, that his presence checked
the freedom of conversation, and I was glad when his duties in
the stable called him away.
In the course of the night we were informed that the Ama
ranth had reached Claiborne. Here we found a flight of wooden
steps, like a ladder, leading up the nearly perpendicular bluff,
which was 150 feet high. By the side of these steps was a
framework of wrood, forming the inclined plane down which the
cotton bales were lowered by ropes. Captain Bragdon politely gave
his arm to my wife, and two negroes preceded us with blazing
torches of pine- wood, throwing their light on the bright shining
leaves of several splendid magnolias which covered the steep.
We were followed by a long train of negroes, each carrying some
article of our baggage. Having ascended the steps, we came to
a flat terrace, covered with grass, the first green sward we had
seen for many weeks, and found there a small, quiet inn, where
we resolved to spend some days, to make a collection of the fossil
tertiary shells, so well known to geologists as abounding in the
strata of this cliff. About 400 species, belonging to the Eocene
formation, derived from this classic ground, have already been
named, and they agree, some of them specifically, and a much
greater number in their generic forms, with the fossils of the mid
dle division of the deposits of the same age of London and Hamp
shire.*
The remains of the zeuglodon have been also found by Mr.
Hale in this cliff; but, although I met with many leaves of ter
restrial plants, I could neither obtain here, nor in any part of the
United States, a single bone of any terrestrial quadruped, although
* They correspond with the middle or Bracklesham series of Prestwich's
triple division. See "Quart. Journ. of Geol. Soc." vol. iii. May, 1847.
54 FOSSIL REMAINS. [CHAP. XXIII.
we know that many of that class inhabited Europe at this period.
That some of these may be discovered in America, I can hardly
doubt ; but the fact is worthy of remark, as connected with the
weight due to negative evidence. When strata have been form
ed far from land, so as to afford few, if any, indications of land
plants, we must not look for indications of air-breathing quadru
peds, nor infer their non-existence, if it be so difficult to discover
them even at Claibome, where the land at the period of the de
position of the marine strata, can not have been far distant.*
* Since writing the above, I hear that Mr. Hale, of Mobile, has met with
some bones of land quadrupeds in these strata. For remarks on the strata
at Claiborne, see a paper by the author, " Quart. Journ. of Geol. Society of
London," vol. iv. p. 10, June, 1848.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Claiborne, Alabama. — Movers to Texas. — State Debts and Liabilities. —
Lending money to half-settled States. — Rumors of war with England. —
Macon, Alabama. — Sale of Slaves. — Drunkenness in Alabama. — Laws
against Dueling. — Jealousy of Wealth. — Emigration to the West. —
Democratic Equality of Whites. — Skeleton of Fossil Whale or Zeuglo-
don. — Voyage to Mobile.
THE morning1 after our arrival at Claiborne, we found at the
inn, a family of " movers" on their way to Texas, sitting- in the
verandah enjoying the warm sunshine after a shower of rain.
At this season, January 29th, the thermometer stood at 80°
Fahrenheit in the shade, and the air was as balmy as on an
English summer day. The green sward was covered with an
elegant flower, the Houstonia serpyllifolia, different from the
H. cerulia, so common in the New England meadows. Before
the house stood a row of Pride-of-India trees (Melia azedarach),
laden with bunches of yellow berries. I had been often told by
the negroes that the American robin (Turdus migratorius) "got
drunk" on this fruit, and we had now an opportunity of witness
ing its narcotic properties ; for we saw some children playing
with one of these birds before the house, having caught it after
it had been eating freely of the berries. My wife seeing that
the robin was in no small danger of perishing, bought it of the
children for some sugar-plums, and it soon revived in our room,
and flew out of the window. In the evening we enjoyed a sight
of one of those glorious sunsets, the beauty of which in these lat
itudes is so striking, when the clouds and sky are lighted up with
streaks of brilliant red, yellow, and green, which, if a painter
should represent faithfully, might seem as exaggerated and gaudy
as would the colors of an American forest in autumn when com
pared with European woods.
The movers, who were going to Texas, had come down 200 miles
from the upper country of Alabama, and were waiting for some
MOVERS TO TEXAS. [CHAP. XXIV.
others of their kindred who were to follow with their heavy wagons.
One of these families is carrying away no less than forty negroes,
and the cheerfulness with which these slaves are going, they
know not where, with their owners, notwithstanding their usual
dislike to quit the place they have been brought up in, shows a
strong bond of union between the master and " his people." In
the last fifteen months 1300 whites, and twice that number of
slaves, have quitted Alabama for Texas and Arkansas, and they
tell me that Monroe County has lost 1500 inhabitants. "Much
capital," said one of my informants, " is leaving this state, and
no wonder ; for if we remain here, we are reduced to the alter
native of high taxes to pay the interest of money so improvidently
borrowed from England, or to suffer the disgrace of repudiation,
which would be doubly shameful, because the money was received
in hard cash, and lent out, often rashly, by the state, to farmers
for agricultural improvements. Besides," he added, " all the
expenses of Government were in reality defrayed during several
years by borrowed money, and the burthen of the debt thrown
on posterity. The facility with which your English capitalists,
in 1821, lent their cash to a state from which the Indians were
not yet expelled, without reflecting on the migratory nature of
the white population, is astonishing ! The planters who got
grants of your money, and spent it, have nearly all of them
moved off and settled beyond the Mississippi.
" First, our Legislature negotiates a loan; then borrows to pay
the interest of it ; then discovers, after some years, that five out
of the sixteen millions lent to us have evaporated. Our demo
crats then stigmatize those who vote for direct taxes to redeem
their pledges as * the high taxation men.' Possibly the capital
and interest may eventually be made good, but there is some
risk at least of a suspension of payment. At this moment the
state is selling land forfeited by those to whom portions of the
borrowed money were lent on mortgage, but the value of prop
erty thus forced into the market, is greatly depreciated."
Although, since my departure in 1846, Alabama has not re
pudiated, I was struck with the warning here conveyed against
lending money to a new and half-formed community, where every-
CHAP. XXIV.] STATE DEBTS. 57
thing is fluctuating and on the move — a state from which tire
Indians are only just retreating, and where few whites ever con
tinue to reside three years in one place — where thousands are
going with their negroes to Louisiana, Texas, or Arkansas —
where even the County Court Houses and State Capitol are on
the move, the Court House of Clarke county, for example, just
shifted from Clarkesville to Macon, and the seat of legislature
about to be transferred from Tuscaloosa to Montgomery. In
the midst of such instability, a feeling of nationality, or state
pride, can not easily be fostered. Nevertheless, the resources,
both mineral and agricultural, of so vast a territory as Alabama
a fifth larger in area than the whole of England proper, may
enable them, with moderate economy, to overcome all their diffi
culties.
Often was the question put to us, " Are you moving ?" But
at the small tavern at Claiborne it was supposed that I might
be the Methodist minister whom they were expecting to come
from the north, to preach a trial sermon. Two Alabamans,
who, as I afterward learnt, were under this persuasion, were
talking beside me of the chances of a war with England, and
praised the British ministers for their offer of mediation. They
condemned the folly of the Government at Washington for not
accepting it, and agreed that the trade of Mobile would suffer
seriously, if they came to blows with the English. " Calhoun,"
said one of them, " has pronounced in favor of peace ; but they
say that the Governor-general of Canada is spending a mint of
money on fortifications." "It is satisfactory," replied his com
panion, " to think that we have not yet spent a dollar on prepa
rations ; yet I doubt not, if we had to fight, that the English
would get the worst of it." " Yes," said his friend, " we have
whipped them twice, and should whip them a third time."
I am bound to state, that never once, where I was known to
be an Englishman, were any similar speeches, uncourteous in
their tone toward my country, uttered in my hearing.
On the table of the inn at Claiborne, I found a book entitled
" Walsh's Appeal from the Judgment of Great Britain," in
which all the provocations given to the Americans by English
c*
58 INNS OF SOUTHERN STATES. [CHAP. XXIV.
travelers, and the daily and periodical press of Great Britain,
were brought together in one view. It is at least instructive, as
showing that a disposition to run down our transatlantic breth
ren was quite as marked, and perhaps even more conspicuous,
before any of the states had repudiated, than after the financial
crisis of 1841. So long as such an unfriendly and disparaging
tone is encouraged, England does well to keep up a larger mili
tary force in Canada, and a larger navy than would otherwise be
called for. It is only to be regretted that the Chancellor of the
Exchequer can not set down as a separate item, the charge for
indulging in anti- American prejudices, for it is possible that John
Bull, patient as he is of taxation, might doubt whether the lux
ury was worth its cost. When the landlord saw me making an
extract from Walsh, he begged me to accept the book ; the
second occasion in this tour in which mine host had pressed me
to take a volume out of his library, which he had seen me read
ing with interest.
There is a considerable uniformity in the scale of charges in
the country inns in the southern states. Great hotels in large
cities are more expensive, and small inns in out-of-the-way places,
where there were few comforts, considerably cheaper. We never
made any bargains, and observed that the bill was always equit
ably adjusted according to the accommodation provided.
From Claiborne we crossed the Alabama River, and were hos
pitably received by Mr. Blount, to whom I had a letter of intro
duction from Mr. Hamilton Couper. While my wife staid
with Mrs. Blount at Woodlands, he took me in his carriage
through the forest, to the county town of Macon, where he had
business as a magistrate. Macon (Alabama) happened to lie
. directly in my way to Clarkesville, where I wished to examine
the geology of the region where the fossil skeletons of the gigantic
zeuglodon had been procured. The district we passed through
was situated in the fork of the Alabama and Tombeckbee rivers,
where the aboriginal forest was only broken here and there by a
few clearings. To travel with an accomplished and agreeable
resident proprietor, who could entirely sympathize with my feel
ings and opinions, in a district so recently deserted by the Indians,
CHAP. XXIV.] SALE OF SLAVES. 5.9
was no small advantage. When I got to Macon, my attention
was forcibly called to the newness of things, by my friend's
pointing out to me the ground where there had been a bloody
fight with the Choctaws and Chickasaws, and I was told how
many Indians had been slaughtered there, and how the present
clerk of the Circuit Court was the last survivor of those who had
won the battle. The memory of General Jackson is quite idol
ized here. It was enough for him to give public notice in the
papers that he should have great pleasure in meeting his friends
at a given point on a given day, and there was sure to be a
muster of several hundred settlers, armed with rifles, and pre
pared for a desperate fight with 5000 or 7000 Indians.
At Macon I was fortunate enough to meet with Mr. William
Pickett, a friend of Mr. Blount's, who, after returning from the
wars in Texas, had most actively aided Mr. Koch in digging up
the skeleton of the fossil whale, or zeuglodon, near Clarkesville.
As I was anxious to knoAv the true position of that remarkable
fossil, and to ascertain how much of it had been obtained in a
single locality, I gladly accepted Mr. Pickett's offer, to act as
guide in this excursion. On repairing to the stable for the horse
destined to draw our vehicle, we were met with a singular piece
of intelligence. The stable-boy who had groomed it in the morn
ing was " up for sale." Without his assistance we could not
start, for this boy had the key of the harness-room. So I deter
mined to go to the auction, where I found that a sale of land and
negroes was going on, in consequence of the state having fore
closed one of those mortgages, before alluded to, on which public
money borrowed from European capitalists had been lent by the
state, for agricultural improvements. I first saw an old man
sold for 150 dollars ; then a boy, seventeen years old, knocked
down for 535 dollars, on which a bystander remarked to me,
" They are selling well to-day." Next came on the young mar
in whose immediate release I was more especially interested.
He stepped forward, hat in hand, with an easy, natural air
seeming to be very indifferent to the scene around him, whilt
the auctioneer began to describe him as a fine griff (which mean&
three parts black), twenty-four years old, and having many su-
60 DRUNKENNESS IN ALABAMA. [CHAP. XX IV.
perior qualities, on which he enlarged in detail. There was a
sharp bidding, which lasted only a few minutes, when he was
sold for 675 dollars. Mr. Pickett immediately asked him to get
ready our horse, and, as he came away with us, began to joke
with him, and told him " they have bid a hundred dollars more
for you than I would have given ;" to which he replied, very
complacently, " My master, who has had the hire of me for three
years, knew better than to let any one outbid him." I discovered,
in short, that he had gone to the sale with the full conviction
that the person whom he had been serving was determined to
buy him in, so that his mind was quite at ease, and the price
offered for him had made him feel well satisfied with himself.
I witnessed no mal-treatment of slaves in this state, but drunk
enness prevails to such a degree among their owners, that I can
not doubt that the power they exercise must often be fearfully
abused. In the morning the proprietor of the house where I
lodged was intoxicated, yet taking fresh drams when T left him,
and evidently thinking me somewhat unpolite when I declined
to join him. In the afternoon, when I inquired at the house of
a German settler, whether I could see some fossil bones discover
ed on his plantation, I was told that he was not at home ; in
fact, that he had not returned the night before, and was supposed
to be lying somewhere drunk in the woods, his wife having set
out in search of him in one direction, and his sister in another.
In the Congress at Washington I had seen one of the represent
atives of this state, the worse for liquor, on his legs in the
House, and I afterward heard of his being killed in a brawl in
Alabama ; yet every one here speaks of the great reform which
the temperance movement has made, it being no longer an
offense to decline taking a dram with your host.
When the conversation at Macon turned on dueling, I re
marked to one of the lawyers, that a new bill had just been
passed by the State of Mississippi, inflicting political disfran-
chisement as a penalty on every one concerned, whether, as first
or second, in a duel. He laughed, and said, " We have a simi
lar statute here, but it is nugatory, for the forfeited rights are
always restored by the Legislature, as a matter of course, if the
CHAP. XXIV.] JEALOUSY OF WEALTH. 61
offenders can prove that there was no unfair play in the fight."
Notwithstanding this assertion, such enactments are not without
their significance, and I believe that the example of New En
gland and the progress of civilization is rapidly changing the
tone of public opinion in regard to this barbarous practice.
Soon after I left Macon, the news reached us of a fatal duel at
Richmond, in Virginia, between two newspaper editors, one of
whom, in the prime of life, and leaving a family dependent on
him, was killed ; and where the coroner's jury had given a ver
dict of murder, although the survivor was afterward acquitted.
The newspaper comments on this tragedy, even in some of the
southern states, were admirable. The following extract may
be taken as an example : — " Mr. P , a man of fifty years'
experience, had been called a coward by a young man, Mr.
Thomas R . This touched his honor, which must be vin
dicated by putting his duty as a son, a father, a citizen, a Chris
tian, and a man at stake. The point to be proved by being mur
dered, was that Tom R 's opinion was incorrect, and that
Mr. P was a man of honor and of courage. Mr. P
is dead. Did his conduct prove that he was a brave or wise
man ? Is his reputation better, or is it worse for all this ? If
he could rise from the dead, and appear again in the streets of
Richmond, would he be counted more a man of courage or honor,
than if he had never taken the least notice of T. R or his
opinion ? Mr. R lives and has his opinion still, and other
people have also their opinion of him," &c.
I heard many anecdotes, when associating with small proprie
tors in Alabama, which convinced me that envy has a much
ranker growth among the aristocratic democracy of a newly set
tled slave state than in any part of New England which I visit
ed. I can scarcely conceive the ostracism of wealth or superior
attainments being carried farther. Let a gentleman who has
made a fortune at the bar, in Mobile or elsewhere, settle in some
retired part of the newly cleared country, his fences are pulled
down, and his cattle left to stray in the woods, and various
depredations committed, not by thieves, for none of his property
is carried away, but by neighbors who, knowing nothing of
62 JEALOUSY OF WEALTH. [CHAP. XXIV.
him personally, have a vulgar jealousy of his riches, and take for
granted that his pride must be great in proportion. In a recent
election for Clarke county, the popular candidate admitted the up
right character and high qualifications of his opponent, an old friend
of his own, and simply dwelt on his riches as a sufficient ground
for distrust. "A rich man," he said, " can not sympathize with
the poor." Even the anecdotes I heard, which may have been
mere inventions, convinced me how intense was this feeling. One,
who had for some time held a seat in the Legislature finding him
self in a new canvass deserted by many of his former supporters,
observed that he had always voted strictly according to his instruc
tions. " Do you think," answered a former partisan, "that they
would vote for you, after your daughter came to the ball in them
fixings ?" His daughter, in fact, having been at Mobile, had had
a dress made there with flounces, according to the newest Parisian
fashion, and she had thus sided, as it were, with the aristocracy
of the city, setting itself up above the democracy of the pine woods.
In the new settlements there the small proprietors, or farmers, are
keenly jealous of thriving lawyers, merchants, and capitalists. One
of the candidates for a county in Alabama confessed to me that he
had thought it good policy to go every where on foot when soli
citing votes, though he could have commanded a horse, and the
distances were great. That the young lady, whose "fixings" I
have alluded to, had been ambitiously in the fashion, I make no
doubt ; for my wife found that the cost of making up a dress at
Mobile was twenty dollars, or four times the ordinary London
price ! The material costs about the same as in London or Paris,
At New Orleans the charge for making a gown is equally high.
I often rejoiced, in this excursion, that we had brought no
servants with us from England, so strong is the prejudice here
against what they term a white body-servant. Besides, it would
be unreasonable to expect any one, who is not riding his own
hobby, to rough it in the backwoods. In many houses I hesi
tated to ask for water or towels, for fear of giving offense,
although the yeoman with whom I lodged for the night allowed
me to pay a moderate charge for my accommodation. Nor
could I venture to beg any one to rub a thick coat of mud off
CHAP. XXIV.] EMIGRANTS TO THE WEST. G1
my boots or trowsers, lest I should be thought to reflect on the
members of the family, who had no idea of indulging in such
refinements themselves. I could have dispensed cheerfully with
milk, butter, and other such luxuries ; but I felt much the want
of a private bed-room. Very soon, however, I came to regard it
as no small privilege to be allowed to have even a bed to myself.
On one occasion, when my host had humored my whims so far
in regard to privacy, I felt almost ashamed to see, in consequence,
a similar sized bed in the same room, occupied by my companion
and two others. When I related these inconveniences afterward
to an Episcopal clergyman, he told me that the bishop and some
of his clergy, when they travel through these woods in summer,
and the lawyers, when on the circuit, or canvassing for votes at
elections, have, in addition to these privations, to endure the
bites of countless musquitos, fleas, and bugs, so that I had great
reason to congratulate myself that it was now so cold. More
over, there are parties of emigrants in some of these woods,
where women delicately brought up, accustomed to be waited
on, and with infants at the breast, may now be seen on their
way to Texas, camping out, although the ground within their
tent is often soaked with heavy rain. " If you were here in the
hot season," said another, " the exuberant growth of the creepers
and briars would render many paths in the woods, through which
you now pass freely, impracticable, and venomous snakes would
make the forest dangerous."
Calling on a proprietor to beg him to show me some fossil
bones, he finished by offering me his estate for sale at 3500 dol
lars. He said he had been settled there for twenty years with
his wife, longer than any one else in the whole country. He
had no children ; and when I expressed wonder that he could
leave, at his advanced age, a farm which he had reclaimed from
the wilderness, and improved so much, he answered, " I hope to
feel more at home in Texas, for all my old neighbors have gone
there, and new people have taken their place here."
The uncertainty of the cotton crops, and the sudden fluctua
tions in the value of cotton from year to year, have been the ruin
of many, and have turned almost every landowner into a mer«
64 DEMOCRATIC EQUALITY. [CHAP. XXIV
chant and speculator. The maize, or Indian corn, appears to be
almost as precarious a crop, for this year it has entirely failed in
many places, owing to the intense summer heat. I passed some
mills in which the grain, cob, arid husk were all ground up to
gether for the cattle and hogs, and they are said to thrive more
on this mixture than on the grain alone.
The different stages of civilization to which families have
attained, who live here on terms of the strictest equality, is often
amusing to a stranger, but must be intolerable to some of those
settlers who have been driven by their losses from the more ad
vanced districts of Virginia and South Carolina, having to begin
the world again. Sometimes, in the morning, my host would be
of the humblest class of " crackers," or some low, illiterate Ger
man or Irish emigrants, the wife sitting with a pipe in her mouth,
doing no work and reading no books. In the evening, I came to
a neighbor, whose library was well stored with works of French and
English authors, and whose first question to me was, " Pray tell
me, who do you really think is the author of the Vestiges of
Creation?" If it is difficult in Europe, in the country far from
towns, to select society on a principle of congeniality of taste and
feeling, the reader may conceive what must be the control of
geographical circumstances here, exaggerated by ultra-democratic
notions of equality and the pride of race. Nevertheless, these
regions will probably bear no unfavorable comparison with such
parts of our colonies, in Canada, the Cape, or Australia, as have
been settled for an equally short term of years, and I am bound
to say, that I passed my time agreeably and profitably in Ala
bama, for every one, as I have usually found in newly peopled
districts, was hospitable and obliging to a stranger. Instead of
the ignorant wonder, very commonly expressed in out-of-the-way
districts of England, France, or Italy, at travelers who devote
money and time to a search for fossil bones and shells, each
planter seemed to vie with another in his anxiety to give me in
formation in regard to the precise spots where organic remains
had been discovered. Many were curious to learn my opinion
as to the kind of animal to which the huge vertebrae, against
which their plows sometimes strike, may have belonged. The
CHAP. XXIV.] FOSSIL WHALE, OR ZEUGLODON. C5
magnitude, indeed, and solidity of these relics of the colossal zeug-
lodon, are such as might well excite the astonishment of the
most indifferent. Dr. Buckley informed me that on the estate
of Judge Creagh, which I visited, he had assisted in digging out
one skeleton, where the vertebral column, almost unbroken, ex
tended to the length of seventy feet, and Dr. Emmons afterward
showed me the greater part of this skeleton in the Museum of
Albany, New York. On the same plantation, part of another
backbone, fifty feet long, was dug up, and a third was met with
at no great distance. Before I left Alabama, I had obtained
evidence of so many localities of similar fossils, chiefly between
Macon and Clarkesville, a distance of ten miles, that I concluded
they must have belonged to at least forty distinct individuals.
I visited, with Mr. Pickett, the exact spot where he and Mr.
Koch disinterred a portion of the skeleton afterward exhibited in
New York under the name of Hydrarchos, or " the Water-king."
The bones were imbedded in a calcareous marly stratum of the
Eocene formation, and I observed in it many casts of the cham
bers of a large nautilus, which were at first mistaken by Koch
for the paddles of the huge animal. Portions of the vertebral
column, exhibited by him, in 1845, at New York and Boston,
were procured in Washington County, fifteen miles distant in a
direct line from this place, where the head was discovered.*
Some single vertebra, which I found here, were so huge and so
impregnated with carbonate of lime, that I could not lift them
from the ground without an effort. Professor Jeffries Wyman
was the first who clearly pointed out that the bones, of which
the factitious skeleton called Hydrarchos was made up, must
have belonged to different individuals. They were in different
stages of ossification, he said, some adult, others immature, a
state of things never combined in one and the same individ
ual. Mr. Owen had previously maintained, that the animal was
not reptilian, but cetacean, because each tooth was furnished
with double roots, implanted in corresponding double sockets.
After my return from America, a nearly entire skull of the zeug-
lodon was found by Mr. S. F. Holmes and Professor L. ft,
* See "American Jour, of Science," New Series, vol. i. p. 312.
68 VOYAGE TO MOBILE. [CHAP. XXIV.
Gibbes, of Charleston, S. C., and it was found to have the
double occipital condyles, only met with in mammals, and the
convoluted tympanic bones which are characteristic of cetaceans,
so that the real nature of this remarkable extinct species of the
whale tribe has now been placed beyond all doubt.
Feb. 5. — On my return from this excursion, I rejoined my
wife at Mr. Blount's, and we then went back to the inn at Clai-
borne to wait for a steamer bound for Mobile. The first large
vessel which touched for a moment at the landing, came up the
river from that city, and stopped to know if there were any pas-
seno-ers. The answer was, "No, what news ?" To which they
replied, " Cotton up one eighth — no war." They were off in an
instant, and, a few hours later, when it was dark, another large
vessel was hailed coming down stream. We were glad to find
that it was the Amaranth, commanded by our old friend Captain
Bragdon, who had sailed up and down more than 800 miles, in
the interval since we saw him. Once more we descended the
steep cliff, on the slope of which we had spent many pleasant
hours, gathering hundreds of beautifully preserved shells, and
saw it illuminated by a blaze of torch-light.
Between Claiborne and Mobile, there are about 100 miles of
river navigation, our course being nearly due south. About half
way, -we passed, in the night, the junction of the Tombeckbee
and Alabama rivers, and, in the morning, saw in all directions a
low flat country, which continued till we reached the metropolis
of Alabama.
CHAPTER XXV.
Voyage from Mobile to Tuscaloosa. — Visit to the Coal-Field of Alabama. —
Its Agreement in Age with the ancient Coal of Europe. — Absenteeism
in Southern States. — Progress of Negroes. — Unthriftiness of Slave-Labor.
— University of Tuscaloosa. — Churches. — Bankruptcies. — Judges and
Law Courts. — Geology on the Tombeckbee River. — Artesian Wells. —
Limestone Bluff of St. Stephen's. — Negro shot by Overseer. — Involuntary
Efforts of the Whites to civilize the Negroes. — New Statute in Georgia
against Black Mechanics. — The Effects of speedy Emancipation and the
free Competition of White and Black Laborers considered.
Feb. 8, 1846. — THE Tuscaloosa steamer was just ready to
sail the next morning for Mobile, up the great western tributary
of the Alabama, called the Tombeckbee (or more familiarly "the
Bigby") ; I determined, therefore, to embark in her for the capi
tal of the state, about 400 miles distant by water to the north,
where I wished to explore the coal-field in which the coal used
for gas and fuel at Mobile is procured, and to ascertain its geo
logical age. Our steamer was 170 feet long, and made about
ten miles an hour against the stream. She carried stores of all
kinds to the upper country, but was not heavily laden ; and, on
her return, is to bring down a large freight of cotton. By means
of the high-pressure principle and the horizontal movement of the
piston, she draws only a few feet of water, notwithstanding her
great length. These steamers never appear to such advantage
as when stemming an adverse current, for the boat can then be
steered with more precision, and less time is lost at the landings ;
at each of these they can go up direct to the bank, whereas, in
descending, they have to turn round and re-ascend the stream
before they can stop. There were also rafts laden with hugo
piles of wood ready to be taken in tow at different points, the
logs being thrown on board by our negroes, while the steamer
was going on at full speed. The empty raft is then turned
adrift, and is easily piloted down the stream by two men, a ma-
68 THE TOMBECKBEE RIVER. [CHAP. XXV.
noeuvre which could not be practiced when vessels are going
in the opposite direction. Al| the chairs in the cabin of the
Tuscaloosa were so constructed as to be capable of floating, and
acting as life-preservers — a useful precaution on a river, whatever
may be thought of such safeguards in an ocean steamer.
The river Tombeckbee was so high that the trees of both
banks seemed to be growing in a lake. Before dark, we came
to the limestone bluff at St. Stephen's, more than sixty miles due
north of Mobile, and nearly 150 miles by the windings of the
river. The tide is still slightly perceptible, even at this distance
from the sea, and the water never rises during a flood more than
five or six feet above its ordinary level ; whereas, higher up, at
Demopolis, the extreme rise is not less than fifty feet, and at
Tuscaloosa, sixty-nine feet. At the latter place, indeed, we
found the waters so high, that the falls were converted into
mere rapids. The magnificent scale of the navigation on these
southern rivers in the rainy season, contrasts remarkably with
the want of similar facilities of water communication in Texas
and the more western countries bordering the gulf of Mexico.
We admired the canes on the borders of the river between Tus
caloosa and Dernopolis, some of which I found to be thirty feet
high. Whether this magnificent reed, which is said sometimes
to grow forty feet high, is a distinct species, or merely a variety
of Miegia macrosperma, which I had seen from six to ten feet
high, as far north as Kentucky and North Carolina, botanists
are not yet agreed.
Tuscaloosa is situated, like Augusta, Milledgeville, and Co
lumbus, at the falls of a river, though, in this instance, the falls
do not occur, as usual, at the junction of the granitic rocks, with
the tertiary or cretaceous strata, but at the point where the latter
first meet the carboniferous formation. The lower beds of the
horizontal cretaceous series in contact with the inclined coal-mea
sures, consist of gravel, some of the quartzose pebbles being as
large as hens' eggs, and they look like an ancient beach, as if the
cretaceous sea had terminated here, or shingle had been accumu
lated near a shore.
There is 'a flourishing college at Tuscaloosa, standing upon a
CHAP. XXV.] COAL-FIELD OF ALABAMA. 6D
hill 450 feet above the level of the sea. Here I was welcomed
by the professor of chemistry, Mr. Brumby, who had the kindness
to set out immediately with me (Feb. 10) to examine the coal
fields lying immediately north of this place. Starting in a north
easterly direction, we first entered a hilly country formed of sand
stone, grit, and shale of the coal formation, precisely like the strata
in Avhich coal occurs in England. These hills were covered
with long-leaved pines, and the large proportion they bear to the
hard wood is said to have been increased by the Indian practice
of burning the grass ; the bark of the oak and other kinds of hard
wood being more combustible, and more easily injured by fire,
than that of the fir tribe. Every where the young seedlings of
the long-leaved pine were coming up in such numbers that one
might have supposed the ground to have been sown with them ;
and I was reminded how rarely we see similar self-sown firs in
English plantations. When we had gone about twenty miles
northeast of Tuscaloosa, we came to a higher country, where
nearly all the pines disappeared, and were replaced by oak, hick
ory, sumach, gum-trees, sassafras, and many others. In some
clearings here, as in Georgia and the Carolinas, the quantity or
cordage of wood fit for charcoal produced in thirty years by the
new growth, is said, from its greater density, to have equaled the
wood contained in the aboriginal forest.
Near the banks of the Black Warrior River, we examined sev
eral open quarries of coal, where the edges of the beds had been
dug into by different proprietors, no regular mining operations
having as yet been attempted. Even at the outcrop the coal is
of excellent quality, and highly bituminous, and I soon satisfied
myself that the strata were not of the age of the Richmond coal
before described,^ but were as ancient as that of the Alleghany
Hills, or of Western Virginia. In the beds of black shale cover
ing each coal-seam, were impressions of fossil plants, precisely sim
ilar to those occurring in the ancient coal-measures of Europe
and America. Among these we found more than one species of
Catamite, several ferns of the genera Sphenopteris and JVeurop-
teris, the trunks of Lepidodendron and Sigilaria, the stems and
* Ante, vol. i. p. 214.
70 ABSENTEEISM IN SOUTHERN STATES. [CHAP. XXV.
leaves of Aster ophyllite, and in other beds the characteristic root
called Stigmaria, not uncommon.^
According to Professor Brumby, this coal-field of the Warrior
River is ninety miles long from north to south, and from ten to
thirty miles in breadth, and includes in it some coal-seams not
less than ten feet thick. It forms a southern prolongation of the
great Appalachian coal-field, with which I was unacquainted when
I compiled my map, published in 1845, of the geology of North
America.! Its geographical situation is peculiarly interesting ;
for, being situated in lat. 33° 10' north, it constitutes at present
the extreme southern limit to which the ancient carboniferous
vegetation has been traced in the northern hemisphere, whether
on the east or west side of the Atlantic.
Continuing our route into the upland country, we entered about
thirty-three miles N.E. of Tuscaloosa, a region called Rooke's
Valley, where rich beds of ironstone and limestone bid fair, from
their proximity to the coal, to become one day a source of great
mineral wealth. At present the country has been suffered to re
trograde, and the population to grow less numerous than it was
twenty years ago, owing to migrations to Louisiana and Texas,
and partly to the unthriftiness of slave labor.
We traveled in a carriage with two horses, and could advance
but a few miles a day, so execrable and often dangerous was the
state of the roads. Occasionally we had to get out and call at a
farm-house to ask the proprietor's leave to take down his snake
fence, to avoid a deep mud-hole in the road. Our vehicle was
then driven over a stubble field of Indian corn, at the end of
which we made our exit, some fifty yards on, by pulling down
another part of the fence. In both places the labor of rebuilding
the fence, which consists simply of poles loosely placed together
and not nailed, was entailed upon us, and caused no small delay.
One of the evils, tending greatly to retard the progress of the
southern states, is absenteeism, which is scarcely known in the
North. The cheapness of land, caused by such rapid emigration
* See " Quart. Journ. of Geol. Soc.," vol. ii. p. 278, and for a list of
the plants, by Mr. C. J. F. Bunbury, p. 282. ibid,
t See "Travels," &c. vol. ii.
CHAP. XXV.] PROGRESS OF NEGROES, 71
to the South and West, and the frequent sales of the estates of
insolvents, tempts planters to buy more land than they can man
age themselves, which they must therefore give in charge to over
seers. Accordingly, much of the property in Alabama belongs to
rich Carolinians, and some wealthy slave-owners of Alabama have
estates in Mississippi. With a view of checking the increase of
these "pluralities," a tax has recently been imposed on absentees.
In Alabama, as in Georgia, I found that the colored people were
more intelligent in the upper country, and I listened with satis
faction to complaints of their setting themselves up, and being-
less content than formerly with their lot. That men of color can
sometimes make large fortunes in trade, was proved to me by a
fact which came accidentally to my knowledge. One of them,
by standing security for a white man, had lately lost no less than
17,000 dollars, or 3400 guineas; yet he was still prospering,
and kept a store, and, being a free man would willingly have
sent his son to the college of Tuscaloosa, had he not been prevent
ed by the prejudices of a white aristocracy, ostentatiously boast
ful of its love of equality. In consequence of similar impediments,
many thriving artisans of the colored race remain uneducated,
and are obliged to have white men to write for them and collect
their debts ; and I found that many cabinet-makers, carpenters,
builders, and other mechanics, earning high wages, who, in New
England, would send their sons to college, do not contribute here
even to the maintenance of common schools, their children riot
being permitted by law to learn to read and write. I can not
believe, however, that this state of things can endure many years,
for I found that an excellent Sabbath school had been established
by the Presbyterians in Tuscaloosa, for the children of negroes.
There are two colored men in this town, who, having a dash of
Indian as well as negro blood in their veins, have become the
owners of slaves.
Frequent mention was made during our stay in Alabama, of a
negro named Ellis, a blacksmith, who had taught himself Greek
and Latin. He is now acquiring Hebrew, and I was sorry to
hear that the Presbyterians contemplate sending him as a mis
sionary to Liberia. If it were an object in the south to elevate
72 FREE AND SLAVE LABOR. [CHAP. XXV.
the blacks, he might be far more instrumental in forwarding the
cause of civilization and Christianity by remaining at home, for
the negroes like a preacher of their own race.
The colored domestic servants are treated with great indul
gence at Tuscaloosa. One day some of them gave a supper to a
large party of their friends in the house of a family which we
visited, and they feasted their guests on roast turkeys, ice-creams,
jellies, and cakes. Turkeys here cost only seventy-five cents, or
about three shillings the couple, prepared for the table ; the price
of a wild turkey, an excellent bird, is twenty-five cents, or one
shilling. After calculating the interest of the money laid out in
the purchase of the slaves, and the price of their food, a lawyer
undertook to show me that a negro cost less than an English
servant ; " but, as two blacks do the work of only one white, it
is a mere delusion," he said, '• to imagine that their labor is not
dearer." It is usual, moreover, not to exact the whole of their
time for domestic duties. I found a footman, for example, work
ing on his own account as a bootmaker at spare hours, and another
getting perquisites by blacking the students' shoes.
That slave labor is more expensive than free, is an opinion
which is certainly gaining ground in the higher parts of Alabama,
and is now professed openly by some northerners who have settled
there. One of them said to me, " Half the population of the
south is employed in seeing that the other half do their work, arid
they who do work, accomplish half what they might do under a
better system." " We can not," said another, " raise capital
enough for new cotton factories, because all our savings go to buy
negroes, or, as has lately happened, to feed them, when the crop
is deficient." A white bricklayer had lately gone from Tusca
loosa to serve an apprenticeship in his trade at Boston. He had
been earning there 2£ dollars a day, by laying 3000 bricks daily.
A southern planter, who had previously been exceedingly boastful
and proud of the strength of one of his negroes (who could, in
fact, carry a much greater weight than this same white brick
layer), was at first incredulous when he heard of this feat, for his
pattern slave could not lay more than 1000 bricks a day.
During my absence on the geological excursion above mention-
CHAP. XXV.] CHURCHES. 73
ed, through forests recently abandoned by the Indians, and where
their paths may still be traced, I found that my wife had made
many agreeable acquaintances at Tuscaloosa. Two of the ladies
she had seen (New Englanders, who had married southerners)
were reading the works of Schiller and Goethe in the original for
their amusement. My companion, the Professor of Chemistry,
was not the only one from whom I obtained much scientific in
formation, and we enjoyed the pleasure, one clear night, of look
ing through a telescope recently sent from London, and were
shown by Mr. Barnard, the teacher of astronomy, some double
stars and southern constellations not visible in England.
The annual expense of a student in the University is 3 0 0 dol
lars, or sixty guineas a year, including board. A gentleman,
whose family consisted of eight individuals, with eight negro serv
ants, told me that he could, not live respectably for less than 1700
dollars a year (340 guineas.) Yet he paid no less than 40 dol
lars, or eight guineas, a year, for a pew in the Presbyterian
church, holding six persons, which will give some idea of the lib
eral support afforded, under the- voluntary system, to the minis
ters of religion. Among the professors here, there are Baptists,
Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and I was told of one that he was
not a member of any church, but a regular attendant at the Bap
tist or Presbyterian meeting. On Sunday, we heard the Bishop
of Alabama preach, the congregation here being reckoned the
second in the state. The first is at Mobile, and there are about
ten in all. The service was read by another clergymen, and as,
according to the usual custom in America, there was no clerk,
the Bishop read the responses and gave out the psalms, seeming
to us, at first, to be performing the office of clerk. It often struck
me as an advantage in the United States, that the responses are
never read by an illiterate man, as happens not uncommonly in
our country parishes, and the congregation joins in the service
more earnestly when the part which properly belongs to them
does not devolve on a regular functionary. A few days later,
when I was on my way, in a steamer, to Mobile, I conversed
with an Episcopal clergyman, a high churchman, whose profes
sion I had recognized by the strictness of his costume. He told
VOL. II. D
74 JUDGES AND LAW COURTS. [CHAP. XXV.
me he meant to visit England, and, with that view, had for some
months abstained entirely from the chewing of tobacco, having
been told it would be considered a breach of good manners there.
His physician, also, had assured him that this habit, which he
had taken pains to acquire when a boy, because he thought it
manly, though much against his natural taste, was injuring his
health. He seemed to know the names of almost every bishop
and dignitary of the English Church, their incomes and shades
of opinion, and regretted that Archbishop Whately had taken
such low ground in regard to the apostolic succession. " The
bishop of this diocese," he said, "receives about 800/. a year,
and has to pay his own traveling expenses, but in the older states
the bishops have higher salaries." Episcopal clergymen usually
receive about 500 dollars (or 100 guineas) in country parishes,
and four times that sum in large towns, or even more. Upon
the whole, he thought them well paid, in proportion to the aver
age scale of fortunes in the United States, and he was convinced,
that as the wealthiest class are so often Episcopalians, his church
is a gainer in worldly advantages as well as spiritual influence-,
by being wholly unconnected with the state.
In the afternoon, the Presbyterian minister of Tuscaloosa de
livered a good discourse on the necessity of a higher standard of
honor in commercial affairs. Channing had said, that they who
become insolvent by over-trading, often inflict more misery than
highwaymen and thieves ; and this preacher affirmed that for
each hundred persons engaged in trade in Alabama, there had
been ninety-seven bankruptcies. One of the citizens, who was
scandalized at this assertion, afterward raised the question, whether
it was true, arid I asked if any one of the party could name a
tradesman in their town who had not failed once in the last
twenty years. They were only able to mention two.
I was surprised at the number of lawyers at Tuscaloosa who
enjoy the title of Judge, and equally amused when the cause was
explained to me. False notions of economy have from time to
time induced the democracy to lower the salaries of the judges;
especially in the inferior courts. The consequence has been, that
as the state can no longer command the services of the best law-
CHAP. XXV. J GEOLOGY. 73
yers, the bench has grown weaker than the bar, and the author
ity of judicial decisions has been impaired. Hence the increased
number of appeals to the Supreme Court of the state now sitting
at Tuscaloosa. Yet, in spite of this augmentation of business,
the income of the judges in this court also has been lowered from
3000 to 2500 dollars ; although lawyers in good practice in Mo
bile have been known to make 10,000 or 14,000 dollars a year.
It is by no means uncommon, therefore, for one who has a large
family, to give up the bench and return to the bar ; but, in that
case, the title of Judge is still given to him by courtesy, and is
much prized, especially by northern men, who are willing to
make a sacrifice for this honor, by serving a few years on the
bench and then retiring from it.
I have before alluded to the deep ravines recently cut through
incoherent strata in Georgia, after the natural wood has been
felled.* One of these modern gulleys may now be seen intersect
ing most inconveniently the main street of Tuscaloosa, and sev
eral torrents are cutting their way backward through the " cre
taceous" clay, sand, and gravel of the hill on which the Capitol
stands. They even threaten in a few years to undermine that
edifice. I had observed other recent ravines, from seventy to
eighty feet deep, in the Eocene strata between Macon and Clarkes-
ville (Alabama), where the forest had been felled a few years
before.
On my way back from Tuscaloosa to Mobile, I had a good
opportunity of examining the geological structure of the country,
seeing various sections, first of the cretaceous, and then lower
down of the tertiary strata. The great beds of gravel and sand
above alluded to, forming the inferior part of the cretaceous series,
might from their want of consolidation, be mistaken for much
newer deposits, if their position on the Tombeckbee, as well as
on the Alabama River at Montgomery, were not perfectly clear.
They pass beneath the great marlite formation, full of cretaceous
shells, which gives rise to the prairie soils before described,! as
nearly destitute of natural wood, and crossing Alabama in an
east and west direction. These I examined at Erie, at Demo-
* Ante, p. 28. * Ante, p. 41.
76 ARTESIAN WELLS. [CHAP. XXV.
polls, and at Arcola, where they contain hippurites and other char
acteristic fossils. The depth to which they have sunk Artesian
wells through them in many places (between 500 and 1000
feet), is astonishing. One boring through blue marl and lime
stone at Erie, in Greene County, was 469 feet deep, and the well
yielded 350 gallons of water per minute at the surface. The
water rises forty feet above the surface, and can be made to reach
fifty feet, though in diminished quantity. Here, as in Europe,
the temperature of the earth's crust is found to increase as we
descend, the water being sensibly warmer than that of the air, so
much so that in cold weather it sends forth steam. Each new
excavation at Erie robs the wells previously bored of part of
their supply. The auger with which they perforate the soil is
four inches in diameter, and the average cost of excavation sixty-
two cents, or about 2s. 6d. per foot, for the whole depth of 469
feet. No solid rock has been pierced here, the strata consisting
throughout of soft, horizontally stratified blue limestone. They
have also pierced these same rocks, at a distance of three miles
from. Demopolis (a town situated at the junction of the Tom-
beckbee and Black Warrior rivers), to the depth of 930 feet
without gaining the water, yet they do not despair of success, as
sand has just been reached.
At Arcola, the proprietor presented me with several creta
ceous fossils, and some irregular tubular bodies, the origin of
which he wished to have explained. I immediately recognized
them as identical with the vitreous tubes found at Drigg, in Cum
berland, in hills of shifting sand, which have been described and
figured in the Transactions of the Geological Society of London.*
They have a glazed and vitrified interior, and bodies of similar
form and structure were first supposed by Saussure to have been
due to the passage of lightning through sand, a theory now gen
erally adopted.
If any geologist retains to this day the doctrine once so popu
lar, that at remote periods marine deposits of contemporaneous
origin were formed every where throughout the globe with the
same mineral characters, he would do well to compare the suc-
# Vol. ii. p. 528, and vol. v. p. 617, 1st series.
CHAP. XXV.] BLUFF OF ST. STEPHEN'S. 77
cession of rocks on the Alabama River with those of the same
date in England. If there were no fossils, he might suppose the
lower cretaceous beds of loose gravel to be the newest tertiary,
the main body of the chalk to be lias, and the soft limestone of
St. Stephen's, which is tertiary, to be the representative of chalk.
When I arrived at the last-mentioned rock, or the white calca
reous bluff of St. Stephen's, it was quite dark, but Captain
Lavargy, who commanded the vessel, was determined I should
not be disappointed. He therefore said he would stop and take
in a supply of wood at the place, and gave me a boat, with two
negroes amply provided with torches of pine wood, which gave so
much light that I was able to explore the cliff from one end to
the other, and to collect many fossils. The bluff was more than
100 feet high, and in parts formed of an aggregate of corals
resembling nummulites, but called, by A. D'Orbigny. orbitoides.
I had seen the same " orbitoidal" limestone in the interior of
Clarke County, forming knolls, on which many cedars or junipers
were growing, reminding me greatly of parts of the English South
Downs, covered with yew trees or juniper, where the pure cal
careous soil of the chalk reaches the surface.
When I looked down from the top of the precipice at St. Ste
phen's, the scene which presented itself was most picturesque.
Near us was the great steamboat, throwing off a dense column
of white vapor, and an active body of negroes throwing logs on
board by torch-light. One of my companions had clambered
with me, torch in hand, to the top of the bluff; the other was
amusing himself in the boat below by holding another blazing
torch under large festoons of Spanish moss, which hung from the
boughs of a huge plane tree. These mossy streamers had at
length been so dried up by the heat, that they took fire, and add
ed to the brilliant illumination. My fellow passengers were asleep
during this transaction, but congratulated me the next morning
on having had the command of the vessel during the night.
On board the steamer were three gentlemen of respectable
families and good standing in society, who had been ruined by
their drunken habits. They had all been brought up to the bar,
and two of them were married. One had become quite imbe-
73 NEGRO SHOT BY OVERSEER. [CHAP. XXV.
cile ; and I saw the captain and clerk interfere to prevent him
from taking more spirits. We heard many lamentations at the
prevalence of this vice in Alabama, and were told of a skillful
physician who had lost all his practice by giving way to intem
perance. While one of the passengers was conversing with me
on this subject, he called my attention to an overseer just coming
on board, who, not long ago, had shot a negro, a ringleader in a
conspiracy. The affair, he said, had not reached a desperate
point, and might have been better managed, had he not been a
passionate man. I was going to express my indignation at the
idea of such an agent continuing to be intrusted with power,
when I saw him approaching us. His countenance was by no
means prepossessing, arid I involuntarily withdrew. To my sur
prise, my companion, whose general opinions had pleased me
much, greeted and shook hands with his acquaintance with appa
rent cordiality.
This adventure, and my meeting with the slave-stealer on
board the " General Clinch," before related,* were the two cases
which most shocked my feelings in the course of my present, tour
in Georgia and Alabama. To inquire into the condition of the
negroes, and the evils arising out of the relation of master and
slave, was not the object of my visit ; but when I afterward
related to an abolitionist in Massachusetts, how little actual suf
fering had obtruded itself on my notice, he told me that great
pains must have been taken by the planters to conceal from me
the true state of things, while they had taken care to propitiate
me by hospitable attentions. I was glad, however, to find my
experience borne out by that of a Scotch weaver, William Thom
son, of Stonehaven, who traveled in the years 1841— 2 for his
health in the southern states. He supported himself as he went
along by manual labor, and lived on intimate terms with persons
of a different class of society from those with whom I had most
intercourse. On his return home he published a small book, in
which he says, " It will appear, to those who knew my opinions
on slavery before I visited America, that, like most others who
can judge dispassionately, I have changed my opinion consider-
* Ante, vol. i. p. 232.
CHAP. XXV.] SLAVERY IN SOUTHERN STATES. 79
ably." He gives a detailed account of his adventures in the re
gions which I traversed in Alabama, Georgia, and many other
states, and concludes by observing, — " After witnessing negro
slavery in mostly all the slaveholding states, — having lived for
weeks in cotton plantations, observing closely the actual condition
of the negroes, — I can assert, without fear of contradiction from
any man who has any knowledge of the subject, that I have
never witnessed one-fifth of the real suffering that I have seen in
manufacturing establishments in Great Britain." In reference to
another topic, he affirms " that the members of the same family
of negroes are not so much scattered as are those of working men
in Scotland, whose necessities compel them to separate at an age
when the American slave is running about gathering health and
strength."-*
I am aware that there is some danger, when one hears the
philanthropist declaiming in terms of gross exaggeration on the
horrors of slavery and the crimes of the planters, of being tempted
by a spirit of contradiction, or rather by a love of justice, to coun
teract misrepresentation, by taking too favorable a view of the
condition and prospects of the negroes. But there is another
reason, also, which causes the traveler in the south to moderate
his enthusiasm for emancipation. He is forced continually to
think of the responsibility which would be incurred, if several
millions of human beings were hastily set aside, like so many ma
chines, by withdrawing from them suddenly the protection afford
ed by their present monopoly of labor. In the opening of the
market freely to white competitors, before the race is more im
proved, consists their danger.
Yet, on taking a near view of the slave question, we are often
thrown into opposite states of mind and feeling, according as the
interests of the white or negro race happen, for the moment, to
claim our sympathy. It is useless now to look back and wish,
for the sake of civilization, that no Africans had ever crossed the
Atlantic. Their number in the Union now exceeds three mill
ions, and, as they have doubled in the last twenty-five years, we
* Tradesman's Travels in the United States, &c., in the years 1840-42,
p. 182.
80 CIVILIZATION OF NEGROES. [CHAP. XXV.
must expect, unless some plan can be devised to check their in
crease, that they will amount, before the close of this century, to
twelve millions, by which time the white population will have
augmented to eighty millions. Notwithstanding this increase of
negroes, were it not for disturbing causes, to which I shall pres
ently advert, I should cherish the most sanguine hopes of their
future improvement and emancipation, and even their ultimate
amalgamation and fusion with the whites, so highly has my esti
mate of their moral and intellectual capabilities been raised by
what I have lately seen in Georgia and Alabama. Were it not
for impediments which white competition and political ascenden
cy threaten to throw in the way of negro progress, the grand ex
periment might be fairly tried, of civilizing several millions of
blacks, not by philanthropists, but by a steadier and surer agen
cy — the involuntary efforts of several millions of whites. In spite
of prejudice and fear, and in defiance of stringent laws enacted
against education, three millions of a more enlightened and pro
gressive race are brought into contact with an equal number of
laborers lately in a savage state, and taken from a continent
where the natives have proved themselves, for many thousand
years, to be singularly unprogressive. Already their task-mas
ters have taught them to speak, with more or less accuracy, one
of the noblest of languages, to shake off many old superstitions, to
acquire higher ideas of morality, and habits of neatness and clean
liness, and have converted thousands of them to Christianity.
Many they have emancipated, and the rest are gradually ap
proaching to the condition of the ancient serfs of Europe half a
century or more before their bondage died out.
All this has been done at an enormous sacrifice of time and
money ; an expense, indeed, which all the governments of Eu
rope and all the Christian missionaries, whether Romanist or
Protestant, could never have effected in five centuries. Even in
the few states which I have already visited since I crossed the
Potomac, several hundred thousand whites of all ages, among
whom the children are playing by no means the least effective
part, are devoting themselves with greater or lesd activity to these
involuntary educational exertions.
CHAP. XXV.] LAW AGAINST BLACK MECHANICS. 81
It had previously been imagined that an impassable gulf
separated the two races ; but now it is proved that more than
half that space can, in a few generations, be successfully passed
over, and the humble negro of the coast of Guinea has shown
himself to be one of the most imitative and improvable of human
beings. Yet the experiment may still be defeated, not so much
by the fanaticism of abolitionists, or the prejudices of those slave^
owners who are called perpetualists, who maintain that slavery
should be permanent, and that it is a blessing in itself to the negro,
but by the jealousy of an unscrupulous democracy invested with
political power. Of the imminent nature of this peril, I was never
fully aware, until I was startled by the publication of an act
passed by the Legislature of Georgia during my visit to that
state, December 27th, 1845. The following is the preamble
and one of the clauses : —
" An act to prohibit colored mechanics and masons, being
slaves, or free persons of color, being mechanics or masons, from
making contracts for the erection of buildings, or for the repair
of buildings, and declaring the white person or persons directly
or indirectly contracting with or employing them, as well as the
master, employer, manager, or agent for said slave, or guardian
for said free person of color, authorizing or permitting the same,
guilty of a misdemeanor," and prescribing punishment for the
violation of this act.
"Section 1. — Be it enacted by the Senate and House of
Representatives of the State of Georgia in General Assembly
met, and it is hereby enacted by the authority of the same, That
from and after the 1st day of February next, each and every
white person who shall hereafter contract or bargain with any
slave, mechanic, or mason, or free person of color, being a
mechanic or mason, shall be liable to be indicted for a mis
demeanor ; and, on conviction, to be fined, at the discretion of the
Court, not exceeding two hundred dollars."
Then follows another clause imposing the like penalties on the
owners of slaves, or guardians of free persons of color, who au
thorize the contracts prohibited by this statute.
I may first observe, in regard to this disgraceful law, which
D*
82 DEGRADED POSITION OF NEGROES. [CHAP. XXV,
was only carried by a small majority in the Georgian Legislature,
that it proves that not a few of the negro race have got on so
well in the world in reputation and fortune, and in skill in certain
arts, that it was worth while to legislate against them in order
to keep them down, and prevent them from entering into success
ful rivalry with the whites. It confirms, therefore, most fully the
impression which all I saw in Georgia had left on my mind, that
the blacks are steadily rising in social importance in spite of slavery ;
or, to speak more correctly, by aid of that institution, assuming,
as it does, in proportion as the whites become civilized, a more
and more mitigated form. In the next place I shall endeavor to
explain to the English reader the real meaning of so extraordinary
a decree. Mr. R. H. Wilde, formerly senator for Georgia, told me
that he once knew a colored freeman who had been brought up as a
saddler, and was a good workman. To his surprise he found him
one day at Saratoga, in the State of New York, acting as servant at
an hotel. " Could you not get higher wages," he inquired, " as a
saddler ?" " Yes," answered he ; " but no sooner was I engaged by
a < boss,' than all the other workmen quitted." They did so, not be
cause he was a slave, for he had long been emancipated, but because
he was a negro. It is evident, therefore, that it requires in Georgia
the force of a positive statute to deprive the negro, whether he be a
freeman or slave, of those advantages from which, in a free state like
New York, he is excluded, without any legislative interference.
I have heard apologists in the north endeavoring to account for
the degraded position which the negroes hold, socially and polit
ically, in the free states, by saying they belong to a race which is
kept in a state of slavery in the south. But, if they really desired
to accelerate emancipation, they would begin by setting an example
to the southern states, and treating the black race with more
respect and more on a footing of equality. I once heard some
Irish workmen complain in New York, " that the ni'ggers shut
them out from all the easiest ways of getting a livelihood ;" arid
many white mechanics, who had emigrated from the north to the
slave states, declared to me that every opening in their trades was
closed to them, because black artisans were employed by their
owners in preference. Hence, they are now using in Georgia the
CHAP. XXV.] EFFECTS OF IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION. 83
power given to them by an exclusive franchise, to pass disabling1
statutes against the blacks, to prevent them from engaging in
certain kinds of work. In several states, Virginia among others,
I heard of strikes, where the white workmen bound themselves
not to return to their employment until the master had discharged
all his colored people. Such combinations will, no doubt, forward
the substitution of white for negro labor, and may hasten the era
of general emancipation. But if this measure be prematurely
adopted, the negroes are a doomed race, and already their situa
tion is most critical. I found a deep conviction prevailing in the
minds of experienced slave-owners, of the injury which threatened
them ; and, more than once, in Kentucky and elsewhere, in an
swer to my suggestions, that the time for introducing free labor
had come, they said, " I think so ; we must get rid of the negroes."
"Do you not think," said I, "if you could send them all away,
that some parts of the country would be depopulated, seeing how
unhealthy the low grounds are for the whites ?" " Perhaps so,"
replied one planter, " but other regions would become more pro
ductive by way of compensation ; the insalubrity of the Pontine
marshes would be no excuse for negro slavery in Italy. All might
end well," he added, "were it not that so many anti-slavery men
in the north are as precipitate and impatient as if they believed,
like the Milleritcs, that the world was coming to an end."
One of the most reasonable advocates of immediate emancipa
tion whom I met with in the north, said to rne, " You are like
many of our politicians, who can look on one side only of a great
question. Grant the possibility of these three millions of colored
people, or even twelve millions of them fifty years hence, being
capable of amalgamating with the whites, such a result might be
to you perhaps, as a philanthropist or physiologist, a very inter
esting experiment ; but would not the progress of the whites be
retarded, and our race deteriorated, nearly in the same proportion
as the negroes would gain ? Why not consider the interests of the
white race by hastening the abolition of slavery. The whites con
stitute nearly six-sevenths of our whole population. As a philan
thropist, you arc bound to look to the greatest good of the two races
collectively, or the advantage of the whole population of the Union."
CHAPTER XXVI.
"Return to Mobile. — Excursion to the Shores of the Gulf of Mexico. — View
from Lighthouse. — Mouth of Alabama River. — Gnathodon inhabiting
Brackish Water. — Banks of these Fossil Shells far Inland. — Miring of
Cattle. — Yellow Fever at Mobile in 1839. — Fire in same Year. — Voyage
from Mobile to New Orleans. — Movers to Texas. — Lake Pontchartrain. —
Arrival at New Orleans. — St. Louis Hotel. — French Aspect of City. —
Carnival. — Procession of Masks.
Feb. 21, 1846. — THERE had been some very cold weather in
the beginning of the month in the upper country, the thermometer
at Tuscaloosa having been down as low as 17° Fahr. ; yet, on
our return to Mobile, we saw the signs of approaching spring, for
on the banks of the Alabama river the deciduous cypress and
cotton trees were putting out their leaves, and the beautiful
scarlet seed-vessels of the red maple (Acer Drummondii) enliv
ened the woods.
Once more at Mobile, I was impatient to see, for the first
time, the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and therefore lost no time
in making an excursion to the mouth of the Alabama River. I
was fortunate in having as my companion the Rev. Dr. Hamilton,
minister of the principal Presbyterian congregation, who was well
acquainted with the natural history of this region. He drove me
first to the lighthouse, where, from the top of the tower, we had
a splendid view of the city to the north, and to the south the
noble bay of Mobile, fourteen miles across. The keeper of the
lighthouse looked sickly, which is not surprising, as he is living
in a swamp in this region of malaria. It was his first year of
residence, and the second year is said to be most trying to the
constitution. The women, however, of his family, seemed healthy
We then went to the sea-side, two miles to the eastward, and
found the waters of the bay smooth and unrippled, like an ex
tensive lake, the woods coming down every where to its edge, and
the live oaks and long-leaved pines, with the buck-eye and several
CHAP. XXVI.] VIEW FROM LIGHTHOUSE. 85
other trees just beginning to put forth their young leaves. As the
most northern countries I had visited in Europe — Norway and
Sweden — were characterized by fir trees mingled with birch, I
was surprised to find the most southern spot I had yet seen, a
plain only a few feet above the level of the sea, almost equally
characterized by a predominance of pines. On the ground I ob
served a species of cactus, about one foot high, and the marshy
spots were covered with the candleberry (My-rica carolinensis),
resembling the species so common in the north, in the scent of
its aromatic leaves, but thrice as high as I had seen it before.
The most common plant in flower was the English chickweed
(Cerastium vulgare), a truly cosmopolite species.
A prodigious quantity of drift timber, of all sizes, and in every
stage of decomposition, lay stranded far and wide along the shore.
Many of the trunks of the trees had been floated a thousand miles
and more down the Mississippi and its tributaries, and, after escaping
by one of the many mouths of the great river, had drifted one hun
dred and fifty miles eastward to this spot. The fact of their long
immersion in salt water was sometimes proved by a dense coat of
encrusting barnacles, the only marine shells we could find here,
for the mollusks proper to this part of the bay are such as belong
to fresh or brackish water, of the genera Cyrena, Gnathodon, and
Neritina. Just before our visit, a north wind had been blowing
and driving back the sea water for some days, and the bay was
so freshened by the Alabama River pouring in at this season a full
stream, that I could detect no brackish taste in the water. It
is, in fact, so sweet here, that ships often resort to the spot to
take in water. Yet there is a regular tide rising three feet every
six hours, and, when the wind blows from the south, the waters
are raised six or seven feet.
After walking over a large expanse of ripple-marked sands, we
came to banks of mud, inhabited by the bivalve shell called
Gnathodon, some of which we dug up alive from a depth of
about two inches from the surface. This part of the bay of Mobile
is now the most northern locality of this remarkable brackish-water
genus, but dead shells of the same species are traced many miles
inland, forming banks three or four feet thick. They are called
86 BANKS OF FOSSIL SHELLS. [CHAP. XXVI.
clams hero in popular language, and, being thick and strong,
afford a good material for road-making. From the same mud-
bank we dug out a species of Cyrena, the only accompanying shell.
In some places riot far off, a Neritina is also met with. As a
geologist, I was much interested by observing the manner in
which these shells were living in the mud of the delta of the
Alabama River. The deposits formed by the advance of this arid
other deltas along the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, will
be hereafter characterized by such shells in a fossil state, just as,
in the Pampas, Mr. Darwin and M. A. D'Orbigny found the
brackish-water shell, called Azara labiat.a, marking far inland
the position of ancient estuaries. Arid as, in South America,
" the Pampean mud," described by Mr. Darwin,* is filled with
the skeletons of the extinct Megatherium, Toxodon, arid other
strange mammalia, so in the modern delta of the Alabama, the
quadrupeds now inhabiting the southern shores of the United
States will hereafter be met with buried in the same assemblage
of deposits of rnud and sand as the Gn&thodon. I was told that
in a great morass which we saw near the lighthouse some cattle
had lately perished, arid for many days the turkey buzzards have
been snatching parts of the dead carcasses out of the mud, watch
ing their opportunity the moment the dogs, which are also preying
on them, retire. Formerly the wolves used to prowl about these
swamps in search of similar booty, tearing up portions of the
mired cattle, arid in this manner we may expect that, while
sonic skeletons, which have sunk deep into the softer mud, may
be preserved entire, the bones of others will be scattered about
where the wolves have gnawed thorn, or birds of prey have picked
oil' the flesh.
On our way back to the town, at places a mile and a half
from the sea, I examined some large banks of fossil shells of the
G-'tuitkodon, lying as if they had been washed up by the waves
at a time when the coast-line extended only thus far south. I
also found that the city of Mobile itself was built upon a similar
bed of shells, in which no specimens of the Neritina occurred ;
but I was told by Mr. Hale, that he has met with them in banks
* Geolog. Ohs. on S. America (1846), p. 99.
CHAP. XXVI.] YELLOW FEVER. 87
much farther in the interior, and, as he truly remarked, they
refute the theory which would refer such accumulations to the
Indians, who, it is well known, were accustomed to feed on the
Gnatkodon. The distinct stratification seen in some of the
heaps of shells and sand at Mobile, also satisfied me that they
were thrown up by the action of water. Mr. Hale gave me a
map, in which he had laid down the localities of these beds of
fossil Gnatliodon, some of which he has traced as far as twenty
miles into the interior, the accumulations increasing1 in thickness
in the most elevated and inland situations, and containing1 there
an intermixture of the Neritince with the Cyrena, which last
seems only to occur in the recent banks of mud and sand. Mr.
Hale observes, " that the inland heaps of shells often rise so far
above the level of the highest tides, that it seems difficult to ac
count for their position simply by the advance of the delta, and
without supposing that there has been a slight upheaval of the
land."
In the gardens at Mobile there were jonquils arid snowdrops
in flower, and, for the first time, we saw that beautiful evergreen,
the yellow jessamine (Gehcmium sempervirens), in full bloom,
trailed along the wall of Dr. Hamilton's house. Its fragrance
is delicious, more like that of our bind- weed than any other scent
I could remember. It had not been injured by the late frost,
although the thermometer at Mobile had been eight degrees below
the freezing point.
The citizens are beginning to flatter themselves that the yel
low fever has worn itself out at Mobile, because the hot season
of 1845 was so healthy both here and at New Orleans. Some
medical men, indeed, confessed to me, that as the wind blew ibr
many weeks from the north, passing over the marshes north of
the city during the summer, without giving rise to the usual epi
demic, all their former theories as to the origin of the pestilence
have been refuted. It may still hold true, that to induce the
disease, three causes must concur, namely, heat, a moist ground,
and a decaying vegetation ; but it seems clear that all these may
be present in their fullest intensity, and yet prove quite innocuous.
The dangerous months are July, August, and September, and
88 FIRE AT MOBILE. [CHAP. XXVI.
great is the anxiety of those who then remain in the city. It is
fearful to witness the struggle between the love of gain, tempting
the merchant to continue at his post, and the terror of the plague,
which causes him to stand always prepared for sudden flight.
In 1839, such was the dismay, that only 3000 out of a popula
tion of 16,000 tarried behind in the city. Dr. Hamilton, one
of those who staid, told me that he knew not a single family, a
member of which was not attacked by the disease. Out of the
3000, 800 died. All the clergy remained faithful to their duties,
and many of them perished.
The yellow fever is not the only scourge which has frequently
devastated Mobile. I found it slowly recovering, like so many
other American cities, from the ravages of a great fire, which, in
1839, laid the greater part of it in ashes. The fire broke out
in so many places at once, as to give too much reason to suspect
that it was the work of incendiaries seeking plunder.
Feb. 23. — The distance from Mobile to New Orleans is 175
miles by what is called the inland passage, or the channel be
tween the islands and the main land. We paid five dollars, or
one guinea each, for berths in the " James L. Day" steamer,
which made about nine miles an hour. Being on the low pres
sure principle, she was so free from noise and vibration, that we
could scarcely believe we were not in a sailing vessel. The
stunning sounds and tremulous motions of the boats on the south
ern rivers are at first so distracting, that I often wondered we
could sleep soundly in them. The " James L. Day" is 185 feet
long, drawing now five and a half feet water, and only seven feet
when fully freighted. We sailed out of the beautiful bay of
Mobile in the evening, in the coldest month of the year, yet the
air was warm, and there was a haze like that of a summer's
evening in England. Many gulls followed our ship, enticed by
pieces of bread thrown out to them by the passengers, some of
whom were displaying their skill in shooting the birds in mere
wantonness. The stars were brilliant as the night came on, and
we passed between the islands and main land, where the sea was
as smooth as a lake.
On board were many " movers," going to Texas with their
CHAP. XXVI.] MOVERS TO TEXAS.
slaves. One of them confessed to me, that he had been eaten
out of Alabama by his negroes. He had no idea where he was
going, but after settling his family at Houston, he said he should
look out for a square league of good land to be had cheap.
Another passenger had, a few weeks before, returned from Texas,
much disappointed, and was holding forth in disparagement of
the country for its want of wood and water, declaring that none
could thrive there, unless they carne from the prairies of Illinois,
and were inured to such privations. " Cotton," he said, " could
only be raised on a few narrow strips of alluvial land near the
rivers, and as these were not navigable by steamers, the crop,
when raised, could not be carried to a market." He also com
forted the mover with the assurance, " that there were swarms
of buffalo flies to torment his horses, and sand flies to sting him
and his family." To this the undismayed emigrant replied,
" that when he first settled in Alabama, before the long grass
and canes had been eaten down by his cattle, the insect pests
were as great as they could be in Texas." He was, I found,
one of those resolute pioneers of the wilderness, who, after build
ing a log-house, clearing the forest, and improving some hundred
acres of wild ground by years of labor, sells the farm, and mi
grates again to another part of the uncleared forest, repeating
this operation three or four times in the course of his life, and,
though constantly growing richer, never disposed to take his ease.
In pursuing this singular vocation, they who go southward from
Virginia to North and South Carolina, and thence to Georgia
and Alabama, follow, as if by instinct, the corresponding zones
of country. The inhabitants of the red soil of the granitic region
keep to their oak and hickory, the "crackers" of the tertiary pine-
barrens to their light-wood, and they of the newest geological
formations in the sea-islands to their fish and oysters. On reaching
Texas, they are all of them at fault, which will surprise no geologist
who has read Ferdinand R,oemer's account of the form which the
cretaceous strata assume in that country, consisting of a hard,
compact, siliceous limestone, which defies the decomposing action
of the atmosphere, and forms table-lands of bare rock, so entirely
unlike the marls, clay, and sands of the same age in Alabama.
90 LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN. [CHAP. XXVI.
On going down from the cabin to the lower deck, I found
a slave-dealer with sixteen negroes to sell, most of them Vir
ginians. I heard him decline an offer of 500 dollars for one of
them, a price which he said he could have got for the man be
fore he left his own state.
Next morning at daylight we found ourselves in Louisiana.
We had already entered the large lagoon, called Lake Pontchar-
train, by a narrow passage, and, having skirted its southern
shore, had reached a point six miles north of New Orleans.
Here we disembarked, and entered the cars of a railway built on
piles, which conveyed us in less than an hour to the great city,
passing over swamps in which the tall cypress, hung with Span
ish moss, was flourishing, and below it numerous shrubs just
bursting into leaf. In many gardens of the suburbs, the almond
and peach trees were in full blossom. In some places the blue-
leaved palmetto, and the leaves of a species of iris (Iris cuprea),
were very abundant. We saw a tavern called the " Elysian
Fields Coffee House," and some others with French inscriptions.
There were also many houses with porte-cocheres, high roofs,
and volets, and many lamps suspended from ropes attached to
tall posts on each side of the road, as in the French capital.
We might indeed have fancied that we were approaching Paris,
but for the negroes and mulattoes. and the large verandahs remind
ing us that the windows required protection from the sun's heat.
It was a pleasure to hear the French language spoken, and to
have our thoughts recalled to the most civilized parts of Europe
by the aspect of a city, forming so great a contrast to the innu
merable new towns we had lately beheld. The foreign appear
ance, moreover, of the inhabitants, made me feel thankful that
it was possible to roam freely and without hindrance over so
large a continent, — no bureaus for examining and signing of
passports, no fortifications, no drawbridges, no closing of gates at
a fixed hour in the evening, no waiting till they are opened in
the morning, no custom-houses separating one state from another,
no overhauling of baggage by gens d'armes for the octroi ; and yet
as perfect a feeling of personal security as I ever felt in Germany
or France.
CHAP. XXVI. J NEW ORLEANS. 91
The largest of the hotels, the St. Charles, being fuL, we ob
tained agreeable apartments at the St. Louis, in a part of the
town where we heard French constantly spoken. Our rooms
were fitted up in the French style, with muslin curtains and
scarlet draperies. There was a finely-proportioned drawing-
room, furnished a la Louis Quatorze, opening into a large dining-
room with sliding doors, where the boarders and the " transient
visitors," as they are called in the United States, met at meals.
The mistress of the hotel, a widow, presided at dinner, and we
talked French with her and some of the attendants ; but most
of the servants of the house were Trish or German. There was
a beautiful ball-room, in which preparations were making for a
grand masked ball, to be given the night after our arrival.
It was the last day of the Carnival. From the time we
landed in New England to this hour, we seemed to have been
in a country where all, whether rich or poor, were laboring from
morning till night, without ever indulging in a holiday. I had
sometimes thought that the national motto should be, " All work
and no play." It was quite a novelty and a refreshing sight to
see a whole population giving up their minds for a short season
to amusement. There was a grand procession parading the
streets, almost every one dressed in the most grotesque attire,
troops of them on horseback, some in open carriages, with bands
of music, and in a variety of costumes, — some as Indians, with
feathers in their heads, and one, a jolly fat man, as Mardi Gras
himself. All wore masks, and here and there in the crowd, or
stationed in a balcony above, we saw persons armed with bags
of flour, which they showered down copiously on any one who
seemed particularly proud of his attire. The strangeness of the
scene was not a little heightened by the blending of negroes,
quadroons, and mulattoes in the crowd ; and we were amused
by observing the ludicrous surprise, mixed with contempt, of
several unmasked, stiff, grave Anglo-Americans from the north,
who were witnessing for the first time what seemed to them so
much mummery and torn-foolery. One wagoner, coming out of
a cross street, in his working-dress, drove his team of horses and
vehicle heavily laden with cotton bales right through the proces-
92 THE CARNIVAL. [CHAP. XXVI.
sion, causing a long interruption. The crowd seemed determined
to allow nothing to disturb their good humor ; but although
many of the wealthy Protestant citizens take part in the cere
mony, this rude intrusion struck me as a kind of foreshadowing
of coming events, emblematic of the violent shock which the in
vasion of the Anglo-Americans is about to give to the old regime
of Louisiana. A gentleman told me that, being last year in
Rome, he had not seen so many masks at the Carnival there ;
and, in spite of the increase of Protestants, he thought there had
been quite as much " flour and fun" this year as usual. The
proportion, however, of strict Romanists is not so great as for
merly, and to-morrow, they say, when Lent begins, there will be
an end of the trade in masks ; yet the butchers will sell nearly
as much meat as ever. During the Carnival, the greater part
of the French population keep open house, especially in the
country.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Catholic Cathedral, New Orleans. — French Opera. — Creole Ladies. —
Quadroons. — Marriage of Whites with Quadroons. — St. Charles Theater.
— English Pronunciation. — Duelist's Grave. — Ladies' Ordinary. — Pro
cession of Fire Companies. — Boasted Salubrity of New Orleans. — Goods
selling at Northern Prices. — Mr. Wilde.— Roman Law. — Shifting of
Capital to Baton Rouge. — Debates in Houses of Legislature. — Conven
tion and Revision of the Laws. — Policy of Periodical State Conventions.
— Judges cashiered. — Limitation of their Term of Office.
New Orleans, February, 1846. — WALKING first over the
most ancient part of the city, called the First Municipality, we
entered the Place d' Armes, and saw on one side of the square the
old Spanish Government House, and opposite to it the Cathedral,
or principal Catholic church, both in an antique style of archi
tecture, and therefore strikingly unlike any thing we had seen for
many months. Entering the church, which is always open, we
found persons on their knees, as in Catholic countries, although it
was not Sunday, and an extremely handsome quadroon woman
coming out.
In the evening we went to the French Opera, and were much
pleased with the performance, the orchestra being the best in
America. The audience were very quiet and orderly, which is
said not to be always the case in some theaters here. The
French creole ladies, many of them descended from Norman an
cestors, and of pure unmixed blood, are very handsome. They
were attired in Parisian fashion, not over dressed, usually not so
thin as the generality of American women ; their luxuriant hair
tastefully arranged, fastened with ornamental pins, and adorned
simply with a colored ribbon or a single flower. My wife learnt
from one of them afterward, that they usually pay, by the month,
a quadroon female hairdresser, a refinement in which the richest
ladies in Boston would not think of indulging. The word creole
is used in Louisiana to express a native-born American, whether
94 QUADROONS. [CHAP. XXVlt.
black or white, descended from old-world parents, for they would
not call the aboriginal Indians Creoles. It never means persons
of mixed breed ; and the French or Spanish Creoles here would
shrink as much as a New Englander from intermarriage with
one tainted, in the slightest degree, with African blood. The
frequent alliances of the Creoles, or Louisianians, of French ex
traction, with lawyers and merchants from the northern states,
help to cement the ties which are every day binding more firmly
together the distant parts of the Union. Both races may be im
proved by such connection, for the manners of the Creole ladies
are, for the most part, more refined ; and many a Louisianian
might justly have felt indignant if he could have overheard a
conceited young bachelor from the north telling me "how much
they were preferred by the fair sex to the hard-drinking, gambling,
horse-racing, cock-fighting, and tobacco-chewing southerners." If
the Creoles have less depth of character, and are less striving and
ambitious than the New Englanders, it must be no slight source
of happiness to the former to be so content with present advant
ages. They seem to feel, far more than the Anglo-Saxons, that
if riches be worth the winning, they are also worth enjoying.
The quadroons, or the offspring of the whites and mulattoes,
sat in an upper tier of boxes appropriated to them, When they
are rich, they hold a peculiar and very equivocal position in so
ciety. As children, they have often been sent to Paris for their
education, and, being as capable of improvement as any whites,
return with refined manners, and not unfrequently with more
cultivated minds than the majority of those from whose society
they are shut out. By the tyranny of caste they are driven,
therefore, to form among themselves a select and exclusive set.
Among other stories illustrating their social relation to the
whites, we were told that a young man of the dominant race
fell in love with a beautiful quadroon girl, who was so light-
colored as to be scarcely distinguishable from one of pure breed.
He found that, in order to render the marriage legal, he was re
quired to swear that he himself had' negro blood in his veins,
and, that he might conscientiously take the oath, he let some of
the' blood of his betrothed into his veins with a lancet. The
CHAP. XXVII.] ST. CHARLES THEATER. 95
romance of this tale was, however, greatly diminished, although
I fear that my inclination to believe in its truth was equally
enhanced, when the additional circumstance was related, that
the young lady was rich.
Some part of the feeling prevailing in New England, in regard
to the immorality of New Orleans, may be set down to the fact
of their theaters being open every Sunday evening, which is no
indication whatever of a disregard of religion on the part of the
Catholics. The latter might, with as much reason, reflect on
the Protestants for not keeping the doors of their churches open
on week-days. But as a great number of the young mercantile
men who sojourn here are from the north, and separated from
their families, they are naturally tempted to frequent the theaters
on Sundays ; and if they do so with a sense that they are violat
ing propriety, or acting against what in their consciences they
think right, the effect must be unfavorable to their moral char
acter.
During our stay here we passed a delightful evening in the
St. Charles theater, seeing Mr. and Mrs. Kean in the " Game
ster" and in " The Follies of a Night." Her acting of Mrs.
Beverley was perfection ; every tone and gesture full of feeling,
and always lady-like, never overwrought, in the most passionate
parts. Charles Kean's acting, especially in Richard, has been
eminently successful during his present tour in the United States.
While at New Orleans, Mrs. Kean told my wife she had
been complimented on speaking English so well ; and some won
der had been expressed that she never omitted or misplaced her
h's. In like manner, during our tour in New England, some of
the natives, on learning that we habitually resided in London,
exclaimed that they had never heard us confound our v's and w's.
" The Pickwick Papers" have been so universally read in this
country, that it is natural the Americans should imagine Sam
Weller's pronunciation to be a type of that usually spoken in the
old country, at least in and about the metropolis. In their turn,
the English retaliate amply on American travelers in the British
Isles : — " You don't mean to say you are an American ? Is it
possible ? I should never have discovered it, you speak English
LADIES' ORDINARY. [CHAP. XXVII.
so well !" — " Did you suppose that we had adopted some one of
the Indian languages ?" — " I really never thought about it; but
it is wonderful to hear you talk like us !"
Looking into the shop-windows in New Orleans, we see much
which reminds us of Paris, and abundance of articles manufac
tured in the northern states, but very few things characteristic
of Louisiana. Among the latter I remarked, at a jeweler's,
many alligators' teeth polished and as white as ivory, and set in
silver for infants to wear round their necks to rub against their
gums when cutting their teeth, in the same way as they use a
coral in England.
The tombs in the cemeteries on the outskirts of the town are
raised from the ground, in order that they may be above the
swamps, and the coffins are placed in bins like those of a cellar.
The water is seen standing on the soil at a lower level in many
places ; there are often flowers and shrubs round the tombs, by
the side of walks made of shells of the Gnathodon. Over the
grave of one recently killed in a duel was a tablet, with the
inscription — " Mort, victime de 1'honneur !" Should any one
propose to set up a similar tribute to the memory of a duelist at
Mount Auburn, near Boston, a sensation would be created which
would manifest how v/idely different is the state of public opinion
in New England from that in the " First Municipality."
Among the signs of the tacit recognition of an aristocracy in
the large cities, is the manner in which persons of the richer and
more refined classes associate together in the large hotels. There
is one public table frequented by bachelors, commercial travelers,
and gentlemen not accompanied by their wives and families, and
a more expensive one, called the Ladies' Ordinary, at which la
dies, their husbands, and gentlemen whom they invite, have their
meals. Some persons who occupy a marked position in society,
such as our friend the ex-senator, Mr. Wilde, often obtain leave
by favor to frequent this ordinary ; but the keepers of the hotels
grant or decline the privilege, as they may think proper.
A few days after the Carnival we had another opportunity of
peeing a grand procession of the natives, without masks. The
corps of all the different companies of firemen turned out in their
CHAP. XXVII.] SALUBRITY OF NEW ORLEANS. 97
uniform, drawing their engines dressed up with flowers, ribbons,
and flags, and I never saw a finer set of young men. We could
not help contrasting their healthy looks with the pale, sickly
countenances of " the crackers," in the pine-woods of Georgia
and Alabama, where we had been spending so many weeks. These
men were almost all of them Creoles, and thoroughly acclima
tized ; and I soon found that if I wished to ingratiate myself
with natives or permanent settlers in this city, the less surprise
I expressed at the robust aspect of these young Creoles the better.
The late Mr. Sydney Smith advised an English friend who was
going to reside some years in Edinburgh to praise the climate : —
" When you arrive there it may rain, snow, or blow for many
days, and they will assure you they never knew such a season
before. If you would be popular, declare you think it the most
delightful climate in the world." When I first heard New Or
leans commended for its salubrity, I could scarcely believe that
my companions were in earnest, till a physician put into my
hands a statistical table, recently published in a medical maga
zine, proving that in the year 1845 the mortality in the metrop
olis of Louisiana was 1-850, whereas that of Boston was 2-250,
or, in other words, while the capital of Massachusetts lost 1 out
of 44 inhabitants, New Orleans lost only 1 in 54 ; "yet the
year 1845," said he, " was one of great heat, and when a wider
area than usual was flooded by the river, and exposed to evapor
ation under a hot sun."
It appears that when New Orleans is empty in the summer —
in other words, when all the strangers, about 40,000 in number,
go into the country, and many of them to the north, fearing the
yellow fever, the city still contains between 80,000 and 100,000
inhabitants, who never suffer from the dreaded disease, whether
they be of European or African origin. If, therefore, it be fair
to measure the salubrity of a district by its adaptation to the
constitutions of natives rather than foreigners, the claim set up
for superior healthiness may be less preposterous than at first it
sounded to my ears. I asked an Irishman if the summer heat
was intolerable. « You would have something else to think of in
the hot months," said he, " for there is one set of musquitoes who
VOL. n. — E
98 GOODS AT NORTHERN PRICES. [CHAP. XXVII.
sting you all day, and when they go in toward dusk, another
kind comes out and bites you all night."
The desertion of the city for five months by so many of the
richer residents, causes the hotels, and the prices of almost every
article in shops, to be very dear during the remainder of the year.
" Goods selling at northern prices" is a common form of adver
tisement, showing how high is the usual cost of all things in this
city. The Irish servants in the hotel assure us that they can
not save, in spite of their high wages, for, whatever money they
put by soon goes to pay the doctor's bill, during attacks of chill
and fever.
Hearing that a Guide-book of New Orleans had been publish
ed, we wished to purchase a copy, although it was of somewhat
ancient date for a city of rapid growth. The bookseller said that
we must wait till he received some more copies from New York,
for it appears that the printing even of books of local interest is
done by presses 2000 miles distant. Their law reports are not
printed here, and there is only one newspaper in the First Mu
nicipality, which I was told as very characteristic of the French
race ; for, in the Second Municipality, although so much newer,
the Anglo-Americans have, during the last ten years, started ten
newspapers.
We were very fortunate in finding our old friend, Mr. Richard
Henry Wilde, residing in the same hotel, for he had lately estab
lished himself iri New Orleans, and was practicing in the courts
of civil law with success. The Roman law, originally introduced
into the courts here by the first settlers, was afterward modified
by the French, and assimilated to the Code Napoleon, and finally,
by modern innovations, brought more and more into accordance
with the common law of England. Texas, in her new constitu
tion, and even some of the older states, those of New England
not excepted, have borrowed several improvements from the Ro
man law. Among these is the securing to married women rights
in property, real and personal, so as to protect them from the
debts of their husbands, and enable them to dispose of their own
property.
Mr. Wilde took me to the Houses of the Legislature, where a
CHAP. XXV1I.J HOUSES OF LEGISLATURE. 99
discussion was going on as to the propriety of changing the seat
of government from New Orleans to some other place in Louisi
ana, for it had been determined, though by a majority of one
only, in a convention appointed for that purpose, that they should
go somewhere else, to a place at least sixty miles distant from
the metropolis. I remarked, that the accessibility of New Or
leans was so great, and so many must be drawn to it by business,
that the determination to seek out a new site for a capital, seemed
to me incomprehensible. " You will wonder still more," he re
plied, " when I tell you, that when the convention had been some
time at Baton Rouge to frame the new constitution, they thought
it advisable to adjourn to New Orleans, where they could consult
with lawyers' who were attending the courts, and with the prin
cipal merchants, and where they might have access to good libra
ries, and be in daily communication by steam with all parts of
the state. In short, they found that for the faithful discharge of
their task, they stood in need of a great variety of information
which they could obtain nowhere so readily as in the metropolis.
Yet it seems never to have struck them that our future law
makers might, with equal profit to the state, derive knowledge
from the same sources."
In the House of Representatives, English is spoken exclusively,
but in the Senate many were addressing the House in French,
and when they sat down an interpreter rose and repeated the
whole speech over again in English. An orator was on his legs,
maintaining that Baton Rouge had the best claims to become the
future capital, a proposition soon afterward adopted by the major
ity. Another contended that Donaldson ville ought to be the
place, as it would suit the convenience of 26,000 white male
citizens, while Baton Rouge would only favor the interest of
12,000. This line of argument seemed to me to contain in it
an implied censure on the abandonment of New Orleans, but
that was no longer an open question. When I afterward saw
the insignificant village of Donaldsonville, I could not help being
diverted at the recollection of the inflated terms in which its
future prospects had been dwelt upon. The speaker said, "He
liked to lift the vail off the face of futurity and contemplate the
100 CHANGING SITE OF CAPITAL. [CHAP. XXVII.
gigantic strides to wealth, population and power, which that city
was destined to make ; he liked to behold it in imagination, as it
will be in reality, built up from the bank of the river to the mar
gin of the lake, sustaining and supporting a happy, industrious,
and enterprising population of millions, and being at the same
time the great emporium of the trade and commerce of the world."
Although I talked much with Louisianiaris of different classes
in society, as to their reasons for changing the site of the capital,
I never could satisfy myself that I had fathomed the truth, and
suspect that a spirit of envy and antagonism of country against
town lies more at the bottom of the measure than they were
willing to confess, aggravated, perhaps, in this case, by the rivalry
of two races. No one pretended that they wished to retreat to
a village, from fear that the populace, or mob, of New Orleans
might control the free action of the representative body. Some
told me, that as their members received pay, they were desirous
of taking away from them all temptations to protract the session,
which the charms of a luxurious metropolis afforded. They also
affirmed that, by living in so dear a place, their representatives
acquired extravagant notions in regard to the expenditure of pub
lic money, and that they were exposed to the influence of rich
merchants and capitalists, who gave them good dinners, and
brought them round to their opinions.
I asked if a convention for remodeling the constitution had
been called for. My informants were generally disposed to think
that the time had arrived when such a re-cast of the old system
had become unavoidable. The recurrence, they said, of such
conventions every twenty-five or thirty years, might seem to
European politicians to imply a wish to perpetuate an experi
mental state of things ; but where the population had quadrupled
since the last convention — where thousands of emigrants had
poured in from various states, the majority of them speaking a
new language, and introducing a new code of laws, into the Sec
ond Municipality — where circumstances connected with their
social, religious, political, and financial affairs had so altered — in
a word, where they were unavoidably in a transition state, the
best way of guarding against revolutionary movements was to
CHAP. XXVII.] JUDGES CASHIERED. 101
settle on some fixed periods for revising the constitution, and in
quiring whether any organic changes were indispensable.
Among other violent proceedings, I found that the late conven
tion had cashiered all the judges of the Supreme Court, although
they had been appointed for life, or " quamdiu se bene gesserint,"
and with very high salaries. They were to have no retiring
pensions, and this I remarked was an iniquity, as some of them
had doubtless given up a lucrative practice on the faith of enjoy
ing a seat on the bench for life. Some lawyers agreed that the
measure was indefensible, and said they presumed that, in the
end, the democratic party would elect all the judges annually, by
universal suffrage. I met, however, with optimists who were
ready to defend every act of the convention. Several of the
judges, they said, were superannuated, and it would have been
invidious to single them out, and force them to resign. It was
better to dismiss the whole. " As for retiring pensions, we hold,
with your Jeremy Bentham, that no man can acquire a vested
right in a public injury. Men are apt, when they have retained
possession of an office for a great part of their lives, to think they
own it." " But what is to become of the judges," said I, " who
are thus cast off without pensions ?" " Old Judge A ," he
replied, " owns a plantation, and will go and farm it. Judge
B will probably get a professor's chair in the new Law
University ;" and so he went on, providing for all of them. " In
future," he continued, " our judges are to be appointed by the
Governor and Senate, with good salaries, for eight years ; those
first named being for two, four, six, and eight years, so that they
may go out in rotation ; but members of the Legislature can not
be raised to the bench, as in Great Britain." I objected, that
such a system might render a judge who desired to be re-elected
subservient to the party in power, or at least open to such an im
putation. " No doubt," he rejoined ; " as in the case of your
judges, who may be promoted to higher posts on the bench. As
to the corrupting influence of their dependence on a legislature
chosen by a widely-extended suffrage, many of your mayors and
aldermen are elected for short terms, and exercise judicial func
tions in England."
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Negroes not Attacked by Yellow Fever. — History of Mr. Wilde's Poem. —
The Market, New Orleans. — Motley Character of Population. — Levee
and Steamers. — First Sight of Mississippi River. — View from the Cupola
of the St. Charles. — Site of New Orleans. — Excursion to Lake Pontchar-
train. — Shell Road. — Heaps of Gnathodon. — Excavation for Gas- Works.
— Buried Upright Trees. — Pere Antoine's Date-palm.
BEFORE we left New Orleans Mr. Wilde received a message
from his negroes, whom he had left behind at Augusta, in Georgia,
entreating him to send for them. They had felt, it seems, some
what hurt and slighted at not having been sooner permitted to
join him. He told us that he was only waiting for a favorable
season to transplant them, for he feared that men of color, when
they had been acclimatized for several generations in so cool a
country as the upper parts of Alabama and Georgia, might run
great risk of the yellow fever, although the medical men here as
sured him that a slight admixture of negro blood sufficed to make
them proof against this scourge.
" No one," he said, " feels safe here, who has not survived an
attack of the fever, or escaped unharmed while it has been rag
ing." He mentioned the belief of some theorists, that the com
plaint was caused by invisible animalcules, a notion agreeing sin
gularly with that of many Romans in regard to the malaria of
Italy.
The year following this conversation, our excellent friend was
himself carried off by this fatal disease. He is well known to
the literary world as the author of a work on the " Love and
Madness of Tasso," published in 1842, and perhaps still more
generally by some beautiful lines, beginning " My life is like the
summer rose," which are usually supposed to have derived their
tone of touching melancholy, from his grief at the sudden death
of a brother, and soon after of a mother, who never recovered the
shock of her son's death. As there had been so much contro-
CHAP. XXVIII.] MR. WILDE'S POEM. 103
versy about this short poem, we asked Mr. Wilde to relate to us
its true history, which is curious. He had been one of a party
at Savannah, when the question was raised whether a certain
professor of the University of Georgia understood Greek ; on
which one of his companions undertook to translate Mr. Wilde's
verses, called " The Complaint of the Captive," into Greek prose,
so arranged as to appear like verse, and then see if he could pass
it off upon the Professor as a fragment of AlcaBus. The trick
succeeded, although the Professor said that not having the works
of Alcseus at hand, he could not feel sure that the poem was
really his. It was then sent, without the knowledge of Mr.
Wilde and his friends, to a periodical at New York, and pub
lished as a fragment from Alcseus, and the Senator for Georgia
was vehemently attacked by his political opponents, for having
passed off a translation from the Greek as an original composi
tion of his own.
Soon after this affair, Captain Basil Hall mentioned in his
" Schloss Hainfeld" (chap, x.), that the Countess Purgstall had
read the lines to him, and would not tell him who was the au
thor, but he had little doubt that she had written them herself.
The verses had become so popular that they were set to music,
and the name of Tampa, a desolate sea-beach on the coast of
Florida, was changed into Tempe, the loveliest of the wooded
valleys of Greece, in the concluding stanza : —
" My life is like the prints which feet
Have left on Tampa's desert strand ;
Soon as the rising tide shall beat,
All trace will vanish from the sand.
Yet, as if grieving to efface
All vestige of the human race,
On that lone shore loud moans the sea, —
But none, alas ! shall mourn for me !"
In the countess's version Zara had been substituted for Tampa.
During our stay in New Orleans, Mr. Wilde introduced us to
his friend Mr. Clay, the Whig candidate in the late presidential
election, and I was glad of the opportunity of conversing with
this distinguished statesman. In the principal Episcopal church
we were very fortunate in hearing Dr. Hawkes preach, and
104 THE MARKET, NEW ORLEANS. [CHAP. XXVIII.
thought the matter and manner of his discourse deserving of his
high reputation for pulpit eloquence.
One morning we rose early to visit the market of the First
Municipality, and found the air on the bank of the Mississippi
filled with mist as dense as a London fog, hut of a pure white
instead of yellow color. Through this atmosphere the innumera
ble masts of the ships alongside the wharf, were dimly seen.
Among other fruits in the market we observed abundance of ba
nanas, and good pine-apples, for 25 cents (or a shilling) each,
from the West Indies. There were stalls where hot coffee was
selling in white china cups, reminding us of Paris. Among
other articles exposed for sale, were brooms made of palmetto
leaves, and wagon-loads of the dried Spanish moss, or Tillandma.
The quantity of this plant hanging from the trees in the swamps
surrounding New Orleans, and every where in the delta of the
Mississippi, might suffice to stuff all the mattresses in the world.
The Indians formerly used it for another purpose — to give poros
ity or lightness to their building materials. When at Natchez,
Dr. Dickeson showed me some bricks dug out of an old Indian
mound, in which the tough woody fiber of the Tillandsia was
still preserved. When passing through the stalls, we were sur
rounded by a population of negroes, mulattoes, and quadroons, some
talking French, others a patois of Spanish and French, others a
mixture of French and English, or English translated from French,
and with the French accent. They seemed very merry, espe
cially those who were jet black. Some of the Creoles also, both
of French and Spanish extraction, like many natives of the south
of Europe, were very dark.
Amid this motley group, sprung from so many races, we en
countered a young man and woman, arm-in-arm, of fair complex
ion, evidently Anglo-Saxon, and who looked as if they had recently
come from the north. The Indians, Spaniards, and French stand
ing round them, seemed as if placed there to remind us of the suc
cessive races whose power in Louisiana had passed away, while
this fair couple were the representatives of a people whose domin
ion carries the imagination far into the future. However much
the moralist may satirize the spirit of conquest, or the foreigner
CHAP. XXVIII.] VIEW OF CITY. 105
laugh at some vain-glorious boasting about " our destiny," none
can doubt that from this stock is to spring the people who will
supersede every other in the northern, if not also in the southern
continent of America : —
• " Immota manebunt
Fata tibi ....
Romanes rerum dominos."
Soon after our arrival we walked to the levee, or raised bank
of the Mississippi, and, ascending to the top of the high roof of a
large steamer, looked down upon the yellow muddy stream., not
much broader than the Thames at London. At first I was dis
appointed that the " Father of Waters" did not present a more
imposing aspect ; but when I had studied and contemplated the
Mississippi for many weeks, it left on my mind an impression of
grandeur and vastness far greater than I had conceived before
seeing it. We counted thirty-four large steam-ships lying at the
wharf, each with their double chimneys, and some of truly mag
nificent dimensions. The vessel we had chanced to enter, had
her steam up and was bound for St. Louis, and we were informed
that she would convey us to that city, a distance of 1100 miles,
in five days, against the current, for eighteen dollars, or 4/., board
included.
We next went, for the sake of obtaining a genera] view of the
city and its environs, to the top of the cupola of the St. Charles
Hotel, the most conspicuous building in New Orleans, finished in
183G, the lofty dome of which is of a beautiful form. Within
the memory of persons now living, there were to be seen on the
site of this massive edifice, ducks and other water birds, swim
ming about in pools of water, in a morass. The architect began
the foundation by placing horizontally on the mud a layer of
broad planks two and a half inches thick ; in spite of which, the-
heavy building has sunk slightly in some places, but apparently
without sustaining material injury.
If a traveler has expected, on first obtaining an extensive view
of the environs of this city, to see an unsightly swamp, with
scarcely any objects to relieve the monotony of the flat plain save
the winding river and a few lakes, he will fee agreeably disap-
E*
106 SITE OF NEW ORLEANS. [CHAP. XXVIII.
pointed. He will admire many a villa and garden in the sub
urbs, and in the uncultivated space beyond, the effect of uneven
and undulating ground is produced by the magnificent growth of
cypress and other swamp timber, which have converted what
would otherwise have formed the lowest points in the landscape
into the appearance of wooded eminences. From the gallery of
the cupola we saw the well-proportioned, massive square tower
of St. Patrick's Church, recently built for the Irish Catholics, the
dome of the St. Louis Hotel, and immediately below us that fine
bend of the Mississippi, where we had just counted the steamers
at the wharf. Here, in a convex curve of the bank, there has
been a constant gain of land, so that in the last twenty-five years
no less than three streets have been erected, one beyond the oth
er, and all within the line of several large posts of cedar, to which
boats were formerly attached. New Orleans was called the
Crescent City, because the First Municipality was built along
this concave bend of the Mississippi. The river in this part of
its course varies in breadth from a mile to three-quarters of a mile,
and below the city sweeps round a curve for eighteen miles, and
then returns again to a point within five or six miles of that from
which it had set out. Some engineers are of opinion that as the
isthmus thus formed is only occupied by a low marsh, the cur
rent will in time cut through it, in which case the First Munic
ipality will be deserted by the main channel. Even should this
happen, the prosperity of a city which extends continuously for
more than six miles along the river would not be materially af
fected, for its site has been admirably chosen, although originally
determined in some degree by chance. The French began their
settlements on Lake Pontchartrain because they found there an
easy communication with the Gulf of Mexico. But they fixed
the site of their town on that part of the great river which was
nearest to the lagoon, so as to command, by this means, the nav
igation of the interior country.
March 5, 1846. — From New Orleans I made a short excur
sion with Dr. Carpenter and Dr. M'Cormac to Lake Pontchar
train, six miles to the northward. We went first along the
«' shell road" by the Bayou St, John's, and then returned by the
CHAP. XXVIII.] HEAPS OF GNATHODON. 107
canal. The shell road, so called from the materials used in. its
construction, namely, the valves of the Gnathodon cuneatus,
before mentioned, is of a dazzling white color, and in the bright
sunshine formed a strong contrast with the vegetation of the ad
joining swamps. Yet the verdure of the tail cypresses is some
what dimmed by the somber color of the gray Spanish moss hang
ing every where from its boughs like drapery. The rich clusters
of scarlet and purplish fruit of the red maple (Acer Drummondii)
were very conspicuous, and the willows have just unfolded their
apple-green leaves. The swamp palmetto ( Chamcerops adanso-
nia) raises its fan-shaped leaves ten feet high, although without
any main trunk, like the sea-island palmetto before described.
Several of them are surmounted by spikes bearing seeds. Among
the spring flowers we gathered violets ( Viola cuculata), the ele
gant Housto?iia serpyllifolia, which we had first seen at Clai-
borne, and a white bramble (Rubus, trivialis), the odor of which
resembles that of our primrose. The common white clover, also,
is most abundant here, as on the banks of the Mississippi, below
New Orleans ; yet it is not a native of Louisiana, and some bot
anists doubt whether any of the European species now growing
wild in this state are indigenous.
Lake Pontchartrain is about fifteen feet below high water, and
two feet below the lowest water of the Mississippi. It is said to
have become sensibly shallower in the last forty years, its depth
being now fourteen or fifteen feet only, for it receives annual sup
plies of mud from the Mississippi, poured into it by one of its
mouths, called the Iberville River.
The southeast wind sometimes drives the salt water into the
great lagoon, and raises its level from five to ten feet. On a mud
bank near the shore I observed the living Gnathodon, accom
panied by a modiola (JDreissena ?), and there was a small bank
of dead shells on the southern borders of the lake, which may
have been thrown up by the waves in a storm, the valves of most
of them being separate. I learned that the road materials before
spoken of were procured from the east end, where there is an
enormous mound of dead shells, a mile long, fifteen feet high, and
from twenty to sixty yards broad. Dr. Riddell, Director of the
108 EXCAVATION FOR GAS-WORKS. [CHAP. XXVIH
Mint at New Orleans, estimates the height of some of these shell
banks north of the lake, at twenty feet above its level ; yet h$
thinks they may have been washed up by the waves during
storms. I suspect, however, that some change in the relative
level of land and sea has taken place since their accumulation.
Dr. M'Cormac informed jne that he had observed heaps of these
same shells recently cast up along the margin of the bay called
the Sabine Lake, where the waters of the delta are brackish.
Returning to the bayou, we passed a splendid grove of live
oaks on the Mctairie ridge, supposed by some to be an old bank
of the Mississippi. These bayous, which traverse the delta and
alluvial plain of the Mississippi in every direction, are some of
them ancient arms of the great river, and others parts of its main
channel which have been deserted. They are at a lower level
than the present bed of the river, and convey the surface-waters
to the sea from that part of the land which the Mississippi is
incapable of draining. The bayous are sometimes stagnant, and
sometimes they flow in one direction when they convey the sur
plus waters of the Mississippi to the swamps, and in an opposite
direction at seasons when they drain the swarnps.
When we reached the canal which connects Lake Pontchar-
train with New Orleans, we found its surface enlivened with the
sails of vessels laden with merchandize. On the stern of one of
these I read, in large letters, a favorite name here — " The Dem
ocrat." Many features of the country reminded me of Holland.
About a mile from the city we passed a building where there is
steam machinery for pumping up water and draining the low
lands.
It is not easy for a geologist who wishes to study the modern
deposits in the delta, to find any natural sections. I was there
fore glad to learn that, in digging the foundations of the gas-works,
an excavation had been made more than fifteen feet deep, and
therefore considerably below the level of the Gulf, for the land at
New Orleans is elevated only nine feet above the sea. The con
tractors had first hired Irishmen, with spades, to dig this pit ;
but finding that they had to cut through buried timber, instead
of soil, they were compelled to engage, instead, 150 well-prac-
CHAP. XXVIII.] BURIED UPRIGHT TREES. 109
ticed ax-men from Kentucky. I am informed that the superin
tendent of the gas-works, Dr. Rogers, who is now absent in Cuba,
endeavored to estimate the minimum of time required for the
growth of the cypress and other trees, superimposed one upon
the other, in an upright position, with their roots as they grew,
and had come to the opinion, that eighteen centuries must hava
been required for the accumulation. At the time of my visit the
section was too obscure to enable me to verify or criticise these
conclusions ; but Mr. Bringier, the state surveyor, told me that
when the great canal, before alluded to, was dug to the depth of
nine feet from Lake Pontchartrain, they had cut through a cy
press swamp which had evidently filled up gradually, for there
were three tiers of the stumps of trees, some of them very old,
ranged one above the other ; and some of the trunks must have
rotted away to the level of the ground in the swamp before the
tipper ones grew over them. If it be true, as I suspect from
these statements, that the stools of trees which grew in fresh
water can be traced down to a level below the Gulf of Mexico,
we must conclude that the land has sunk down vertically. Per
haps some part of this subsidence might arise from the gradual
decay or compression of large masses of wood slowly changing
into lignite, for carbonated hydrogen is said to be constantly given
out from the soil here wherever such masses of vegetable matter
are decomposing ; and during the excavation of these works much
inflammable gas was observed to escape. That such upright
buried trees are not every where to be met with in this part of
the delta, I ascertained from Mr. Bringier. At his house, in the
suburbs of New Orleans, a well has been sunk to the depth of
twenty-seven feet, and the strata passed through consisted of sandy
clay, with only here and there some buried timber and roots.
Walking through one of the streets of New Orleans, near the
river, immediately north of the Catholic cathedral, I was surprised
to see a fine date-palm, thirty feet high, growing in the open air.
(See fig. 8.)
Mr. Wilde told me, that in 1829, in the island of Anastatio,
opposite St. Augustine, in Florida, he saw one still taller, proba
bly brought there by the Spaniards, who have introduced them
110
DATE-PALM.
[CHAP. XXVIII.
into the south of Spain from Africa. The tree is seventy or
eighty years old, for Pere Antoine, a Roman Catholic priest,
who died about twenty years ago, at the age of eighty, told Mr.
Bringier that he planted it himself, when he was young. In his
will he provided, that they who succeeded to this lot of ground
should forfeit it if they cut down the palm. Wishing to know
something of Pere Antoine's history, I asked a Catholic Creole,
who had a great veneration for him, when he died. He said it
could never be ascertained, because, after he became very emaci
ated, he walked the streets like a mummy, and gradually dried
up, ceasing at last to move ; but his flesh never decayed, or em
itted any disagreeable odour.
Fig. 8.
Pere Antoine's Date-palm (Phoenix dactylifera).
If the people here wish to adorn their metropolis with a striking
ornament, such as the northern cities can never emulate, let them
plant in one of their public squares an avenue of these date-palms.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Excursion from New Orleans to the Mouths of the River. — Steam-Boat
Accidents. — River Fogs. — Successive Growths of Willow on River Bank.
— Pilot-Station of the Balize. — Lighthouse destroyed by Hurricane. —
Reeds, Shells, and Birds on Mud-Banks.— Drift- Wood. — Difficulty of
estimating the annual Increase of Delta. — Action of Tides and Currents.
— Tendency in the old Soundings to be restored. — Changes of Mouths in
a Century inconsiderable. — Return to New Orleans. — Battle-Ground. —
Sugar-Mill. — Contrast of French and Anglo-American Races. — Causes
of Difference. — State and Progress of Negroes in Louisiana.
Feb. 28, 1846. — BEFORE my arrival at New Orleans, I had
resolved to visit the mouths of the Mississippi, and see the banks
of sand, mud, and drift timber, recently formed there during the
annual inundations. Dr. William Carpenter, although iri full
practice as a physician, kindly offered to accompany me, and his
knowledge of botany and geology, as well as his amiable manners,
made him a most useful and agreeable companion.*
I had heard much of the dangers of the Mississippi, and even
before I left New England, some of my friends, partly in jest,
and partly for the sake of inspiring me with due caution, in the
choice of vessels and captains, had told me endless stories of the
risks we should run. One of them presented to me a newspaper,
containing a formidable array of last year's casualties. Fifty
vessels had been snagged, twenty-seven sunk, sixteen had burst
their boilers, fifteen had been run into by other vessels, thirteen
destroyed by fire, ten wrecked, and seven cut through by ice.
This enumeration was followed by an account of the number of
persons drowned or injured. Another friend called my attention
to a form of advertisement, not uncommon in the St. Louis papers,
headed thus, " A fine opportunity of going below." This, he
explained, " does not mean going to the bottom, as you might
* This excellent naturalist, I regret to say, died soon afterward, in the
prime of life, at New Orleans, in 1848.
112 STEAM-BOAT ACCIDENTS. [CHAP. XXIX.
naturally conclude (although this is by no means an improbable
result of your voyage), but it merely signifies ' going down the
river.' '"' Another offered this piece of advice, " When you are
racing with an opposition steam-boat, or chasing her, and the
other passengers are cheering the captain, who is sitting on the
safety valve to keep it down with his weight, go as far as you
can from the engine, and lose no time, especially if you hear the
captain exclaim, ' Fire up boys, put on the resin !' Should a
servant call out, ' Those gentlemen who have not paid their
passage will please to go to the ladies' cabin,' obey the summons
without a moment's delay, for then an explosion may be appre
hended." " Why to the ladies's cabin ?" said I. " Because it
is the safe end of the boat, and they are getting anxious for the
personal security of those who have not yet paid their dollars,
being, of course, indifferent about the rest. Therefore never pay
in advance, for should you fall overboard during a race, and the
watch cries out to the captain, ' A passenger overboard,' he will
ask, ' Has he paid his passage ?' and if he receives an answer in
the affirmative, he will call out, ' Go ahead !' "
I shall explain in the sequel why the danger of accidents, in
the present state of the navigation, is by no means so great as
statistical tables make it appear at a distance ; but certainly my
first day's experience was not of a character to dispose me to
regard the warnings I had received as idle or uncalled for.
After we had been seated for half an hour on the deck of the
" Wave" steamer, Dr. Carpenter was recommended by a friend
to go by preference in a rival boat, just ready to start for the
Balize, which he said was safer. We accordingly went into
her, and she sailed first. Eight hours afterward, while we were
waiting, as I thought, an unconscionable time, at a landing, while
a Creole proprietor, who was by no means inclined to be in a
hurry, was embarking himself and some black servants, we saw
the rival steamer come up very slowly. No sooner had she
joined us, than all her passengers poured into our steamer, and
told us they had been in the greatest alarm, their steam-pipe
having burst ; but, most providentially, they had all escaped
without serious injury. If I had not already sailed about 1500
CHAP. XXIX.] RTVER FOGS. 113
miles in southern steamboats, since leaving South Carolina, with
out a mischance, I might have looked on this adventure as very
ominous.
The greater part of New Orleans would be annually over-
flowed by the river, but for the " levee," an artificial embank
ment, eight or nine feet high, which protects the city. This
levee became less and less elevated as we descended the stream.
We saw the buildings of several sugar plantations just behind it, at
a short distance from the edge of the bank. When we had gone
about twenty miles, below the bend called the English turn, I
was struck with the resemblance of the Mississippi to the Savan
nah, Alabama, and Altamaha rivers, where they flow through
a broad alluvial plain, with no bluffs in sight. The swamps on
both sides, although several feet lower than the river banks, have
the aspect, as before stated, of wooded eminences.
The distance from New Orleans to the great pilot-station at
the mouth of the river, called the Balize, is about 80 miles by
land, and 1 1 0 by water. We had been told we should reach
our destination before night ; but we were scarcely half way,
when we cast anchor in a dense fog, followed in the course of
the night, by much lightning and rain. We found the tempera
ture of the water to be 46° Fahrenheit, while that of the air had
varied, in the course of twenty-four hours, from 50° to 75°. This
difference between the temperature of the water and air, often
amounting to 3 0 ° Fahrenheit, gives rise to the fogs which prevail
at this season. The river flowing from the north, where there is
now much ice and snow, is always much colder, and I am in
formed by pilots, that as far as the Mississippi water can be
traced, by its color, into the gulf, it is commonly covered, in the
spring, with dense fog, while the atmosphere is clear on each
side. These fogs are generated in the same manner as ordinary
clouds, by the mixture of two currents of air of different degrees
of temperature. The river cools the air in contact with its sur
face, and this colder layer of air mingling with the warmer layer
immediately over it, causes the fog to begin to form close to the
water. Hence it is frequently confined to the bed of the river,
not spreading at all over the banks. The upper surface is often
114 PUMICE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. [CHAP. XXIX.
as well defined as if it were a bed of liquid, instead of vapor, and
the cabin, roof, and funnels of a steamer may be seen moving
along perfectly imobscured, while the hull and lower parts are
as completely hidden as if buried beneath the turbid water on
which it floats. The pilot, too, from the upper deck, can often
see the shore and landmarks with perfect clearness, and steer his
vessel with safety, while the passengers on the cabin deck can see
nothing beyond the sides of the boat. The fogs form sometimes
whatever be the quarter from which the wind blows, but are
more frequent when it is from the south, as the air is then the
warmest. Pieces of ice rarely floated down below Natchez,
350 miles above the Balize ; but, in some seasons, they have
been known to reach the gulf itself.
Next morning we weighed anchor, and passed Fort Jackson,
formerly Fort St. Philip, thirty-three miles above the Balize.
At several points, where we stopped for passengers, Dr. Carpenter
and I landed. The wood consisted of live oaks bearing bunches
of misletoe, cypress hung with Spanish moss, elms, alders, and the
red maple ; also a species of myrica, twenty feet high, and nu
merous wild vines, and other climbers, on the trees. At Bayou
Liere, there was a dense growth of a fan-palrn (Cliatn&rops
adansonia), from eight to thirteen feet high, and a log-cabin
thatched with its leaves, affording good shelter from the heaviest
rain. On the ground were numerous land-crabs ( Gclasimus),
called here fiddlers, which ran into their holes as we approached,
and a few small lizards, and a frog (liana pipicus), which, in
the night, had so shrill and clear a note, that we heard it two
miles off. The spring is so backward that few flowers are in
bloom, and we congratulated ourselves on escaping all annoyance
from musquitoes. At the water's edge I picked up several nuts
of the Carya aquatica, and many pieces of pumice as large as
apples, which must have come from the Rocky Mountains, and
are interesting, as reminding one of the fact, that volcanic regions
are drained by the western tributaries of the Mississippi. But I
could riot find a single empty land-shell, or helix, such as the
Rhine arid many other rivers bring down, and am told that none
are met with buried in the recent deposits of the delta.
CHAP. XXIX.] WILLOWS ON RIVER BANK. 115
The storm of the preceding night had driven many sea-gulls
up the river, which now followed our steamer, darting down to
the water to snatch up pieces of apple or meat, or whatever we
threw to them. After passing Fort Jackson, all trees disap
peared, except a few low willows. We then entered that long
promontory, or tongue of land, if such it can be called, which
consists simply of the broad river, flowing between narrow banks,
protruded for so many miles into the Gulf of Mexico. Each
bank, including the swamps behind it, is about 200 or 300
yards wide, covered with dead reeds, among which we saw many
tall, white cranes feeding, as in a flooded meadow, and as con
spicuous as sheep. The landscape on either side was precisely
similar, and most singular, consisting of blue sky, below which
were the dark-green waters of the Gulf, lighted up by a brilliant
sun ; then the narrow band of swamp, covered with dead reeds,
and, in the foreground, a row of pale-green willows, scarcely re
flected in the yellow, turbid water of the river. Occasionally
large merchant-vessels, some three-masted, were towed up by
steam-tugs, through the slack water, near the bank. How the
river can thus go to sea as it were, and yet continue for centuries
to preserve the same channel, in spite of storms and hurricanes,
which have more than once in the last hundred years caused the
waters of the Gulf to break over its banks, seems, at first, incom
prehensible, till we remember that we have here a powerful body
of fresh water flowing in a valley more than a hundred feet deep,
with vasts mounds of mud and sand on each side, and that the
sea immediately adjoining is comparatively shallow.
The growth of willows on that side of the stream where the
land is gaining on the water, is often so formal and regular, that
they look like an artificial plantation. In the front row are
young saplings just rising out of the ground, which is formed of
silt, thrown down within the last two or three years. Behind
them is an older growth from four to eight feet high. Still far
ther back is seen a third row twenty-five feet high, and some
times in this manner five tiers, each overtopping the other, show
ing the gradual formation of the bank, which inclines upward,
because the soil first deposited has been continually raised during
116 THE BALIZE. [CHAP. XXTX.
annual floods. While a gain of land is thus taking place on one
side, the river is cutting into and undermining the opposite bank,
often at the rate of ten feet or more in a year. The most com
mon willow is Salix nigra, but Dr. Carpenter tells me there is
a rarer species (Salix longifolia) intermixed. I inquired how it
happened that none of these trees were old, although some part
of the banks on which they grew are known to be of considerable
antiquity. My companion said, " that in marshy places the
Salix nigra is not a long-lived tree, rarely lasting more than
twenty-five or thirty years."
At length, as we approached the Balize, even these willows
ceased to adorn the margin of the river, which was then simply
bounded by mounds of bare sand. Balize means beacon in
Spanish. It appears that, in 1744, the main passage or en
trance of the river was at three small islands, which then existed
where this pilot station now stands. It continued to be the
principal mouth of the Mississippi for about a quarter of a cen
tury later. The present village, called the Balize, has a popu
lation of more than 450 souls, among whom there are fifty reg
ularly appointed pilots, and many more who are aspirants to that
office. The houses are built on piles driven into the mud-banks,
and the greater part of them moored, like ships, to strong anchors,
whenever a hurricane is apprehended. They have no fear of the
river, which scarcely rises six inches during its greatest floods ;
but some winds make the Gulf rise six feet, as in the year 1812,
and so fast has been the increase of the population of late, that
there are scarcely boats enough, as one of the pilots confessed to
me, to save the people, should the waters rise again to that ele
vation. They might, however, escape on drift timber, which
abounds here, provided they had time to choose the more buoy
ant trees ; for we observed many large rafts of wood so water
logged that it could scarcely swim, and the slightest weight
would sink it.
Although the chimney of our steamer was not lofty, it stood
higher than the houses ; but in order to obtain a wider prospect,
I went up into the look-out, a wooden frame-work with a plat
form, where the pilots were watching for vessels, with their
CHAP. XXIX.] LIGHTHOUSE— HOUSES ON PILES. 117
telescopes. From this elevation we saw, far to the south, the
lighthouse, situated at what is now the principal entrance of the
river. The pilots told us, that the old lighthouse, of solid brick
work, eighty-seven feet high, erected on "the south point," was
destroyed by a hurricane in the winter of 1839. The keeper
was saved, although he was in the building for forty-eight hours
before it fell, and, during the whole time, it vibrated frightfully
to and fro. Much of the low banks, then bounding the river,
were swept away, but have since been restored.
To the eastward all was sea ; turning to the north, or toward
New Orleans and the delta, I could discover no more signs of
the existence of a continent than when looking southward or
toward the lighthouse. In the west, Bird Island, covered with
trees, was more conspicuous. An old pilot told us it was inhab»
ited by large deer, and was "very high land." "How high
above the sea?" said I. "Three or four feet," he replied ; and
as if so startling an assertion required the confirmation of several
witnesses, he appealed to the bystanders, who assented, saying,
"It is all that, for it was only just covered during the great hur
ricane." And well may such an elevation command respect in
a town where all the foundations of the houses are under water,
and where the value of each site is measured by the number of
inches or feet within which a shoal rises to the surface of the sea.
It was a curious sight to behold seventy or more dwellings,
erected on piles, among reeds half as high as the houses, and
which often grew close to them, most of the buildings communi
cating with an outhouse by a wooden bridge thrown over a
swarnp or pool of water, sometimes fresh and sometimes brackish.
On one side of the main channel, which our steamer had entered,
was built a long wooden platform, made of planks, resting on
piles, which served for a promenade. There we saw the pilots'
wives and daughters, and among them the belles of the place,
well dressed, and accompanied by their pet dogs, taking their
evening walk.
March 1 . — Having engaged a boat, Dr. Carpenter and I set
out on an excursion to examine the bayous or channels between
the mud banks. The first stroke of the oars carried us into the
118 REEDS, SHELLS, AND BIRDS. [CHAP. XXIX.
midst of a dense crop of tall reeds. This plant (Arundo phrag-
mitis) is an annual, and inhabits fresh-water swamps, yet we
found many dead barnacles attached to them, showing that, in
the course of the year, when the river is low, the salt water pre
vails here, so that these marine cirripeda have time to be devel
oped from the embryo state, and to flourish for some months, till
they are killed by the returning fresh water. We could only
detect one shell inhabiting these mud banks, a species of Neritina.
But I am told that the Gnathodon is found in the brackish
water, a short distance beyond. It was also stated, that about
eighteen miles beyond the southwest and northwest passes, or
extreme mouths of the river, there are banks of sea-shells of
various species. With the arundo was intermixed a tall rush or
reed-mace ( Typha), somewhat resembling the bulrush. We got
out and walked on these banks, on which fresh water was stand
ing, so cold and benumbing to the hands, that we had no fear of
musquitoes. At almost any other season these insects would have
swarmed here, and tormented us greatly. Even the alligators
were invisible, though some of them had been out a few days
before. Many paths, recently trodden by racoons, were seen to
traverse the reeds, and there were foot-prints of the civet or
mink, and of wild cats and water-rats in abundance. We put
up several white herons, and many snipes and curlews, and the
boat-tailed grackle (Quisqualus).
At length returning to the boat, we soon reached a channel
blocked up with drift wood in every stage of decay, some fresh
and sound, but most of it rotten and water-logged. We walked
for hundreds of yards over natural rafts of this timber, the quan
tity of which, they say, has sensibly diminished since the steamers
began to consume so much fuel, for it is now intercepted in large
quantities before it gets to New Orleans, and cut into logs for the
steamers.
We were desirous of obtaining accurate information from the
pilots respecting the recent advance of land on the Gulf, hoping
from such data to calculate the time when the mouths of the
river were at New Orleans. But I soon found that materials
for such a calculation are not to be procured.
CHAP. XXIX.] CHARLEVOIX'S MAPS. U9
Dr. Carpenter had brought with him Chaiievoix's maps of the
river mouths or "passes," published 112 years ago, and referring
to the state of things about 130 years ago. We were surprised
to find how accurately this survey represents, for the most part,
the number, shape, and form of the mud-banks and bayous, or
channels, as they now exist around the Balize. The pilots, to
whom we showed the charts, admitted that one might imagine
them to have been constructed last year, were it not that bars
had been thrown across the mouths of every bayou, because they
are no longer scoured out as they used to be when the principal
discharge of the Mississippi was at this point. We then went
within a mile of the old Spanish building, called the Magazine,
correctly laid down in Charlevoix's map, and now 600 yards
nearer the sea than formerly, showing that the mud-banks have
given way, or that the salt water has encroached in times when
a smaller body of fresh water has been bringing down its sedi
ment to this point.
The southwest pass is now the principal entrance of the
Mississippi, and till lately there was eighteen feet water in it,
but the channel has grown shallower by two feet. When it is
considered that a fleet of the largest men-of-war could sail for a
thousand rniles into the interior, were it not for the bars thrown
across the entrance of each of the mouths or passes, one can not
wonder that efforts should have been made to deepen the main
channel artificially. But no human undertaking seems more
hopeless; for, after a great expenditure of money in 1838 and
1839, and the excavation, by means of powerful steam dredges,
of a deep passage, the river filled up the entire cavity with mud
during a single flood.
One of the chief pilots told us, that since 1839, or in six years,
he had seen an advance of the prominent mouths of the river of
more than a mile. But Linton, the oldest and most experienced
of them, admitted that the three passes called the northeast,
southeast, and southwest, had in the last twenty-four years only
advanced one mile each. Even this fact would furnish no ground
for estimating the general rate at which the delta advances, for
on each of these narrow strips of land, or river-banks, the sea
120 ANNUAL INCREASE! OF DELTA. [CHAP. XXIX.
would make extensive inroads whenever the main channel of
discharge is altered and there is a local relaxation of the river's
power. Every year, as soon as the flood season is over, the tide
enters far up each channel, scouring out mud and sand, and
sweeping away many a bar, formed during the period of inunda
tion. Bringier, an experienced surveyor of New Orleans, told
me, that on revisiting the mouths of the Mississippi after an
interval of forty years, he was surprised to observe how station
ary their leading features had remained. Mr. Dunbar, also an
engineer in great practice in Louisiana, assured me that on com
paring the soundings lately made by him with those laid down
in the French maps of Sieur Diron, published in 1740, he found
the changes to be quite inconsiderable. On questioning the
pilots on the subject, they stated that the changes from year to
year are great, but are no measure whatever of those worked out
in a long period, for there seems to be a tendency in the action
of the tides and river to restore the old soundings.
Captain Grahame, also a government surveyor, on comparing
the northeast pass with the charts made a century before, found
it had not advanced more than a quarter of a mile, and that in
the same interval the principal variations at the pass a Loutre
had consisted in the filling up of some bayous. Even if we could
assume that the progress of the whole delta in twenty-five years
was as great as that assigned by Linton to one or two narrow
channels and banks, it would have taken several thousand years
for the river to advance from New Orleans to the Balize ; but
when we take into our account the whole breadth of the delta, or
that part of it which has advanced beyond the general coast-line
above 100 miles across, we must allow an enormous period of
time for its accumulation.
The popular belief in New Orleans, that the progress of the
banks near the mouths of the river has been very rapid, arises
partly from the nature of the evidence given by witnesses in the
law courts, in cases of insurance. When a ship is lost, the usual
line of defense on the part of the pilots, whether for themselves
or their friends, is to show that new sand-bars are forming, and
shoals shifting their places so fast, that no blame attaches to any
CHAP. XXIX.] TIDES AND CURRENTS. 121
one for running a vessel aground. To exaggerate rather than
underrate, the quantity of sediment newly deposited by the river,
is the bias of each witness, although their statements may in the
main be correct ; for in the contest annually carried on between
the river and the sea, there is unquestionably a vast amount of
destruction and renovation of mud-banks and sand bars. In
these changes the action of the tide, and the power of the break
ers during storms, and a strong marine current, all play their part.
There seem to be well-authenticated accounts of anchors cast
up from a depth of several fathoms near the mouths of the river,
and heavy stones sunk sixteen feet deep, and found afterward high
and dry on shoals. The ballast also of several wrecked vessels,
the submergence of which, in two or three fathoms water, had
been ascertained, have in like manner been thrown up, above
high water mark, on newly formed islands.
All the pilots agree, that when the Mississippi is at its height,
it pours several streams of fresh water, tinged with yellow sedi
ment, twelve or more miles into the gulf, beyond its mouths.
These streams floating over the heavier salt water, spread out
into broad superficial sheets or layers, which the keels of vessels
plough through, turning up a furrow of clear blue water, form
ing a dark streak in the middle of the ship's wake. I infer,
therefore, that both in the summer, when the swollen river is
turbid and depositing mud, and in the winter, when the sea is
making reprisals on the delta, there is a large amount of fine sed
iment dispersed far and wide, and carried by currents to the deeper
and more distant parts of the Gulf. To this dispersing power I
shall recall the reader's attention in a future chapter, when dis
cussing the probable antiquity of the delta.
March 2. — We returned to New Orleans in the same steamer.
It is remarkable that for more than 150 miles above the Balize,
there is only one of those great bends in the course of the Missis
sippi, which are so general a character of its channel north of
New Orleans. The exception is the great sweep called the English
Turn. Mr. Forshey imputes this difference in the shape of the
bed of the river to the distinct circumstances under which a
stream is placed when it shapes out its course through a deposit
VOL. TI. — F
122 SUGAR-MILL. [CHAP. XXIX,
raised above the level of the sea, or when it is forming its bed,
as to the south of New Orleans, below the sea-level.
Above the English Turn, and within a few miles of the me
tropolis, I landed on the famous battle-ground, where the English,
in 1815, were defeated, and saw the swamp through which the
weary soldiers were required to drag their boats, on emerging from
which, they were fired upon by the enemy, advantageously
placed on the higher ground, or river-bank. The blunder of the
British commander is sufficiently obvious even to one unskilled in
military affairs. They are now strengthening the levee at this
point, for the Mississippi is threatening to pour its resistless cur
rent through this battle-ground, as, in the delta of the Ganges,
the Hoogly is fast sweeping away the celebrated field of Plassy.
At one of the landings on the left bank of the river, Dr. Car
penter went with me to see a large sugar-mill, in the management
of which an Anglo-American proprietor had introduced all the
latest improvements. There was machinery, worked by steam,
for pressing the j uice out of the sugar-canes, and large boilers and
coolers, with ducts for the juice to flow down into enormous vats.
We heard much of the injury done to the sugar plantations
and gardens by the cocoa, or nut grass (Cyperus hydra), which
I had seen springing up even in the streets of New Orleans be
tween the pavement stones. It increases by suckers as well as
by seed ; but it is only of late years that it has ravaged Louisi
ana. If horses be brought from an estate where- this plant is
known to exist, their hoofs are carefully cleaned, lest the soil, ad
hering to them should introduce some fibers or tubers of this
scourge.
Although impatient to return to the city, we could riot help
being amused when we learnt that our boat and all its passengers
were to be detained till some hogsheads of sugar were put on
board, some of the hoops of which had got loose. A cooper had
been sent for, who was to hammer them on. " You may there
fore go over the sugar-mill at your leisure." I observed that all
whose native tongue was English, were indignant at the small
value which the captain seemed to set on their time ; but the
Creole majority, who spoke French, were in excellent humor. A
CHAP. XXIX. ] FRENCH AND ANGLO AMERICANS. 123
party of them was always playing whist in the cabin, and the rest
looking1 on. When summoned to disembark at their respective
landings, they were in no haste to leave us, wishing rather to
finish the rubber. The contrast of the two races was truly di
verting, just what I had seen in Canada. Whenever we were
signaled by a negro, and told to halt "till Master was ready,"
I was sure to hear some anecdote from an Anglo-Saxon passen
ger in disparagement of the Creoles. "North of New Orleans,"
said one of my companions, " the American captains are begin
ning to discipline the French proprietors into more punctual
habits. Last summer, a senator of Louisiana having forgotten
his great-coat, sent back his black servant to bring it from his
villa, expecting a first-rate steamer, with several hundred people
on board, to wait ten or fifteen minutes for him. When, to his
surprise, the boat started, he took the captain to task in great
wrath, threatening never to enter his vessel again."
My attention was next called to the old-fashioned make of the
French ploughs. " On this river, as on the St. Lawrence," said
an American, "the French had a fair start of us by more than a
century. They obtained possession of all the richest lands, yet
are now fairly distanced in the race. When they get into debt,
and sell a farm on the highest land next the levee, they do not
migrate to a new region farther west, but fall back somewhere
into the low grounds near the swamp. There they retain all
their antiquated usages, seeming to hate innovation. To this day
they remain rooted in those parts of Louisiana where the mother
country first planted her two colonies two centuries ago, and they
have never swarmed off, or founded a single new settlement.
They never set up a steam-engine for their sugar-mills, have tak
en no part in the improvement of steam navigation, and when a
railway was proposed in Opelousas, they opposed it, because they
feared it would 'let the Yankees in upon them.' When a rich
proprietor was asked why he did not send his boy to college, he
replied, < Because it would cost me 450 dollars a year, and I shall
be able to leave my son three more negroes when I die, by not
incurring that expense.' ' Dr. Carpenter informed me, that the
Legislature of Louisiana granted in 1834, a charter for a medi-
121 FRENCH AND ANGLO-AMERICANS. [CHAP. XXIX.
cal college in the Second Municipality, which now, in the year
1846, numbers one hundred students, and is about to become the
medical department of a new university. The Creoles were so
far stimulated by this example, as to apply also for a charter for a
French College in the First Municipality. It was granted in the
same year, but has remained a dead letter to this day.
One of the passengers had been complaining to me, that a cre-
ole always voted for a Creole candidate at an election, however
much he differed from him in political opinions, rather than sup
port an Anglo-Saxon of his own party. I could not help saying
that I should be tempted to do the same, if I were of French ori
gin, and heard my race as much run down as I had done since
I left the Balize.
A large portion of the first French settlers in Louisiana came
from Canada, and I have no doubt Gayarre is right in affirming
that they have remained comparatively stationary, because they
carried out with them, from the mother country, despotic maxims
of government, coupled with extreme intolerance in their religious
opinions. The bigotry which checked the growth of the infant
colony was signally displayed, when Louis XIV. refused to per
mit 400 Huguenot families, who had fled to South Carolina,
after the revocation of the edict of Nantes, to be incorporated
among the new settlers on the Mississippi.^
Notwithstanding the marked inclination of the Anglo-Saxons
to seek no other cause than that of race to account for the alleged
stationary condition of the Creoles, I was glad to find that one of
the most intelligent citizens of New Orleans took a more hopeful
and less fatalist view of the matter. « I observe," he said, " that
those French emigrants who have come out to us lately, espe
cially the Parisians, are pushing their way in the world with as
much energy as any of our race ; so I conclude that the first
settlers in Canada and Louisiana quitted Europe too soon, before
the great Revolution of 1792 had turned the Frenchman into a
progressive being."
Among the Creoles with whom I came in contact, I saw many
whose manners were most polite and agreeable, and I felt as I
* Gayarre, Hisloire de la Louisiane, torn. i. p. 69.
CHAP. XXIX.] NEGROES IN LOUISIANA. 125
had done toward the Canadian " habitants," that I should have
had more pleasure in associating with them than with a large
portion of their Anglo-American rivals, who, from a greater read
iness to welcome new ideas, are more likely to improve, and will
probably outstrip them in knowledge and power.
When we sat down to dinner in the cabin, one of the Creoles,
of very genteel appearance, was so dark that I afterward asked
an American, out of curiosity, whether he thought my neighbor
at table had a dash of negro blood in his veins. He said he had
been thinking so, and it had made him feel very uncomfortable
during dinner. I was so unprepared for this manifestation of
anti-negro feeling, that I had difficulty in keeping my counte
nance. The same messmate then told me that the slaves had
lately risen on an estate we were just passing, on the right bank
of the river, below New Orleans, but had been quickly put down.
He said that the treatment of them had greatly improved within
the last eight years, keeping pace steadily with the improved civ
ilization of the whites. The Creoles, he said, fed their negroes
well, but usually gave them no beds, but blankets only to lie
down upon. They were kind in their feelings toward them ; but,
owing to their improvident habits, they secured no regular med
ical attendance, and lost more black children than the American
planters.
I afterward remarked that the growth of New Orleans seemed
to show that a large city may increase and flourish in a slave
state ; but Dr. Carpenter arid Mr. Wilde both observed, that the
white race has been superseding the negroes. Ten years ago,
say they, all the draymen of New Orleans, a numerous class, and
the cabmen, were colored. Now, they are nearly all white.
The servants at the great hotels were formerly of the African,
now they are of the European race. Nowhere is the jealousy
felt by the Irish toward the negroes more apparent. According
to some estimates, in a permanently resident population not much
exceeding 80,000, there are only 22,000 colored persons, and a
large proportion of these are free.
Over a door in the principal street of New Orleans we read
the inscription, "Negroes on sale here." It is natural that
126 NEGROES IN LOUISIANA. [CHAP. XXIX.
southerners should not be aware how much a foreigner is shocked
at this public mode of treating a large part of the population as
mere chattels.
The following is an advertisement copied verbatim from a
Natchez paper : —
"NINETY NEGROES FOR SALE.
"I have about ninety negroes, just arrived from Richmond,
Virginia, consisting of field hands, house servants, carriage drivers,
two seamstresses, several very fine cooks (females), and one very
fine neat cook (male), one blacksmith, one carpenter, and some
excellent mules and excellent wagons arid harness, and one very
fine riding horse — all of which I will sell at the most reasonable
prices. I have made arrangements in Richmond, Va., to have
regular shipments every month, and intend to keep a good stock
on hand of every description of servants during the season.
" JOHN D. JAMES.
"Natchez, October 16-tf."
In a St. Louis paper, I read, in the narrative of a steamboat
collision, the following passage : — " We learn that the passengers,
with few exceptions, lost all their effects ; — one gentleman in
particular lost nine negroes (who were on deck) arid fourteen
horses."
Among the laws recently enacted in Louisiana, I was glad to
see one to prevent persons of color exiled from other states, or
transported for some offense, from becoming citizens. In spite of
such statutes, the negro-exporting portions of the Union will al
ways make the newer states play in some degree the part of penal
settlements.
Free blacks are allowed to be witnesses in the courts here, in
cases where white men are concerned, a privilege they do not en
joy in some free states, as in Indiana ; but they do not allow
free blacks to come and settle here, and say they have been com
pelled to adopt this precaution by the abolitionists.
An intelligent Louisianian said to me, «Were we to emanci
pate our negroes as suddenly as your government did the West
CHAP. XXIX. ] NEGROES IN LOUISIANA.
Indians, they would be a doomed race ; but there can be no doubt
that white labor is more profitable even in this climate." " Then,
why do you not encourage it ?" I asked. " It must be the work
of time," he replied ; " the prejudices of owners have to be over
come, and the sugar and cotton crop is easily lost, if not taken in
at once when ripe ; the canes being damaged by a slight frost,
and the cotton requiring to be picked dry as soon as mature, and
being ruined by rain. Very lately a planter, five miles below
New Orleans, having resolved to dispense with slave labor, hired
one hundred Irish arid German emigrants at very high wages.
In the middle of the harvest they all struck for double pay. No
others were to be had, and it was impossible to purchase slaves
in a few days. In that short time he lost produce to the value
of ten thousand dollars."
A rich merchant of Pennsylvania, who was boarding at the
St. Louis Hotel, showed me a letter he had just received from
Philadelphia, in which his correspondent expressed a hope that
his feelings had not often been shocked by the sufferings of the
slaves. " Doubtless," said the writer, " you must have often
witnessed great horrors." The Philadelphian then told me, that
after residing here several years, and having a strong feeling of
the evils as well as. impolicy of slavery, he had never been forced
to see nor hear of any castigatiori of a slave in any establishment
with which he had intercourse. " Once," he added, " in New
Jersey (a free state) he remembered having seen a free negro child
whipped by its master." The tale of suffering to which his
Pennsylvanian correspondent particularly alluded, was not authen
tic, or, at least, grossly exaggerated. It had been copied from
the abolitionist papers of the north into the southern papers,
sometimes with and sometimes without comment ; for such libels
are hailed with pleasure by the Perpetualists as irritating the feel-
ino- of that class of slave-owners who are most anxious to advance
C5
the welfare arid education of the negroes.
We ascertained that Miss Martirieau's story of Madame Lalau-
rie's cruelty to her slaves was perfectly correct. Instances of such
savage conduct are rare, as was indeed sufficiently proved by the
indignation which it excited in the whole city. A New England
123 NEGROES IN LOUISIANA. [CHAP. XXIX,
lady settled here told me, she had promised to set free her two
female colored servants at her death. I asked if she had no fear
of their poisoning her. " On the contrary," she replied, " they
would be in despair were I to die."
One of the families which we visited at New Orleans was
plunged in grief by the death of a little negro girl, suddenly car
ried off by a brain fever, in the house. She was the daughter of
a domestic servant, and the sorrow for her loss was such as might
have been felt for a relation.
CHAPTER XXX.
Voyage from New Orleans to Port Hudson. — The Coast. Villas, and Gar
dens. — Cotton Steamers. — Flat Boats. — Crevasses and Inundations. —
Decrease of Steamboat Accidents. — Snag-Boat. — Musquitoes. — Natural
Rafts. — Bartram on buried Trees at Port Hudson. — Dr. Carpenter's Ob
servations. — Landslip described. — Ancient Subsidence in the Delta fol
lowed bv an upward Movement, deducible from the buried Forest at
Port Hudson.
March 10, 1846. — ON leaving New Orleans, I made ar
rangements for stopping to examine the bluff at Port Hudson,
160 miles up the river, where I was to land in the night, from
the Rainbow steamer, while my wife started in another boat,
the Magnolia, to go direct to the more distant port of Nat
chez. If a lady is recommended to the captain of one of these
vessels she feels herself under good protection, and needs no other
escort ; but Mr. Wilde introduced my wife to Judge , who
kindly undertook to take charge of her, and see her to the hotel
at Natchez. The Rainbow ascended the river at the rate of
eleven miles an hour, keeping near the bank, where the force of
the current was broken by eddies, or where the backwater was
sometimes running in our favor. Occasionally her speed waa
suddenly checked, when it became necessary to cross the stream
on reaching a point where the current was setting with its full
force against the bank along which we had been sailing. In
spite of such delays, the rate of going up is only one-third less
than going down the stream. The recent introduction of sep
arate engines to work each of the wheels greatly economizes
the time spent in the landing of passengers. The boat may be
turned round or kept stationary with more facility, when each
wheel can be moved in an opposite direction. In this part of
the Mississippi, and at this season, the points where passengers
can be set ashore are very numerous, the water being often forty
feet deep close to the banks But there are certain regular places
130 THE COAST— FLAT BOATS. [CHAP. XXX.
of disembarkation, the approach to which is announced by ringing
a large bell.
A great proportion of the trees are still leafless, the willows,
cypresses, and red maples being no more advanced than I had
seen them at Mobile in the third week of February. The gar
dens continue to be gay with the blossoms of the peach and plum-
trees. As our vessel wound its way round one great bend after
another, we often saw directly before us the dome of the St. Charles
and the tower of St. Patrick's, and were sailing toward them after
I thought we had already taken a last look at them far astern.
In the first seven hours we made sixty miles, including stoppages.
We were passing along what is called " the coast," or that part
of the Mississippi which is protected by a levee above the metrop
olis. A great many handsome country houses, belonging to the
proprietors of sugar plantations, give a cultivated aspect to this
region, and the scenery is enlivened by a prodigious number of
schooners and large steamers sailing down from the Ohio arid Red
rivers, heavily laden with cotton. This cotton has already been
much compressed when made up into bales ; but it undergoes, at
New Orleans, still greater pressure, by steam power, to diminish
its bulk before embarkation for Liverpool.
The captain calculated that within the first seven hours after
we left the wharf, in the Second Municipality, we had passed no
less than ten thousand bales going down the river, each bale
worth thirty-five dollars at present prices, and the value of the
whole, therefore, amounting to 350.000 dollars, or 73,500/.
sterling. All this merchandize would reach the great emporium
within twenty hours of the time of our passing it. Before we
lost sight of the city, we saw a large flat boat drifting down in
the middle of the current, steered by means of a large oar at the
stern. It was laden with farm produce, and had come about
two thousand miles, from near Pittsburg, on the Ohio. I had
first observed this kind of craft on my way to the Balize, meet
ing near Fort Jackson a boat without a single inmate, thirty-five
feet long, and built of stout planks, with a good roof. It was
drifting along on its way to the Gulf of Mexico, the owner hav
ing abandoned it after selling his corn and other stores at the
CHAP. XXX.] FLAT BOATS. 131
great city. He himself had probably returned to the north in a
steamer ; having found the substantial floating mansion, in which
he had lived for several weeks or months, quite unsaleable, al
though containing so much good timber shaped into planks. It
is the duty of the wharfinger at New Orleans to see that the
river is not blocked up with such incumbrances, and to set them
adrift. After wandering for several hundred miles in the Gulf,
they are sometimes cast ashore at Pensacola.
Soon afterward, when we were taking in wood at a landing,
I entered another of these flat boats, just arrived there, and dis
covered that it was a shop, containing all kinds of grocery and
other provisions, tea, sugar, lard, cheese, flour, beef, and whiskey.
It was furnished with a chimney, and I was surprised to see a
large family of inmates in two spacious cabins, for no one would
suspect these boats to be so roomy below water, as they are
usually sunk deep in the river by a heavy freight. They had a
fiddle on board, and were preparing to get up a dance for the
negroes. A fellow-traveler told me that these peddlers are com
monly called chicken-thieves, and, the day after they move off",
the planters not unfrequently miss many of their fowls.
Pointing to an old levee with a higher embankment newly
made behind it, the captain told me, that a breach had been
made there in 1844, through which the Mississippi burst, inun
dating the low cultivated lands between the highest part of the
bank and the swamp. In this manner, thousands of valuable
acres were injured. He had seen the water rush through the
opening at the rate of ten miles an hour, sucking in several flat
boats, and carrying them over a watery waste into a dense swamp
forest. Here the voyagers might remain entangled among the
trees unheard of and unheeded till they were starved, if canoes
were not sent to traverse the swamps in every direction, in the
hope of rescuing such wanderers from destruction. When we
consider how many hair- breadth escapes these flat boats have
experienced, — how often they have been nearly run down in the
night, or even in the day, during dense fogs, and sent to the bot
tom by collision with a huge steamer, it is strange to reflect,
that at length, when their owners have caught sight of the
132 CREVASSES AND INUNDATIONS. [CHAP. XXX.
towers of New Orleans in the distance, they should be hurried
into a wilderness, and perish there.
I was shown the entrance of what is called the Carthage
crevasse, formed in May, 1840, and open for eight weeks, during
which time it attained a breadth of eighty feet. Its waters
were discharged into Lake Pontchartrain, when nothing was
visible between that great lagoon and the Mississippi but the
tops of tall cypress trees growing in the morass, and a long, nar-
narrow, black stripe of earth, being the top of the levee, which
marked the course of the river.
The reader may naturally ask why the Mississippi, when it
has once burst through its bank, and taken this shorter cut to the
sea, does not continue in the same course, reaching the salt water
in a few miles instead of flowing two hundred miles before it
empties itself into the Gulf. I may remark in reply, that the great
river does not run, as might be inferred from the description of
some of the old geographers, on the top of a ridge in a level plain,
but in a valley from one hundred to two hundred and fifty feet
deep.
Fig. 9-
^J?^_jg>jjj._»
c
Section of Channel, Bank, Levees (a and b), and Swamps of Mississippi River.
Thus a b c may represent the cavity in which the river flows,
the artificial levees at the top of the banks being seen at a and b.
The banks are higher than the bottom of the swamps, f g and
d e ; because, when the river overflows, the coarser part of the
sediment is deposited at a and b, where the speed of the current
is first checked. It usually runs there with a gentle current
among herbage, reeds, and shrubs ; and is nearly filtered of its
earthy ingredients before it arrives at the swamps. It is probable
that the Mississippi flows to the nearest point of the Gulf, where
there is a sufficient depth or capacity in the bed of the sea to
CHAP. XXX.] SNAG-BOATS. 133
receive its vast burden of water and mud ; and if it went to Lake
Pontchartrain, it would have to excavate a new valley like a b c,
many times deeper than the bottom of that lagoon.
The levee raised to protect the low grounds from inundation,
was at first, when we left New Orleans, only four feet high, so
as not to impede our view of the country from the deck ; but as
we ascended, both the natural bank and the levee became higher
and higher, and by the time we had sailed up sixty-five miles, I
could only just see the tops of tall trees in the swamps. Even
these were only discernible from the roof of the cabin, or what is
called the hurricane deck, when we had gone 100 miles from New
Orleans.
The large waves raised by the rapid movement of several hun
dred steamers, causes the undermining and waste of the banks
to proceed at a more rapid rate than formerly. The roots also
of trees growing at the edge of the stream, were very effective
formerly in holding the soil together, before so much timber had
been cleared away. Now the banks offer less resistance to the
wasting action of the stream.
The quantity of drift wood floated down the current has not
diminished sensibly within the last twenty years, but nearly all
of it is now intercepted in the last forty miles above New Orleans,
and split up into logs by the proprietors to supply the furnaces of
steamboats, which are thus freeing the river of the heavy masses
against which they used formerly to bump in the night, or round
which they were forced to steer in the day. There has also been
a marked decrease, of late years, in the number of snags. The
trunks of uprooted trees, so called, get fixed in the mud, having
sunk with their heavier end to the bottom, and remain slanting
down the stream, so as to pierce through the bows of vessels sail
ing up. A government report just published, shows that two
snag-boats, each having a crew of twenty men, one of them draw
ing four feet, and the other two feet water, have, extracted 700
snags in four weeks out of the Missouri, and others have been at
work on the Mississippi. When it is remembered that some of
the most dangerous of these snags have been known to continue
planted for twenty years in the same spot (so slowly does wood
134 STEAMBOAT ACCIDENTS. [CHAP. XXX.
decay under water), it may readily be conceived how much this
formidable source of danger has lessened in the last few years.
At the season when the river is lowest, grappling irons are firm
ly fixed to these snags, and the whole force of the engines in the
snag-boat is exerted to draw them out of the mud ; they are then
cut into several pieces, and left to float down the stream, but
part of them being water-logged, sink at once to the bottom.
Several travelers assure me, that serious accidents are not more
common now on the Mississippi and its tributaries, when there are
800 steamers afloat, than twenty years ago, when the number
of steamers was less than fifty. The increased security arises,
chiefly, from the greater skill and sobriety of the captains and
engineers, who rarely run races as formerly, and who usually cast
anchor during fogs and in dark nights. Such precautions have
no doubt, become more and more imperative, in proportion as the
steamers have multiplied. On the wide Atlantic, the chances of
collision in a fog may be slight, but to sail in so narrow a channel
as that of a river, at the rate of ten miles an hour, unable to see
a ship's length ahead, with the risk of meeting, every moment,
other steamers coming down at the rate of fifteen miles an hour,
implies such recklessness, that one can not wonder that navigators
on the western waters have earned the character of setting small
value on their own and others' lives. Formerly, the most fre
quent cause of explosions was a deficiency of water in the boiler ;
one of the great improvements adopted, within the last five years,
for preventing this mischief, is the addition of a separate steam-
apparatus for pumping up water, and securing a regular supply
by machinery, instead of trusting to the constant watchfulness of
the engineers. On the whole, it seems to be more dangerous to,
travel by land, in a new country, than by river steamers, and
some who have survived repeated journeyings in stage-coaches,
show us many scars. The judge who escorted my wife to
Natchez, informed her that he had been upset no less than thir
teen times.
On the left bank, about sixty miles above New Orleans, stands
Jefferson College ; a schoolmaster from the north, speaking to me
of its history, imputed its want of success to the insubordination
CHAP. XXX.] THUNDER-SHOWER. 135
of the youths, the inability of southern planters to govern their
children themselves, and their unwillingness to delegate the
necessary authority to the masters of universities or schools.
" But they are growing wiser," he said, " and vigorous efforts
are making to improve the discipline in the university of Char-
lottesville, in Virginia, which has hitherto been too lax.
We soon afterward passed a convent on the same bank, and I
heard praise bestowed on the " Sisters of Charity," for their
management of a hospital.
At St. Thomas's Point, about twenty-five miles above New
Orleans, we passed a fine plantation, which formerly belonged to
Mr. Preston, of South Carolina, a distinguished member of Con
gress, whose acquantaince I made in 1842. There are, I am
told, nearly 1000 negroes here, and I am astonished at the large
proportion of the colored race settled every where on the land
bordering the river. The relative value of colored and white
labor was here, as elsewhere, a favorite theme of conversation,
when there happened to be passengers on board from the northern
states. The task of three negroes, they say, in Louisiana, is to
cut and bind up two cords of wood in a day, whereas, a single
white man, in the State of New York, prepares three cords daily.
In packing cotton, the negroes are expected to perform a third
less work than a white laborer.
In the afternoon we were overtaken by a heavy thunder-shower,
the water pouring off the eaves of our cabin roof, in copious streams,
into the river, through numerous spouts or tin pipes. When the
rain abated, I saw a fog slowly stealing over parts of the stream,
for the water was much colder than the air. For some hours we
were unable to proceed, and the captain informed me, that wre
should remain prisoners until the temperature of the Mississippi
and that of the atmosphere were more nearly equalized. This,
he hoped, would happen in one of two ways, either by a renewal
of rain, which would warm the river, or by the wind veering
round from south to west, which wrould cool the air. The latter
change soon occurred, and we were instantly released.
I was congratulated by some northerners at having escaped
the musquitocs. The captain said, "that they who are acclirnat-
136 MUSQUITOES.— BAYOUS. [CHAP. XXX.
ized, suffer no longer from the bites, or scarcely at all, and even
the young children of Creoles are proof against them, although
the face and neck of a new settler, whether young or old, swell
up frightfully. Yet the wild cattle and deer have not acquired any
hereditary immunity from this torment, and, to escape it, are seen
standing in the lakes with their heads only above the water."
Some passengers assured me, " that when people have recovered
from the yellow fever, the skin, although in other respects as
sensitive as ever, is no longer affected by a musquito bite, or, if
at all, in a very slight degree;" and they added, "that last year,
1845, both the yellow fever and the musquitoes were in abeyance,
although the heat of the season was intense."
After we had sailed up the river eighty miles, I was amused
by the sight of the insignificant village of Donaldsonville, the
future glories of which I had heard so eloquently depicted.^ Its
position, however, is doubtless important ; for here the right bank
is intersected by that arm of the Mississippi, called Bayou La
Fourche. This arm has much the appearance of a canal, and
by it, I am told, our steamer, although it draws no less than ten
feet water, might sail into the Gulf of Mexico, or traverse a large
part of that wonderful inland navigation in the delta which con
tributes so largely to the wealth of Louisiana. A curious
description was given me, by one of my fellow travelers, of that
same low country, especially the region called Attakapas. It
contains, he said, wide " quaking prairies," where cattle are
pastured, and where you may fancy yourself far inland. Yet,
if you pierce any where through the turf to the depth of two
feet, you find sea-fish swimming about, which make their way in
search of food under the superficial sward, from the Gulf of Mexico,
through subterranean watery channels.
Notwithstanding the quantity of sediment in the Mississippi,
they tell me that its waters are inhabited by abundance of shad
and herring, and in several places, when I asked the fishermen
what they were catching, they answered, " Sardines."
In the course of the first day we saw the Bayou Plaquemine
on the right, and the Iberville River on the left bank of the Mis-
* Ante, p. 99.
CHAP. XXX.] BURIED TREES, PORT HUDSON. 137
sissippi, the two arms next above that of La Fourche. One of
those natural rafts of floating trees which occasionally bridge over
the western rivers for many years in succession, becoming covered
over with soil, shrubs, and trees, blocked up till lately the Bayou
Plaquemine. The obstacle was at length removed at the expense
of the state, and the rush of water through the newly cleared
channel was so tremendous, that several engineers entertained
apprehensions, lest the whole of the Mississippi should take its
course by this channel to the sea, deserting New Orleans. Mr.
Forshey assured me there was no real ground for such fears,
because the Mississippi, as before hinted,^ takes at present the
shortest cut to that part of the Gulf where it can find a basin
deep and capacious enough to receive it.
During the night we passed Baton Rouge, the first point above
New Orleans where any land higher and older than the alluvial
plain comes up to the bank to constitute what is termed a bluff.
The cliff there is only a few feet high. The next bluff is at Port
Hudson, 2 5 miles higher up the river, and 165 miles above New
Orleans. I had been urged by Dr. Carpenter to examine the
geology of this bluff, which I had also wished to do, because
Bartram, in his travels, in 1777, discovered there the existence
of a fossil forest at the base of the tall cliff, and had commented
with his usual sagacity on the magnitude of the geographical
changes implied by its structure. The following are his words,
which deserve the more attention, because the particular portion
of the cliff described by him, has long ago been undermined and
swept away by the Mississippi. " Next morning," says Bartram,
" we set off again on our return home, and called by the way at
the cliffs, which is a perpendicular bank or bluff, rising up out
of the river near one hundred feet above the present surface of the
water, whose active current sweeps along by it. From eight or
nine feet below the loamy vegetative mold at top, to within four
or five feet of the water, these cliffs present to view strata of clay,
marl, and chalk of all colors, as brown, red, yellow, white, blue,
and purple ; there are separate strata of these various colors, as
well as mixed or parti-colored : the lowest stratum next the water
* Ante, p. 132.
138 BURIED TREES. [CHAP. XXX.
is exactly of the same black mud, or rich soil, as the adjacent
low cypress swamps above and below the bluff; and here, in the
cliffs, we see vast stumps of cypress and other trees which, at this
day, grow in these low, wet swamps, and which range on a level
with them. These stumps are sound, stand upright, and seem
to be rotted off about two or three feet above the spread of their
roots ; their trunks, limbs, &c., lie in all directions about them.
But when these swampy forests were growing, and by what cause
they were cut off and overwhelmed by the various strata of earth,
which now rise near one hundred feet above, at the brink of the
cliffs, and two or three times that height, but a few hundred yards
back, are inquiries perhaps not easily answered. The swelling
heights, rising gradually over and beyond this precipice, are now
adorned with high forests of stately Magnolia, Liquidambar,
Fagus, Quercus, Lauras, Morus, Juglans, Tilia, Halesia,
JEsculus, Callicarpa, Liriodendron" fyc.*
Dr. Carpenter, in 1838, or sixty-one years after Bartram,
made a careful investigation of this same bluf£ having ascertained
that in the interval the river had been continually wrearing it
away at such a rate as to expose to view a section several hun
dred feet to the eastward of that seen by his predecessor. I shall
first give a brief abstract of Dr. Carpenter's observations, published
in Sillirnan's Journal.!
" About the level of low water, at the bottom of the bluff, a
bed of vegetable matter is exposed, consisting of sticks, leaves, and
fruits, arranged in thin horizontal laminae, with very thin layers
of clay interposed. Among the fruits were observed the nuts of
the swamp hickory (Juglam aquoMca) very abundant, the burr-
like pericarp of the sweet gurn (Liquidambar styraciflua), and
walnuts, the fruit of Juglans nigra. The logs lying horizontally
are those of cypress (Cupressus thyoides), swamp hickory, a
species of cotton wood (Populus), and other trees peculiar to the
low swamps of Louisiana. Besides these there were a great
number of erect stumps of the large deciduous cypress ( Taxodium
disticlium} sending their roots deep into the clay beneath. This
* Bartram, " Travels in North America," p. 433.
t Vol. xxxvi. p. 118.
CHAP. XXX.] BLUFFS OF PORT HUDSON. 139
buried forest is covered by a bed of clay, twelve feet thick, and
is followed by another superimposed bed of vegetable matter, four
feet thick, containing logs arid branches, half turned into lignite,
and erect stumps, among which there are none of the large cy
presses, as in the lower bed. Among the logs, the water-oak
(Quercus aquatica) was recognizable, and a pine with a great
deal of bark, and the strobiles of the Pinus tceda.
" This upper forest points to the former existence, on the spot,
of one of those swamps, occurring at higher levels, in which the
Ciqiressus disticha ( Taxodium) does not grow. Above the
upper layer of erect stumps are various beds of clay, in all more
than fifty feet thick, with two thin layers of vegetable matter
intercalated ; and above the whole more than twenty feet of sand,
the lower part of which included siliceous pebbles derived from
some ancient rocks, and containing the marks of encrinites and
corals (Favosites)," &c.
Dr. Carpenter, when he published this account in 1838,
thought he had detected the distinct marks of the ax* on some
of the logs accompanying the buried stumps ; but he informed
me, in 1846, that he was mistaken, and that the apparent
notches were caused by the gaping open of the bituminized wood,
probably after shrinking and drying, of the truth of which I was
myself convinced, after seeing the specimens. That the lowest
bed had originally been a real cypress swamp, was proved beyond
all doubt by the stumps being surrounded by those peculiar knobs
or excrescences called cypress knees, which this tree throws out
from its base, when it grows in a submerged soil. These knees
sometimes rise up through the water from a depth of six or eight
feet, and are supposed to supply the roots with air, as they are
never formed when the cypress grows on dry ground.
At the time of my visit, the river was unfortunately too high
to enable me to see the lowest deposit containing the memorials
of this ancient forest, the geological interest of which is much
enhanced by its having been seen by Bartram, and again by
Carpenter, extending horizontally over a considerable area. I
learnt from several residents at Port Hudson, and from Captain
* Silliman. ibid. p. 119,
140 BURIED TREES. [CHAP. XXX
Sellick. who commanded the Rainbow, that, last season, when,
the water was low, the stumps of the buried trees were as con
spicuous as ever at the base of the cliff, which has been much
undermined by the river since the year 1838, when Dr. Carpenter
explored it. The fossil forest was 12 feet under water when I
landed, but at higher levels I saw the trunks of two trees buried
in a vertical position at different levels, each of them about 2£
feet high. I estimated the height of the entire cliff to be about
75 feet, consisting in part of stiff unctuous clay, and partly of
loam, but with no chalk, as stated by Bartram. A small
streamlet, artificially led to the top of the bluff, had, within the
last four years, cut out a ravine no less than sixty feet deep
through the upper loamy beds. In the sections thus laid open,
I saw precisely such deposits as a river would form in its bed, or
in the swamps which it had occasionally flooded. Near the
bottom was a layer of leaves, resembling those of the bay, with
numerous roots of trees and wood in a fresher state than I ever
saw them in any tertiary formation. Taking a canoe, I after
ward proceeded to examine that part of the cliff which extends
about a mile down the river's left bank, immediately below Port
Hudson, where it is between seventy and eighty feet high. The
deposits laid open to view were divisible into three groups, the
topmost consisting of brown clay, the middle of whitish siliceous
sand, and the lower of green clay. I found some men digging
the middle or sandy stratum for making bricks, and they had just
come upon a prostrate buried tree, black and carbonized, but not
turned into lignite. I counted in it 220 rings of annual growth.
Near it I found two other smaller fossil trunks, all lying as if
they had been drift wood carried down by a river and buried in
sand. One of the men pointed out to me that the structure of
the wood showed distinctly that they belonged to three different
species, one being oak, another hickory, and the third sassafras.
Their texture seemed certainly that of distinct genera of trees,
but for the accuracy of my informant's determination I can not
vouch. At this point they told me the bluff has, in the course
of the last eight years, lost ground no less than 200 feet by the
encroachment of the river.
CHAP. XXX.] LANDSLIP. 141
To prove that the present site of the buried forest before
alluded to, must be far from the point where Bartram or even
Carpenter saw it, an account was given me by the residents here,
of several recent landslips near Port Hudson ; one in particular,
a few years ago, when by the caving in of the bank, three acres
of ground, fifty or sixty feet high, composed of clay and sand, and
covered by a forest, sank down bodily in the river, and were then
gradually washed away. One of the eye-witnesses related to me
that the trees were at first seen to tremble, then large rents began
to open in the soil deeper and deeper, after which the movement
was such that the boughs of the trees lashed each other, and acorns
and beech nuts were showered down like hail. A herd of pigs
was so intent in devouring these, that they allowed themselves
to be carried down vertically fifty feet, the subsidence occupying
about five minutes. The outer edge of the bluff, with some of
the swine, fell into the river, but these swam to the sunk part
of the bluff, and joined their companions. The owners watched
them anxiously till dusk, unable to go to their rescue ; but at
length, to their surprise, they saw a leader, followed by all the
rest, wind his way along narrow ledges on the face of the precipice,
from which the fallen mass had been detached, and climb up to
the top. Next morning, to their no less astonishment, they found
the herd feeding again on the same perilous ground, and saw them
again return by the same path at night.
I have dwelt at some length on the geological phenomena
disclosed in the interesting sections of these bluffs, because I agree
with Bartram and Carpenter, that they display a series of deposits
similar to the modern formations of the alluvial plain and delta
of the Mississippi. They lead us, therefore, to the important
conclusion, that there have been changes in the relative level of
land and sea since the establishment, in this part of the continent,
of a geographical state of things approximating to that now pre
vailing. Then, as now, there were swamps in which the decid
uous cypress and other trees grew, and became buried in mud,
without any intermixture of sand or pebbles. At that remote
period, also, drift wood was brought down from the upper country,
and inclosed in sandy strata. Although I could not ascertain
142 ANCIENT SUBSIDENCE OF DELTA. [CHAP. XXX.
the exact height above the level of the sea, of the fossil cypress
swamp at Port Hudson, I presume it is less than thirty feet ; and
in order to explain the superposition of 150 feet of fresh-water
sediment, we must imagine the gradual subsidence of fluviatile
strata to a depth far below the level of the sea, followed by an
upward movement to as great an amount. The depression must
have taken place so slowly as to allow the river to raise the
surface by sedimentary deposition continually, and never permit
the sea to encroach and cover the area. Jt is quite conceivable,
for example, that the present delta and alluvial plain should sink
150 feet without the salt water coming up even to New Orleans,
provided the land went down only a few feet or inches in a cen
tury, and provided the ground was raised vertically to the same
amount by fluviatiie mud, sand, or vegetable matter. But if the
land should go down even ten or twelve feet at once, the whole
delta would be submerged beneath the sea. Were the downward
movement here supposed to be followed by an upheaval to the
extent of about 150 feet, and should the river then cut a channel
through the upraised mass, we might expect to see the modern
formation exhibit appearances similar to those of high antiquity
above described at Port Hudson.
I shall endeavor, in the sequel, to show that oscillations of
level, like those here assumed to account for the phenomena at
Port Hudson, will explain other appearances, observable, not
only in cliffs bounding the valley of the Mississippi, but in ancient
alluvial terraces bordering the Ohio, and other tributaries of the
great river.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Fontania near Port Hudson. — Lake Solitude. — Floating Island. — Bony Pike,
— Story of the Devil's Swamp. — Embarking by Night in Steamboat. —
Literary Clerk. — Old Levees undermined. — Succession of upright buried
Trees in Bank. — Raccourci Cut-off. — Bar at Mouth of Red River. — Shelly
Fresh-water Loam of Natchez. — Recent Ravines in Table-Land. — Bones
of extinct Quadrupeds. — Human Fossil Bone. — Question of supposed co
existence of Man with extinct Mammalia discussed. — Tornado at Natchez.
— Society, Country-Houses, and Gardens. — Landslips. — Indian Antiqui
ties.
AFTER I had examined the bluff below Port Hudson, I went
down the river in my boat to Fontania, a few miles to the south,
to pay a visit to Mr. Faulkner, a proprietor to whom Dr. Car
penter had given me a letter of introduction. He received me
with great politeness, and, at my request, accompanied me at
once to see a crescent-shaped sheet of water on his estate, called
Lake Solitude, evidently an ancient bed of the Mississippi, now
deserted. It is one of the few examples of old channels which
occur to the east of the great river, the general tendency of which
is always to move from west to east. Of this eastward movement
there is a striking monument on the other side of the Mississippi
immediately opposite Port Hudson, called Fausse Riviere, a sheet
of water of the usual horse-shoe form. One of my fellow pas
sengers in the Rainbow had urged me to visit Lake Solitude,
" because," said he, " there is a floating island in it, well wooded,
on which a friend of mine once landed from a canoe, when, to his
surprise, it began to sink with his weight. In great alarm he
climbed a cypress tree, which also began immediately to go down
with him as fast as he ascended. He mounted higher and higher
into its boughs, until at length it ceased to subside, and, looking
round, he saw in every direction, for a distance of fifty yards, the
whole wood in motion." I wished much to know what founda
tion there could be for so marvelous a tale. It appears that
144 BONY PIKE. [CHAP. XXXI.
there is always a bayou or channel, connecting, during floods,
each deserted bend or lake with the main river, through which
large floating logs may pass. These often form rafts, and become
covered with soil supporting shrubs and trees. At first such
green islands are blown from one part of the lake to another by
the winds, but the deciduous cypress, if it springs up in such a
soil, sends down strong roots, many feet or yards long, so as to
cast anchor in the muddy bottom, rendering the island stationary.
Lake Solitude, situated in lat. 31° N. is two miles and a half
in circuit, and is most appropriately named, being a retired sheet
of water, its borders overhung by the swamp willow, now just
coming into leaf, and skirted by the tall cypress, from which long
streamers of Spanish moss are hanging. On the east it is bounded
by high ground, a prolongation of the bluff at Port Hudson, on
which the hickory, the oak, and many splendid magnolias, with
the beech, walnut, tulip tree, and holly, and a variety of beautiful
shrubs are seen. The surface of the lake (except near the shore,
where it is covered with the water lily) faithfully reflects the trees
and sky, presenting, in this respect, a marked contrast to the
yellow waters of the Mississippi. It is inhabited by hundreds
of alligators and countless fish, and so many birds were swimming
on it, or flying over it, that it seemed as if all the wild creatures
which the steamers had scared away from the main river had
taken refuge here. Several alligators were lying motionless, with
their noses just above the surface of the water, resembling black
logs. About fourteen years ago, some of them were not unfre-
quently seen here measuring fifteen feet in length, but they now
rarely exceed eight feet. I observed a large gar-fish, or bony
pike, called the alligator gar (Lepidosteus), leap nearly out of the
water in pursuit of its prey. Its hard shining scales are so strong
and difficult to pierce, that it can scarcely be shot. It can live
longer out of water than any other fish of this country, having a
large cellular swimming bladder, which is said almost to serve
the purpose of a real lung. One of them has been known to seize
the nostrils of a mule who was drinking, and only to be shaken
off on dry ground, when its whole body had been dragged into
the air.
CAP. XXXL] THE DEVIL'S SWAMP. 145
On the "boughs of the willows were perched several white
cranes, while herons, cormorants, and water-rails were swimming
on the lake, their various notes adding to the wildness of the scene.
Shriller than all, as the evening came on, we heard the voice of
the large bull-frog.
As we went back to the house, over the high ground, we saw
three kinds of squirrels and many birds. So skillful was my
companion with his rifle, that he brought down every bird which
came within shot — owls, rice-birds, woodpeckers, and jays — that
I might examine their plumage. I admired a beautiful cluster
of the flowers and fruit of the red maple, about twenty feet above
our heads. He offered to pick them for me, and, without delay,
took aim so dexterously, as to sever the stem from the bough just
below the blossom, without seeming to have injured the flower by
a single shot. In the course of our walk, I observed several
shrubs, almost hidden by the luxuriant growth of that most ele
gant of climbers, the yellow jessamine (Gelsemmm nitidum),
with its fragrant blossoms.
From these heights south of Port Hudson, we had a grand
view of the great plain of the Mississippi, far to the south and
west, an endless labyrinth of uninhabited swamps, covered with
a variety of timber, and threaded with bayous, one resembling
another so exactly, that many a stranger, who has entered them
in a canoe, has wandered for days without being able to extricate
himself from their woody mazes. Among these morasses, one
called the Devil's Swamp was in sight, and I found a curious
account of the origin of its name in a MS. dated 1776, of Caleb
Carpenter, a relation of my New Orleans friend.
A German emigrant having settled near the bank of the Mis
sissippi, in 1776, felled, with great labor, some lofty cypresses;
but, happening one day to make a false turn in his canoe, entered,
by mistake, a neighboring bayou. Every feature was so exactly
like the scene where he had been toiling- for weeks, that he could
riot question the identity of the spot. He saw all the same bends,
both in the larger and smaller channels. He made out distinctly
the same trees, among others the very individual cypresses which
he had cut down. There they stood, erect and entire, without
VOL. II. G
146 EMBARKATION BY NIGHT. [CHAP. XXXI.
retaining one mark of his ax. He concluded that some evil spirit
had, in a single night, undone all the labors of many weeks ;
and, seized with superstitious terror, he fled from the enchanted
wood, never to return.
In order that I might not spend an indefinite time on the
Mississippi, I determined to be prepared for a start in the first
chance steamer which might be bound for Natchez, 140 miles
distant, whenever an opportunity should offer, whether by day or
night. I was told by my host that a trusty black servant had
been already appointed to look out for a steamer, which was to
convey some farm produce to a proprietor far off on the Pvecl
River. He proposed, therefore, to give orders to this negro to
wake me if any boat bound for Natchez should appear in sight
before morning. Accordingly, about an hour after midnight, I
was roused from rny slumbers, and went down over a sloping lawn
to the steam-boat landing on the river's bank. The sky was clear,
and it was bright moonlight, and the distant cries of the owls, and
other night birds around Lake Solitude, \vere distinctly heard,
mingled with the chirping of myriads of frogs. On the low bank
my watchman had lighted a signal fire, and I heard the puffing
of a steamer in the distance ascending the stream. She soon
neared us, and, on being hailed, answered, " La Belle Creole,
bound for Bayou Sara." This port was far short of my destina
tion, and when we shouted " Natchez," the captain first asked
if we had any wood to sell, and on learning there was none,
sailed away. I returned to the house, and took another nap of
several hours, when I received a second summons from my faith
ful sentinel. The scene was entirely changed ; it was nearly
day-break, and the fogs rising from the marshes had begun to
cover the river. I was in despair, fearing that our signal fire
would not be discerned through the mist. Soon, however, we
heard the loud gasping of the two steam-pipes sounding nearer
and nearer, and a large steamer coming suddenly close to the
landing, was announced as " the Talma of Cincinnati." In a
few minutes I was crossing the narrow plank which led from
the steep bank to the vessel, which was actually in motion as I
walked over it, so that I was glad to find myself safe on deck.
CHAP. XXXI.] LITERARY CLERK.— OLD LEVEES. 147
They told me I must register my name at the office. The clerk
asked me if I was the author of a work on geology, and being
answered in the affirmative, wished to know if I was acquainted
with Mr. Macaulay. On my saying yes, he took out a late
number of the Edinburgh Review, and begged me to tell him
whether the article on Addison was written by my friend, for
he had been discussing this matter with a passenger that evening.
When I had confirmed this opinion he thanked me, expressing much
regret that he should not see me again, since I was to land next
day at Natchez before he should be up. This conversation lasted
but a few minutes, and in as many more I was in a good berth
under a musquito net, listening to a huge bell tolling in the fog,
to warn every flat-boat to get out of the way, on peril of being
sent instantly to the bottom. In spite of this din, and that of
the steam funnels arid machinery, I soon fell asleep for the third
time.
When I carne on deck next day, all hands were at work, taking
in wood at a landing below Bayou Sara, where I saw on the top
of the river bank, now sixteen feet high, several striking memorials
of the ravages of former inundations. Besides the newest levee,
there was one which had given way previously to the great flood
of 1814, and a still older one, which, although once parallel, was
now cut off abruptly, and at right angles to the present course of the
river. They reminded me of the remnant of an oval intrench-
ment at the edge of the cliff near New Haven in Sussex, and of
those paths leading directly to the brink of precipices overhanging
the sea in many maritime counties in England. Farther on, at
another wooding station, in Adams County, Mississippi, I observed
a bank eighteen feet in perpendicular height, and said to be forty-
five feet high when the water is at its lowest. It was composed
of sand, or sandy loam, indicating a comparatively rapid deposi
tion. In such loam, no erect stumps and trunks of trees are met
with, the sediment having accumulated on the margin of the
river in a few years too fast to allow large trees to grow there.
But in other places, where the bank consisted of fine, stiff clay,
I saw here and there the buried stools of cypresses, and other
trees, in an upright position, with their roots attached, sometimes
148 UPRIGHT BURIED TREES. [CHAP. XXXI.
repeated at several different levels iii the face of the same bank.
I first remarked one of these at a point forty-five miles above New
Orleans, and they increased in number as we ascended. When
first told of this phenomenon, before visiting the Mississippi, it
appeared to me very difficult of explanation. I soon, however,
discovered that the great river, in its windings, often intersects
the swamps or cypress basins which had been previously filled up
with fine mud or vegetable matter, at various distances from the
former river-channel.
Suppose an ancient bed of the Mississippi, or some low part
of the plain, to become fit for the growth of cypress, yet to be
occasionally flooded, so that the soil is slowly raised by fine mud,
drift wood, or vegetable matter like peat. As the cypress ( Taxo-
diuin distichum} often attains to the age of three or four centu
ries, and, according to many accounts, occasionally in Louisiana
to that of two thousand years, it is clear that the bottoms of the
oldest trees will often be enveloped in soil several feet deep, before
they die, and rot down to the point where they have been covered
up with mud. In the mean time other trees will have begun to
grow on adjoining spots, at different and considerably higher levels,
and eventually some of these will take root in soil deposited directly
over the stump or decayed trunk of some of the first or oldest
series of cypresses. They who have studied the delta affirm that
such successive growths of trees are repeated through a perpendic
ular height of twenty-five feet without any change occurring in
the level of the land.*'
Proceeding up the river, we soon passed Bayou Sara on our
right hand, and came to the isthmus called the Raccourci cut
off, across which a trench nine feet deep has been dug, in the
hope that the Mississippi would sweep out a deep channel. This
" cut-off/' should it ever become the main channel, would enable
a steamer to reach, in one mile, a point, to gain which costs
now a circuit of twenty-six miles, and two and a half hours.
Unfortunately, when they cleared the forest in this spot, the soil
of the new canal was found to consist of a stiff blue clay,
* See Dickeson and Brown, Silliman's Journal, Second Series, vol. v. p.
17, Jan. 1848.
CHAP. XXXI.] RACCOURCI CUT-OFF. 1 19
strengthened by innumerable roots of trees, and, in the flood of
1845, the surplus waters of the Mississippi poured through the
cut with great velocity, yet failed to deepen it materially. By
shortening the channel twenty-five miles, the fall of the river
would be augmented, and the engineer flattered himself that the
effect might extend as far up as the mouth of the Red River.
By accelerating the current there it was hoped that a deeper
passage might be kept open in the sand-bar, which now blocks
up the navigation of that important tributary for the greater
part of the year.
Some experienced pilots assured me, that the supposed short
ening of the channel of the Mississippi, between its junction with
the Ohio and New Orleans, was, in a great degree, a delusion.
Instead of the boasted gain of fifty miles, they say that not a
third of this distance has been realized. Immediately after the
completion of a new cut-off", the Mississippi begins to restore the
natural curvature of its channel by eating away one bank and
throwing out a sand-bar on the opposite side.
Another fifty miles brought us to the mouth of the Red River,
where I saw the formidable bar, before alluded to, covered, for
the most part, by a growth of young willows and cotton-wood
(Populus angulata). After leaving the mouth of Red River,
we passed two bluffs on the left or eastern bank, one that of
Fort Adams, a very picturesque line of precipices, the other called
Ellis's Cliffs. In both I observed a predominance of white sand,
similar to that seen in part of the bluff at Port Hudson.
At Natchez (where I rejoined my wife), there is a fine range
of bluffs, several miles long, and more than 200 feet in perpen
dicular height, the base of which is washed by the river. The
lower strata, laid open to view, consist of gravel and sand, desti
tute of organic remains, except some wood and silicified corals,
and other fossils, which have been derived from older rocks ;
while the upper sixty feet are composed of yellow loam, present
ing, as it wastes away, a vertical face toward the river. From
the surface of this clayey precipice are seen, projecting in relief,
the whitened and perfect shells of land-snails, of the genera Helix,
lldiclna, Pupa, C//clostoma, Achatina, and Succinca. These
150 FRESH-WATER LOAM OF NATCHEZ. [CHAP. XXXI.
shells, of which we collected twenty species, are all specifically
identical with those now inhabiting the valley of the Mississippi.
The resemblance of this loam to that fluviatile silt of the val
ley of the Rhine, between Cologne and Basle, which is generally
called " loess" and " lehm" in Alsace, is most perfect. In both
countries the genera of shells are the same, and as, in the ancient
alluvium of the Rhine, the loam sometimes passes into a lacus
trine deposit containing shells of the genera Lymnea, Planorbis,
and Cydas, so I found at Washington, about seven miles inland,
or eastward from Natchez, a similar passage of the American
loam into a deposit evidently formed in a pond or lake. It con
sisted of marl containing shells of Lymnea, Planorbis, Paludiiia,
PUysa, and Cyclas, specifically agreeing with testacea now
inhabiting the United States. With the land-shells before men
tioned are found, at different depths in the loam, the remains of
the mastodon ; and in clay, immediately under the loam, and
above the sand and gravel, entire skeletons have been met with
of the megalonyx, associated with the bones of the horse, bear,
stag, ox, and other quadrupeds, for the most part, if not all, of
extinct species. This great loamy formation, with terrestrial
and fresh-water shells, extends horizontally for about twelve
miles inland, or eastward from the river, forming a platform
about 200 feet high above the great plain of the Mississippi.
In consequence, however, of the incoherent arid destructible
nature of the sandy clay, every streamlet flowing over what
must originally have been a level table-land, has cut out for
itself, in its way to the Mississippi, a deep gully or ravine. This
excavating process has, of late years, proceeded with accelerated
speed, especially in the course of the last thirty or thirty-five
years. Some attribute the increased erosive action to partial
clearings of the native forest, a cause of which the power has
been remarkably displayed, as before stated, within the last
twenty years, in Georgia.* Others refer the change mainly to
the effects of the great earthquake of New Madrid, in 1811—12,
by which this region was much fissured, ponds being dried up
and many landslips caused.
* See tonte, p. 29.
CHAP. XXX I.] FOSSIL HUMAN BONE. 151
In company with Dr. Dickeson and Colonel Wales, I visited
a narrow valley, hollowed out through the shelly loam recently
named " the Mammoth ravine," from the fossils found there.
Colonel Wiley, a proprietor of that part of the State of Mississippi,
who knew the country well before the year 1812, assured me
that this ravine, although now seven miles long, and in some parts
sixty feet deep, with its numerous ramifications, has been entirely
formed since the earthquake. He himself had plowed some of
the land exactly over one spot which the gully now traverses.
A considerable sensation was recently caused in the public
mind, both in America and Europe, by the announcement of the
discovery of a fossil human bone, so associated with the remains
of extinct quadrupeds, in " the Mammoth ravine," as to prove
that man must have co-existed with the rnegalonyx and its con
temporaries. Dr. Dickeson showed me the bone in question,
admitted by all anatomists to be part of a human pelvis, and
being a fragment of the os innominatmn. He felt persuaded
that it had been taken out of the clay underlying the loam, in
the ravine above alluded to, about six miles from Natchez. I
examined the perpendicular cliffs, which bound a part of this
water-course, where the loam, unsolidified as it is, retains its
verticality, and found land-shells in great numbers at the depth
of about thirty feet from the top. I was informed that the fossil
remains of the mammoth (a name commonly applied in the Unit
ed States to the mastodon) had been obtained, together with the
bones of some other extinct mammalia, from below these shells
in the undermined cliff. I could not ascertain, however, that
the human pelvis had been actually dug out in the presence of
a geologist, or any practiced observer, and its position unequivo
cally ascertained. Like most of the other fossils, it was, I
believe, picked up in the bed of the stream, which would simply
imply that it had been washed out of the cliffs. But the evi
dence of the antiquity of the bone depends entirely on the part
of the precipice from which it was derived. It was stained
black, as if buried in a peaty or vegetable soil, and may have
been dislodged from some old Indian grave near the top, in
which case it may only have been five, ten, or twenty centuries
152 TORNADO AT NATCHEZ. [CHAP. XXXI.
old ; whereas, if it was really found in situ at the base of the
precipice, its age would more probably exceed 100,000 years, as
1 shall endeavor to show in a subsequent chapter. Such a posi
tion, in fact, if well authenticated, would prove that man had
lived in North America before the last great revolution in the
physical geography of this continent had been accomplished ; in
other words, that our race was more ancient than the modern
valley, alluvial plain, and delta of the Mississippi — nay, what is
more, was antecedent to the bluffs of Port Hudson and Natchez,
already described. Now that elevated fresh-water formation, as
I shall by and by endeavor to show, is the remnant of a river-
plain arid delta of extremely high antiquity ; and it would follow,
if the human race was equally ancient, that it co-existed with
one group of terrestrial mammalia, and, having survived its
extinction, had seen another group of quadrupeds succeed and
replace it.
In our excursion through the forest, from Washington to the
Mammoth ravine, I crossed the path of the last tornado, which
occurred May 17, 1840, one of three which have devastated
this region since the year 1809. They all came from Texas,
moving along from southwest to northeast, and laid waste a
long strip of country, about a mile wide. The courses of each
of the three whirlwinds were within a few miles of the other,
and the last threw down many houses at Natchez, unroofed
others, and leveled to the ground a railway terminus, causing
the abandonment of a scheme for a rapid communication between
Natchez, Vicksburg, and the State of Tennessee. On each side
of the path of the tornado the land was finely timbered ; but
where its force had been expended, old trees lay uprooted, and a
growth of young wood wras rising. Many large trunks had been
broken off ten or twelve feet above the ground, and portions of
the solid wood, torn and twisted into shreds, were still waving
in the air.
This tornado checked the progress of Natchez, as did the
removal of the seat of legislature to Jackson ; but it has suffered
still more, since steam navigation has been so much improved,
by the all-absorbing importance acquired by New Orleans as the
CHAP. XXXI.] COUNTRY-HOUSES.
great emporium of the whole trade of the Mississippi. There
are, however, so few bluffs on the great river, so few places
where the channel will remain constant for ages to the same
spot, that I can not doubt that this city must, in time, become
large and prosperous.
It augurs favorably of the future prospects of civilization in
America, that here, as elsewhere, we found the society most
agreeable in places which have been the longest settled. If the
political opinions and notions of honor cherished by the majority
of the citizens of Natchez, had had their due weight in the legisla
tion of the state, the fair fame of Mississippi, and her credit, would
have stood as high as that of any other southern state. Many
of the country-houses in the neighborhood are elegant, and some
of the gardens belonging to them laid out in the English, others
in the French style. In the latter are seen terraces, with statues
and cut evergreens, straight walks with borders of flowers, ter
minated by views into the wild forest, the charms of both being
heightened by contrast. Some of the hedges are made of that
beautiful North American plant, the Gardenia, miscalled in
England the Cape jessamine, others of the Cherokee rose, with
its bright and shining leaves. It had already put forth some of
its white flowers, which a month later would be in full blow.
The woods here, when all the trees are in full foliage, and the
tall magnolias in blossom, must be truly beautiful. But so
intense is the heat, and such the danger of ague and the torment
of musquitos, that, at that season, they who can afford to move,
fly to some higher or more northern retreat.
On the steep slope of the bluffs at Natchez, below the vertical
face of shelly loam, the Judas-tree, or red-bud (Cercis. canademis),
was now in full flower, displaying a blaze of pink blossoms before
it has put forth any leaves. I saw four landslips on these bluffs
which have occurred within the last tea years, for the springs
which burst from the sand ancterra^ne. the clayey loam. They
are instructive, as showing How the bluffs give way as the Mis
sissippi gradually extends. \ta course eastward. There is one
hollow of ancient date, caused by a similar undermining, called
the Devil's Punch-bowl, a picturesque, crater-shaped basin, of
G*
154 INDIAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. XXXI.
about 300 yards diameter at the top, and 100 yards at the bot
tom, where cypresses and gum-trees are growing. At the top
are seen the cotton-wood, the maple, and the magnolia, mixed
with pines.
The name of Natchez has been derived from an Indian tribe,
and on the highest part of the bluff, on an eminence called St.
Rosalie, are some Indian mounds, from which Dr. Dickeson has
obtained some curious remains of pottery, showing that some of the
aboriginal inhabitants of the great valley had made much greater
progress in the arts than their descendants whom the Europeans
drove out. One morning, close to the spot where these antiqui
ties were dug up, we saw a wild-looking group of Indians, whose
aspect gave no token that their contact with Europeans had
tended to revive the spirit of improvement which must once have
animated some of their predecessors in this region.
CHAPTER XXXII.
Natchez. — Vidalia and Lake Concordia. — Hibernation of Alligator. —
Bonfire on Floating Raft. — Grand Gulf. — Magnolia Steamer. — Vicksburg
to Jackson (Mississippi) by Railway. — Fossils on Pearl River. — Ordinary
at Jackson. — Story of Transfer of State-House from Natchez. — Vote by
Ballot. — Popular Election of Judges. — Voyage from Vicksburg to Mem
phis. — Monotony of River Scenery. — Squall of Wind. — Actors on Board.
— Negro mistaken for White. — Manners in the Backwoods. — Inquisitive-
ness. — Spoiled Children. — Equality and Leveling. — Silence of English
Newspapers on Oregon Question.
March 15, 1846. — FROM Natchez we crossed the river, by
the ferry, to Vidalia, situated on the low river plain, on a level
with the base of the bluffs before described. We were accompa
nied by Mr. Davis, a large proprietor, who took us to see his
negro-houses, all neatly built and well whitewashed. Even in
this cursory view we could perceive how much the comfort and
bodily wants of the slaves had been attended to. We had now
left the country where sugar and cotton are the staple products,
and had just entered the region where cotton and Indian corn
are cultivated together. Here, as in Louisiana, the negroes
constitute half, and sometir^s more than half, the population on
the borders of the Mississippi.
At Vidalia we were joined by Mr. Forshey, the engineer,
who went with us to Lake Concordia, a fine example of an old
bend of the Mississippi, recently detached and converted into a
crescent-shaped lake, surrounded by wood. It is a fine sheet of
water, fifteen miles long, if measured by a curved line drawn
through the middle. The old levee, or embankment, is still
seen ; but it is no longer necessary to keep it in repair, for, a
few years ago, the channel which once connected this bend with
the main river was silted up. Opposite Natchez the depth of
the Mississippi varies from 100 feet to 150 feet, but Lake Con
cordia has nowhere a greater depth than 40 feet. There are
156 LAKE CONCORDIA. [CHAP. XXXII.
thirteen similar lakes between the mouth of the Arkansas and
Baton Pvouge, all near the Mississippi, and produced by cut-offs ;
and so numerous are the channels which communicate from one
to the other, that a canoe may pass, during the flood season,
from Lake Concordia, and reach the Gulf of Mexico without once
entering the Mississippi. We were shown a cypress tree on the
borders of this deserted river bend, from under the roots of which,
a few days before the time of our visit, a she alligator had come
out on a warm day, the place of her hybemation appearing to be
half in the mud and half in the water. She brought out with
her two broods, one born in the preceding summer, which were
six inches long, and the others, an older set, about a foot long.
When Mr. Forshey approached them, the young ones yelped like
puppies, and the old one hissed. On the shore of the lake we
caught a tortoise, called here the snapping-turtle, and found that
all its feet had been bitten off — devoured, our companions sup
posed, by predaceous fish. The fresh-water shells, of which we
obtained specimens from the lake, belong to the genera Lymnea,
Planorbis, Paludina, Anchylotus, Physa, Cyclas, and Unio.
Wre put up flights of water-fowl of various species, chiefly wild
ducks, which were swimming about. On the top of a pole,
driven into the mud near the margin of the lake, was perched a
kingfisher, and two cormorants were wheeling round it, one with
a fish in its mouth, which the other was trying to snatch away.
The water, although much clearer than the Mississippi, was not
transparent, for it had communicated, during the late inunda
tions, with the great river. In this manner sediment is annually
introduced into such basins, and in the course of ages Lake Con
cordia may become so shallow as to support a forest of swamp
timber. Some modern concretions of clay and lime, and of clay
containing iron, which I picked up from the mud of the Missis
sippi bordering this lake, were so like those associated with the
ancient buried forest at Port Hudson, and the shelly loam of
Natchez, as to confirm me in the opinion before expressed, that
the cliffs there, although of very high antiquity, correspond in
origin with the recent fluviatile formations of the alluvial plain.
March 17. — We established ourselves in the wharf-boat at
CHAP. XXXII. ] BONFIRE ON FLOATING RAFT. 157
Natchez, prepared for a start in the first steamer which would
take us to Grand Gulf, fifty miles higher up. We amused our
selves by watching a party of young negro boys, who collected
the drift wood which bordered the river, and, having tied it
together into a raft, heaped some dead branches of trees upon it,
placing a layer of shavings under the pile. Having set it on
fire, they pushed it'off from the shore, and exulted as they saw
the floating bonfire, in the dusk of the evening, throwing a glar
ing light on the bluffs, town, and shipping. The raft was car
ried round and round in the great eddies near the bank, and the
urchins shouted when their love of mischief was gratified by
seeing the alarm of the boatmen, each of whom was observing
the wandering fire with some anxiety, lest it should come too
near his own craft. In the cabin of the wharf-boat we found no
furniture, but were supplied with two chairs, which, like the
walls and ceiling, were of unpainted wood. As it grew dark,
they brought in a table and a single candle. We were not sorry
when the Peytona was announced, and we were ushered into a
splendid saloon, 150 feet long, lighted by two large chandeliers sus
pended from the ceiling, and supplied with brilliant gas, manufac
tured on board. The mattresses of our beds were clastic, made
of India rubber, no unmeaning luxury, for we were awakened
before morning by the bumping of the boat against one floating
log after another, and, in spite of the frequent stoppage of the
engine, no small damage was done to the paddle-wheels, which
got entangled with the drift timber. We reached Grand Gulf
when morning had scarcely dawned, and found the floor of the
saloon covered with the sleeping colored servants, over whom we
had to step. The river had risen twenty-five feet in two days,
and was more turbid than we had yet seen it.
The blulf at Grand Gulf is about 180 feet high, the upper
most 60 feet, composed, as at Natchez, of yellow loam or loess,
beneath which was white quartzose sand, partially concreted into
solid sandstone, which is quarried here for building. From the
summit, the river-plain to the westward seemed as level, blue,
and boundless as the ocean. As we had now traveled two
degrees of latitude northward, the spring was not more advanced
158 GRAND GULF— MAGNOLIA STEAMER. [CHAP. XXXII.
than when we left New Orleans, but the woods crowning the
bluffs are beautiful from the variety of trees, many of them ever
greens, and we were charmed with the melody of the mocking
birds, and the warm sun brought out many large and brilliantly
colored butterflies, and more insects of other kinds than I had
yet seen in the south. Among these were a beetle (Phaneus
carnifex), with green and gold wing-cases, and a horn on the
thorax. The name of bug is given to all beetles (Coleopteral)
here, and does not seem to awaken the same unpleasant associa
tions as it suggests to English ears. Even the elegant fire-fly is
called a lightning-bug, and ladies who have diamond beetles set
in brooches, ask you to admire their beautiful bugs. The Lon
doners, by way of compensation, miscall the cockroach a black
beetle.
From Grand Gulf we embarked in the Magnolia, which had
brought my wife to Natchez, and, having since made a trip to
St. Louis and New Orleans, was on its return up the river. It
is a new boat, and, among other improvements, has a separate
sleeping cabin for the colored servants. The furniture in the
principal saloon is of fine Utrecht velvet, and the hanging lusters
for gas very brilliant : the beds excellent ; but the powerful
vibration caused by the machinery far from agreeable. Our
state room contained a chest of drawers, and cupboards for hang
ing up ladies' dresses. Ample time was allowed for dinner, and
we thought the fare only too sumptuous. The repast began
with turtle soup, and two kinds of fish ; then followed a variety
of made dishes, admirably cooked, and then a course of cocoa-nut
pies, jellies, preserved bananas, oranges, grapes, and ice-creams,
concluding with coffee. The claret was excellent, and it may
seem strange, at first, that they who indulge in such luxuries,
can drink freely of the opaque, unfiltered water of the Mississippi.
But this fluid has, at least the merit of being cool on a hot day,
and is believed to be very wholesome. We found it pleasant to
the taste, however untempting to the sight. Few of the praises
bestowed by Denham on the Thames can be lavished on the
Mississippi ; for, though deep, it is not clear, nor is it " without
o'erflowing full." Yet, in spite of the occasional undermining
CHAP. XXXII.] VICKSBURG TO JACKSON. 159
of forests on its banks, it may be truly characterized as " strong,
without rage ;" absorbing, as it does, in its course, one great
tributary after another, several of them scarcely inferior in width
to itself, without widening its channel, and in this manner car
rying down noiselessly to the sea its vast column of water and
solid matter, while the greater part of its alluvial plain is left
undisturbed.
A settler at Natchez told us he had lived on the great river
long enough to admire it, for the ease with which it performs its
mighty work ; and to fear it, so often had he witnessed the wreck
of vessels and the loss of lives. " If you fall overboard," he said,
" in the middle of the Atlantic, you may rise again and be saved ;
but here you are sucked down by an eddy, and the waters, closing
over you. are so turbid, that you are never seen again."
March 19. — At Vicksburg, where we next landed, I found
the bluffs, forming the eastern boundary of the great plain, similar,
in their upper part, to those of Natchez ; but beneath the fresh
water loam and sand were seen, at the base of the cliffs, a marine
tertiary deposit, of the Eocene period, in which we collected many
shells and corals. (See fig. 10, p. 193 ; and 3, fig. 11, p. 196.)
Leaving my wile to rest at the hotel, I made a rapid trip by
railway, fifty-five miles eastward, to Jackson, the capital of the
State of Mississippi. For the first ten miles, the cars traversed
a table-land, corresponding in height with the summit of the bluff
at Vicksburg, and preserving an even surface, except where gullies
had been hollowed out in the soft shelly loam or loess. These
are numerous, and it had been necessary to throw bridges over
many of them so as to preserve the level of the road. It was
curious to observe, in the cuttings made through the loam, that
each precipitous face retained its perpendicularity, as in natural
sections, although composed of materials wholly uriconsolidated.
Farther to the east, the Eocene strata, belonging to the same
series, which are seen at the bottom of the bluffs at Vicksburg,
rise up to the surface from beneath the fresh-water loam, which
attains an elevation of about 250 feet above the sea, and then
gives place to older rocks.
We passed through large forests of oaks and beeches, just
1GO FOSSILS ON PEARL RTVER. [CHAP. XXXII.
coming into leaf, in which Avere some green hollies. The red-
bud, in. blossom, was conspicuous in some of the woods. In the
wet grounds were cane-brakes, willows, and magnolias. I observed,
in a large clearing, three plows following each other, one guided
by a man, and the others each by a negro woman. When we
reached the Big Black River, twelve miles from Vicksburg, we
passed over a long wooden bridge arid viaduct, built on piles,
nearly a mile in length. In about four hours, we arrived at the
town of Jackson. I was wholly without letters of introduction,
having suddenly determined on this excursion, arid knew not the
name of a single individual ; which I regretted the more, as I
had only a few hours of daylight at my disposal, and was to return
by the cars at noon the day following. I inquired, as I had often
done in France on similar occasions, for the nearest pharmacien,
or chemist, and, being shown a shop, asked if they knew any one
who was interested in geology. The chemist informed me that
Dr. Gist, a physician, lodged in the floor above, and might assist
me. Fortunately, this gentleman was at home, and, telling me
he had read my work on Geology, he presented me with some
fossil shells and corals collected by him in the neighborhood ; and,
within ten minutes of my " landing" from the cars, \ve were on
our way together to explore the dried-up channel of a small
tributary of the Pearl River, where I found a rich harvest of
fossil marine shells and zoophytes. When we parted, my excellent
guide agreed to accompany me, early the next morning, many
miles in another direction.
On entering my hotel, after dark, I was informed that supper
was ready, and was conducted to a large ordinary, crowded chiefly
by lawyers, who were attending the courts here. The landlord,
General A , formerly of the Tennessee militia, played the
part of master of the ceremonies, much to my amusement. He
first obtained silence by exclaiming, with the loud voice of a herald,
" Gentlemen, we are a great people," and then called out the
names of all the viands on his long table and sideboard, beginning
with " Beef-steak, with or without onions, roast turkey, pork,
hominy, fish, eggs, &c., and ending with a list of various drink
ables, the last of which was " tea, foreign and domestic."
CHAP. XXXII.] TRANSFER OF STATE-HOUSE. Id
Curiosity led me to order the last-mentioned beverage ; but I
soon repented, finding it to be a liquid of a pink color, made of the
root of the sassafras tree, and having a very medicinal taste. I
was told that many here drink it for their health ; but the general,
seeing that I did not relish it, supplied me with some good " foreign"
tea. My host then introduced me to several of the lawyers who
sat near me, which gave me an opportunity of asking whether
there was any truth in the story told me by some of the Whigs
at New Orleans, of the manner in which the seat of legislature
had been transferred from Natchez to Jackson. I related the
story, which was as follows : — ' ' Natchez was the metropolis of
the state, and the chief town of Adams County, which was so
wealthy as to pay a third of all the taxes in Mississippi. It was
a city to which the richest and best-informed citizens resorted,
representing both the landed and moneyed interests of the state.
It was, moreover, a center of communication, because it com
manded the navigation of the great river. That the Houses of
Legislature should meet here, was so natural and convenient, so
fitted to promote good government, that the Democratic party
could not be expected to put up, for many years, with an arrange
ment of affairs so reasonable and advantageous. They accord
ingly decided, by a majority, that some change must be made,
and gave orders to a surveyor to discover the exact geographical
center of the state. He found it in a wilderness, about fifty miles
in a straight line east of Natchez, and pointed out an old cypress
tree, in the middle of a swamp, accessible only by a canoe, as the
spot they were in search of. This was welcome news ; all might
now be placed on a footing of equality, the spot being equally
inaccessible and inconvenient for all. When the architect, how
ever, came to build the capitol, he took the liberty, instead of
erecting the edifice on piles in the center of the swamp, to place
it on an adjoining rising ground, from which they had cleared
away the native wood, a serious abandonment of principle, as it
was several hundred yards from the true geographical center.'1
When my auditors had done laughing at this Louisiana version
of a passage in their history, they said, the tale, after all, was
not so exaggerated as it might have been, considering the vexation
1G2 VOTE BY BALLOT. [CHAP. XXXIT.
under which the New Orleans Whigs were smarting, in having
to go to Baton Rouge. They could show me, they said, the
swamp on the Pearl River, which must have been alluded to.
That river, though now only beatable, might, they declared, be
made navigable to steamboats, when the rafts of drift timber
were cleared away, and they might then have a direct commer
cial intercourse with the Gulf of Mexico. The soil, also, sur
rounding Jackson, had proved to be very fertile, and the railway
had brought the place within three or four hours of Natchez, now
their port. In short, their town was flourishing, by aid of natural
advantages, and the patronage of the Legislature and Law Courts.
Next day, after a geological excursion, I wras taken to see the
State House and Governor's Mansion, both handsome and com
modious, arid built in a good style of architecture, but at great
expense, at a time when the price of labor happened to be un
usually high. I heard much regret expressed at the debts they
had incurred, and at the refusal to acknowledge them in 1841.
One lawyer, a member of the Legislature, declared his conviction
that the repudiation of the state debt would not have been carried
in his county, but for the facility afforded by secret voting. The
same individuals, he said, who openly professed a more honorable
line of conduct, must, out of selfishness, have taken advantage of
the ballot-box to evade an increase of taxation, otherwise there
could riot have been a majority in favor of disowning their liabil
ities. This wras one of the few instances in which I heard the
ballot condemned in the United States ; yet the position of the
laboring and middle classes is, comparatively, so independent
here, in relation to their rich employers, that the chief arguments
relied upon in England in favor of secret voting, would seem to
be inapplicable.
The dependence of the judges, for their election, on the popular
suffrage, appears to have been carried farther in Mississippi than
in any other state. I was told that rival candidates for the bench
and chancellorship, have been known to canvass for votes in
taverns, and have been asked what construction they put on
certain statutes relating to banks chartered by the state, just as,
in an ordinary election for representatives, men are asked what
CHAP. XXXII.] VICKSBURG TO MEMPHIS. 163
are their opinions, and how they would vote on certain questions.
I met with more men of property in Mississippi who spoke as if
they belonged to an oppressed class, governed by a rude, ignorant,
and coarse democracy, than in any other part of my tour. "Many
of our poorest citizens," they said, " would freely admit, that nothing
is so difficult, for the individual, as self-government, and yet hold
that nothing is so easy and safe as self-government for the million,
even where education has been carried no farther than here, where
there are still seven counties without a single school-house, and
large districts where the inhabitants have but recently been con
verted to Christianity by itinerant Methodists. They forgot that
even honorable and enlightened men will sometimes do, in their
corporate capacity, what each individual would be ashamed to do
if he acted singly." When I heard these remarks, and reflected
that even in those parts of the state where the whites are most
advanced, as in Adams County, more than half the population
are slaves, I felt more surprise that English capitalists had lent
so much money to Mississippi, than that they had repented of it.
At the same time there is more hope for the future, for education
must come.
The town of Vicksburg is beautifully situated on the slope of
a wooded bluff, about 180 feet high, and walks might be made,
commanding the river, which would be delightful. At present
no one can roam along the paths in the suburbs, as they are dis
gracefully filthy. *
We took our passage in the Andrew Jackson steamer, from
Vicksburg to Memphis, a distance of 390 miles, and paid only
six dollars each (25 shillings), board and lodging included. The
monotony of the scenery on the great river for several hundred
miles together, is such as to grow wearisome. Scarcely any ves
sels with sails are seen, all the old schooners and smaller craft
having been superseded by the great steam-ships. The traveler
becomes tired of always seeing a caving bank on one side, and
an advancing sand-bar, covered with willows and poplars, on the
* For observations on the Geology of Jackson and Vicksburg, see a paper
by the Author, Journ. of Geol. Soc. London, vol. iv. p. 15, 1847, and Silli-
man's Journal, Second Series, vol. iv. p. 186, Sept. 1847.
1G4 MONOTONY OF SCENERY. [CHAP. XXXII.
other ; the successive growths of young trees rising to greater
heights, one tier above another, as before described, below New
Orleans. The water, at this season, is too turbid to reflect the
sky or the trees on its bank. The aspect of things, day after
day, is so exactly similar, that it might seem as necessary to take
astronomical observations, in order to discover what progress one
lias made, as if the voyage were in mid-Atlantic. That our
course is northward, is indicated by the willows on the banks
growing less green, and a diminishing quantity of gray moss
hanging from the trees. The red maple has also disappeared.
When I landed at wooding stations, I saw, on the damp ground
beneath the trees, abundance of mosses, with scarcely a blade of
grass, while the only wild flowers w^ere a few violets and a white
bramble. The young leaves of the poplars are most fragrant in
the night air. We were now in latitude 34° north, passing the
mouths of the Arkansas and White rivers.
The village of Napoleon, 212 miles above Vicksburg, at the
mouth of the Arkansas, had suffered much by the floods of ] 844.
Its red, muddy waters are hardly mixed up thoroughly with the
Mississippi till they reach Vicksburg. They often bring down
much ice into the Mississippi. The White River is said to be
navigable for about six hundred miles above its mouth.
Our steamer, the Andrew Jackson, bound for Cincinnati, car
rying a heavy cargo of molasses, was eight feet deep in the
water. To avoid the drift wood, which impeded her progress,
the captain, on arriving at Island Eighty-four (for they are all
numbered, beginning from the mouth of the Ohio), determined to
take a short cut between that island, and the left river bank.
The lead was heaved, and the decreasing depth, from ten feet to
eight and a half, was called out ; our vessel then grazed the bot
tom for a moment, but fortunately got off again. There wras so
much sameness in the navigation, that such an incident was
quite a relief. Soon afterward, March 23d, some variety was
afforded by a squall of wind, accompanied by lightning. I never
expected to see waves of such magnitude, and was surprised to
learn, that in some reaches, where the water extends ten miles
in a straight line, a strong wind blowing against the current will
CHA.P. XXXII.] ACTORS ON BOARD. 165
cause large steamers to pitch so as to make many passengers sea
sick ; but this rarely happens. In the night we had often to
draw up to the bank, wherever a signal-fire was lighted, finding
sometimes a single passenger waiting to be taken on board.
There were many actors on board, and, among others, a
pleasing young woman, who turned out to be the manager's
wife, returning with her family of young children and sick hus
band from Vicksburg, where she complained that the drama was
at a low ebb, and where, as in many other cities in the south, the
drunken habits of the inferior actors made the profession by no
means a pleasant one for a woman. She was longing for an
engagement in some " eastern theater," where, she told rny wife,
she would willingly take less pay, and would not object to under
take the part of " first old woman" for eighteen dollars a week,
as most of the actresses, being desirous of looking young and pretty,
compete eagerly for the character of " first juvenile." She liked
much to act chambermaid, as then she was not expected to learn
her part so accurately. She had a real feeling of enthusiasm for
her art, and great admiration for Mrs. Kean, and spoke with
satisfaction of having once acted second to her when she was
Miss Ellen Tree. During her husband's illness at Vicksburg,
she had been obliged to take the management of the theater
herself, and had good reason to lament that the temperance move
ment had not reached so far west. The physician, after attend
ing his patient for many weeks in a fever, remitted to them a
bill of fifty dollars, one only of many similar acts of generosity in
the members of this profession which came to my knowledge in
the course of my tour. This actress had with her a young
maid, fairer than many an English brunette, but who, though a
free woman, did not happen to belong to the white aristocracy.
The stewardess came into the cabin and summoned her to dinner,
and she, doing as she was bid, sat down at the second table,
where the officers of the ship and the white children were dining.
When her repast was half finished, her master and mistress sud
denly discovered the prodigious breach of decorum which their
attendant was perpetrating, and, calling her away from the table,
began explaining to one lady after another, especially those with
ItiG MANNERS IN THE BACKWOODS. [CHAP, XXXII.
whose children she had been sitting, that she was really a good
girl, who knew no better. The stewardess also, knowing she
should incur blame, came and apologized for her mistake, ob
serving that the girl was quite undistinguishable by her com
plexion from a white. There was a quadroon lady on board,
of very respectable appearance and manners, who w^as taking all
her meals in her own state-room, thus avoiding the risk of meet
ing with similar indignities. It is not surprising, in such a state
of society, that they who belong to the degraded race, should
make every effort to conceal the fact ; or, if that be impossible,
to assimilate themselves, as far as they can. to individuals of the
dominant race. In proportion to the mixture of white blood, the
woolly, short hair of the negro lengthens and straightens, and the
ambition of the black women is to contend with nature in tortur
ing their hair, by combing and plaiting, till it resembles, as near
as possible, the flowing locks of the whites.
At one of the wooding stations, a countryman came on board with
his wife, a half-breed Indian. She had straight black hair, and a
soft, mild eye. She sat at table with us, taking her place on terms
of perfect equality, no distinction of caste being made in this case.
As I was pacing the deck, one passenger after another eyed
my short-sight glass, suspended by a ribbon round my neck, with
much curiosity. Some of them asked me to read for them the
name inscribed on the stern of a steamer so far off that I doubted
whether a good telescope would have enabled me to do more than
discern the exact place where the name was written. Others,
abruptly seizing the glass, without leave or apology, brought their
heads into close contact with mine, and, looking through it, ex
claimed, in a disappointed and half reproachful tone, that they
could see nothing. Meanwhile, the wives and daughters of pas
sengers of the same class, were sitting idle in the ladies' cabin,
occasionally taking my wife's embroidery out of her hand, without
asking leave, and examining it, with many comments, usually,
however, in a complimentary strain. To one who is studying
the geology of the valley of the Mississippi, the society of such
companions may be endurable for a few weeks. He ought to
recollect that they form the great majority of those who support
CHAI». XXXII.] INQUISITIVENESS. 167
these noble steamers, without which such researches could not
be pursued except by an. indefinite sacrifice of time. But \vo
sometimes doubted how far an English party, traveling1 for mere
amusement, would enjoy themselves. If they venture on tho
experiment, they had better not take with them an English
maid-servant, unless they are prepared for her being transformed
into an equal. It would be safer to engage some one of that too
numerous class, commonly called "humble companions/' who
might occasionally enter into society with them. Ladies who
can dispense with such assistance, will find the maids in the inns,
whether white or colored, most attentive.
We were not asked more questions in regard to our private
affairs than we had often been accustomed to submit to when
traveling in France and Scotland. Nor had I any reason to
complain ; for when I had satisfied the curious as to my age, the
number of my children, how we liked the country, and many other
particulars, often asked very abruptly by one just come on board, I
had no ceremony in retaliating on him, and putting to him as many
queries in my turn. Every one must admit that the answers you
commonly receive are most intelligent. Americans of the higher
classes seemed more put out than we were, when thus catechised.'
One of them, before we left Boston, as if determined that
nothing should surprise me, related many diverting anecdotes to
illustrate the inquisitive turn of his countrymen. Among other
stories he gave a lively description of a New Englander who was
seated by a reserved companion in a railway car, and who, by
way of beginning a conversation, said, " Are you a bachelor ?"
To which the other replied, drily, " No, I'm not." — "You are a
married man ?" continued he. — " No, I'm not." — " Then you
must be a widower?" — "No, I'm not." Here there was a short
pause ; but the undaunted querist returned to the charge, observ
ing, " If your are neither a bachelor, nor a married man, nor a
widower, what in the world can you be?" — " If you must know,"
said the other, " I'm a divorced man !"
Another story, told me by the same friend, was that a gentle
man being asked, in a stage coach, how he had lost his leg, made
his fellow travelers promise that if he told them they would put
SPOILT CHILDREN. [CHAP. XXXII.
no more questions on the subject. He then said, " It was bitten
off." To have thus precluded them for the rest of a long jour
ney from asking how it was bitten off, was a truly ingenious
method of putting impertinent curiosity on the rack.
ftVhen my wife first entered the ladies' cabin, she found every
one of the numerous rocking-chairs filled with a mother suckling
an infant. As none of them had nurses or servants, all their other
children were at large, and might have been a great resource to
passengers suflering from ennui, had they been under tolerable
control. As it was, they were so riotous and undisciplined, as to
be the torment of all who approached them. " How fortunate
you are," said one of the mothers to my wrife, " to be without
children ; they are so ungovernable, and, if you switch them, they
sulk, or go into hysterics." The threat of " I'll switch you," is
forever vociferated in an angry tone, but never carried into execu
tion. One genteel and pleasing young lady sat down by my wife,
and began conversation by saying, £; You hate children, don't you ?"
intimating that such were her own feelings. A medical man, in.
large practice, in one of the southern states, told us he often lost
young patients in fevers, and other cases where excitement of the
nerves was dangerous, by the habitual inability of the parents to
exert the least command over their children. We saw an instance
where a young girl, in considerable danger, threw the medicine into
the physician's face, and heaped most abusive epithets upon him.
The Director of the State Penitentiary, in Georgia, told me,
that he had been at some pains to trace out the history of the
most desperate characters under his charge, and found that they
had been invariably spoilt children ; and, he added, if young
Americans were not called upon to act for themselves at so early
an age, and undergo the rubs and discipline of the world, they
would be more vicious arid immoral than the people of any other
nation. Yet there is no country where children ought to be so
great a blessing, or where they can be so easily provided for.
Parents have not the excuse of Mrs. MacClarty, in the " Cottag
ers of Glenburnie," when she exclaims, " If I don't give the boy
his own way, what else have I to give him ?" but it is probably
because so many of these western settlers have risen recently from
CHAP. XXXil.l EQUALITY AND LEVELING. 169
Mrs. MacClarty's grade in society, that they have retained her
maxims for the management of their children ; for the young
people in the families of the best class of society in the United
States, are often kept in as good order, and are as engaging in
their manners, as they are in any part of Europe.
Many young Americans have been sent to school in Switzer
land, and I have heard their teachers, who found them less
manageable than English or Swiss boys, maintain that they
must all of them have some dash of wild Indian blood in their
veins. Englishmen, on the other hand, sometimes attribute the
same character to republican institutions ; but, in fact, they are
spoilt long before they are old enough to know that they are not
born under an absolute monarchy.
Some officers of the army, who had been educated at West
Point, a lieutenant in the navy, and a judge, with his family,
from a southern state, were agreeable companions on this voyage,
and differed as much in manners from the majority of our mess
mates, as persons of the same rank in Europe would have done.
There seemed, to us, to be a great want, in such steamers, of a
second cabin, at a price intermediate between that of the first
cabin and the deck. A poor emigrant, who waB roughing it in
the latter place, remarked to me truly, that they were treated
there like dogs, and had nothing but a plank to sleep upon. He
was paying highly for his wife and family, who had places in
the first cabin. Among all who have paid for these, a recogni
tion of perfect equality is scrupulously exacted. Not only would
a man of rank and ancient family, but one of the most refined
manners, and superior knowledge and education, find himself
treated as entitled to no more deference or respect than the rud
est traveler. Plato's definition of a man, " bipes implume," "a
featherless biped," would be most appropriate to one who was
journeying in such company. To a certain extent, however, the
manners of the ruder members of this society are improved by
such intercourse, and there is some leveling up as well as level
ing down. The European traveler must also bear in mind, that
it would be no discredit to those who are settling in this wilder
ness — especially when Europe pours into it, annually, her hun-
VOL. I!. II
170 ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS. [CHAP. XXXII.
dreds of thousands of ignorant and disappointed emigrants — if
the accommodation was of the rudest kind ; if there were no
steamers in whose machinery the latest improvements had been,
adopted, many of them invented in the United States ; and if
the cabin was not provided with good libraries, or the table cov
ered with newspapers, literary magazines, and reviews. It is
precisely because there is so much civilization in the western
states, that foreigners criticise them unfairly, contrasting their
condition with the highest standard of older countries.
The authority of the captain is absolute, and he does not hesi
tate, if any unruly spirit is refractory, and refuses to conform to
the regulations of the ship, to put him ashore at the nearest
place on the bank where he can be landed ; but I never hap
pened to see so strong a measure resorted to.
The newspapers on the cabin table of the Andrew Jackson
had a column headed in capitals, " Five Weeks later from Eu
rope." The mail packet had been detained by adverse winds
longer than usual, and the uneasiness respecting the chances of a
war with England, still the subject of debate in Congress, had
risen to a great height. Many lovers of peace had misgiving's
lest the English democracy, growing at last impatient, should
express themselves with violence, and excite the war party here.
The first glance at the news relieved them from anxiety, for the
English were entirely absorbed with Free Trade, Cheap Bread,
and the admission of foreign grain without duty. The Cabinet
were too well satisfied that the people's attention was drawn off
from foreign affairs to obtrude the American question unneces
sarily on their attention. One of the politicians on board, who
had been reading an account of the proceedings of the Anti-Corn-
Law League, and the parliamentary debates on the Corn Duties,
confessed to me, that the omission of all allusion to America —
the English being so entirely occupied with their domestic affairs
— Avounded his feelings, "Here we have been talking," he said,
"for three months about nothing else but Oregon, imagining that
the whole world was looking on in suspense, at this momentous
debate, and even in Great Britain it has been forgotten for five
entire weeks ! What an absurd figure we are cutting !"
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Bluffs at Memphis. — New Madrid. — No Inn. — Undermining of River Bank.
— Examination of Country shaken by Earthquake of 1811-12. — Effects
of Passage of Waves through Alluvial Soil. — Circular Cavities or Sand-
Bursts. — Open Fissures. — Lake Eulalie drained by Shocks. — Borders of
Sunk Country, west of New Madrid. — Dead Trees standing erect. — A
slight Shock felt. — Trade in Peltries increased by Earthquake. — Trees
erect in new-formed Lakes. — Indian Tradition of Shocks. — Dreary Forest
Scene. — Rough Quarters. — Slavery in Missouri.
March 24, 1816. — AT length we reached Memphis, in the
State of Tennessee. The town on which this ancient and vener
able name is conferred, appears the newest of the large places
we have yet seen on the Mississippi. It is growing with great
rapidity, standing on a bluff now fifty-two feet above the level
of the water when the river is high. The cliff is the abrupt
termination of deposits similar to those of fresh-water origin, which
I have before alluded to at Natchez and Vicksburg. A mass of
yellow loarn, forty feet thick, reposes on sand with quartz pebbles,
which rests on clay, not visible at the time of my visit. Such a
site for a town, in spite of the slow undermining of the cliffs, is
permanent by comparison with the ordinary banks of the river
for hundreds of miles continuously ; for, as a general rule, the
stream in the alluvial plain is either encroaching a foot or more
annually, so as to wash away buildings, if there be any on the
bank, or is retreating, so that a port soon becomes an inland
town. The people of Memphis are ambitious that their city
should be a great naval arsenal, and there are considerable naval
stores here ; but as frigates require from eighteen to twenty-
three feet water, and men-of-war thirty feet, while the bar at
the mouth of the Mississippi affords at present no more than six
teen feet water, their hopes can riot be realized till a ship canal
is made from some point on the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
After we left Memphis, we were shown, on the Tennessee
172 MEW MADRID. [CHAP. XXXIIL
bank of the river, a log cabin, where they said General Jackson
began his career ; one of his claims to popularity with the demo
cratic party consisting in his having risen from a very humble
origin. The advantages of a more liberal education, which a
rival might have possessed who had begun life in easier circum
stances, would not have countervailed, in the present stage of
progress of the Union, the prestige which attaches to the idea of
a man's having made his way by his own merits.
JMarcli 25. — From Memphis we sailed in a smaller steamer
for 170 miles, first between the states of Tennessee and Arkan
sas, and then between Tennessee and Missouri, and arrived very
late at night at New Madrid, a small village on the western
bank of the river, where I intended to stay and make geological
observations on the region shaken by the great earthquake of
181 1—12. So many of our American friends had tried to dissuade
us from sojourning in so rude a place, that we were prepared for
the worst. In the wharf-boat, at least, I expected to find a bed
for the first night, and proposed to seek accommodation elsewhere
the next day ; but, to my dismay, the keeper of this floating
tavern told me, when I landed, that he had just come there, had
nothing as yet " fixed," and could not receive us. I also learnt
that the only inn in New Madrid had been given up for want
of custom. Leaving, therefore, my wife sitting by the stove in
the wharf-boat, and taking a negro as my guide, I began to pace
the dark and silent streets. First I applied in vain for admit
tance at the old tavern, then to a storekeeper in the neighbor
hood, who informed me that a German baker, near the river,
sometim.es took in lodgers. I next roused this man and his wife
from their slumbers ; their only spare room was occupied, but
they asked their lodger if he would give it up to us. No sum
of money would have bribed him to comply, as I was satisfied
when I knew him better, but his good nature led him at once to
assent cheerfully. We were soon shown into the apartment, a
kind of scullery, with a mattress on the floor, on which we slept,
and did not make our appearance next morning till half-past
eight o'clock. We then apologized, fearing we had kept them
waiting for breakfast. They said, good humoredly, they had
CHAP. XXXIII.] UNDERMINING OF RIVER-BANK. 173
indeed waited from six o'clock, and it was now near their dinner
time ! The young German, originally from near Strasburg, a
man of simple manners, regarded himself as belonging to a differ
ent station in society, and would have acted as waiter till we
had finished our repast, had not his wife, a native-born American,
from the State of Indiana, insisted on his sitting down to table.
They were so poor, that they had no servants, not even a negro
boy or girl, and two children to look after. The fare was of the
humblest kind, bread of Indian corn, bacon, and thick coffee.
Some of the indispensable articles of the breakfast table equipage
had been purchased, as we afterward discovered, expressly for
our use that morning. The lodger, " Uncle John," was an old
bachelor in easy circumstances, fond of fishing, who had come
here to indulge in that sport. He was an old pilot, who had
visited half the ports in the Mediterranean, as well as Great
Britain, and was quite a character. He could tell many a good
story of his adventures, and, like many natives of Louisiana,
could bear to be contradicted on any point rather than hear the
healthiness of New Orleans called in question. His manners,
and those of our host and hostess toward each other and to us,
were very polite, and never approached undue familiarity. Uncle
John assured me that the Mississippi is now flowing where New
Madrid stood in 1811, and that the old grave-yard has traveled
over from the State of Missouri into Kentucky. How this had
happened, it was easy for me to divine when I went out after
breakfast to look at the place by daylight.
The river bank is now about twenty -five feet high, and would
be forty-five feet at the lowest water level. It is giving way rapid
ly, three houses having fallen in during the last week, and some
proprietors are in the act of shifting their quarters half a mile
inland. At the bottom of the wasting bank, there is a semi-fluid
quick-sand, which greatly accelerates the process of destruction.
Yesterday, the ruins of a house, with the wooden fence of a gar
den, were precipitated into the river, and some of the wreck has
formed a talus, up which I saw some hogs, after several unsuc
cessful attempts, clamber at last into a garden, where they began
to uproot the flowers. The steamboats, which are now sailing
174 EARTHQUAKE OF 1811-12. [CHAP. XXXITI.
close to the bank, will, in a few years, pass freely over the site of the
humble mansion where we had been sleeping ; and the geographer,
in constructing a map half a century hence, may have to transfer to
the State of Kentucky, the spot where I saw a garden flourish.
I examined the perpendicular face of the bank with some
interest, as exemplifying the kind of deposits which the Missis
sippi throws down near its margin. They differ in no way
from accumulations of sand and loam of high antiquity with
which the geologist is familiar ; some beds are made up of hori
zontal layers, in others they are slanting, or in what is called
cross stratification. Some are white, others yellow, and here
and there a seam of black carbonaceous matter, derived apparent
ly from the destruction of older strata, is conspicuous.
I next set out on an excursion to examine those districts,
where I heard that some superficial effects of the great earth
quake of 1811 were still visible. The reader should be remind
ed that this convulsion occurred contemporaneously with one of
the most fatal earthquakes of South America, when the towns
of Guayra and Caraccas were laid in ruins. The shocks were
also felt in South Carolina. Humboldt has remarked that the
shocks of New Madrid are the only examples on record, of the
ground having quaked almost incessantly for three months, at a
point so far remote from any active volcano. The shocks were
most violent in part of the region called the Little Prairie, to
the southward of New Madrid, and they extended as far south
as the river St. Francis, and, northward, as far as the mouth of
the Ohio. Although the country was thinly settled, and most
of the houses built of logs, the loss of life was considerable.
From accounts published at the time, it appears that the grave
yard of New Madrid was precipitated into the Mississippi, the
banks of which gave way in many places, and the ground swelled
up so that the current of the river flowed backward for a time,
carrying several flat boats northward, against the stream. In
various parts of the region above alluded to as having been con
vulsed, lakes twenty miles and upward in extent were formed,
while others which pre-existed were drained.* Hundreds of
* SiJliman's Journal, vol. xv. 1829.
CHAP. XXXIIL] SAND-BURSTS. 175
chasms opened, and new islands appeared in the Mississippi and
its tributaries. Flint, the geographer, who visited the country
seven years after the event, says that, at the time of his visit,
a district west of New Madrid still remained covered with water,
and that the neighboring forest presented a scene of great con
fusion — many trees standing inclined in every direction, and
others having their trunks and branches broken. He also saw
hundreds of deep chasms remaining in the alluvial soil, which
were produced, according to the inhabitants, by the bursting of
the earth, which rose in great undulations, and discharged vast
volumes of water, sand, and coaly matter, thrown up as high as
the tops of the trees. As the shocks lasted throughout a period
of three months, the country people remarked that, in given dis
tricts, there were certain prevailing directions in which these fis
sures opened, arid they accordingly felled the tallest trees, making
them fall at right angles to the direction of the chasms. By
stationing themselves on these, they often escaped being swal
lowed up when the earth opened beneath them. Some of the
shocks were perpendicular, while others, much more desolating,
were horizontal, or moved along like great waves.
Before I left New Orleans, Mr. Bringier, the engineer, related
to me that he was on horseback near New Madrid, in 1811,
when some of the severest shocks were experienced, and that, as
the waves advanced, he saw the trees bend down, and often, the
instant afterward, when in the act of recovering their position,
meet the boughs of other trees similarly inclined, so as to become
interlocked, being prevented from righting themselves again. The
transit of the wave through the woods was marked by the crash
ing noise of countless branches, first heard on one side and then
on the other. At the same time powerful jets of water, mixed
with sand, mud, and bituminous coaly shale, were cast up with
such force, that both horse and rider might have perished, had
the undulating ground happened to burst immediately beneath
them. He also told me that circular cavities, called sink-holes,
were formed where the principal fountains of mud and water
were thrown up.
Hearing that some of these cavities still existed near the town,
176 LAKE EULALIE. [CHAP. XXXIII.
I went to see one of them, three quarters of a mile to the west
ward. There I found a nearly circular hollow, ten yards wide,
and five feet deep, with a smaller one near it, and I observed,
scattered about the surrounding level ground, fragments of black
bituminous shale, with much white sand. Within a distance
of a few hundred yards, were five more of these " sand-bursts,"
or " sand-blows," as they are sometimes termed here, and, rather
more than a mile farther west, near the house of Mr. Savors,
my guide pointed out to me what he called " the sink-hole where
the negro was drowned." It is a striking object, interrupting
the regularity of a flat plain, the .sides very steep, and twenty-
eight feet deep from the top to the water's edge. The water
now standing in the bottom is said to have been originally very
deep, but has grown shallow by the washing in of sand, and
the crumbling of the bank caused by the feet of cattle coming to
drink. I was assured that many wagon loads of matter were
cast up out of this hollow, and the quantity must have been con
siderable to account for the void ; yet the pieces of lignite, and the
quantity of sand now heaped on the level plain near its borders,
would not suffice to fill one-tenth part of the cavity. Perhaps a
part of the ejected substance may have been swallowed up again,
and the rest may have been so mixed with water, as to have
spread freely like a fluid over the soil.
My attention was next drawn to the bed of what was once a
lake, called Eulalie ; Mr. W. Hunter, the proprietor of the estate,
accompanying -me to the spot. The bottom, now dried up, is
about 300 yards long, by 100 yards in width, and chiefly com
posed of clay, covered with trees, the whole of them less than
thirty-four years old. They consist of cotton- wood (Populus
angulata), willows, the honey locust, and other species. Some
single cotton-wood trees have grown so fast as to be near two
and a half feet in diameter, and had not my guide known their
age accurately, I should have suspected their origin to have been
prior to 1811. All the species on the bottom differ from those
covering the surrounding higher ground, which is more elevated
by twelve or fifteen feet. Here the hickory, the black and white
oak, the gum, and other trees, many of them of ancient date, are
CHAP. XXXIII.] EXCURSION TO "SUNK COUNTRY." 177
seen to flourish. On all sides, the ascent from the old bed of
the lake to its boundary, is by a steep slope, on ascending which
you reach a platform on a level with the top of the bank of the
Mississippi, which is about a mile distant. Mr. Hunter in
formed me that Lake Eulalie was formerly filled with clear
water, and abounded in fish, until it was suddenly drained by
the earthquake. In the clayey bottom, I traced the course of
two parallel fissures, by which the waters escaped. They are
separated from each other by a distance of about eight yards,
and are not yet entirely closed. Near their edges, much sand
and coal shale lie scattered, which were throwrn out of them when
they first opened.
In regard to the origin of this black bituminous shale, so
abundantly cast out of chasms in this region, it belongs to the
alluvial formation, and is found, in digging wells, fifteen feet
deep, or sometimes nearer the surface. It was probably drifted
down at a former period by the current of the Mississippi, from
the coal-fields farther north.
Having learned that still more striking monuments of the
earthquake were to be seen in the territory farther to the west
ward of New Madrid, I endeavored, but in vain, to hire a horse.
At length a merchant's widow kindly lent me a steed. To pro
cure a guide was impossible, all hands being fully employed. I
therefore set out alone through the forest, skirting the borders of
a swamp called the Bayou St. John, where I observed a great
many fallen trees, and others dead and leafless, but standing
erect. After riding some miles, I found my way to a farm, the
owner of which had witnessed the earthquake when a child. He
described to me the camping out of the people in the night when
the first shocks occurred, and how some were wounded by the
falling of chimneys, and the bodies of others drawn out of the
ruins. He confirmed the published statements of the inhabitants
having availed themselves of fallen trees to avoid being engulfed
in open fissures, and I afterward heard that this singular mode
of escape had been adopted in distant places, between which
there had been no communication, and that even children threw
themselves on the felled trunks. My new acquaintance then
H*
178 SLIGHT SHOCK FELT. [CHAP. XXXIII.
took me to see several fissures still open, which had been caused
by the undulatory movement of the ground, some of them jagged,
others even and straight. I traced two of them continuously for
more than half a mile, and found that a few were parallel ; but,
on the whole, they varied greatly in direction, some being ten
and others forty-five degrees west of north. I might easily have
mistaken them for artificial trenches, if my companion had not
known them within his recollection to have been " as deep as
wells." Sand and black shale were strewed along their edges.
They were most of them from two to four feet wide, and five or
six feet deep ; but the action of rains, frost, and occasional inun
dations, and above all the leaves of the forest blown into them
every autumn in countless numbers, have done much to fill them up.
Continuing my ride, I came to the house and farm of Mr. Love,
who had long resided in this district, and he took me to part of
the forest, on the borders of what is called the " sunk country,"
where all the trees of a date prior to 1811, although standing
erect and entire, are dead and leafless. They are chiefly oaks
and walnuts, with trunks three or four feet in diameter, and many
of them 200 years old. They are supposed to have been killed
by the loosening of the roots during the repeated undulations
which passed through the soil for three months in succession.
The higher level plain, where these dead trees stand, terminates
abruptly toward the Bayou St. John, and the sudden descent
of eight or ten feet throughout an area four or five miles long,
and fifty or sixty broad, was caused, my informant assured me,
by the earthquake. At the lower level are seen cypresses and
cotton- wood, and other trees which delight in wet ground, all
newer than 1812. I was told that there are some places where
the descent from the upper level to that of the sunk country is
not less than twenty and even thirty feet. In part of this sunk
ground I saw not only dead oaks and hickory still erect, but aged
gum-trees also and cypresses (Cupressus disticha).
While I was riding with Mr. Love he stopped his horse, and
asked me if I did not feel the shock of an earthquake. When
my attention was called to it, I fancied I had perceived it, but
was not sure. He said they were frequent, although he had not
CHAP. XXXIII.] "SUNK COUNTRY." 179
felt one for the last fortnight. It was now three years since they
had been seriously alarmed by any movement. We looked at our
watches, and when we returned to the farm he inquired of the
family if any thing had happened. They said they had felt a
shock, and heard a sound like distant thunder, at twenty-five
minutes past eleven o'clock, which agreed exactly with the time
when my companion had felt the motion.
If the information I obtained from several quarters be correct,
in regard to the country permanently submerged by the earth
quake of 1811—12, the area must exceed in magnitude what
was stated in former accounts. The " sunk country," I am told,
extends along the course of the White Water and its tributaries
for a distance of between seventy and eighty miles north and south,
and thirty miles east and west. A trapper, who had been hunting
on the Little River, told me, that large spaces there were obviously
under water, owing to the great shake, because the dead trees were
still standing. In the true hunter spirit, he regarded the awful
catastrophe of 1811—12 as a blessing to the country, and expati-
ited with delight on the vast area turned into lake and marsh,
id the active trade carried on ever since in the furs of wild animals,
j^had been the making of New Madrid, he affirmed, which would
)me a rival of St. Louis, and exported even now at least half
my peltries. There had been taken last year 50,000 racoon
skin^and 25,000 musk-rats for making hats and caps ; 12,000
mink for trimming dresses; 1000 bears and 1000 otters; 2500
wild oats, 40 panthers, and 100 wolves. Beavers there were
none, or only five or six had been trapped. He had gone in his
canoe, which carried his hut, his gun, and his baggage, over the
whole sunk country, and described to me the villages or hummocks
built in the swamps by the musk-rats, which he called " French
settlements," a piece of impertinence in which the Anglo- Americans
indulge toward the Creoles of Louisiana. He told me that within
the area of the sunk country in Arkansas, about eighty miles from
New Madrid, is a space called Buffalo Island, containing about
twenty-five square miles, where, two years ago (1844), a herd
of buffaloes, 300 or 400 strong, was surprised, and six of them
taken.
180 TRADITION OF EARTHQUAKES. [CHAP. XXXIII.
The sunk country is not confined to the region west of the
Mississippi ; for, on my way up the river, I learnt from Mr.
Fletcher, a farmer, who had a wooding station in Tennessee, that
several extensive forest tracts in that state were submerged during
the shocks of 1811—12. and have ever since formed lakes arid
swamps, among which are those called Obion and Reelfoot. He
had observed, in several of these, that trees which had been killed,
and had stood for a long time partially submerged, had in many
places rotted down to the water's edge. In some swamps caused
by the earthquake, they had all decayed to within a few inches
of the base of the trunk. It is therefore evident, that should the
turbid waters of the Mississippi overflow that region, and deposit
their sediment on such stumps, they would present to the geologist
a precise counterpart of the buried stools of trees with their roots
before described as occurring at the bottom of the b]uff at Port
Hudson.* Mr. Fletcher also told me, that he knew several fis
sures in Tennessee, formed in 1811—12, where the ground on one
side of the rent remained higher by two feet than that on the
other side.
I was informed at New Madrid that the Indians, before
year 1811, had a tradition of a great earthquake which h
previously devastated this same region. Yet there is so wide an
area of forest without sink-holes, or any great inequalities of sur
face, and without dead trees like those above alluded to, that wro
can not suppose any convulsion of equal magnitude to have
occurred for many centuries previous to 1811.
Having explored the margin of the Great Prairie, and seen
the sunk country several miles west of New Madrid, I returned
by a different path through the woods, often losing my way, till
I fell into the main road for the last six miles, which was cut
straight through the forest, and was at this season singularly
monotonous and dreary. It was furrowed with long, deep ruts,
cut in black mud. and full of miry water. The sky was cloudy,
and the plain as level as if it had never been disturbed by the
slightest subterranean movement since it originated. The trees
were, for the most part, leafless, and almost all of the same height,
* Ante, pp. 137-140.
CHAP. XXXIII.] ROUGH QUARTERS. 181
with no evergreens below them, and no grass ; but, instead of it,
a somber brown covering of damp and dead oak leaves, strewed
evenly over the ground. At one point I saw the rotting trunks
of several fallen trees, and near them an old oak, on the boughs
of which, near the base, a group of five turkey-buzzards were
perched, in perfect character with the rest of the scene. Twilight
was coming on, and the woods were silent ; but, as I approached
the river, the silence was agreeably broken by the varied and
liquid notes of a mocking-bird, and, at the same time, one of the
large woodpeckers, with its brilliant plumage, flew over my head,
as if to remind me that at other seasons the solitude is cheered
by the song and bright colors of birds, when the leaves of the
trees unfold themselves, and the sun's heat would then be so in
tense, that a traveler would gladly retreat into the shades of the
dense forest.
When I took back my horse to its owner in New Madrid, I
received a pressing invitation to exchange our present homely
quarters for her comfortable house. Some of the other principal
merchants made us hospitable offers of the same kind, which
were exceedingly tempting. We thought it right, however, to
decline them all, as we might have hurt the feelings of our
German host and his wife, who, in their anxiety to accommodate
us, had purchased several additional household articles. Among
these was a table-cloth, and, when I entered the house, T was amused
at the occupations of my wife and her companion. The baker's
lady had accepted the offer of her guest to hem the new table-cloth,
in which task she was busily engaged ; while the settler in the
backwoods, having discovered that my wife had brought from
New Orleans a worked collar of the latest Parisian fashion, had
asked leave to copy it, and was intent on cutting out the shape,
thus qualifying herself to outdo all the " fashionists" of the sunk
country.
A great spirit of equality was observable in the manners of the
whites toward each other at New Madrid, yet with an absence
of all vulgar familiarity. But what I saw and heard, convinced
me that the condition of the negroes is least enviable in such out-
of-the-way and half civilized districts, where there are many ad-
182 SLAVERY IN MISSOURI. [CHAP. XXXIII.
venturers, and uneducated settlers, who have little control over
their passions, and who, when they oppress their slaves, are not
checked by public opinion, as in more advanced communities.
New comers of a higher tone of sentiment are compelled some
times to witness cruelties which fill them with indignation,
heightened by the necessity of being silent, and keeping on good
terms with persons of whose conduct they disapprove. To the
passing stranger, they can enlarge on this source of annoyance,
and send him away grieving that so late as the year 1821, Mis
souri should have been added to the Union as a slave state, against
the wishes of a respectable minority of its own inhabitants, and
against the feeling of a majority of the more educated population
of the north.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
Alluvial Formations of the Mississippi, ancient and modern. — Delta defined.
— Great Extent of Wooded Swamps. — Deposits of pure Vegetable Mat
ter. — Floors of Blue Clay with Cypress Roots. — Analogy to ancient Coal-
measures. — Supposed " Epoch of existing Continents." — Depth of Fresh
water Strata in Deltas. — Time required to bring down the Mud of the
Mississippi. — New Experiments and Observations required. — Great Age
of buried and living Cypress-trees. — Older and Newer Parts of Alluvial
Plain. — Upraised Terraces of Natchez, &c., and the Ohio, the Monuments
of an older Alluvial Formation. — Grand Oscillation of Level. — The ancient
Valleys inhabited by Quadrupeds now extinct. — Land-shells not changed.
— Probable Rate of Subsidence and Upheaval. — Relative Age of the an
cient Alluvium of the Mississippi, and the Northern Drift.
BEFORE leaving the valley of the Mississippi, I shall take this
opportunity to offer some general remarks on the modern delta and
alluvial plain of the great river, and on those fresh-water deposits
before described in the bluffs of Port Hudson, Natchez, Vicksburg,
and Memphis, which I regard as the monuments of a more an
cient alluvial formation, one of high antiquity, yet formed when
the physical geography of the country already bore a great re
semblance to that now existing, and when, moreover, the land
and waters were inhabited by the same species of terrestrial,
fluviatile, and lacustrine mollusca, which now inhabit this region,
although the land quadrupeds were almost entirely different.
The delta of the Mississippi may be defined as that part of the
great alluvial slope, which lies below, or to the south of the
branching off of the highest arm, or that called the Atchafalaya.
Above this point, which is the head of the delta, the Mississippi
receives water from its various tributaries ; below, it gives out
again, through numerous arms or channels, the waters which it
conveys to the sea. The delta, so defined, is about 14,000
square miles in area, and elevated from a few inches to ten feet
above the level of the sea The greater part of it protrudes into
the Gulf of Mexico, beyond the general coast line. The level
plain to the north, as far as Cape Girardeau, in Missouri, above
184 DELTA OF THE MISSISSIPPI. [CHAP. XXXIV.
the junction of the Ohio, is of the same character, including,
according to Mr. Forshey, an area of about 16,000 square miles,
arid is, therefore, larger than the delta. It is very variable in
width from east to west, being near its northern extremity, or at
the mouth of the Ohio, 50 miles wide, at Memphis 30, at the
mouth of the White River 80, and contracting again further
south, as at Grand Gulf, to 33 miles. The delta and alluvial
plain rise by so gradual a slope from the sea as to attain at the
junction of the Ohio (a distance of 800 miles by the river) an
elevation of only 200 feet above the Gulf of Mexico.
First, in regard to the whole alluvial slope, whether above or
below the present head of the delta, it will appear, from what has
been already said, that sand is thrown down near the borders of
the main river and its tributaries, arid fine mud at more distant
points. The larger portion, however, of the whole area consists
of swamps, supporting a luxuriant growth of timber, interspersed
with lakes, most of which are deserted river bends. These lakes
are slowly filling up, and every swamp is gradually becoming
shallower, the substances accumulated in them being, for the
most part, of vegetable origin, unmixed with earthy matter. It
is only on their exterior margins (except after a sudden subsidence,
daring an earthquake like that of 1811—12), that the waters of
the Mississippi throw down sediment in the interior of any large
swamp or lake, for the reeds, canes, and brushwood, through
which the waters must first pass, cause them to flow slowly,
and to part with all the matter previously held in mechanical
suspension. Long before they reach the central parts of a morass
or lake, they are well filtered, although still deeply stained by
vegetable matter in a state of decomposition.
Over a large portion of the submerged areas of the great plain,
trees are seen growing every where in the water. Into the deeper
water, where no forest can grow, the trunks of trees are floated,
and many of these sink, when water-logged, to the bottom, which
is also raised by an annual deposit of leaves, and of peaty matter
derived from decaying plants, of which there is an exuberant
growth round the borders of every swamp. That the admixture
of inorganic matter is very small, has been shown by the observ-
CHAP. XXXIV.] FLOORS OF BLUE CLAY. 18!
ations of Messrs. Dickeson and Brown, who state, " that wher
the woods are burning1, after an unusually dry season, pits ar%
found burnt into the ground as far as the fire can descend Avithout
coming into contact with water, and scarcely any residuum or
earthy matter is left."* They also state that at the bottom of
all the cypress swamps or brakes, there is found a peculiar layer
of tenacious blue clay, which forms the foundation, or floor, on
which the vegetable matter accumulates. We may conclude,
therefore, that as the roots of the cypress penetrate far beneath
the soil, and project horizontally far and wide, those of one tree
interlacing with another, such root-bearing beds of argillaceous
loam must be very analogous to what are called fire-clays, so well
known to the geologist as occurring underneath almost every seam
of coal in the ancient carboniferous rocks. f
Other points of analogy might also be indicated between the
deposits, whether of organic or inorganic matter, now accumulat
ing in the valley-plain and delta of the Mississippi, and those of
the ancient carboniferous rocks. When, for example, depressions
are suddenly caused, as in the " sunk country" before described,
certain wooded areas being submerged, the lower parts of the
erect trees become enveloped with sand arid mud, the upper por
tions rotting away, as must have happened in the case of the
celebrated fossil forest of Dixon-fold, in Lancashire, belonging to
the ancient coal-measures. $ In the modern alluvial plain, also,
river-sand will be often thrown down, as the Mississippi shifts its
course over spaces on which pure vegetable matter had been pre
viously accumulating for hundreds or thousands of years, just as
we find sandstone sometimes resting immediately upon the old
coal-seams ; and, if there be a long succession of downward move
ments, the thickness of strata, all formed in shallow water or in
swamps, may be indefinitely great. Should the hilly country,
moreover, be distant, pebbles will no more be seen in the modern
* Silliman's Journal, Second Series, vol. v. p. 17, January, ] 848.
t In my former "Travels," I have alluded to the fire-stones with Stig-
maria (now acknowledged to be the root of Sigillaria), underlying the
American coal-seams, as they do those of South Wales, 3000 miles distant.
" Travels in North America," vol. i. p. 62.
t Proceedings of Geol. Society, 1839. p. 139.
136 DEPTH OF FRESH- WATER STRATA. [CHAP. XXXIV.
sand strewed over the buried trees and layers of vegetable mat
ter, than they usually are in the grits associated with the coal of
ancient date. The phenomena, also, of the New Madrid earth
quake, may help us to explain the vast geographical area over
which, in the course of ages, dense fluviatile and lacustrine strata,
with intercalated beds of vegetable origin, may be made to ex
tend without any inroads of the sea. For the inland parts of any
hydrographical basin may be augmented indefinitely in length
and breadth, while the seaward portions continue unaltered, as
the delta around New Orleans, and the low lands bordering the
Gulf of Mexico, preserved their level unchanged, while parts of
Missouri and Tennessee were lowered.
By duly appreciating the permanent geographical revolutions
which would result from a succession of such earthquakes as that
of 1811—12, in the territory of New Madrid, we shall be pre
vented from embracing the theory implied in the language of
those who talk of " the epoch of existing continents." In treat
ing of deltas, they are in the habit of assuming that the present
mass of alluvial matter which has been thrown into the sea at
the mouths of great rivers, began to be deposited in all the great
hydrographical basins of the world at one and the same fixed
period — namely, when the formation of the existing continents
was completed ; as if the relative levels of land and sea had,
during that time, remained stationary, or had been affected to so
inconsiderable an amount, as to be unimportant in their influence
on the physical geography of each region, in comparison with the
changes wrought by the rivers, in converting sea into land. But
what we already know of the deltas of the Po, Indus, Ganges,
and other rivers, leads to a very different conclusion. The bor
ing of an artesian well at Calcutta, was carried to the depth of
481 feet, the greater part of the section being below the level of
the sea, and yet all the beds pierced through were of fresh-water
origin, without any intermixture of marine remains. At differ
ent depths, even as far down as 380 feet, lacustrine shells, arid
a stratum of decayed wood, with vegetable soil, which appears to
have supported trees, was met with.* These appearances may
* See " Principles of Geology," Seventh Edition, 1847, p. 266.
CHAP. XXXIV.] AGE OF DELTA OF MISSISSIPPI. 187
readily be accounted for, by assuming that there was a gradual
subsidence of the ground for ages, which was as constantly raised
by the accession of fluviatile sediment, so as to prevent any in
cursion of the sea. Occasionally there were pauses in the down
ward movement, when trees grew on the soil, and vegetable mat
ter of some thickness had time to accumulate.
Recent observations, by Morlat and others, have demonstrated
that, since the time of the Romans, there has been a general
subsidence of the coast at the head of the Adriatic, to the amount
of five feet, which has not prevented the delta of the Po and
other rivers from advancing on the sea, although it must have
checked their progress. Of the much greater movements of ele
vation and depression which have taken place in the delta of the
Indus, especially those wrought in the year 1819, I have else
where given an account.^ It would, therefore, be perfectly con
sistent with analogy to find, in the neighborhood of New Orleans,
ancient swamp formations, with the roots and stumps of erect
trees, unmixed with marine remains, far below the level of the
sea, as is the fact, if I can rely on the information given me in
1846-f
Finding it impossible to calculate the age of the delta, from
the observed rate of the advance of the land on the Gulf in each
century, I endeavored to approximate, by a different method, to
a minimum of the time required for bringing down from the upper
country that large quantity of earthy matter which is now depos
ited within the area of the delta. Dr. Riddell communicated to
me, at New Orleans, the result of a series of experiments which
he had made, to ascertain the proportion of sediment contained in
the waters of the Mississippi. He concluded that the mean an
nual amount of solid matter was to the water as r.^5 in weight,
or about ^ in volume. $ Since that period, he has made
another series of experiments, and his tables show that the quan-
* Principles, Seventh Edition, p. 437. t See ante, p. 109.
J The calculations here given, were communicated to the British Asso
ciation in a Lecture which I delivered at Southampton, in September, 1846.
See "Athenaeum Journal," Sept. 26, 1846, and "Report of British Asso
ciation," 1846, p. 117.
188 AGE OF DELTA OF MISSISSIPPI. [CHAP. XXXIV.
tity of mud held in suspension, increases regularly with the in
creased height arid velocity of the stream. On the whole, com
paring the flood season with that of clearest water, his experi
ments, continued down to 1849, give an average annual quantity
of solid matter somewhat less than his first estimate, but riot va
rying materially from it. From these observations, and those of
Dr. Carpenter and Mr. Forshey (an eminent engineer, to whom
I have before alluded), on the average width, depth, and velocity
of the Mississippi, the mean annual discharge of water and sedi
ment was deduced. I then assumed 528 feet, or the tenth of a
mile, as the probable thickness of the deposit of mud and sand in
the delta ; founding my conjecture chiefly on the depth of the
Gulf of Mexico between the southern point of Florida and the
Balizc, which equals, on an average, 100 fathoms, and partly
on some borings, 600 feet deep, in the delta near Lake Pont-
chartrain, north of New Orleans, in which the bottom of the
alluvial matter is said not to have been reached. The area
of the delta being about 13.600 square statute miles, and the
quantity of solid matter annually brought down by the river
3,702.758,400 cubic feet, it must have taken 67,000 years for
the formation of the whole ; and if the alluvial matter of the
plain above be 264 feet deep, or half that of the delta, it must
have required 33,500 more years for its accumulation, even if its
area be estimated as only equal to that of the delta, whereas it is
in fact larger.
From information since received, I think it not improbable
that the quantity of water may have been underrated in this
estimate ;* and, if so, a larger amount of sediment would have
* I allude chiefly to the observations and experiments, on the velocity of
the Mississippi at various depths, made by Mr. W. H. Sidell. during a Gov
ernment survey, communicated to me through the kindness of Mr. Ruggles,
of New York, which, if correct, would lead to the inference that the average
number of cubic feet of water discharged into the Gulf per second, is con
siderably greater than Mr. Forshey and Dr. Carpenter deduced from their
observations on the velocity of the stream at different depths. If, as I un
derstand, there exist documents in the hydrographer's office at Washington,
which would afford more ample data for such calculations, the Government
would confer a boon on the scientific world by publishing them without
CHAP. XXXIV.] AGE OF DELTA OF MISSISSIPPI. 189
been brought down from the interior in a given time, and conse
quently a deduction would have to be made from the number of
centuries above stated on that account. But, on the other hand,
if it could be shown, by more accurate experiments and calcula
tions, that the quantity of water in the above computation was
greatly deficient, say even one-third less than the real quantity, I
do not imagine that any exaggeration has been made in the time
supposed to have elapsed since the rivers began to transport their
earthy ingredients to the alluvial plains of Louisiana. The delta
is, after all, a mere fragmentary portion of a larger body of mud,
the finer particles of which never settle down near the mouths
of the Mississippi, but are carried far out into the Gulf, and there
dispersed.
The description which I have given of the great distance to
which the yellow and lighter streams of fresh water are seen
extending, from the various mouths, in the flood-season, into the
Gulf; and still more, the destruction of the banks and bars of
mud and sand caused by the tide scouring out the channels when
the river is low,^ and the strength of the marine current, run
ning ten miles an hour, and the stories of anchors and heavy
ballast cast up by the breakers high and dry on the shifting
shoals near the extremity of the delta, make me doubt whether
delay. Such experiments as Mr. Sidell's, which give the velocity at various
depths and at different distances from the banks, are the more needed,
because it seems doubtful whether any correct mathematical formulae have
as yet been furnished for calculating the mean rate at which so deep a river
as the Mississippi flows, from observations made simply on its superficial
velocity. I placed all the data given me by Messrs. Riddell, Forshey, and
Carpenter, in the hands of my friend, Mr. George Rennie, F.R.S., to whom
we are indebted for many valuable papers on the application of the science
of hydraulics to rivers (see Report of British Association, vol. iii. p. 415,
1834), and, after examining them, he came to conclusions which did not
vary materially from those which I had previously announced. Mr. James
Nicol, Assistant Secretary of the Geological Society of London, before he
had seen Mr. Sidell's experiments, had expressed to me his belief that the
quantity of water carried to the Gulf by the Mississippi, must be greater
than I had assumed from Mr. Forshey's calculations, judging from the
amount usually assigned as the annual discharge of rivers having hydro-
graphical basins smaller than that of the Mississippi.
* See ante, p. 121.
190 AGE OF DELTA OF MISSISSIPPI. [CHAP. XXXIV.
the larger part of that impalpable mud, which constitutes the
bulk of the solid matter carried into the sea by the Mississippi,
is not lost altogether, so far as the progress of the delta is con
cerned. So impalpable is the sediment, and so slowly does it
sink, that a glass of water taken from the Mississippi, may
remain motionless for three weeks, and yet all the earthy matter
will not have reached the bottom. If particles so minute are
carried by the current, setting for a great portion of the year
from west to east, across the mouth of the river, into the Gulf
Stream, and so into the Atlantic, they might easily travel to the
banks of Newfoundland before sinking to the bottom ; and some
of them, which left the head waters of the Missouri in the 49th
degree of north latitude, may, after having gone southward to
the Gulf, and then northward to the Great Banks, have found
no resting-place before they had wandered for a distance as far
as from the pole to the equator, and returned to the very latitude
from which they set out. Were it not for the peculiar manner
in which the Mississippi forms long bars of sand, which frequently
unite with some part of the coast, so as to dam out the sea and
form lagoons, the deposition of sediment in the delta would be
much less considerable. A lagoon, like Lake Pontchartrain,
once formed, becomes a receptacle of the finest mud, poured into
it by an arm of the great river during the flood season, and the
space thus parted off from the Gulf by bars of sand, is protected
from the action of the breakers and marine currents.
When I inquired what might be the depth of the fluviatile
mud in the suburbs of New Orleans, I was told that, in making
a railroad near Lake Pontchartrain, piles were driven down sixty
feet into the soft mud or slush, and when a boring was made
there, 600 feet deep, beds of gnathodon were found, but no
marine shells.
The depth of the alluvium may vary in different parts of the
great sloping plain ; for certain areas, such as the " sunk coun
try," for example, west of New Madrid, may have been repeat
edly depressed, and have been always brought up again to the
same superficial level, by the deposition of the river rnud, or the
growth of vegetable matter.
CHAP. XXXIV.] CYPRESS TREES. 191
The age of stumps and erect trunks of the deciduous cypress,
whether living or buried, retaining their natural position, at
points near the present termination of the delta, ought to be
carefully examined, as they might afford evidence of the minimum
of time which can be allowed for the gain of land on the sea.
Some single trunks in Louisiana are said to contain from 800 to
2000 rings of annual growth, and Dr. M. W. Dickeson and Mr.
A. Brown state, that the cypress brakes or basins, which fill up
gradually, give place at length to other timber ; but before this
happens, the buried cypress stumps often extend through a de
posit of vegetable and sedimentary matter twenty-five feet thick.
" Sections of such filled-up cypress basins, exposed by the changes
in the position of the river, exhibit undisturbed, perfect, arid erect
stumps, in a series of every elevation with respect to each other,
extending from high-water mark down to at least twenty-five
feet below, measuring out a time when not less than ten fully-
matured cypress growths must have succeeded each other, the
average of whose age could not have been less than 400 years,
thus making an aggregate of 4000 years since the first cypress
tree vegetated in the basin. * There are also instances where
prostrate trunks, of huge dimensions, are found imbedded in the
clay, immediately over which are erect stumps of trees, number
ing no less than 800 concentric layers."
Michaud, in his famous work on the forest trees of North
America, mentions that stems of this deciduous cypress ( Taxodi-
um distichum) are met with in Florida, and in southern Louisi
ana, forty feet in circumference above the enlarged base, which
is three or four times that size ; but such individuals dwindle to
nothing before the gigantic trunk near Santa Maria del Tule, in
the province of Oaxaca, in Mexico, which was first mentioned by
Exeter, who found its circumference to be 117-10 French feet.
Zuccarini, has lately removed the doubts of Do Candolle respect
ing this measurement, which was taken above the dilated base,
for that was no less than 200 feet in circumference. In this
stem there would be 5352 rings of annual growth, if one line a
year was taken as the average growth, the deposit of wood
* Silliraan's Journal, Second Series, vol. v. p. 17. January, 1848.
192 ALLUVIAL PLAIN. [CHAP. XXXIV.
becoming always much smaller in trees of great age ; but Zuc-
carini, in his estimate, thinks it may be safer to assume 1-6 line
as the average, which would even then give the age of 3512
years for this single tree.
The great number of crescent-shaped lakes to the westward of
the Mississippi, which formerly constituted bends in its ancient
channel, are also monuments of the antiquity of the great plain
over which the river has been wandering. Darby, the geogra
pher, observed that, in the steep banks of the Atchafalaya, there
are alternations of the bluish clay of the Mississippi arid of the
red ocherous earth peculiar to Red River, proving that the
waters of these two streams once occupied alternately consider
able tracts below their present point of union. ^ Since their
junction (an event, the date of which is unknown), the waters
and sediment of the Red River and Mississippi have been thor
oughly mixed up together, before any deposition of their mud
takes place in the lower country. It is evident, therefore, that,
when we are enabled, by geological observations such as those of
Darby, to distinguish the older from the newer portions, even of
the modem alluvial plain, we may obtain more aid in our chro
nological computations founded on rings of growth in buried trees ;
for we may then add the years deduced from stumps buried in
the modern parts of the delta, to those proved by the structure
of trees included in mud of earlier date.
After considering the age and origin of the modem deposits of
the Mississippi and its tributaries, we have still to carry back
our thoughts to the era of the fresh-water strata seen in the bluffs
which bound the great valley. These, in their southern termina
tion, have evidently formed an ancient coast-line, beyond which
the modern delta has been pushed forward into the sea. Let a,
b (fig. 10) represent the alluvial plain of the Mississippi, bound
ed on its eastern side at Vicksburg, as before described, by the
bluffs d, at the foot of which are seen the Eocene strata, ft the
upper part of the bluff being composed of shelly loam, or loess, of
fresh- water origin, d, e (No. 2).
At Memphis, Port Hudson, and many other places, loam of
* Darby's Louisiana, p. 103.
CHAP. XXXIV.] UPRAISED TERRACES. 1;»3
the same age as No. 2, rising from 50 to 200 feet above the
level of the sea, constitutes the entire bluffs, forming a table-land
like that represented at d, e. Similar deposits, #, c (fig. 10),
recur in Louisiana, on the western side of the great valley ; but
they are not, I am informed, denuded so as to present a steep
bluff at a. They rest equally on Eocene strata, /(No. 3).
From what has been said of the species of shells contained in
the loam, d, e, at Natchez, and in other localities, from the
remains also of associated terrestrial animals, and from the
buried trees of Port Hudson, we have inferred that these deposits
(No. 2), are the monuments of an ancient alluvial plain, of an
age long anterior to that through which the Mississippi now
Fig. 10.
VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
Louisiana. c
1. Alluvium. 2. Loess. 3. /. Eocene. 4. Cretaceous.
flows, which was inhabited by land and fresh-water mollusca
agreeing with those now existing, and by quadrupeds now for
the most part extinct.
In my former " Travels in North America," I described some
ancient terraces of gravel, sand, and loam, occurring every where
in the valley of the Ohio, and gave a section of them as they are
seen at Cincinnati.* I pointed out that the included fossil
shells demonstrate the fluviatile and modem origin of the
deposits, and suggested that their present position could only be
explained by supposing, first, a gradual sinking down of the land
after the original excavation of the valley, during which period
the gravel and sand were thrown down, and then an upheaval
of the same valley, when the river cut deep channels through
the fresh-water beds.f Certain swamp formations observable in
* Travels in North America, fig. 9, vol. ii. p. 59, chap. xvii.
t The second terrace (c, fig. 9, ibid.) at Cincinnati, may imply a second
oscillation.
VOL II.. — I
194 EXTINCT QUADRUPEDS. [CHAP. XXXIV.
the valleys of small tributaries of the Ohio, such as those of Big
Bone Lick, in Kentucky, and Mill Creek, near Cincinnati, are
of geological celebrity, in consequence of the great number of
skeletons of extinct mammalia, such as the megalonyx, mastodon,
elephant, and others, which seem to have lived, and have been
mired in ancient morasses, before the land began to sink ; for the
great mass of fluviatile loam and gravel forming the terraces, has
been superimposed on the black bog earth containing such bones.
The teeth, however, and bones of similar extinct quadrupeds,
especially the mastodon, are occasionally met with scattered
through the incumbent gravel and loam, so that the same
assemblage of quadrupeds continued to inhabit the valleys while
the first change of level or the subsidence was going on. By sim
ply extending to the valley of the Mississippi, the theory before
applied to that of the Ohio, we may, as already stated at p. 142,
in reference to the Port Hudson bluffs, account for the geological
appearances seen in the larger and more southern area.
It has been long ascertained that in Norway and Sweden a
gradual rise of the land above the sea has been going on for
many centuries, producing an apparent fall in the waters of the
adjoining ocean. The rate of elevation increases as we proceed
northward from Gothenburg to the North Cape, the two extremi
ties of this line being distant more than a thousand geographical
miles from each other, and we know not how much farther north
or south the motion may be prolonged under water. The rise of
the land, which is more than five feet in a hundred years at the
North Cape, gradually diminishes to a few inches in a century
iu the neighborhood of Stockholm, to the south of which the
upward movement ceases ; and in Scania, the southernmost part
of Sweden, appears to give place to a slight movement in an
opposite or downward direction.1*
We also know that part of the west coast of Greenland, ex
tending about 600 miles north and south, has been subsiding for
three or four centuries, between latitudes 60° arid 69° N.f But
whether, in this instance, the rate of depression varies in different
parts of the sinking area, has not yet been determined. In spec-
* Principles of Geology, 7th Ed. p. 506. t See " Principles," ibid.
CHAP. XXXIV.] OSCILLATION OF LEVEL. 195
ulating, however, on the manner in which the valleys of the Mis
sissippi and its tributaries may have been affected by subterranean
movements, we are at least authorized by analogy to assume that
the downward movement may have been greater in the more
inland part of the continent, just as we have seen in 1811—12,
that the " sunk country" west of New Madrid subsided, while
the level of the delta at New Orleans underwent no sensible-
change. If, then, the vertical movement in the interior, in and
near the valley of the Ohio, for example, were greater than near
the Gulf, as, if. in the former case, it were two and a half feet in
a century, and near the sea only half that amount, it would fol
low that the general fall of the rivers would be lessened. They
would deposit all their heavier, and some even of their finer sedi
ment, in their channels, instead of having power to carry it to the
sea. They would fill up their beds, and often overflow the ad
joining plains, raising their level by repeated layers of fluviatile
matter or silt, frequently containing the shells of land and amphib
ious mollusks.
If, even now, the Mississippi, when flooded, dams up the mouths
of its great tributaries, and transforms them for months into tem
porary lakes, it must have produced the same effect to a far greater
extent if at any time the general fall of the country toward the
sea was less rapid.
In narrow valleys bounded by ancient rocks 500 or 600 feet
high, such as that of the Ohio, the alluvial formation could never
acquire great breadth. Its thickness would depend entirely on
the length of time throughout which the subsidence was prolong
ed. But nearer the sea, where the continent falls with a gentle
slope toward the Gulf, the encroachment of the fresh-water de
posits (No. 2, fig. 11, p. 196), of the great river on the tertiary
strata (No. 3), constituting the original bluffs on its eastern and
western boundaries, might be very great.
If we then suppose the downward movement to cease, and to
be at length converted into an ascending one, the rate of up
heaval being greatest in the more inland country, the fall of every
river, and consequently its velocity, would begin immediately to
augment. Their power of carrying earthy matter seaward, and
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CHAP. XXXIV.] OSCILLATION OF LEVEL. 197
of scouring1 out and deepening their channels, would be greater
and greater, till at length, after a lapse of many thousand years,
each of them would have eroded a deep channel or valley through
the fluviatile formation previously accumulated. The surface of
what was once the river-plain at the period of greatest depression,
would remain fringing the valley sides as a terrace, apparently
flat, but in reality sloping down with the general inclination of
the valley. Every where this terrace would present clifis of
gravel and sand facing the river.
After these changes, the fundamental strata (Nos. 3,4, 5, fig.
1 1, p. 196) might be restored nearly to their ancient positions ;
the fresh- water beds (No. 2) having been raised, and having suf
fered great denudation.
It is not improbable that the same series of movements gave
rise to the accumulation and present position of marine strata of
comparatively modern date, forming the lower terrace near Da-
rien in Georgia*1 which is indicated at 2*, in the annexed section
(fig. 11). The reader will remember that the remains of the
megatherium, mastodon, elephant, Harlanus, equus, and other ex
tinct species of land quadrupeds, are there associated with marine
shells, of species agreeing with those now inhabiting the Atlantic.
On the other hand, there are proofs in Texas of the prevalence
of the same succession of subterranean movements far to the south
west, along the country bordering the Gulf of Mexico ; for on the
Brazos River there are beds of loam, or loess, examined by Dr.
Dickeson, and, when at New Orleans, I saw the bones of extinct
quadrupeds brought from that deposit. Among them was the
jaAv-bone of a tapir, apparently identical with the South Ameri
can species ; remains of the mastodon, elephant, ox, and other
mammalia, much resembling, on the whole, those found at Nat
chez and on the Ohio.
As to the seaward extremity of the ancient delta, the effect of
the gradual depression of land above assumed would be to cause
its mud and sand to increase in thickness, instead of augmenting
in area. When at length the movement was reversed, and the
fresh- water deposits began to rise, the action of the sea would un-
* See ante, vol. i. p. 257.
198 PROBABLE RATE OF SUBSIDENCE. [CHAP. XXXIV.
dermine them, and, aided by the river and tides, sweep much of
them away, and perhaps shape out a bay. But the swamp-mud,
with innumerable interlaced roots of cypress and other trees, might
offer considerable resistance ; and, after a time, the river charged
with sediment would throw down bars, and form a breakwater,
to protect the newly upraised deposits from annihilation.
In regard to the time consumed in accomplishing the great
oscillation of level which first depressed so large an area to the
depth of 200 feet or more, and then restored it to its former po
sition, it is impossible, in the present state of science, to form more
than a conjecture as to the probable mean rate of movement.
To suppose an average sinking and upheaval of two and a half
feet in a century, might be sufficient, or would, perhaps, be too
great, judging from the mean rate of change in Scandinavia,
Greenland, the north of the Adriatic, and other regions. Even
such an oscillation, if simultaneously continuous over the whole
area, first in one direction, and then in another, and without any
interruptions or minor oscillations, would require sixteen thousand
years for its accomplishment. But the section at Cincinnati
seems to imply two oscillations, and there would probably be
pauses, and a stationary period, when the downward movement
ceased, and was not yet changed into an upward one. Nor
ought we to imagine that the whole space was always in motion
at once.
When we have at length done our best to trace back the his
tory of the more modern and more ancient alluvial formations of
the Mississippi, the question still remains, what may be their age
relatively to the great body of the drift containing erratic blocks
in the northern latitudes of this same continent. The terraces
of gravel and loam bordering the Ohio, and those on a larger
scale, but of the same age, which constitute many of the eastern
bluffs of the Mississippi, are evidently features of subordinate im
portance in the physical configuration of the continent. But to
explain the origin of the northern drift of the Canadian lake dis
trict, and of the St. Lawrence, as I have endeavored to show in
my former " Travels," requires a reference to such changes as
would imply the submergence of a great part of the continent
CHAP. XXXIV.] NORTHERN DRIFT. 199
drained by the head waters of the Mississippi, Missouri, and their
northern tributaries.* For this and other reasons, into which I
can not now enter, I presume that the great mass of the most
elevated drift in the north, and the glacial grooving and polishing
of the rocks, although they belong to a very modern era in the
earth's history, were nevertheless anterior in date to the loam of
Natchez and Vicksburg.
There exist in Canada, in the Niagara district, in New York,
and other states north of the Ohio, lacustrine and swamp deposits
of marl and bog-earth, including the bones of extinct quadrupeds,
such as the mastodon, elephant, castoroides, and others, associated
with land and fresh-water shells of recent species, which are
decidedly post-glacial, and often found in hollows in the drift.
These may be of contemporaneous date with the loam of Port
Hudson and Natchez.
The northern drift, however, is by no means all of the same
age, and as the period of glaciers and icebergs freighted with
erratics is still going on, and has now a wide range in the tem
perate parts of the Atlantic, bordering the eastern shores of North
America, so must we naturally suppose that certain parts of the
drift, especially those found at lower levels, and near the sea,
may not be more ancient than the loam of the western bluffs of
the Mississippi.
* See vol. i. ch. ii. p. 47, and vol. ii. ch. xix. p. 99.
CHAPTER XXXV.
Departure from New Madrid. — Night-watch for Steamers. — Scenery of the
Ohio River. — Mount Vernon, Ornithology. — No Undergrowth in Woods.
— Spring Flowers. — Visit to Dr. Dale Owen, New Harmony. — Fossil
Forest of erect Trees in Coal-measures. — Movers migrating Westward.
— Voyage to Louisville. — Professional Zeal of one of " the Pork Aristo
cracy." — Fossil Coral-reef at the Falls of the Ohio, Louisville. — Fossil
Zoophytes as perfect as recent Stone-corals.
March 27, 1846.— -WE took up our quarters in the wharf-
boat at New Madrid in readiness to sail by the first steamer
bound for the Ohio, for I wished to visit New Harmony in In
diana, and there was some risk of being detained several days.
The first steamer we hailed, was bound for St. Louis, the next
for the Cumberland river, Tennessee, and a third which might
have taken us to Mount Vernon, in Indiana, where I meant to
disembark, was unwilling to lose time by stopping, the captain
shouting out that she was full of passengers, and heavily laden.
Before retiring to rest, I engaged with the keeper of the boat
that he should appoint a good night-watch, and an hour after
dark, I was awakened by the loud puffing and splashing of a
steamer, evidently close at hand. Going on deck, I found the
faithless black sentinel fast asleep. It was already too late to
hail the vessel, but we made out that she was the Nimrod, and
I afterward learnt, that in the course of her voyage she was
snagged, both her chimneys thrown down, and her boiler pierced,
so that we had a narrow escape. I now gave the keeper of the
wharf-boat to understand that the whole town of New Madrid
should be informed next day in what manner their night-watches
were kept, which piqued him, and he then lighted a large fire on
the bank ; but having no longer any faith in the sentinel, I could
not sleep, so I determined to keep a look-out myself. Fortunately
another steamer soon appeared ; and, almost before she was fairly
alongside, a party of active negroes leapt upon our deck, each
CHAP. XXXV.] SCENERY ON THE OHIO. 201
snatching up an article of our luggage, while the clerk ushered
us over the plank into a brilliantly lighted saloon. The change
of scene to travelers who had been roughing it for several days
under a humble roof, talking with trappers about the watery wil
derness of the " sunk country," and who had just stepped out of
a dark half-furnished wharf-boat, was more like the fiction of a
fairy tale, than a real incident in an ordinary journey. Some
musicians were playing at one end of the room, which was 150
feet long, and a gay young party from New Orleans were danc
ing a quadrille. At the other end we were delighted to see a
table covered with newspapers, for we were nearly a week in
arrear of news, and their columns were filled with the recent de
bates of the English House of Commons. There were also many
articles reprinted from the best European periodicals, quarterly
and monthly, besides those published in New England and New
York. Nor were any of the advantages afforded by this floating
palace more like an eastern tale of enchantment, than the thought,
as we went to our berths, that before we rose next morning to
breakfast we should be transported more than a hundred miles on
our route northward against the current of a mighty river.
March 29. — Passed Cairo in the night, and next morning
were at Smithland on the Ohio, at the mouth of the Cumber
land Hiver, having Kentucky on our right hand, and Illinois on
the left. Limestone cliffs, bounding the valley, were a welcome
sight, after the eye had been dwelling for so many weeks on flat
and level regions. Although we had not yet ascended the river
to a height of much more than 200 feet above the level of the
sea, the climate had changed, and we were told that snow had
fallen the day before. We observed that the red-bud, or Judas-
tree, was not yet in flower.
On reaching the mouth of the Wabash River, which divides Illi
nois from Indiana, I learnt that when the ice breaks up there in
the spring, it is often packed into such masses that, before melt
ing, they float down with gravel frozen on to them as far as New
Madrid. This fact may explain the coarseness of the materials
observable in the shoals of the Mississippi, at low water, near
Natchez, and still farther down ; and may perhaps throw light
i*
202 ORNITHOLOGY. [CiiAP. XXXV.
on some large boulders, of a former period, in the ancient gravel
below the shelly loam of Natchez.
At Mount Vernon we landed, and I collected there many fossil
shells, of fresh-water and land species, from a terrace of yellow
loam, elevated many yards above high- water mark, on the Ohio.
Returning from my excursion, I fell in with a naturalist of the
place, armed with a rifle, and carrying some wild birds which he
had shot. He was a shoemaker by trade, and had a collection
of more than 150 well-stuffed birds from the neighborhood. He
told me that the notes I heard here in the woods were chiefly
those of the red-bird, but that some of the most musical were the
song of a brown thrush, called, in Indiana, the mocking bird, but
differing from the real musician of that name, which, though
abounding at New Madrid, does not range so far north as the
Ohio. Conversing with him, I learnt that the loud tapping of
the large red-headed woodpecker, so common a sound in the
American forests, is not produced, as I had imagined, by the
action of the beak perforating the bark or wood, but is merely a
succession of sharp blows on the trunk of the tree, after which
the bird is seen to listen attentively, to know if there are any
insects within. Should they stir in their alarm, and betray the
fact of their being "at home," the woodpecker begins immediately
to excavate a hole in the rotten timber.
I had promised to pay a visit to Dr. David Dale Owen, the
state geologist of Indiana, and hired a carriage which conveyed
us to New Harmony, situated on the Wabash River sixty miles
above its junction with the Ohio. On our way across the coun
try, we went through a continuous forest, consisting chiefly of
oak, beech, and poplar, without any undergrowth, and in this
respect differing remarkably from the wooded valleys and hills of
the Alleghanies, and the region eastward of those mountains, as
well as all parts of New England. Here there were no kalmias
or azaleas, or sweet fern, or candleberry, or other evergreens.
The green carpet beneath the trees was made up largely of
mosses, and among them was that beautiful European species
of feather-moss, Hypnum prolifcrum, in great plenty. The
trunks of many trees were spotted by a jet-black fungus resem-
CHAP. XXXV.] NEW HARMONY. 203
bling a lichen. Below the branches we were pleased to gather
several spring flowers, the white anemone, the blood-root (San-
guinaria canadensis), the dog-tooth violet (Erythronium ameri-
canum), and the spring-beauty (Claytonia virginica).
Though a large proportion of the mosses and other cryptogamia
are identical with those of Europe, we saw no flower which was
not peculiar to America. Many European plants, however, are
making their way here, such as the wild camomile, and the
thorn-apple (Datura Stramonium) ; and it is a curious fact,
which I afterward learnt from Dr. Dale Owen, that when such
foreigners are first naturalized they overrun the country with
amazing rapidity, and are quite a nuisance. But they soon grow
scarce, and after eight or ten years can hardly be met with.
We spent several days very agreeably at New Harmony, where
we were most hospitably welcomed by Dr. and Mrs. Dale Owen.
The town is pleasantly situated in a valley watered by the
Wabash, which here divides the states of Indiana and Illinois.
Some large buildings, in the German style of architecture, stand
conspicuous, and were erected by Rapp ; but the communities
founded by him, and afterward by Robert Owen of Lanark, have
disappeared, the principal edifice being now appropriated as a
public museum, in which I found a good collection of geological
specimens, both fossils and minerals, made during the state survey,
and was glad to learn that the Legislature, with a view of en
couraging science, has exempted this building from taxes. Lec
tures on chemistry and geology are given here in the winter.
Many families of superior intelligence, English, Swiss, and Ger
man, have settled in the place, and there is a marked simplicity
in their manner of living which reminded us of Germany. They
are very sociable, and there were many private parties where
there was music and dancing, and a public assembly once a week,
to one of which we went, where quadrilles and waltzes were
danced, the band consisting of amateur musicians.
Say, the eminent conchologist, who died at the age of forty-
five, formerly resided at New Harmony ; and recently Prince
Maximilian, of Neuwied, and the naturalists who accompanied
him, passed a winter here. We found also, among the residents,
204 FOSSIL, TREES, INDIANA. [CHAP. XXXV.
a brother of Mr. Maclure, the geologist, who placed his excellent
library and carriage at our disposal. He lends his books freely
among the citizens, and they are much read. We were glad to
hear many recent publications, some even of the most expensively
illustrated works, discussed and criticised in society here. We
were also charmed to meet with many children happy and merry,
yet perfectly obedient ; and once more to see what, after the ex
perience of the last two or three months, struck us as a singular
phenomenon in the New World, a shy child !
I made some geological excursions with Dr. Owen and his
friend, Mr. Bolton, to see the " carboniferous rocks," of which
this region is constituted, and the shelly loam, like that of
Natchez, which has evidently once filled up to a considerable
height the valley of the Wabash, and through which the running
waters have re-excavated the present valley.
There is no church or place of public worship in New Harmony,
a peculiarity which we never remarked in any town of half the
size in the course of our tour in the United States. Being here
on week-days only, I had no opportunity of observing whether on
Sundays there are any meetings for social worship. I heard that
when the people of Evansville once reproached the citizens of this
place for having no churches, they observed that they had also no
shops for the sale of spirituous liquors, which is still a character
istic of New Harmony ; whereas Evansville, like most of the
neighboring towns of Indiana, abounds in such incentives to in
temperance.
April 3. — Left New Harmony for Evansville, on the Ohio,
Mr. Maclure having kindly lent us his carriage and horses. We
were accompanied by Dr. Dale Owen and Mr. Bolton. On the
way, we visited KimbalFs mill, in the township of Robinson, in
Poser County, fourteen miles northwest of Evansville, where a fine
example is seen of upright fossil trees belonging to a species of
Sigillaria. These are imbedded in strata of argillaceous shale,
or hardened mud, which constitute the upper part of the great
Illinois coal-field, and above them lies a horizontal layer of sand
stone, while a seam of coal, eighteen inches thick, is observed
about eighteen feet below the roots. Having borrowed spades
CHAP. XXXV.] MOVERS MIGRATING WESTWARD. 205
from the neighboring mill, we dug out the earth from round one
of the buried trees, and exposed a trunk four feet eight inches
high, from the bottom of which the roots were seen spreading
out as in their natural position. There were two other fossil
trees near it, both apparently belonging to the same species of
SigiUaria. The bark, converted into coal, displayed the scars
left by the attachment of the leaves, but no internal structure
was preserved in the mud, now forming a cylindrical mass within
the bark. The diameter of the three trunks was from 18 inches
to two feet, and their roots were interlaced. A great number of
others, found in like manner in an erect posture, have been removed
in working the same quarry. The fossil plants obtained here and
in other parts of the Indiana coal-field, are singularly like those
in other carboniferous strata in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nova Scotia,
and Europe. Among them occur species of ferns of the genera
Pecopteris and Cydopteris, and three plants, Neuropteris flexu-
osa, N. cordata, and Lcpidodendron obovatum, all European
species, and common to the Alleghanies and Nova Scotia.
The three large fossil trees above described as newly exposed
to view, were standing erect under the spreading roots of one
living oak, and it is wonderful to reflect on the myriads of ages
which have intervened between the period when the ancient
plants last saw the light, and the era of this modern forest, the
vegetation of which would scarcely afford, except in the case of
the ferns, any generic resemblance, yet where the trees are similar
in stature, upright attitude, and the general form of their roots.
As we approached Evansville, we passed a German farm,
where horses were employed to tread out the maize, and another
where vines were cultivated on the side of a hill. At one turn
of the road, in the midst of the wood, we met a man with a rifle,
carrying in his hand an empty pail for giving water to his horse,
and followed at a short distance by his wife, leading a steed, on
which was a small sack. " It probably contains," said our com
panions, " all their worldly goods ; they are movers, and have
their faces turned westward, a small detachment of that great
army of emigrants, which is steadily moving on every year toward
the Pvocky Mountains. This young married couple may perhaps
206 VOYAGE TO LOUISVILLE. [CHAP. XXXV.
go down to the Mississippi, and buy, for a few dollars, some acres
of land, near a wooding station. The husband will fell timber,
run up a log cabin, and receive ready money from the steamboats,
which burn the wood. At the end of ten or fifteen years, by
which time some of their children will have become profitable
servants, they may have put by 2000 dollars, bought a farm, and
be living in a frame-house."
The very moment of our arrival at Evansville, a fine steam
boat, the Sultana, came in sight, and we found, among the pas
sengers, some agreeable acquaintances, whom we had known at
New Orleans and Natchez.
As some of these large vessels are much more expensive than
others, Americans of the richer class, when making a long voyage,
choose them purposely, as in England we take places in a first-
class railway carriage, that they may be less thrown into contact
with ruder travelers. One of our friends, a naval officer, speaking
of the improvement of society in the western states, said that
dueling and drinking had greatly diminished in the last fifteen
years. He related one of the strange scenes he had witnessed at
a dinner-party, only a few years ago, at the house of a judge, in
a town on the banks of the Mississippi. A quarrel had arisen,
when one of the guests took out a pen-knife, and stabbed the judge
in the side, so that the blood spirted out. The judge himself
immediately drew out a bowie knife, and his antagonist, at the
same instant, a pistol, and it then appeared that every other
individual was armed with knives or pistols. The narrator
admitted, that as he was traveling, he had also pistols upon him.
Fortunately some cool, judicious persons of the party interposed
in time to prevent farther mischief.
I fell into conversation with an intelligent well-dressed pas
senger, who, as we sailed by the town of Utica, in Indiana, re
marked that it was too near the large city of Louisville to thrive
greatly ; and in speculating on the future prospects of the west,
he said that by the census of 1840, it was proved that the At
lantic states had about nine and a half millions of inhabitants,
while the states lying west of the mountains, and^between the
great lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, numbered about six millions
CHAP. XXXV.] FORK MERCHANT. 207
four hundred thousand. Now it is believed that the census of
1850 will show the population of the whole country to have
changed its center to the west of the mountains, and under a
system of universal suffrage, the center of population becomes the
center of political power. After having been much interested
with the information which I gained from this companion, although
occasionally struck with his violation of the rules of ordinary good
manners, I was trying to divine to what class in society he might
belong, when he began to enlarge on the number of hogs killed
last year in Cincinnati, which exceeded all former seasons,
amounting to 300,000, and to describe to me how the streets,
in killing time, were blocked up with barrels of salt pork for ex
portation, so that it was not easy to pass in a carriage. He then
asked me abruptly, " How many hogs do you think I killed last
season?" Imagining that he might be a farmer, I said, 300.
He exclaimed, " 18,000, and all of them dispatched in thirty-five
days !" He next began to boast that one of his men could evis
cerate more hogs in one day than any other hand in Kentucky ;
and, placing himself in the attitude of his favorite executioner, he
gave me such a minute description of his mode of operating, and
dwelt on it with so much zest, as to make me feel satisfied that,
as Thomas Diafoirus, in the " Malade Imaginaire," proposed to
treat his mistress with " a dissection," so this member of the
" pork aristocracy" of the west, would never doubt that such
feats of professional dexterity as he loved to dilate upon, must
command the admiration of all men who have the slightest feeling
for superior artistical skill.
The distance from Evansville to Louisville was 205 miles,
and on both sides of the river were hills of limestone or sandstone,
of the coal formation, 300 feet high, frequently presenting steep
and picturesque cliffs. Every where I observed a^flat terrace of
loam, or loess, bordering the river, sometimes on the side of Ken
tucky, sometimes on that of Indiana.
I had found this ledge, both at Mount Vernon and at Evans
ville, to contain land and fresh-water shells. At the last-men-
tione dtown, where the terrace was from twenty to thirty feet high,
one of the lower beds of coarse materials was full of PalndincB
208 FOSSIL CORAL REEF. [CHAP. XXXV.
and the valves of a Unio, both of living species ; yet with them
were included in the same gravelly and shelly mass, the well-
preserved bones of the megalonyx.
The coal-measures had given place to an older series of strata,
the Devonian, when we reached the Falls of the Ohio, at Louis
ville, where we saw the river foaming over its rocky bed. I
first landed at New Albany, in Indiana, nearly opposite Louis
ville, that I might visit Dr. Clapp, and see his splendid collection
of fossil corals. He accompanied me to the bed of the river,
where, although the water was not at its lowest, I saw a grand
display of what may be termed an ancient coral reef, formed by
zoophytes, which flourished in a sea of earlier date than the
carboniferous period. The ledges of horizontal limestone, over
which the water flows, belong to the old red sandstone, or De
vonian group, and the softer parts of the stone have decomposed
and wasted away, so that the harder calcareous corals stand out
in relief. Many branches of these zoophytes project from their
erect stems precisely as if they were living. Among other spe
cies I observed large masses, not less than five feet in diameter,
of Favosites gothlandica, with its beautiful honeycomb structure
well displayed, and, by the side of it, the Favistella, combining
a similar honeycombed form with the star of the Astrcea. There
was also the cup-shaped Cyathophyllum, and the delicate net
work of the Fcnestella, and that elegant and well-known Euro
pean species of fossil, called "the chain coral," Catenipora cscha-
roides, with a profusion of others, which it would be tedious to
all but the geologist to enumerate. These coralline forms were
mingled with the joints, sterns, and occasionally the heads, of lily
encrinites. Although hundreds of fine specimens have been de
tached from these rocks, to enrich the museums of Europe and
America, another crop is constantly working its way out, under
the action of the stream, and of the sun and rain, in the warm
season when the channel is laid dry. The waters are now
twenty feet above their lowest, and more than forty feet below
their highest level, so that large spaces of bare rock are exposed
to view.
On one of the window-sills of Dr. Clapp's library was displayed
CHAP. XXXV.] FOSSIL CORAL REEF. 209
a group of these ancient corals, and, in the other window, a set
of recent corals from the West Indian seas, of the genera Mean-
drina, Astrea, Madrepora, and others ; some of them as heavy
and stony as those of older date, their pores, foramina, and
minute microscopic structure, not being more distinctly preserved.
No one but a zoologist would have been able to guess which set
were of modern, and which of ancient origin. Yet so old are
the fossils, that they are referable to an era antecedent to the
Alleghanies, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, nay, even to the time
when by far the greater part of the materials composing these
mountain-chains were slowly elaborated beneath the ocean.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Louisville. — Noble Site for a Commercial City. — Geology. — Medical Stu
dents. — Academical Rotation in Office. — Episcopal Church. — Preaching
against the Reformation. — Service in Black Methodist Church. — Im
proved Condition of Negroes in Kentucky. — A colored Slave married as
a free White. — Voyage to Cincinnati. — Naturalized English Artisan
gambling. — Sources of Anti-British Antipathies. — Progress of Cincinnati.
— Increase of German Settlers. — Democracy of Romanists. — Geology of
Mill Creek. — Land Tortoises. — Observatory. — Cultivation of the Vine. —
Sculpture by Hiram Powers.
April 5, 1846. — FROM New Albany we. crossed the river to
Louisville, the metropolis of Kentucky, and found the Gait
House the best hotel we had been in since we left the St. Louis
at New Orleans. On our way through the streets, we saw
written in large letters, over a smith's shop, the word " black-
smithy," and another inscription ran thus : — " Cash paid for
coon, mink, wild-cat, beaver, musk-rat, otter, bear, wolf, arid
deer- skins ;" which reminded us that this city, being the first
place where large vessels coming up the river are stopped by the
Falls, is the natural emporium for the produce of the western
hunting grounds. A more noble site for a great commercial
town can not be imagined ; and several merchants expressed to
me their opinion, that Cincinnati, founded at a later date, would
not have outstripped her rival in the race, so as to number now
a population of nearly 100,000 souls, more than double that of
Louisville, but for the existence of slavery, and a large negro
population in Kentucky. Besides the disadvantages always
arising from the partition of a country between two races, evils
which emancipation can not put an end to, Kentucky suffers
from the decided preference shown to the right bank of the river
by the best class of new settlers from the northeastern states,
who choose the free s-tate of Ohio for their residence, instead of
the slave state on the left bank.
CHAP. XXXVL] MEDICAL STUDENTS. 211
I made a geological excursion with Dr. Yandell, one of the
Professors of the University of this place, into the neighborhood,
going to the summit of a hill called Button-Mould Knob, so
named from the joints of encrinites with which the lower strata
of the carboniferous formation are charged. Here we enjoyed a
wide prospect of the surrounding country, which,, if all the val
leys were filled up, would form an even table-land, the nearly
horizontal strata having been evidently planed off at a certain
level by the denuding action of the sea. The valley of the Ohio
forms the principal break in a region otherwise void of any strik
ing feature in its natural scenery. A few spring flowers only
were to be seen, the most plentiful being the Houstonia and the
Claytonia.
We went to an evening party at the house of one of the Pro
fessors of the University, and met many of his colleagues, and
some medical students. Two of the latter informed me, that
they had been sent to London to finish their course of study,
having been brought up to feel great respect and veneration for
English educational establishments. They had been received
kindly and politely by the professors, but the prejudices of the
majority of their fellow pupils against the institutions of the
United States, and still more their rude remarks about the vul
garity of all Americans (of whom they knew scarcely any thing),
had so wounded their national feelings, that they had written
home to entreat their parents to allow them to attend classes at
Paris, or in some German University, to which they had reluct
antly assented. These young men, being of good families in
Kentucky, were gentlemanlike in their manners, in this respect
decidedly above the average standard of students of the same
profession in England, and they spoke with no bitterness even on
this annoying topic. Talking over academical matters, some
elders of the company complained of the wish of the democratic
party to apply their favorite dogma of " rotation in office," or,
" le.t every man have his turn," not only to members of the
executive and the election of judges, but actually to University
professors. "You may amuse your countrymen," said they, "on
your return, by telling them of the wisdom of our sovereign rulers,
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Louisville. — Noble Site for a Commercial City. — Geology. — Medical Stu
dents. — Academical Rotation in Office. — Episcopal Church. — Preaching
against the Reformation. — Service in Black Methodist Church. — Im
proved Condition of Negroes in Kentucky. — A colored Slave married as
a free White. — Voyage to Cincinnati. — Naturalized English Artisan
gambling. — Sources of Anti-British Antipathies. — Progress of Cincinnati.
— Increase of German Settlers. — Democracy of Romanists. — Geology of
Mill Creek. — Land Tortoises. — Observatory. — Cultivation of the Vine. —
Sculpture by Hiram Powers.
April 5, 1846. — FROM New Albany we.crossed the river to
Louisville, the metropolis of Kentucky, and found the Gait
House the best hotel we had been in since we left the St. Louis
at New Orleans. On our way through the streets, we saw
written in large letters, over a smith's shop, the word " black-
smithy," and another inscription ran thus : — " Cash paid for
coon, mink, wild-cat, beaver, musk-rat, otter, bear, wolf, arid
deer- skins ;" which reminded us that this city, being the first
place where large vessels coming up the river are stopped by the
Falls, is the natural emporium for the produce of the western
hunting grounds. A more noble site for a great commercial
town can not be imagined ; and several merchants expressed to
me their opinion, that Cincinnati, founded at a later date, would
not have outstripped her rival in the race, so as to number now
a population of nearly 100,000 souls, more than double that of
Louisville, but for the existence of slavery, and a large negro
population in Kentucky. Besides the disadvantages always
arising from the partition of a country between two races, evils
which emancipation can not put an end to, Kentucky suffers
from the decided preference shown to the right bank of the river
by the best class of new settlers from the northeastern states,
who choose the free state of Ohio for their residence, instead of
the slave state on the left bank.
CHAP. XXXVI. ] MEDICAL STUDENTS. 211
I made a geological excursion with Dr. Yandell, one of the
Professors of the University of this place, into the neighborhood,
going to the summit of a hill called Button-Mould Knob, so
named from the joints of encrinites with which the lower strata
of the carboniferous formation are charged. Here we enjoyed a
wide prospect of the surrounding country, which,, if all the val
leys were filled up, would form an even table-land, the nearly
horizontal strata having been evidently planed off at a certain
level by the denuding action of the sea. The valley of the Ohio
forms the principal break in a region otherwise void of any strik
ing feature in its natural scenery. A few spring flowers only
were to be s-een, the most plentiful being the Houstonia and the
Claytonia.
We went to an evening party at the house of one of the Pro
fessors of the University, and met many of his colleagues, and
some medical students. Two of the latter informed me, that
they had been sent to London to finish their course of study,
having been brought up to feel great respect and veneration for
English educational establishments. They had been received
kindly and politely by the professors, but the prejudices of the
majority of their fellow pupils against the institutions of the
United States, and still more their rude remarks about the vul
garity of all Americans (of whom they knew scarcely any thing),
had so wounded their national feelings, that they had written
home to entreat their parents to allow them to attend classes at
Paris, or in some German University, to which they had reluct
antly assented. These young men, being of good families in
Kentucky, were gentlemanlike in their manners, in this respect
decidedly above the average standard of students of the same
profession in England, and they spoke with no bitterness even on
this annoying topic. Talking over academical matters, some
elders of the company complained of the wish of the democratic
party to apply their favorite dogma of " rotation in office," or,
" let every man have his turn," not only to members of the
executive and the election of judges, but actually to University
professors. "You may amuse your countrymen," said they, "on
your return, by telling them of the wisdom of our sovereign rulers,
212 EPISCOPAL CHURCH. [CHAP. XXXVJ.
who would shorten to a minimum the term of service even of
men who fill literary or scientific chairs." I informed them
that nearly the whole University lectures at Oxford and Cam
bridge, had of late years, in opposition to earlier usage, been
transferred to temporary occupants of tutorships, who looked for
ward to the resigning of their academical functions as soon as
they could afford to marry, or could obtain church preferment ;
so that the extreme democracy of Kentucky would at least have
no claim to originality, should they apply their maxim of rotation
in office to a body of academical lecturers.
On Sunday we attended service in an Episcopal church. The
young preacher dwelt largely on the supreme authority of the
Church, and lamented that many dogmas and pious usages,
which had received the unbroken sanction of fifteen centuries,
should have been presumptuously set at naught by the rebellious
spirit of the sixteenth century, the great intellectual movement
of which he described as marked by two characteristics, " non
sense and philosophy ;" nor was it easy to discover which of
these two influences, in their reference to matters ecclesiastical,
were most evil in his sight. After a long dissertation in this
strain, he called up to him a number of intelligent looking young
girls to be catechized, and I never saw a set of children with
more agreeable or animated countenances, or who displayed more
of that modest reverence and entire, unreflecting trust in their
teacher, which it is so pleasing to see in young pupils. That
some of the questions should have reference to the doctrines just
laid down in the preceding discourse was to be expected. One
of the last interrogatories, " Who wrote the Prayer-book?" puz
zled the whole class. After waiting in vain for an answer, the
minister exclaimed, " Your mother ;" and made a short pause,
during which I saw the girls exchange quick glances, and I
found time to imagine that each might be exclaiming mentally
to herself, " Can he mean my mother ?" when he added, in a
solemn and emphatic tone, " Your mother, the Church !" Had
his congregation belonged to any other than the Anglican Church,
I might simply have felt regret and melancholy at much that I
had witnessed ; as it was, I came out of the church in a state of
CHAP. XXXVL] BLACK METHODIST CHUCRH. 213
no small indignation. I had heard, in the course of my travels,
several discourses equally at variance with the spirit of the
Reformation, but none before in which the Reformation itself
was so openly denounced, and I could not help reflecting on the
worldly wisdom of those who, wishing in the middle of the nine
teenth century, to unprotestantize the members of a reformed
church, begin their work at an age when the mind is yet un
formed and plastic — dealing with the interior of the skull as
certain Indian mothers dealt with its exterior, when they bound
it between flat boards, and caused it to grow, not as nature
intended, but into a shape which suited the fashion of their tribe.
In the evening we were taken, at our request, to a black
Methodist church, where our party were the only whites in a
congregation of about 400. There was nothing offensive in the
atmosphere of the place, and I learned, with pleasure, that this
commodious building was erected and lighted with gas by the
blacks themselves, aided by subscriptions from many whites of
different sects. The preacher was a full black, spoke good En
glish, and quoted Scripture well. Occasionally he laid down
some mysterious and metaphysical points of doctrine with a dog
matic air, and with a vehement confidence, which seemed to increase
in proportion as the subjects transcended the human understand
ing, at which moments he occasionally elicited from his sympa
thizing hearers, especially from some of the women, exclama
tions such as " That is true," and other signs of assent, but no
loud cries and sobs, such as I had heard in a white Methodist
church in Montgomery, Alabama. It appeared from his explan
ation of " Whose superscription is this ?" that he supposed the
piece of money to be a dollar note, to which Caesar had put his
signature. He spoke of our ancestors in the garden of Eden in
a manner that left no doubt of his agreeing with Dr. Prichard,
that we all came from one pair — a theory to which, for my own
part, I could never see any ethnological or physiological objection,
provided time enough be allowed for the slow growth of races ;
though I once heard Mr. A. W. Schlegel, at Bonn, pronounce it
to be a heresy, especially in an Englishman who had read the
" Paradise Lost." " I could have pardoned Prichard," said the
214 BLACK PREACHER. [CHAP. XXXVI.
Professor, " for believing that Adam was the forefather of all the
Africans, had he only conceded that « the fairest of her daughters,
Eve,' never could have been a negress."
Toward the close of the discourse, the minister said " that a
protracted meeting would soon be held ; but such assemblies
were, in his judgment, becoming too frequent." He also an
nounced that on Easter Sunday there would be a love-feast,
which no doubt would be very crowded, " and where I hope you
will all enjoy yourselves." He then said, " Sirs and Madams, I
have now to warn you of a serious matter, but I see many of
you are nodding, and let every one wake up his neighbor. The
sexton, poor man, has more than he can do." This official, by
the way, had been administering with his cane many admonitory
taps on the heads of the younger part of the congregation, such
as must have precluded them from napping for some time, if
their skulls are not harder than those of their white brethren.
There was a general stir, and two fat negro women, between
whom my wife was wedged in (for the two sexes sat on separate
sides), looked to see if she was awake. " There is a storm
brewing," said the preacher, "owing to some late doings in Ohio,
and I hope that none of the membership will get themselves into
a scrape." The exciting topic on which he then enlarged was
the late seizure, or kidnaping, as it was termed, of Jerry Phin-
ney, who, after residing some years in Ohio, had been reclaimed
by the heirs of his owners, in consequence of some flaw in his
letters of freedom, and brought back to Kentucky. An attempt
at a rescue was for a time apprehended, but 500 dollars were
soon raised and paid to secure his release.
When I commended the action of the black preacher as grace
ful, I was assured that he had successfully imitated an eminent
American player who had lately performed at Louisville. « These
blacks," said my informant, " are such inimitable mimics, that
they will sometimes go through a whole sermon in the same
style as they have heard delivered by a white man, only appear
ing somewhat to caricature it, because they are more pompous
and declamatory ; which in them is quite natural, for they are a
more demonstrative race than we are. If he addresses them in
CHAP. XXXVI.] NEGROES IN KENTUCKY. 215
a plain, colloquial manner, his sermon would seem tame, and
make no impression. They can not talk about the price of a
pair of shoes, or quid of tobacco, without such gesticulations that
you would fancy it was a matter of life and death they were
discussing." There was a second colored man in the pulpit,
who delivered a prayer with a strong nasal twang, and very
extravagant action. The hymns were some of them in rather a
wild strain, but, on the whole, not unmusical.
I learnt that the domestic servants of Louisville, who are
chiefly of negro race, belong very commonly to a different church
from their owners. During our short stay here, an instance came
to my knowledge of ofmaster who, having an untractable black
servant, appealed to a ne*gro minister, not of his own church, to
interfere and reprove him for his bad conduct, a measure which
completely succeeded. We were told of four Sunday schools for
colored people in the city, and in one of them 170 children
receive instruction. There are also other schools on week days
for teaching negroes to read, both in Kentucky and Tennessee.
When I communicated these facts to Americans in Philadelphia,
they were inclined to be incredulous, and then said, " If such be
the condition of negroes in Kentucky, they must be better off in
slave states than in others called free ; but you must not forget
that their most worthless runaways take refuge with us."
A recent occurrence in Louisville places in a strong light the
unnatural relation in which the two races now stand to each
other. One of the citizens, a respectable tradesman, became
attached to a young seamstress, who had been working at his
mother's house, and married her, in the full belief that she was
a white, and a free woman. He had lived happily with her for
some time, when it was discovered that she was a negress and a
slave, who had never been legally emancipated, so that the mar
riage was void in law. Morally speaking, it was certainly not
void ; yet a separation was thought so much a matter of course,
that I heard the young man's generosity commended because he
had purchased her freedom after the discovery, and given her the
means of setting up as a dressmaker. No doubt the lady knew
that she was not of pure blood, and we were told that only six
216 VOYAGE TO CINCINNATI. [CHAP. XXXVL
years before she had run away from her owner. She had also
concealed this fact from her lover, but at a time, probably, when
her affections were deeply engaged. On the other hand, we may
pity the husband who suddenly finds that he is disgraced by
having made an unlawful marriage, that his children are illegit
imate, and that the wife of his choice belongs to an inferior caste
}n society. This incident is important in many points of view,
and especially as proving to what an extent the amalgamation
of the two races would take place, if it were not checked by
artificial prejudices and the most jealous and severe enactments
of law. I found that many here believe and hope that the time
of emancipation is near at hand ; but I was sorry to discover that
the most sagacious seemed to think that the blacks in these mid
dle states will not be able to stand alone when no longer protected
by enjoying the monopoly of the labor market.
April 7. — Sailed in the Ben Franklin steamer from Louisville
to Cincinnati, a distance by the river of 130 miles. The scenery
much resembled that below the Falls ; the valley of the Ohio being
bounded by flat-topped hills, 200 or 300 feet high, formed of hor
izontal beds of sandstone or limestone, with steep slopes or cliffs
toward the river, and at the base of these a flat terrace of gravel
or loam on one or both sides of the Ohio, above high- water mark.
We made twelve miles an hour against the stream, and if we
were descending, the captain says, we should go at the rate of
eighteen miles an hour. Among the passengers I saw a thin,
sallow-faced, anxious looking artisan, whom I mistook for a na
tive-born Yankee, holding forth to a small circle of idlers about
" our revolution" and " our glorious victories over the British,"
and calling upon all to prove themselves "true Democrats."
Soon after we started I saw him take a dram, and then sitting
down to cards lose sixty dollars in half an hour. The officers
of the ship, observing this transaction, interfered, and put a stop
to the game, giving orders to the steward not to sell any more
brandy to this passenger. I afterward learnt that he was an
Englishman, a skillful, first-rate mechanic in the iron trade at
Pittsburg, who had come out from Liverpool about sixteen years
ago. After drinking and losing all his earnings at the gaming
CHAP. XXXVI. ] ANTI-BRITISH ANTIPATHIES. i>\7
table, he has returned again and again to work, and can always
command high wages. He has read up the history of the
American revolution, and at an election can harangue a mob of
newly come emigrants with great effect, and with all the author
ity of a native, assuming a tone of intense nationality. On other
occasions I had met with a naturalized Englishman of a different
stamp, who might equally be described as "ipsis Americanis Ame-
ricanior," one who, having been born in the middle classes, has
gone over early in life to the New World, where he has succeeded
in business, risen to a good social position, and given his children
an excellent education. He then goes back to visit the " old
country," and see his friends and relatives, and is surprised and
mortified that they are separated by so great a gulf from the
higher classes, greater than exists between the humblest and
most elevated in his adopted country. He finds, also, the
religious sect to which he and his kindred belong, only tolerated,
and not standing on the same footing of "gentility" as the domi
nant church. His sectarian zeal, his feelings of social pride, and
his political principles are all up in arms, and he comes back to
America far more patriotic and more of an optimist than any
native. If he then ventures to enter on the political arena, his
opponents warn the electors against one who is an alien by birth
and feeling, and, in his efforts to disprove such imputations, he
reaches the climax of anti-British antipathy.
Such citizens were unaffectedly incapable of comprehending
that I could have seen so much of the Union, and yet have JLO
wish whatever to live there. Instead of asking, " Would you
not like to settle here ?" it would be more prudent for them to
shape their question thus : " If you were to be born over again, and
take your chance, by lot, as to your station in society, what coun
try would you prefer ?" Before choosing, I should then have to
consider, that the chances are many thousands to one in favor of
my belonging to the laboring class, and the land where they are
best off, morally, physically, and intellectually, and where they
are most progressive, would be the safest one to select. Such
being the proposition, the Free States of the Union might well
claim a preference,
VOL. ii. — K
2lf! PROGRESS OF CINCINNATI. [CHAP. XXXVI.
Every town we had visited in the last three months, since we
left Savannah, in January, was new to us, and Cincinnati was
the first place where we were able to compare the present state
of things with that observed by us in the summer of 1842. In
this short interval of four years, great improvements in the build
ings, streets, and shops were visible ; a vast increase of population,
and many additional churches, and new cotton factories. The
soil of the country immediately behind the town is rich, and there
is an ample supply of laborers, partly indeed because the Catholic
priests strive to retain in the city all the German emigrants.
Although they are industrious and thrifty, such an arrangement
is by no means the best for promoting the progress of Ohio, or
her metropolis ; for, next to having an "Irish quarter," a "Ger
man quarter" in a large city is most undesirable. The priests,
no doubt, judge rightly, both in reference to their notions of dis
cipline, and with a view of maintaining their power ; for these
peasants, when scattered over the country, and interspersed with
Protestants, can not be made to confess regularly, attend mass,
and read orthodox German newspapers, three of which are pub-
blished here daily, and one weekly, all under ecclesiastical cen
sorship. There are a large number of German Protestants, and
20.000 Catholics, in all twelve churches, where the service is
performed in the German language. Only half of these are
Romanist churches, but they are much more crowded than the
others. The chief emigration has been from Bavaria, Baden,
Swabia, Wirtemberg, and the Black Forest, and they are almost
all imbued with extreme democratic notions, which the ordinary
European training, or the working of semi-feudal institutions,
evidently fosters in the minds of the million, far more than does
the republicanism of the United States. The Romanist priests
feel, or affect, sympathy with this political party, and in the last
election they instructed the Germans and the Irish to vote for
Polk against Clay. It ought, indeed, to serve as a warning,
and afford serious matter of reflection to the republicans of
America, that a church which requires the prostration of the
intellect in matters of faith and discipline, and which is most
ambitious of wordly power, is also of all others the most willing
CHAP. XXXVI.J GEOLOGY OF MILL CREEK. 019
to co-operate with the ultra-democratic party. Are the priests
conscious of having embarked in a common cause with the dema
gogue, and that they must, like him, derive their influence from
courting the passions, prejudices, and ignorance of the people ?
If so, one method alone remains for combating both — the removal
of ignorance by a well-organized government system of schools,
neither under sectarian or ecclesiastical control, nor under the
management of any one political party.
In the city, the New Englanders appeared to me to have lost
political weight since we were last here. To show me how
seriously the priests interfere in their domestic affairs, a bookseller
told me that he had just lost the services of a young shopman
who, although a Protestant, like his father, found that his mother,
a Catholic, considered it her duty never to let him rest till he
adopted some other profession. The priest had told her that he
was constantly handling dangerous and heretical books in his store,
with which his mind must be contaminated.
In many of the large towns, in the valley of the Mississippi,
the Catholics have established such excellent schools, and enforced
discipline so well, that the children of Protestants have been at
tracted there, and many have become proselytes ; but I heard of
still more Catholics who have become converts to Protestantism,
and I can not but believe that Romanism itself will undergo many
salutary modifications under the influence of the institutions of this
country.
I made an excursion with Messrs. Buchanan, James, Carley,
Clark, and Anthony, to Mill Creek, a tributary valley of the
Ohio, where loam and gravel, with fresh-water shells, overlies a
deposit of leaves and fossil stems of trees. The shells are of recent
species, and the layer of vegetable matter of the same age as that
which contains the bones of the mastodon, elephant, megalonyx,
and other extinct animals at Big Bone Lick, in Kentucky.* I
afterward saw in the city some beautiful collections of Silurian
fossils from the blue limestone, and was struck with the dimen
sions of some of the trilobites of the genus Isoteles, the most
* See ante, p. 194, and "Travels in North America," vol. ii. pp. 62,
65, 67.
222 SCULPTURE BY POWERS. [CHAP. XXXVI.
their veins ; they confessed themselves unable to guess, for the
two girls were not only among the best scholars, but better look
ing and less dark than many of the other pupils.
At Mr. Longworth's we saw a beautiful piece of sculpture, an
ideal head called Ginevra, by Hiram Powers, who had sent it
from Rome as a present to his first patron. It appeared to me
worthy of the genius of the sculptor of " Eve" and the " Greek
Slave." Thorwaldsen, when he saw Powers' " Eve," foretold
that he would create an era in his art ; and not a few of the
Italians now assign to him the first place in the " Naturalista"
school, though assuredly there is much of the ideal also in his
conceptions of the beautiful. It augurs well for the future culti
vation of the fine arts in the United States, that the Americans
are as proud of their countryman's success as he himself could
desire.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
Cincinnati to Pittsburg. — Improved Machinery of Steamer. — Indian Mound.
— Gravel Terraces. — Pittsburg Fire. — Journey to Greensburg. — Scenery
like England. — Oregon War Question. — Fossil Foot-prints of Air-breath
ing Reptile in Coal Strata. — Casts of Mud-cracks. — Foot-prints of Birds
and Dogs sculptured by Indians. — Theories respecting the Geological
Antiquity of highly organized Vertebrata. — Prejudices opposed to the
Reception of Geological Truths. — Popular Education the only Means of
pi-eventing a Collision of Opinion between the Multitude and the Learned.
April 13, 1846. — FROM Cincinnati we embarked in the Clip
per steamer for Pittsburg, a distance of no less than 450 miles ;
so magnificent is the scale of the navigation of this mere tribu
tary of the Mississippi ! Yet there are other large steamers also
plying above Pittsburg, on the tributaries of the Ohio. We ob
serve more punctuality than in 1842, in the starting of the steam
ers. The Clipper made ten miles an hour against the current,
including stoppages. We fell in with some large artificial rails
of wood stretching more than half across the river, and met a
steamer, which had run foul of one of them, still entangled, and,
though bound for Pittsburg, floating down the stream with the
raft. Our steamer only draws 3^ feet water, and her engines
are of a very peculiar construction, hitherto used in sea-boats only,
with the exception of one on Lake Erie. The inventor of this
improvement is Thomas K. Litch. There are two cylinders, one
twice the size of the other, and the steam escapes from the smaller
into the larger, instead of issuing into the open air, so that its
heat is not lost. The economy of fuel arising from this contriv
ance is great, and the vibrations and noise much less than in
other boats on the same high-pressure principle. In place of the
usual bell, signals are made by a wild and harsh scream, pro
duced by the escape of steam, as in locomotive engines ; a fear
ful sound in the night, and which, it is to be hoped, some ma
chinist who has an ear for music will find means to modulate.
GRAVEL TERRACES. [CHAP. XXXVII.
There was a Pennsylvania!! farmer on board who told me that,
having a large family to provide for, he had resolved to settle in
Indiana, and was returning from that state, after making a pur
chase of land in "the rolling prairies." He had paid the usual
government price of 11 dollar, or about 5s. Qd. an acre ; whereas
he could sell his own property in Pennsylvania, which had a house
on it, at the rate of 60 dollars an acre. He had been much con
cerned at finding a strong war party in the west, who were
eager to have a brush with the English. " It was a short-sighted
policy," he remarked, " in your country, to exert so little energy
and put forth so small a part of her strength in the last war with
the United States. It will one day involve both you and us in
serious mischief."
At a point about twenty-four miles below Wheeling, we came
to the largest of the Indian mounds on the Ohio, of which I have
spoken in my former "Travels."^ It is between 60 and 70
feet high, rising from a flat terrace of loam, and a very striking
object, reminding one, by its shape, of the pyramidal Teocallis of
the ancient Mexicans, of which Humboldt has given figures, and
which are so well described by Prescott, in his " History of Cor
tes." As we approached Wheeling, the valley of the Ohio be
came narrower, and the hills, composed of strata of the coal form
ation, sensibly higher. The State of Ohio was on our left hand,
or the northern bank of the river, and that of Virginia on our
right. The flat terrace of loam and gravel, extending every
where from the base of the hills to the river's bank, forms a pic
turesque contrast to the steep slope of the boundary hills, clothed
partly with ancient timber, and partly with a second growth of
trees of less height, which has sprung up where clearings have
been made. It is worthy of remark, that the materials of the
great terrace of loam and gravel become more and more coarse
as we approach nearer the mountains between Wheeling and
Pittsburg, and at the same time the terrace itself is more and
more elevated above the level of the river. It appeared to be
about 60 feet high near the mouth of the Great Kanawha, and
about 80 feet high at Georgetown, 40 miles below Pittsburg,
* Vol. ii. p. 32.
CHAP. XXXVII.] PITTSBURG FIRE. 225
which I can only explain by reference to the theory before ad
vanced ;* namely, by supposing the amount of subsidence, as well
as of the subsequent upward movement, to have been greater
inland, or farther north, than in the south, or nearer the Gulf of
Mexico.
April 16. — There had been so hard a frost in the night, that
the roof of our steamer's cabin was glazed with a thin sheet of
ice as we approached Pittsburg, and we heard fears expressed
that the fruit trees would be injured. Four years had elapsed
since we were last at Pittsburg, and, in the interval, a consider
able part of the city, covering sixty acres, had been burnt to the
ground, the great roofed bridge over the Monongahela, all built
of wood, having shared the same fate. A light suspension bridge
has already replaced that structure of ponderous aspect, and al
though the conflagration only happened in April of last year, new
streets have sprung up every where from the ashes of the old, and
the town has very far from a ruined or desolate look. Com
manding the navigation of three great rivers, and an inexhausti
ble supply of coal, it has every advantage save that of an atmo
sphere free from coal smoke.
I learnt that there had recently been a strike of the factory
girls here for ten instead of twelve hours of daily labor. Their
employers argue that they are competing with rivals who work
their girls twelve or more hours per day, and the strike has fail
ed ; yet many are of opinion, that even without legislative inter
ference, a ten-hour rule will be eventually established.
Most of our companions in the steamer were agents of com
mercial houses going to look out for orders at Pittsburg. On the
whole they were very intelligent, and conversed well on a variety
of subjects, while most of them were too gentlemanlike to feel
ashamed of " the shop." But we had now been living so many
weeks in public with strangers, and without opportunities of
choosing our society, that great was our delight to be able to hire
at Pittsburg a private carriage, and set out alone on an expedi
tion to Greensburg, 3 2 miles distant, where I had a point of geo
logical interest to investigate. As we were leaving the hotel, a
* See ante, p. 195,
226 JOURNEY TO GREENSBURG. [CHAP. XXXVII.
news-boy, finding I was supplied with newspapers, offered to sell "
me a cheap American reprint of the miscellaneous works of Lord
Jeffrey, assuring me that " it contained all the best articles he
had written in the Edinburg Review."
To be once more climbing hills even of moderate height, was
an agreeable novelty after dwelling so long on the flat plains of
the Mississippi. We were on the direct road, leading across the
Alleghanies to Harrisburg. The scenery often reminded us of
England, for we were traveling on a macadamized road, and
passing through turnpike gates, with meadows on one side, and
often on the other large fields of young wheat, of an apple-green
color, on which a flock of sheep, with their lambs, had been
turned in to feed. The absence of stumps of trees in the fields
was something new to us, as was the non-appearance for a whole
day of any representative of the negro race. Here and there a
snake-fence, and a tall strong stubble of maize, presented a point
of contrast with an English landscape. In some of the water-
meadows the common English marigold (Caltlia palustris) was
in full flower. At one turn of the road, a party of men on foot
came in sight, each with his rifle, and they were followed, at a
short distance, by a wagon with women and children, and a train
of others laden with baggage. Our driver remarked that they
were " movers," and I asked him if he ever knew an instance of
an American migrating eastward. He said that he was himself
the only example he ever heard of; for he was from Kentucky,
having come the year before to satisfy his curiosity with a sight
of the great Pittsburg fire. There he found a great demand for
work, and so was tempted to stay.
Our road lay through East Liberty, Wilkinsburg, and Adams-
burg. Some day-laborers, who were breaking stones on the road,
told me they were receiving seventy-five cents, or three shillings,
a day ; and this in a country where food and fuel are much
cheaper than in England, although clothing is rather dearer.
Near Turtle Creek, two farmers conducted me to a spot where
coal was worked, and where the undulating ground consisted of
sandstone, limestone, and shale, green and black, of the coal-
formation, precisely resembling strata of the same age in England,
CHAP. XXXVII.] SCARCITY OF SERVANTS. 227
both in mineral appearance, and in most of the species of imbed
ded fossil plants.
About fifteen miles before we reached Greensburg, we saw, in
the extreme distance, the blue, faint, long, and unbroken line of
the most western ridge of the Alleghanies.
Greensburg is a neat, compact town of about 1000 inhabit
ants. The houses are all of brick ; there is a court-house and five
churches, some Lutheran, others Calvinistic, the German language
being used in some, and the English in others. They publish
three newspapers. We took up our quarters at a comfortable old-
fashioned inn, where we were waited upon by the members of
the family, for the difficulty of hiring or retaining servants here,
seems to be extreme. One girl had left a lady, whose acquaint
ance we made, because, being a farmer's daughter, she was not
allowed to sit down at table with her mistress. The lady's sis
ter, who was accomplished, and conversed with us on many lit
erary subjects, was obliged to milk the cow for the whole sum
mer, though they were in easy circumstances, such was the
scarcity of " help/' Fortunately for us, my wife and I had, by
this time, acquired the habit of waiting on ourselves in the inns,
going occasionally down to the kitchen to ask for things, in a way
which in England would be thought quite derogatory to one's
dignity, especially in the eyes of the servants, whose trouble would
thereby be lessened. Here, on the contrary, we found that it
made us popular. The general system in America that servants
at inns receive no gratuities, but are paid ample wages instead,
is one cause of this difference. Yet much may be said in its
favor, as it raises the independence of the servants, and relieves
strangers from the perplexity of determining what fees are suit
able.
There was a crowded public meeting the day of our arrival,
at which several orators were haranguing an audience of the
lowest class, in favor of war with England about Oregon. The
walls were placarded with bills, on which were printed, in large
letters, these words, " Forty-Five, or Fight," which meant that
the Oregon Territory must extend as far north as the 45th degree
of latitude.
223 FOSSIL FOOT-PRINTS IN COAL STRATA. [CHAP. XXXVII.
This ambition of the people of the west to possess Oregon, is
at least no new idea, for I happened to purchase at Louisville an
old guide-book, describing the Falls of the Ohio and the city, in
which, when speaking of commercial matters, the colonization
and annexation of Oregon was set forth as the means of "opening
a direct trade with China." I observed to one of the citizens,
that it was satisfactory to see that none of the upper, or even
of the middle classes, were taking any part at Greensburg in this
agitation. He shook his head, and said, " Very true ; but these
meetings are most mischievous, for you must bear in mind, that
your nobody in England is our everybody in America."
I had determined to visit Greensburg, on my way from Pitts-
burg to Philadelphia, that I might examine into the evidence of
the reality of certain fossil foot-prints of a reptile said to have
been found in strata of the ancient coal-formation, and of which
Dr. King, of Greensburg, had published an account in 1844.
The genuineness of these foot-marks was a point on which many
doubts were still entertained, both in Europe and America, and
I had been requested by several geological friends not to return
without having made up my mind on a fact which, if confirmed,
was of the highest theoretical importance. Up to this period,
no unequivocal proofs had been detected of the fossil remains of
vertebrated animals more highly organized than fishes, in strata
of such antiquity as the carboniferous rocks, and the absence of
air-breathing quadrupeds or birds, served to constitute negative
evidence, of peculiar significance, in reference to the coal-meas
ures, because, as before stated,1* they contained the monuments
of shallow fresh-water swamps, and often of surfaces of land
covered with a luxuriant vegetation of terrestrial plants, some of
the buried trees of which still remain with their roots in their
natural position. That we should never have found, in such
deposits, the remains of air-breathing creatures, except a few
insects, that we should not yet have met with a single mammifer
or bird, or lizard, snake, or tortoise, or the faintest indication of
their existence, seemed most inexplicable, and led many geolo
gists to embrace the opinion, that no beings having a higher
* See ante, p. 185.
CHAP. XXXVII.] FOSSIL FOOT-PRINTS IN COAL STRATA. 229
organization than fishes, were created till after the carboniferous
strata had been elaborated.
During my stay in Westmoreland County, I was indebted to Dr.
King for the most active assistance in the prosecution of my inqui
ries. He kindly devoted several days to this object, and we first
visited together a stone quarry in Union township, six miles
southeast of Greensburg, on a farm belonging to Mr. Gallagher,
where the foot-marks had been first observed, standing out in
relief from the lower surface of slabs of sandstone, resting on thin
layers of fine clay. These slabs were extracted for paving-stones,
and the excavation was begun in the bank of a small stream,
where there was at first a slight thickness only of shale overlying
the harder beds ; but as they cut their way into the bank, the
mass of shale became so dense as to oblige them to desist from
the work. Between the slabs of stone, each a few inches thick,
were thin parting layers of a fine unctuous clay, well fitted to
receive and retain faithful impressions of the feet of animals. On
the upper surface of each layer, Dr. King saw the foot-steps im
pressed more or less distinctly ; but, as the clay was left exposed
to the weather, it had crumbled to pieces before I examined it,
and I had only an opportunity of seeing the casts of the same
projecting in relief from the under sides of slabs of argillaceous
sandstone. I brought away one of these masses, of which the
annexed figure (fig. 12) is a faithful representation ; and it will
be observed that it displays not only the marks of the foot-prints
of an animal, but also casts of cracks, a, a', of various sizes,
which must have existed in the clay. Such casts are produced
by the drying and shrinking of mud, and they are usually detect
ed in sandstones of all ages in which foot-marks appear. It will
be seen that some of these cracks, as at b, c, traverse the foot
prints, and they not unfrequently produce distortion in them, as
might have been expected, for the mud must have been soft
when the animal walked over it and left the impressions, where
as, when it afterward dried up and shrank, it would become too
hard to receive such indentations. I have alluded, in my former
"Travels,"* to the recent foot-prints of birds called sand-pipers
* Vol. ii. p. 168.
230 FOSSIL FOOT-PRINTS IN COAL STRATA. [CHAP. XXXVII.
Fig. 12.
Scale one-sixth the original.
Slab of sandstone from the coal-measures of Pennsylvania, with foot- prints of air-breathing
leptile and casts of cracks.
CHAP. XXXVII.] FOSSIL FOOT-PRINTS IN COAL STRATA. 231
Fig. 13.
Series of reptilian foot-prints in the coal-^trataTof Westmoreland County,
Pennsylvania.
a. Mark of nail ?
232 FOSSIL FOOT-PRINTS IN COAL STRATA. [CHAP. XXXVII.
(Tringa mimtta), which I saw running, in 1842, over the red
mud thrown down by every tide on the borders of estuaries con
nected with the Bay of Fundy. When this mud, which extends
over thousands of acres, has been baked by the hot summer sun
of Nova Scotia, it shrinks and cracks to the depth of several
inches or even feet, and acquires such consistency as to be divisi
ble into the successive layers of which it is composed, presenting
on many upper surfaces impressions of birds' feet and cracks, and
on the under sides the casts of the same standing out in relief. ^
I have also stated f that on the sea beach near Savannah, in
Georgia, I saw clouds of fine sand drifted by the wind, filling up
the foot-prints of racoons and opossums, which a few hours before
had passed along the shore, after the retreat of the tide. This
process will account, in a satisfactory manner, for the sharpness
of many fossil casts of animals in ancient rocks, as the grains of
uniformly fine sand were poured into the newly made cavities,
not by a current of water, which could scarcely have failed to
disturb the soft mud, but by the air, which could not cause the
slightest derangement of the most delicate imprints.
No less than twenty-three foot-steps were observed by Dr.
King on slabs in the stone quarry of Union township, before
mentioned, before its abandonment, and the greater part of these
were so arranged (see fig. 13) as to imply that they were the
marks of the successive foot-steps of the same animal. Every
where there was seen a double row of tracks, occurring in pairs,
each pair consisting of a hind and fore foot, and each being at
nearly equal distances from the next pair. The toes in each of
these parallel rows turn the one set to the right, the other to the
left. It is instructive to compare these impressions with those
which had previously been met with in an ancient European
rock (although one of less antiquity than the coal-formation),
namely, the new red sandstone or Trias of Saxony and Cheshire.
The accompanying figure (fig. 14) represents the Saxon Cheiro-
* I have presented specimens of this red mud, with the foot-prints of
birds, to the British Museum, Geological Society, and Museum of Eco
nomic Geology.
t Travels, vol. i. p. 167.
CHAP. XXXVII.] FOSSIL FOOT-PRINTS IN COAL STRATA. 233
therium, so called by Professor Kaup, because the marks
both of the fore and hind feet resemble the shape of a
human hand. Now in these European hand-shaped
foot-marks, both the hind and fore feet have each five
toes, and the size of the hind foot is about five times
as large as the fore foot ; but in the American fossil
(fig. 13), the posterior foot-print is not nearly twice
as large as the anterior, and the number of toes is
unequal, being five in the hinder and four in the
anterior foot. In the Greensburg animal, as in the
European Cheirotherium, the fifth toe stands out near
ly at a right angle with the foot, and somewhat resem
bles the human thumb. On the external side of all
the Pennsylvanian tracks, both the larger and smaller,
there is a protuberance like the rudiment of another
toe. The average length of the hind foot is five and
a half inches, and of the fore foot four and a half.
The fore and hind feet being in pairs, follow each
other very closely, there being an interval of about
one inch only between them. Between each pair
the distance is six to eight inches, and between the
two parallel lines of tracks there is about the same
distance.
In the case of the European Cheirotherium, whether English
or German, the hind and fore feet occur in pairs, but they form
only one row, as in fig. 14, in consequence of the animal having
put its feet to the ground nearly under the middle of its body, and
the thumb-like toes are seen to turn to the right and to the left
in the alternate pairs. But in the American tracks, which form
two parallel rows, all the thumb-like toes in one set turn to the
right, and in the other set to the left. We may infer, therefore,
that the American Cheirotherium belongs to a new genus of
reptilian quadrupeds, wholly distinct from that which characterizes
the triassic strata of Europe, and such a generic diversity might
have been expected in reptilian fossils of such different ages.
The geological position of the sandstone of Greensburg is per
fectly clear, being situated in the midst of the Appalachian coal-
234 SCULPTURED FOOT-PRINTS. [CHAP. XXXVII.
field, having the main bed of coal, called the Pittsburg seam, three
yards thick, a hundred feet above it, worked in the neighborhood,
and several other seams of coal at lower levels. The impressions
of Lepidodendron, Sigillaria, Stigmaria, and other characteristic
carboniferous plants, are found both above and below the level of
the reptilian loot-steps.
We may safely assume that the huge reptile which left these
prints on the ancient sands of the coal-measures was an air-
breather, for its weight would not have been sufficient under
water to have made impressions so deep and distinct. The
same conclusion is also borne out by the casts of the cracks above
described, for they show that the clay had been exposed to the
air and suri, so as to have dried and shrunk. As we so often see
the ripple mark preserved in sandstones of all ages, and in none
more frequently than in the American and European coal strata,
we ought not to feel surprised that superficial markings, such as
foot-prints, which are by no means more perishable or evanescent
in their nature, should have been faithfully preserved down to
our times, when once the materials had been hardened into stone.
There are some bare ledges of rock, composed of pure white
quartzose grit of the coal-measures, standing out exposed above
the general level of the ground, in many places near Greensburg,
especially near Derry, in Westmoreland County, about fourteen
miles north of G-reensburg. They are so bare that scarcely any
lichens grow upon them, and on some of them the foot-prints oi
birds, as well as those of dogs and some other quadrupeds have
been artificially cut. After examining them carefully, I entertain
no doubt that they were sculptured by Indians, for there are many
Indian graves near Deny, arid one of their paths, leading through
the forest from the Alleghany Mountains to the west, lay precisely
in the line of these curious carvings. The toe joints in the feet
of the birds thus cut are well indicated, as might have been ex
pected, for the aboriginal hunting tribes of North America were
skillful in following the trail of all kinds of game, and are known
to have carved in some places on rocks, many rude imitations of
the external forms of animals. If, therefore, they were sometimes
tempted to use the representation of foot-prints as symbols of the
CHAP. XXXVII. ] OPPOSITION TO GEOLOGICAL TRUTHS. 235
birds or quadrupeds which they hunted, they would be not unlikely
to give very accurate copies of markings with which they were
so familiar. The important observations made by Dr. King
relatively to the fossil imprints, called the attention of the whole
country to the Indian antiquities of comparatively modern date ;
but the popular notion that there was a connection between them
is wholly erroneous.
Since the announcement, by Dr. King, in 1844, of the proofs
of the existence of reptiles at the period when the coal strata of
Pennsylvania were formed, Professor Goldfuss, of Bonn, has pub
lished the description of more than one saurian found in the an
cient coal-measures of Saarbruck, near Treves.
Never, certainly, in the history of science, were discoveries
made more calculated to put us on our guard for the future
against hasty generalizations founded on mere negative evidence.
Geologists have been in the habit of taking for granted, that at
epochs anterior to the coal there were no birds or air-breathing
quadrupeds in existence ; and it seems still scarcely possible to
dispel the hypothesis that the first creation of a particular class
of beings coincides in date with our first knowledge of it in a fossil
state, or the kindred dogma that the first appearance of life on
the globe agrees, chronologically, with the present limits of our
insight into the first creation of living beings, as deduced from
organic remains. These limits have shifted, even in our own
times, more than once, or have been greatly expanded, without
dissipating the delusion, so intense is the curiosity of man to trace
back the present system of things to a beginning. Rather than
be disappointed, or entertain a doubt of his power to discern the
shores of the vast ocean of past time, into which his glances are
penetrating, like the telescope into the region of the remoter ne
bulae, he can not refrain from pleasing his imagination with the
idea that some fog-banks, resting on the bosom of the deep, are,
in reality, the firm land for which his aching vision is on the
stretch.
I can not conclude these remarks on the geological discoveries
made in these remote valleys of the Alleghanies, without alluding
to a moral phenomenon, which was forcibly brought before my
236 OPPOSITION TO GEOLOGICAL TRUTHS. [CHAP. XXXVIL
mind in the course of the investigation. The interest excited by
these singular monuments of the olden times, naturally led to
animated discussions, both in lecture-rooms and in the columns
of the daily journals of Pennsylvania, during which the high
antiquity of the earth, and the doctrine of former changes in the
species of animals and plants inhabiting this planet before the
creation of man, were assumed as established truths. But these
views were so new and startling, and so opposed to popular pre
possessions, that they drew down much obloquy upon their pro-
mulgators, who incurred the censures not only of the multitude,
but also of some of the Roman Catholic and Lutheran clergy.
The social persecution was even carried so far as to injure pro
fessionally the practice of some medical men, who had given
publicity to the obnoxious doctrines. Several of the ministers
of the Lutheran church, who had studied for years in German
universities, were too well informed not to believe in the conclu
sions established by geologists, respecting the immensity of past
time and former vicissitudes, both in animal and vegetable life :
but although taking a lively interest in discoveries made at their
own door, and joining in the investigations, they were compelled
by prudence to conceal their opinions from their congregations, or
they would have lost all influence over them, and might perhaps
have seen their churches deserted. Yet by maintaining silence
in deference to the opinions of the more ignorant, they become, in
some degree, the instruments of countenancing error ; nay, they
are rearing up the rising generation to be, in their turn, the per
secutors of many of their contemporaries, who may hereafter be
far in advance in their scientific knowledge.
" To nothing but error," says a popular writer of our times,
" can any truth be dangerous ; and I know not," he exclaims,
" where else there is seen so altogether tragical a spectacle, as
that religion should be found standing in the highways, to say,
< Let no man learn the simplest laws of the universe, lest they
mislearn the highest. In the name of God the Maker, who said,
and hourly yet says, Let there lie light, we command that you
continue in darkness !' "*
* Letter on Secular Education, by T. Carlyle, July, 1848.
CHAP. XXXVII.] INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM.
Goldsmith, in the " Vicar of Wakefield," makes his traveler
say, that after he had walked through Europe, and examined
mankind nearly, he found that it is not the forms of government,
whether they be monarchies or commonwealths, that determine
the amount of liberty enjoyed by individuals, but that " riches in
general are in every country another name for freedom." I agree
with Goldsmith that the forms of government are not alone suffi
cient to secure freedom — they are but means to an end. Here
we have in Pennsylvania a free press, a widely extended suffrage,
and the most perfect religious toleration — nay, more than tolera
tion, all the various sects enjoying political equality, and, what is
more rare, an equality of social rank , yet all this machinery is
not capable, as we have seen, of securing even so much of intel
lectual freedom as shall enable a student of nature to discuss
freely the philosophical questions which the progress of science
brings naturally before him. He can not even announce with
impunity, results which half a century of observation and reason
ing has confirmed by evidence little short of mathematical demon
stration. But can riches, as Goldsmith suggests, secure intellectual
liberty ? No doubt they can protect the few who possess them
from pecuniary penalties, when they profess unpopular doctrines.
But to enable a man to think, he must be allowed to communi
cate freely his thoughts to others. Until they have been brought
into the daylight and discussed, they will never be clear even to
himself. They must be warmed by the sympathy of kindred
minds, and stimulated by the heat of controversy, or they will
never be fully developed and made to ripen and fructify.
How, then, can we obtain this liberty ? There is only one
method ; it is by educating the millions, and by dispelling their
ignorance, prejudices, and bigotry.
Let Pennsylvania not only establish numerous free schools, but
let her, when she organizes a system of government instruction,
raise the qualifications, pay, and station in society of the secular
teachers, as highly as Massachusetts is now aspiring to do, and
the persecution I have complained of will cease at once and for
ever.
The project of so instructing the millions might well indeed be
238 POPULAR EDUCATION. [CHAP, XXXVII.
deemed Utopian, if it were necessary that all should understand
the patient and laborious trains of research and reasoning by which
we have arrived at grand generalizations in geology, and other
branches of physical science. But this is not requisite for the
desired end. We have simply to communicate the results, and
this we are bound to do, without waiting till they have been
established for half a century. We ought rather carefully to
prepare the public mind for new conclusions as soon as they
become highly probable, and thus make impossible that collision
of opinion, so much to be deprecated, between the multitude and
the learned.
It is as easy to teach a peasant or a child that the earth moves
round the sun, as to inculcate the old exploded dogma that it is
the motionless center of the universe. The child is as willing to
believe that our planet is of indefinite antiquity, as that it is only
6000 years old. Tell him that the earth was inhabited by other
races of animals and plants before the creation of man, as we now
know it to have been, and the idea is not more difficult for him
to conceive than the notion which is usually allowed to take root
in his mind, that man and the species of animals and plants, now
our contemporaries, were the first occupants of this globe. All
that we require, when once a good system of primary and normal
schools has been organized, is a moderate share of moral courage
and love of truth, on the part of the laity and clergy ; and then
the academical chair and scientific lecture-room, and every pulpit,
and every village school, may be made to speak the same lan
guage, in regard to those natural phenomena, which are of a kind
to strike and interest the popular mind.*
* The substance of the above remarks, on the fossil foot-prints of Greens-
burg, was given by me in a Lecture to the Royal Institution, London, Feb.
4, 1848.
/ V
Jsfff'j •
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Greensburg to Philadelphia. — Crossing the Alleghany Mountains. — Scenery.
— Absence of Lakes. — Harrisburg. — African Slave-trade. — Railway
Meeting at Philadelphia. — Borrowing Money for Public Works. — Negro
Episcopal Clergyman. — Washington. — National Fair and Protectionist
Doctrines. — Dog-wood in Virginia. — Excursion with Dr. Wyman. — Nat
ural History. — Musk-rats. — Migration of Humming-birds to New Jersey.
April 19, 1846. — LEFT Greensburg, intending to cross the
Alleghariy Mountains to Harrisburg, and go thence to Philadel
phia. We started in the evening in a large stage coach, in which
were nine inside passengers, so that our night journey through
Youngstown, Stony town, and Shellsburg was fatiguing, and not
the less so by our having twice to turn out in the dark, while all
the luggage was shifted to a new vehicle. The last of these
broke down, one of the wheels having given way, and we had an
opportunity of witnessing the resources and ingenuity displayed on
such occasions by American travelers. A large bough of a tree
was cut off with an ax, and tied on to the axletree with ropes,
so as to support the body of the carriage, and in this way we
went several miles without inconvenience. During one of the
night transfers of our luggage a carpet bag of mine was left be
hind, and when I afterward missed it at Philadelphia I wrote to
three places to claim it. After five days I found it in my room
in the hotel, no one knowing whence it came, and nothing having
been paid for it. Before reaching1 Philadelphia it must have been
transferred to three distinct conveyances, including two railways.
I may state here a fact highly creditable to the public convey
ances in the United States, that I never lost a package in either
of my tours, although I sent more than thirty boxes of geological
specimens from various places, often far south of the Potomac,
and west of the Alleghanies ; some by canals, some by river
steamers, others by coaches or railways. Every one of them
sooner or later found their way safely to my house in London.
240 ABSENCE OF LAKES. [CHAP. XXXV11I.
On leaving Greensburg we crossed one after another of the long
parallel ridges of which the Alleghany chain is composed, de
scending into each of the long intervening valleys, the hills be
coming higher and higher as we advanced eastward. The char
acter of the forest changed as we came to higher ground, espe
cially by the intermixture of trees of the fir tribe, and by the
undergrowth of azaleas, kalmias, and rhododendrons, for I had
seen none of these evergreens since I left Indiana, not even under
the oak wood round Greensburg. When day dawned we had
reached the highest part of our road, and enjoyed a splendid
mountain view, the steep wooded slopes being relieved by the
contrast of green meadows bordering the rivers in the bottom of
each deep valley, while in many parts of the landscape a pictur
esque effect was produced by what appeared to be extensive lakes.
All who were strangers to the scene required to be assured that
they were not really sheets of water ; yet they were simply banks
of dense white fog resting on the low grounds, which the heat of
the sun would soon dissipate. It is singular that there are no
lakes in the Appalachian chain, all the rivers escaping from the
longitudinal valleys through gorges or cross fissures, which seem
invariably to accompany such long flexures of the strata as char
acterize the Alleghanies or the Jura.
In Campbell's " Gertrude of Wyoming," indeed, we see —
"Lake after lake interminably gleam,"
amidst the Appalachian ridges ; but such characteristics of the
scenery of this chain are as pure inventions of the poet's imagina
tion, as the flamingoes, palrns, and aloes with which he adorns
the banks of the Susquehanna.
Near the highest summit of the chain I saw two seams of ex
cellent coal, one of them twelve feet thick, in strata belonging to
the same series which I had examined near Greensburg. After
descending from the highest level, we followed for a time the
windings of the Juniata River, the road often bounded by high
rocky cliffs, on the ledges of which we saw the scarlet columbine,
blue hepatica, and other wild flowers in blossom.
We slept at Chambersburg, where, on the roof of the court-
CHAP. XXXVIII.] AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE. 241
house, stands a statue of Franklin, holding a lightning conductor
in his hand. A company of firemen were exercising their en
gines in the great square, throwing up powerful jets of water
high enough to wash the statue.
From Chambersburg we went on by railway at the rate of
fourteen miles an hour, only slackening our pace when we passed
through the middle of towns, such as Shippensburg and Carlisle,
where we had the amusement of looking from the cars into the
shop windows.
On reaching the Susquehanna we came in sight of Harrisburg,
the seat of Legislature of Pennsylvania, a cheerful town, which
makes a handsome appearance at a distance, with its numerous
spires and domes. The railway bridge over the river had been,
burnt down, and the old bridge carried away by a recent freshet,
when large fragments of ice were borne down against the piers.
Among the passengers in the railway to Philadelphia, was an
American naval officer, who had just returned from service on
the coast of Africa, fully persuaded that the efforts made by the
English and United States fleets to put down the slave-trade,
had increased the misery and loss of life of the negroes, without
tending to check the traffic, which might, he thought, have been
nearly put an end to before now, if England and other countries
had spent an equally enormous sum of money in forming settle
ments such as Liberia ; although he admitted that negroes from
the United States, whose families had been acclimatized in Amer
ica for several generations, and who settled in Liberia, were cut
off by fever almost as rapidly as Europeans.
Returning to Philadelphia, after an absence of six months, we
were as much pleased as ever with the air of refinement of the
principal streets, and the well-dressed people walking on the neat
pavements, under the shade of a double row of green trees, or
gazing, in a bright, clear atmosphere, at the tastefully arranged
shop windows ; nor could we agree with those critics who com
plain of the prim and quakerish air, and the monotonous same
ness, of so regularly built a city.
During our stay, a large meeting was held to promote a scheme
for a new railway to Pittsburg, through Harrisburg, the interest
VOL. II. L
242 NEGRO CLERGYMAN. [CHAP. XXXVIII.
of the money to be raised chiefly by city rates. Some of rny
friends here are opposed to the measure, declaring that such pub
lic works are never executed with economy, nor thriftily man
aged. The taxation always falls on some districts, which derive
no profit from the enterprise, and they demand other grants of
public money as a compensation, and these are laid out with equal
extravagance. The good sense of the New Englanders, say they,
has almost invariably checked them from entering upon such un
dertakings, and in one of the few instances in which they have
deviated from sound policy, they have repented. For when, in
opposition to the richer inhabitants, a branch railway was made
to connect Bridgeport, in Connecticut, with the main line of road,
the bonds of that small inland town were pledged as security for
the money borrowed. The traffic proved insufficient to meet
their liabilities, and a majority of the citizens then determined to
repudiate. The rich alleged that they had opposed the project,
and the poor, who had voted away their money, were quite will
ing that no new taxes should be imposed. The creditors, how
ever, went to law, and, by aid of the courts, compelled payment,
as the Supreme Court might have done in the case of the delin
quent states (had not the original constitution of the Union been
altered before any of them repudiated), which might have given
a wholesome check to rash enterprises guaranteed by state bonds.
The booksellers tell me that their trade is injured by the war-
panic, arid I observe that most of the halfpenny, or cent papers,
are still very belligerent on the Oregon question.
On Sunday, I attended service, for the first time, in a free
black Episcopal church. Prayers were read well by a negro
clergyman, who was evidently an educated man. The congre
gation consisted wholly of the colored race. Where there is a
liturgy, and where written sermons are read, there is small oppor
tunity of comparing the relative capabilities of Africans and Euro
peans for the discharge of such functions. In the Baptist, Meth
odist, and Presbyterian services, the success of the minister depends
much more on his individual ability. I was glad, however, to
see a negro officiating in a church which confers so much social
rank on its clergyman, and in no city more than Philadelphia
CHAP. XXXVIII.] WASHINGTON— FREE TRADE. 243
does the colored race stand in need of some such make- weights to
neutralize the prejudices which retard their natural progress.
We were told of an ineffectual attempt, recently made by a lady
here, to obtain leave to bury a favorite free negro woman in St.
James's graveyard, although she had died a member of the Epis
copal church ; nor are any colored people allowed to be buried at
the Laurel Hill Cemetery. That burial-ground commands a
beautiful view up and down the Schuylkill, and the ground there
is laid out with much taste, being covered with evergreens and
trees, and having many of the graves adorned, at this season,
with violets and lilies of the valley.
April 27. — Leaving my wife with some friends at Philadel
phia, I set out on a geological tour to Richmond, Virginia, to Re
sume my examination of the Oolitic coal-field, left half-finished in
December last. At Washington I found they were holding a
national fair, or grand exhibition of manufactured articles, intend
ed to convince Congress of the advantage of a high tariff. The
protectionists maintain that every article which, for seven years,
has been shielded from foreign competition, has been reduced in
price to the consumer below the foreign cost at the time when
the duty was imposed. The free-traders, on the other hand,
argue, that their antagonists keep out of sight the fact that in
those same seven years the price of the foreign articles might,
and probably would, have fallen as much. One party points to
the former policy of Great Britain toward her American colonies ;
how she interdicted them from manufacturing for themselves, and
even from selling the productions of their own soil and industry
to any but the mother country ; — how she grew rich by monop
oly and restrictions, nursing her infant agriculture, commerce, and
factories, by prohibitive duties ; and they ask whether, if the
English cabinet really believed in the theory of free-trade, they
would not long ere this have repealed the navigation laws ? The
advocates of the opposite policy appeal to the recent law for ad
mitting American corn duty-free into England, as demonstrating
the sincerity of the British government. But in this controversy
it happens, as usual, that class-interests are espoused with all the
personal zeal and energy with which men pursue a private object,
244 TREES AND FLOWERS. [CHAP. XXXVIII.
while the cause of science, and the general good of the public,
being every body's business, are treated with comparative apathy.
When I arrived in Virginia, April 29th, I found the woods
every where enlivened by the dazzling white flowers, or bracteae,
of the dog- wood (Cornus florida), the average height of wliich
somewhat exceeds that of our white thorn ; and when, as often
happens, there is a back-ground of cedar or pine, the mass of
flower is almost as conspicuous as if a shower of snow had fallen
upon the boughs. As we sometimes see a pink variety of the
wild thorn in England, so there occurs here, now and then, though
rarely, a pink dog- wood. Having never remarked this splendid
tree in any English shrubbery or park, I had some fine young
plants sent home from a nursery to several English friends, and,
among others, to Sir William Hooker, at Kew, who was not a
little diverted at my zeal for the introduction ef a tree which had
been well-established for many years in the British arboretum.
But now that I have since seen the dwarfed and shabby repre
sentatives of this species in our British shrubberies, I am ready to
maintain that it is still unknown in our island. No Virginian,
who was not a botanist, could ever recognize it in England as the
same plant as the dog- wood of his native land. Yet it is capable
of enduring frosts as severe and protracted as are ever experienced
in the south of England, and the cause of its flowers not attain
ing their full size in our climate, is probably a want of sufficient
intensity of light and heat.
A great variety of oaks were now in leaf in the Virginian
forests, among which I observed the white oak, with its leaves
in the shape of a violin, and the willow oak, with long and nar
row leaves. The ground underneath these trees was adorned
with the pink azalea and many other flowers, among the rest the
white violet, a species of phlox, and an everlasting Gnaplialium.
The cedar (Juniperus virginiana) is often covered at this
season with what is termed here the cedar apple (Podisoma
macropus), supposed by many of the inhabitants to be the flower
or fruit of the tree itself. It is a beautiful orange-colored fungus,
ornamented with tassels, a very conspicuous object after a shower,
but shrinking up if exposed to a day's sunshine.
CHAP. XXXVIII.] NATURAL HISTORY. 245
I made excursions in various directions with my friend Mr.
GifFord, to examine the coal mines north and south of Black-
heath, near Richmond, and have already given the results of our
observations in the first volume.^ I afterward made an expedi
tion with Dr. Wyman, now Professor of Comparative Anatomy
at Cambridge, Massachussetts, to examine the geology of the
tertiary strata round Richmond, and those (of the Eocene period)
displayed in the cliffs bordering the Potomac River, near Acquia.
Creek. In one of our walks we saw some dogs feeding on part
of the carcass of a horse, and a group of turkey-buzzards eagerly
looking on close at hand, but not daring to share in the repast.
Near the same spot were the skulls of two dogs lying bleached
in the sun, and in the hollow of each we found the nest of a
large species of wasp, somewhat resembling our hornet, contain
ing a good store of honey. On the surface of some pools of
water I saw floating the singular seed-vessel of the nuphar, or
yellow pond lily (Nelumbiuni). These seeds have been known
to vegetate after they have been kept for a hundred years.
In passing through a wood near Acquia Creek, on a hot day,
we came upon a large snake, about four feet long, resembling
that called the mocassin, which lifted itself up, folding its body
into several graceful coils, and then darted its head and neck
forward at a dog which had followed us from the inn. The dog
dexterously retreated as often -as a blow was aimed at him, bark
ing loudly, and enjoying the rnock fight. The extremity of the
snake's tail, although not armed with a rattle, was in a state of
constant vibration.
On a soft sandy road we saw a great many of the ball-rolling
beetles (Ateuchus volvens), which resemble in form the Scarabceus
sacer of Egypt. They were all busily engaged in pushing along
round balls of dung, in the center of some of which we found an
egg, and in others a maggot. A pair of beetles was occupied
with each globular mass, which considerably exceeded themselves
in size. One of them went before, and usually climbed up the
side of the ball till the weight of its body made the mass fall
over, the other pushing behind, so as to urge it forward, or at
* Vol. i. p. 211.
246 MUSK-RATS. [CHAP. XXXVIII
least prevent it from rolling back again. We saw two of them
in half a minute force a ball for a distance of eighteen inches up
a gentle slope, and when they reached a soft part of the road,
one of them began to excavate a hole, and soon entirely disap
peared under ground, heaving up the earth till it cracked and
opened wide enough to allow his companion to push the ball of
dung into it. The round mass immediately began to sink, and
in a few minutes was out of sight. We saw another pair try in
vain to bury their treasure, for they had selected a spot where
the soil was too hard ; at last they gave up the attempt, and,
rolling it away, set out in search of a more favorable spot.
We crossed several plowed fields on the slope of the hills which
descend toward the Potomac, where a singular kind of manure is
used, consisting of dead fish, and almost exclusively of the bony
pike, or gar-fish (Lepidosteus oxyurus). The hard stony scales
resist decomposition for several years. The fishermen told us
that they are greatly annoyed by constantly taking these pikes
in their nets with the herrings. There is so enormous an abund
ance of herrings in some spots in this estuary, that 50,000 have
sometimes been taken this season in a few hours.
In a marsh near the inn, we observed numerous habitations
of the musk-rat, standing up like hay-cocks. When the small
size of the animal is considered, the quantity of dried grass, reeds,
and rushes accumulated in one of these hummocks, at least a
cart-load, is surprising. We waded through the water to one
of them, and found that it was four feet high, and nine feet in
diameter. When we pulled it to pieces, the smell of musk was
very perceptible. At the depth of about sixteen inches from the
top we found a cavity, or chamber, and a small gallery leading
from it to another chamber below, from which a second gallery
descended, and then went upward again to a third chamber, from
all which there was a perpendicular passage, leading down to below
the level of the water, so that the rats can dive, and, without being
seen again, enter their apartments, in which they breathe air.
The unio, or fresh-water mussel, is a favorite food of these
rats, and they often leave the shells on the banks of the American
rivers, with one valve entire and the other broken. In the even-
CHAP. XXXVIII.] HUMMING-BIRDS. 247
ing the note of the bull-frog, in these swamps, reminded me much
of the twanging of a large Jew's harp.
From Acquia Creek, I went, by steamer, to Washington, and
thence by railway through Philadelphia to the town of Burling
ton, in New Jersey, beautifully situated on the banks of the
Delaware. Here I paid a short visit to my friend, Mr. William
M'llvaine, and crossed the Delaware with him to Bristol, to
renew my acquaintance with Mr. Vanuxem, a geologist of no
ordinary merit. His death, which happened soon afterward,
was a loss to the public as well as to many personal friends.
In Wilson's " Ornithology" it is stated, that the humming
bird migrates from the south to Pennsylvania the latter part of
April, and builds its nest there about the middle of May. For
the last thirty years, Mr. M'llvaine had never been disappointed
in seeing it reach Burlington the first week of that month, gen
erally about the middle of the week, its northward progress being
apparently hastened or retarded by the mildness or inclemency
of the season. They seem always to wait for the flowering of a
species of horse-chestnut, called here the buck-eye, from a fancied
likeness of its fruit to the eye of a deer. The bright-red blos
soms of this tree supply the nourishment most attractive to these
birds, whose arrival had been looked for the very day after I
came. Strange to say, one of them, the avant-courier of the
feathered host, actually appeared, and next morning, May 7th,
hundreds were seen and heard flitting and humming over the
trees. A lady sent us word that a straggler from the camp was
imprisoned in her greenhouse, and, going there, I saw it poised
in the air, sucking honey from the blossom of an orange-tree.
The flower was evidently bent down slightly, as if the bird rested
its bill upon it to aid its wings in supporting its body in the air,
or to steady it. When it wished to go out, it went straight to
the window at which it had entered, and, finding it closed, flew
rapidly round the large conservatory, examining all parts of it,
without once striking the glass or beating its wings against the
wall, as the more timid of the feathered tribe are apt to do. No
sooner, however, was a small casement opened, than it darted
through it like an arrow.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
New York, clear Atmosphere and gay Dresses. — Omnibuses. — Naming of
Streets. — Visit to Audubon. — Croton Aqueduct. — Harpers' Printing
Establishment. — Large Sale of Works by English and American Authors.
— Cheapness of Books. — International Copyright. — Sale of Eugene Sue's
"Wandering Jew." — Tendency of the Work. — Mr. Gallatin on Indian
Corn. — War with Mexico. — Facility of raising Troops. — Dr. Dewey
preaching against War. — Cause of Influence of Unitarians. — Geological
Excursion to Albany. — Helderberg War. — Voting Thanks to the Third
House. — Place-hunting. — Spring Flowers — Geology andTaconic System.
May 7, 1846. — ON our return to New York, we were struck
with the brightness of the atmosphere in spring, arising not merely
from the absence of smoke, but from the quantity of solar light
as compared to England, this city being in the same latitude as
Naples. The unsullied purity of the air makes gay and brilliant
colors in dress and furniture appropriate.
Every fortnight the " Journal des Modes" is received from
France, and the ladies conform strictly to the Parisian costume.
Except at balls and large parties, they wear high dresses, and,
as usual in mercantile communities, spare no expense. Embroi
dered muslin, of the finest and costliest kind, is much worn ; and
my wife learnt that sixteen guineas were not unfrequently given for
a single pocket handkerchief. Extravagantly expensive fans, with
ruby or emerald pins, are also common. I had heard it said in
France that no orders sent to Lyons for the furnishing of private
mansions, are on so grand a scale as some of those received from
New York ; and I can well believe it, for we saw many houses
gorgeously fitted up with satin and velvet draperies, rich Axmin-
ster carpets, marble and inlaid tables, and large looking-glasses,
the style in general being Parisian rather than English. It was
much more rare here than at Boston to see a library forming
part of a suite of reception-rooms, or even a single book-case in a
drawing-room, nor are pictures so common here.
CHAP. XXXIX.] OMNIBUSES. 249
In the five months since we were last in this metropolis, whole
streets had been built, and several squares finished in the northern
or fashionable end of the town, to which the merchants are now
resorting, leaving the business end, near the Battery, where they
formerly lived. Hence there is a constant increase of omnibuses
passing through Broadway, and other streets running north and
south . Groups of twelve of these vehicles may be seen at once,
each with a single driver, for wages are too high to support a
cad. Each omnibus has an opening in the roof, through which
the money is paid to the coachman. We observed, as one
woman after another got out, any man sitting near the door,
though a stranger, would jump down to hand her out, and, if it
was raining, would hold an umbrella over her, frequently offering,
in that case, to escort her to a shop, attentions which are com
monly accepted and received by the women as matters of course.
All the streets which cross Broadway, run east and west, and
are numbered, so that they have now arrived at 146th-street —
a mode of designating the different parts of the metropolis worthy
of imitation on both sides of the Atlantic, since experience has
now proved that there is in the Anglo-Saxon mind an inherent
poverty of invention in matters of nomenclature. For want of
some municipal regulations like those of New York, the same
names are indefinitely multiplied in every great city, and letters,
after wandering over all the streets bearing the same appellation,
to the infinite inconvenience and cost of the post-office, are at
length received, if haply they ever reach their destination, long
after they are due.
The low island on which New York is built, is composed of
granite and gneiss covered with " drift" and boulders. The
original surface being very uneven, the municipality has fixed
upon a certain grade or level to which all heights must be
lowered by blasting the rocks or by carting away the gravel,
and up to which all the cavities must be raised. Besides other
advantages of this leveling process, the ground is said to become
more healthy and free from malaria, there being no longer any
stagnant pools of water standing in the hollows.
May 10. — Paid a visit to Mr. Audubon, the celebrated orni-
!<*
250 CROTON AQUEDUCT. [CHAP. XXXIX.
thologist, at his delightful residence on the banks of the Hudson,
north of Bloomingdale. His son had just returned from Texas,
where he had been studying the natural history of that country,
especially the mammalia, and was disappointed at the few oppor
tunities he had enjoyed of seeing the wild land quadrupeds in a state
of activity, so as to observe their habits. I told him I had been
equally surprised at the apparent scarcity of this tribe in the
native forests of the United States. This whole class of animals,
he said, ought to be regarded as properly nocturnal ; for not
merely the feline tribe and the foxes, the weasels and bats, shun
the daylight, but many others feed partly by night, most of the
squirrels and bears, for example. The ruminants no doubt are
an exception, yet even the deer and the buffalo, like the wild
horse, travel chiefly in the night.
From Mr. Audubon's I went to Highbridge, where the Croton
water is made to play for the amusement of visitors, and is thrown
up in a column to the height of 120 feet.
I went also to see the reservoir, inclosing an area of no less
than thirty-six acres, from which the water is distributed to all
parts of New York. In this artificial lake all the river sediment
is deposited, the basin being divided into two parts, so that one
may be cleaned out while the other is in use. The tunnel or pipe
conveying the water for a distance of more than thirty miles, from
the source to the Harlem Hiver, is so large, that the chief engineer
and commissioners of the works were able to float down it in a
flat-bottomed boat when it was first opened, in July, 1842.
While at New York, we were taken by our literary friend,
Mr. Cogswell, over the printing and publishing establishment of
the Harpers, the largest in America, and only surpassed, in the
scale of its operations, by two or three in Great Britain. They
give employment to three hundred men, manufacture their own
types and paper, and have a " bookbindery" under the same roof;
for, in order to get out, with the utmost dispatch, the reprints of
foreign works not entitled to copyright, they require to be inde
pendent of all aid from other traders. We were shown a fire
proof vault, in which stereotype plates, valued at 300,000 dollars,
are deposited. In one of the upper stories a long line of steam-
CHAP. XXXIX.] HARPERS' PRINTING-OFFICE. 251
presses was throwing off sheets of various works, and the greater
number were occupied with the printing of a large illustrated
Bible, and Morse's Geography for the use of schools. In 1845,
the Harpers sold two millions of volumes, some of them, it is true,
being only styled numbers, but these often contain a reprint of an
entire English novel, originally published in two or three volumes,
at the cost of a guinea and a half, the same being sold here for
one or two shillings. Several of Bulwer's tales are among these,
40,000 copies of his "Last of the Barons" having just issued
from this house. It may, indeed, be strictly said of English
writers in general, that they are better known in America than
in Europe.
Of the best English works of fiction, published at thirty-one
shillings in England, and for about sixpence here, it is estimated
that about ten times as many copies are sold in the United States
as in Great Britain ; nor need we wonder at this, when we con
sider that day laborers in an American village often purchase a
novel by Scott, Bulwer, or Dickens, or a popular history, such
as Alison's Europe (published at thirteen pounds in England and
sixteen shillings in America), and read it at spare moments, while
persons in a much higher station in England are debarred from
a similar intellectual treat by considerations of economy.
It might have been apprehended that, where a daily newspaper
can be bought for a halfpenny, and a novel for sixpence, the public
mind would be so taken up with politics and light reading, that
no time would be left for the study of history, divinity, and the
graver periodical literature. But, on the contrary, experience
has proved that, when the habit and facility of reading has been
acquired by the perusal even of trashy writings, there is a steady
increase in the number of those who enter on deeper subjects.
I was glad to hear that, in proportion as the reading public
augments annually, the quality of the books read is decidedly
improving. About four years ago, 40,000 copies were printed
of the ordinary common-place novels published in England, of
which sort they now only sell about 8000.
It might also have been feared that the cheapness of foreign
works unprotected by copyright, would have made it impossible
252 CHEAPNESS OF BOOKS. [CHAP. XXXIX.
for native authors to obtain a price capable of remunerating them
highly, as well as their publishers. But such is not the case.
Very large editions of Prescott's " Ferdinand and Isabella," and
of his " Mexico," and " Peru," have been sold at a high price ;
and when Mr. Harper stated to me his estimate of the original
value of the copyright of these popular works, it appeared to me
that an English author could hardly have obtained as much in
his own country.* The comparative cheapness of American
books, the best editions of which are by no means in small
print, seems at first unintelligible, when we consider the dearness
of labor, which enters so largely into the price of printing, paper,
and binding. But, first, the number of readers, thanks to the
free-schools, is prodigiously great, and always augmenting in a
higher ratio even than the population ; and, secondly, there is a
fixed determination on the part of the people at large to endure
any taxation, rather than that which would place books and
newspapers beyond their reach. Several politicians declared to
me that not only an income tax, but a window tax, would be
preferred ; and " this last," said they, " wrould scarcely shut out
the light from a greater number of individuals." The duty on
paper, in the United States, is trifling, when compared to that
paid in Great Britain. Mr. Chambers informs us, that the
Government duty of 5000Z., paid by him for his Miscellany, in
twenty volumes, was equal in amount to the whole profits of that
publication. The cost of advertisements, in America, is also
small. One of my American friends sent over to a London
publisher 250 copies of his work, charging him 4s. 6d. each.
* A letter dated April 15, 1849, was lately shown me from the Harpers,
with permission to make known its contents, in which they mentioned, that
having been authorized by Mr. Macaulay to publish in America his " His
tory of England," they had printed six editions at various prices varying
from four dollars to fifty cents (sixteen shillings and sixpence to two shillings) .
At the expiration of the first three months, they had sold 40,000 copies, and
other booksellers who had issued independent editions had sold about 20,000 ;
so that 60,000 copies had been purchased in the United States at a time
when about 13,000 had been disposed of by Longman and Co., in London,
at the price of 11. 12s. each. As the cheap American editions were only
just brought into the market at the date of this letter, the principal sale of
the book was but commencing.
CHAP. XXXIX.] INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT. 253
After paying entrance duties, and necessary outlay for advertise
ments in London, and the agency, it was found that the price
must be as high as 1 6s.
The party who are in favor of an international copyright be
tween England and the United States, seems to be steadily
gaining strength among the booksellers, publishers, and authors,
although the editors of newspapers and their readers may per
haps oppose the measure for some time. The number of reprisals
now made by English speculators are very numerous. According
to a statement lately presented to Congress by Mr. Jay, of New
York, there are about 600 original American works "pirated"
in Great Britain ; or, to speak more correctly, while the law
remains in its present state, reprinted without leave of their
American authors, or any pecuniary acknowledgment to them.
Many are of opinion that the small print of cheap editions in
the United States, will seriously injure the eyesight of the rising
generation, especially as they often read in railway cars, devouring
whole novels, printed in newspapers, in very inferior type. Mr.
Everett, speaking of this literature, in an address to the students
of Harvard College, said, "If cheap it can be called, which begins
by costing a man his eyes, and ends by perverting his taste and
morals."
As an illustration of the mischievous tendency of the indiscrim
inate reading of popular works by the multitude, when the higher
classes and clergy can exert little or no control in the selection
of the books read, the wonderful success of Eugene Sue's " Wan
dering Jew" was pointed out to me by many, with no small
concern. This led me to ask Mr. Harper how many copies he
had disposed of, and he answered, "80,000, issued in different
shapes, and at various prices." It had so often been thrust into
my hands in railway cars, and so much talked of, that, in the
course of my journey, I began to read it in self-defense ; and,
having begun, could not stop till I had finished the whole,
although the style of the original loses half its charms in an
imperfect translation. " Le vieux dragon," for example, is
always rendered the " old dragon," instead of " dragoon," and
the poetry of a brilliant passage is nearly destroyed by "defense"
254 « THE WANDERING JEW." [CHAP. XXXIX.
being translated " defense," instead of " barrier," with other
blunders equally unpardonable. Yet the fascination of the orig
inal, and its power to fix the attention, triumph over these dis
advantages, and over the violence done to probability in the
general plot, and over the extravagance of many of its details.
The gross, sensual, and often licentious descriptions in which the
author indulges, in some scenes, and still more, such sentimental
immorality as is involved in the sympathy demanded for Hardy's
love and intrigue with a married woman (he being represented as
the model of a high-minded philanthropist), make one feel the con
trast of such a work with the chaste and pure effusions of Scott's
genius. Yet there is much pure feeling, many touches of tenderness
in the tale, and many passages fitted to awaken our best affec
tions. Even the false political economy bordering on communism, is
redeemed by the tendency of the book to excite sympathy for the
sufferings, destitution, and mental degradation of the poor. The
dramatic power displayed in many scenes, is of a high order ; as
when the Jesuit Rodin, receiving his credentials from Rome, is
suddenly converted into the superior of the haughty chief to whom
he had been previously the humble secretary, and where Dago-
bert's wife, under the direction of her confessor, refuses, in opposi
tion to a husband whom she loves and respects, to betray the
place of concealment of two young orphans, the victims of a vile
conspiracy. In this part of the narrative, moreover, the beauty
of the devotional character of the female mind is done full justice
to, while the evils of priestly domination are exhibited in their
true colors. The imprisonment of a young girl, of strong mind
and superior understanding, in a madhouse, until she is worked
upon almost to doubt her own sanity, are described with much
delicacy of feeling and pathos, and make the reader shudder at
the facility with which such institutions, if not subject to public
inspection, may be, and have been abused.
The great moral and object of the whole piece, is to expose the
worldly ambition of the Romanist clergy, especially of the Jesuits,
and the injury done, not only to the intellectual progress of society
at large, but to the peace and happiness of private families, by
their perpetual meddling with domestic concerns. That the shafts
CHAP. XXXIX.] MR. GALLATIN ON INDIAN CORN. 255
of this satire have not missed their aim, has been proved, among
other evidences, by its having been thought politic, even in En
gland, to circulate, chiefly, it is said, among the Irish Catholics, an
" Adaptation of the Wandering Jew, from the original of Eugene
Sue." In this singular re-cast of the French romance, which I
have perused, the Russian police is every where substituted for
the Jesuits, and Rodin becomes the tool of the Czar, intriguing
in French politics, instead of the servant of the successor of Ig
natius Loyola. On the whole, I am inclined to believe that the
good preponderates over the evil, in the influence exerted on the
million, even by such a romance. It has a refining rather than
a corrupting effect, and may lead on to the study of works of a
more exalting character. The great step is gained, when the
powers of the imagination have been stimulated and the dormant
and apathetic mind awakened and lifted above the prosaic mono
tony of every-day life.
May 9. — Called with a letter of introduction on Mr. Gallatin,
well known by a long and distinguished career in political life.
As a diplomatist in London, he negotiated the original Oregon
treaty with Great Britain, and has now, at the age of eighty-
two, come out with several able and spirited pamphlets, to de
monstrate to his countrymen that their national honor would not
be compromised by accepting the terms offered by the British
Cabinet. Being at the same time an experienced financier, he
has told them plainly, if they will go to war, how much it will
cost them annually, and what taxes they should make up their
minds to submit to cheerfully, if they would carry on a campaign
with honor and spirit against such an enemy.
In the course of conversation I found that Mr. Gallatin was
of opinion that the indigenous civilization of several Indian tribes,
and of the Mexicans and Peruvians among others, was mainly due
to the possession of a grain so productive, and, when dried in the sun,
so easily kept for many years, as the maize or Indian corn. The
potato, which, when healthy, can rarely be stored up and pre
served till the next harvest, may be said, on the contrary, to be a
food on which none but an improvident race would lean for sup
port. " I have long been convinced," said Mr. Gallatin, " that
256 WAR WITH MEXICO. [CHAP. XXXIX.
the Indian corn has also given a powerful impulse to the rapid
settlement of the whites in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and other
western states. In one of my first excursions to the west, I saw
a rnan felling trees in March, who, when I returned in October,
had harvested a crop of Indian corn, grown on the very spot.
He had also the leaves and stems of the plant to serve for winter
fodder for his cattle. He was an emigrant, newly arrived, and
entirely without the capital indispensable to enable him to culti
vate wheat, which must have been twelve or thirteen months in
the ground before it could be reaped."
Next day the stirring news of the invasion of the Mexican
territory by the American army, reached New York, and I met
the news-boys, in every street, crying out, "War with Mexico!"
Soon afterward I saw the walls covered with placards, headed
with the words, " Ho, for the halls of the Montezumas !"
The mayor had called a public meeting to express sympathy
with the President and the war-party at Washington. This
meeting was held in the Park, and although it may have served
the purpose of the democratic party, it was certainly a signal
failure, if any strong expression of popular feeling in favor of such
a war was looked for. In the crowd I heard nothing but Irish,
Scotch, and German accents, and the only hearty cheer which
any one orator could draw, even from this mob of foreigners,
was obtained by representing the Mexicans as acting under the
influence of British gold.
I met with no one person in society who defended the aggres
sion on the Mexican territory ; but, as they can not prevent it,
they endeavor, each in his way, to comfort themselves that the
mischief is no worse, some saying, it will be a less evil than
fighting with Great Britain ; others that it will furnish employ
ment for a host of turbulent spirits ; while some merchants hint
that the democratic party, had they been economical, might
have lowered the tariff, and carried out their dangerous theory
of free trade, whereas now they will plunge the nation into debt,
and be compelled to resort to high duties, which will " protect
native industry." The dissatisfaction of others is unbounded ;
they dread the annexation of a region containing five millions of
CHAP. XXXIX.] RAISING TROOPS. 257
Indians, which, say they, will deteriorate the general standard of
the white population ; — they deplore the development of a love
for military glory, a passion inconsistent with all true republican
principles ; — and one friend observed to me, " You will soon see
a successful soldier, wholly unknown to all of us at this moment,
a man unversed in civil affairs, raised to the Presidentship." I
asked whether, in a country where nearly all are industriously
employed, it will be possible to find recruits for foreign service.
Nothing, they reply, is more easy. " Our broad Indian frontier
has nurtured a daring and restless population, which loves ex
citement and adventure, and in the southern states there are
numbers of whites to whom military service would be a boon,
because slavery has degraded labor." A week later I received a
letter from a correspondent in the south, who said, " Such is the
military fever in Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi,
that these states alone would furnish 50,000 men, if required ;
and in many districts we are in fear of such an enlistment of the
white population, that there will be too few left at home to serve
as a police for the negroes. Married men are going, as well as
bachelors, lawyers, medical men, and schoolmasters, many of
whom have no taste whatever for fighting or foreign service, but
they know that to have served a year in a campaign, to have
been in a battle, or have been wounded, would advance them
more in an election, or even in their several professions, than any
amount of study or acquired knowledge."
The Sunday following we heard a sermon by the Rev. Orville
Dewey, in which this spirit of territorial aggrandizement, this
passion for war, these false notions of national honor and glory,
were characterized as unchristian, and indicating a low standard
of private as well as public morality. I remarked to a New
England acquaintance, who was one of the large congregation,
that whatever might be said against the voluntary system, the
pulpit in America seemed to me more independent than the press.
" Because every newspaper," he replied, " is supported by half
yearly or annual subscribers, and no editor dares write against
the popular sentiment. He knows that a dagger is always sus
pended over him by a thread, and if he presumed to run counter
258 DR. DEWEY— UNITARIANISM. [CHAP. XXXIX.
to the current, his table would be covered next morning- with
letters each beginning with the dreaded words, ' Stop my paper.'
He has made a bargain, like that of Dr. Faustus, with the devil,
bartering away his immortal soul for a few thousand dollars."
When I afterward reflected on this alleged tyranny of regular
subscribers, it occurred to me that the evil must be in a great
degree mitigated by the cheapness and variety of daily prints,
each the organ of some distinct party or shade of opinion, and
great numbers of them freely taken in at every reading-room and
every hotel.
I might say of Dr. Dewey's discourse, as I have already said
of the preaching of the Unitarians generally, that, without want
ing spirituality, it was more practical and less doctrinal than the
majority of sermons to which I have been accustomed to listen.
But I should mislead my readers, if I gave them to understand
that they could frequent churches of this denomination without
risk of sometimes having their feelings offended by hearing doc
trines they have been taught to reverence treated slightingly, or
even with contempt. On one occasion (and it was the only one
in my experience), I was taken, when at Boston, to hear an emi
nent Unitarian preacher, who was prevented by illness from offi
ciating, and his place was supplied by a self-satisfied young man,
who, having talked dogmatically on points contested by many a
rationalist, made it clear that he commiserated the weak minds
of those who adhered to articles of faith rejected by his church.
If this too common method of treating theological subjects be ill
calculated to convince or conciliate dissentients, it is equally
reprehensible from its tendency to engender, in the minds of those
who assent, a Pharisaical feeling of self-gratulation that they are
not as other sectarians are.
T can only account for the power which the Unitarians have
exerted, and are now exerting, in forwarding the great education
al movement in America, in the face of that almost superstitious
prejudice with which their theology is regarded by nineteen-
twentieths of the population, by attributing it to the love of
intellectual progress which animates both their clergy and laity,
and the deep conviction they are known to feel that public moral-
CHAP. XXXIX.] EXCURSION TO ALBANY. 259
ity and happiness can only be insured by spreading an elevated
standard of popular education throughout the masses. In their
enthusiastic pursuit of this great end, they are acknowledged to
have no thought of making proselytes to any system of religious
doctrines, and are therefore trusted in the management of schools
by the parents of children of the most opposite persuasions. In
regard to their own faith, some misapprehension has arisen, in
consequence of the name they bear, which was not chosen by
themselves, but to which, on the contrary, they have objections,
such as members of the Anglican Church might feel if some such
name as Anti-transubstantiationists, or any term which simply
expressed their opposition to some one article of the Romanist
creed, had been fixed upon them. When the rigid Calvinism of
the old Puritans caused a schism in New England, the seceders
wished to free themselves from the fetters of a creed, and to take
the Gospel alone as their standard of faith. They were naturally,
therefore, averse to accept a name which might be generally
supposed to imply that they attached a prominent importance to
the negation of any one doctrine professed by other Christians.
"I desire," said Charming, " to wear the livery of no party;
but we accept the appellation which others have imposed upon
us, because it expresses what we believe to be a truth, and
therefore we ought not to shrink from the reproaches cast upon
it. But, had the name been more honored, had no popular cry
been raised against it, I would gladly have thrown it off."*
May 11. — Sailed from New York to Albany in a steamer,
which carried me at the rate of eighteen miles an hour through
the beautiful scenery of the Hudson Hiver. I had been invited
by two of the state surveyors of New York to make an excursion
with them to the north of Albany, and to discuss in the field
some controverted points respecting the geology of the oldest fos-
siliferous strata. There was a physician on board, who, having
been settled for twenty-six years in Virginia, had now come back,
after that long absence, to see his native state. His admiration
and wonder at the progress made by New York in a quarter of
a century were unbounded. Speaking of his adopted country,
* Channing's Works, vol. iii. p. 210.
260 HELDERBERG WAR. [CHAP. XXXIX.
he exclaimed, " We have been left far behind in the race." I
suggested, that if, twenty-six years ago, a period had been fixed
upon by law for the emancipation of their slaves, Virginia might,
ere this, have been relieved of nearly all her negro population,
so great has been the migration of negroes to the south. " It is
useless," he said, "to discuss the practicability of such a measure,
while the majority of our legislators, having been born slave
holders, are not convinced of its desirability." While my com
panion was absorbed in admiration at the improvement of " the
Empire State," my thoughts and feelings took a very different turn,
when I learned that "the Helderberg war," which I have alluded
to in my former " Travels,"^ is still going on, and seems as far
from a termination as ever. The agricultural population through
out many populous counties have now been in arms for eight
years, to resist payment of rents due to their landlords, in spite
of the decisions of the courts of law against them. Large con
tributions have been made toward an insurrectionary fund — one
of its objects being to support a newspaper, edited Ijy a Chartist
refugee from England, in which the most dangerous anti-social
doctrines are promulgated. The " anti-renters" have not only
set the whole militia of the state at defiance, in more than one
campaign, but have actually killed a sheriff's officer, who was
distraining for rent ! If any thing could add to the disgrace
which such proceedings reflect on the political administration of
affairs in New York, it is the fact that the insurgents would
probably have succumbed ere this, had they not been buoyed up
by hopes of legislative interference in their favor, held out to them
by popularity-hunting candidates for the governorship, and other
official places.
In the newspapers of the day, a scene described as having
occurred at the close of the legislative session in Albany excited
my curiosity. One of the members of the House of Representa
tives moved a vote of thanks " to the gentlemen of the third
house for the regularity of their attendance and the courtesy
with which they had conducted themselves." The motion was
seconded, read from the chair amidst great laughter, and then
* Vol. i. p. 68.
CHAP. XXXIX.] "THE THIRD HOUSE." 261
allowed to drop. I inquired what might be the meaning of this
joke, and was asked in reply whether I had read the letters of
Jesse Hoyt and others, edited by Mackenzie ? I had, indeed,
purchased the pamphlet alluded to, containing a selection from
an immense mass (said to amount to twenty-five volumes) of the
private and confidential correspondence of official men, left acci
dentally by them, on a change of administration, in the custom
house of New York. All these had been printed for the benefit
of the public by their successors. The authenticity of the docu
ments made known by this gentlemanlike stroke of party tactics,
purporting to be penned by men who had filled high places in
the State and Federal Governments, had been placed beyond a
doubt ; for the writers had attempted to obtain an injunction in
the law courts to stop the publication, claiming the copyright of
letters which they had written. Some time before this conver
sation, a merchant of Boston, who wished me to look only on the
bright side of their institutions, and who was himself an optimist,
had said to me, " Our politicians work in a glass hive, so that
you always see the worst of them ; whereas your public men can
throw a decent vail of secrecy over much that may be selfish and
sordid in the motives of their conduct. Hence the scandal of
your court and cabinets is only divulged to posterity, a hundred
years after the events, in private memoirs." Unfortunately for
this theory, a glance at the Mackenzie letters was enough to
teach me, that, if the American bees work in a glass hive, the
glass is not quite so transparent as my friend would have led me
to believe. The explanation of the satirical motion made in the
House at Albany, then proceeded thus : " The patronage of the
State of New York is enormous ; the Governor alone has the
appointment of two hundred and sixty civil officers, and the
nomination of more than two thousand places is vested jointly in
him and the senate. Some of these are for two, others for five
years, and they are worth from two hundred to five thousand
dollars a year. Among the posts most coveted, because the
gains are sometimes very high, though fluctuating, are those of
the inspectors, who set their mark or brand on barrels of exported
goods, such as flour, tobacco, preserved pork, mackerel and other
262 PLACE-HUNTING. [CHAP. XXXIX.
fish, to guarantee their good quality, arid guard the public against
imposition, in cases where the articles would be injured if opened
and examined by the purchaser. It is scarcely necessary to state,
that where the prey is so abundant, there will the eagles be gath
ered together ; and besides the aspirants to vacant offices, there
is a crowd of lawyers and paid agents of private individuals and
companies, who have to watch the passage of private and public
bills through the legislature. During the whole session, they fill
the Governor's ante-room, and the lobby of each house ; and, as
they are equal in respectability, number, station, and influence,
to the two other houses put together, besides that they spend,
perhaps, more money in Albany, we dignify them with the name
of < the third house.' "
" Are they," said I, " suspected of giving money-bribes to
legislators ?" " No ; but they may convey a party of repre
sentatives on a railway trip, to make them acquainted with the
merits of some case relating to a canal or railroad, and then
entertain them with a dinner before they return." " In Massa
chusetts," said I, " people speak with more respect of their
assembly." '• No doubt, for in that state there is much less to
give away, and therefore less corruption and intrigue. Besides,
we have only 160 senators and representatives, whereas the
assembly at Boston is far more numerous, so that it is not so
easy to bring the influence of 'the third house' to bear upon it."
In the public museum at Albany, Dr. Emmons showed me a
fine collection of simple minerals, rocks, and fossils, made by
himself and other geologists to whom the state survey was
intrusted. He then accompanied me across the Hudson River,
to examine the slate and limestone eastward of Albany. Here,
from the summit of Greenbush Hill, we enjoyed a magnificent
view of the Catskill Mountains, and the Helderberg range in the
distance. In the foreground was the river, and Albany itself,
now containing a population of 40,000 inhabitants, with its domes
and spires clustered together, in the higher parts of the city, and
lighted up by a bright sunshine.
The day following, Dr. Emmon.s and Mr. James Hall went
with me to explore the chain of the Bald Mountains, north of
CHAP. XXXIX.] SPRLNG FLOWERS— GEOLOGY. 263
Galeville. We passed through the gay town of Saratoga Springs,
where the mineral waters burst out from "the Lower Silurian,"
or most ancient fossiliferous rocks. We saw many picturesque
spots, especially the waterfall called Baaten Kill, near Galeville,
but no grand or striking scenery. Among the plants in blossom,
we gathered Anemone nemorosa, Trientalis americana (less
beautiful than our British Trientalis europcea), Cypripedium
pubescens, Geranium sylvaticum, three species of violet (all
without scent), Homtonia ccerulea, Gnaplialium perenne, and
in several copses, the beautiful Polygala paucijlora, which might
be truly said —
" To purple all the ground with vernal flowers."
Whether, in this part of the United States, there are any fos
siliferous rocks older than the Lower Silurian, was the geological
point at issue ; and the question resembled one on which an
animated controversy had lately been carried on in Great Britain,
in regard to the relative ages of the " Cambrian" and " Silu
rian" groups. As those strata, called Cambrian, which contained
organic remains, were found to be nothing more than highly
disturbed and semi-crystalline Silurian rocks, so I believe the
formations called Taconic in the United States, to have claim to
no higher antiquity, and to be simply Silurian strata much altered,
and often quite metamorphic.
CHAPTER XL.
Construction and Management of Railways in America. — Journey by Long
Island from New York to Boston. — Whale Fishery in the Pacific. —
Chewing Tobacco. — Visit to Wenham Lake. — Cause of the superior
Permanence of Wenham Lake Ice. — Return to Boston. — Skeletons of
Fossil Mastodons. — Food of those extinct Quadrupeds. — Anti-war De
monstration. — Voyage to Halifax. — Dense Fog. — Large Group of Ice
bergs seen on the Ocean. — Transportation of Rocks by Icebergs. — Danger
of fast Sailing among Bergs. — Aurora Borealis. — Connection of this
Phenomenon with drift Ice. — Pilot with English Newspapers. — Return
to Liverpool.
May 21, 1846. — IN the construction and management of
railways, the Americans have in general displayed more prudence
and economy than could have been expected, where a people of
such sanguine temperament were entering on so novel a career
of enterprise. Annual dividends of seven or eight per cent, have
been returned for a large part of the capital laid out on the New
England railways, and on many others in the northern states.
The cost of passing the original bills through the state parliaments
has usually been very moderate, and never exorbitant ; the lines
have been carried as much as possible through districts where
land was cheap ; a single line only laid down where the traffic
did not justify two ; high gradients resorted to, rather than incur
the expense of deep cuttings ; tunnels entirely avoided ; very little
money spent in building station-houses ; and, except where the
population was large, they have been content with the speed of
fourteen or sixteen miles an hour. It has, moreover, been an
invariable maxim " to go for numbers," by lowering the fares so
as to bring them within the reach of all classes. Occasionally,
when the intercourse between two rich and populous cities, like
New York and Boston, has excited the eager competition of rival
companies, they have accelerated the speed far beyond the usual
average ; and we were carried from one metropolis to the other,
CHAP. XL.J WHALE FISHERY. -2G5
a distance of 239 miles, at the rate of thirty miles an hour, in a
commodious, lofty, and well- ventilated car, the charge being only
three dollars, or thirteen shillings. We went by a route newly
opened, first through Long Island, ninety-five miles in length,
over a low, level tract, chiefly composed of fine sand ; and wo
then found a steamer ready to take us across the Sound to New
London in Connecticut, where we were met by the cars at Point
Allen ; after which we enjoyed much delightful scenery, the rail
way following the margin of a river, where there were cascades
and rapids foaming over granite rocks, and overhung with trees,
whose foliage, just unfolded, was illumined by a brilliant sun
shine.
In the estuary of New London we saw many large whalers,
arid a merchant talked to me with satisfaction of the success of
the United States whale-fishery in the Pacific, saying it amounted
to 200,000 tons, while that of Great Britain did not exceed
60,000. "Five fish," said he, "is the usual cargo of an English
whaler, as they boil the blubber at home, whereas the Americans
boil it in a huge cauldron on deck, and after staying out three years,
return with the oil of ninety whales in one ship. Our fishery
in the Pacific is becoming a most important nursery for seamen,
giving occupation to about 20,000 men, which would enable us
at any moment to man a powerful fleet. The possession of
California is therefore much coveted by us, because the port of
San Francisco is the only one in the northern Pacific not exposed
to the west wind, or blocked up by a bar of sand, such as that
which renders the mouth of the Columbia River impassable to
large ships. It is not territory but a sea-port we need, and this
advantage a war with Mexico may give us."
There was besides much characteristic conversation in the cars,
about constructing a railway 4000 miles long from Washington
to the Columbia River ; and some of the passengers were specu
lating on the hope of seeing in their lifetime a population of 15,000
souls settled in Oregon and California. A variety of plans was
also freely discussed for crossing the isthmus from the Gulf of
Mexico into the Pacific, so as to avoid the long and dangerous
voyage round Cape Horn. A ship-canal across the isthmus of
VOL. II. M
2G6 CHEWING TOBACCO. [CHAP. XL.
Tehuantepec, 135 miles in length, was alluded to as the favorite
scheme ; and the expediency of forcing Mexico to cede a right of
way was spoken of as if the success of their campaign was certain.
It is the fashion for travelers in the New World to dwell so
much on the chewing of tobacco, that I may naturally be ex
pected to say something of this practice. There is enough of it
1<> bo very annoying in steamboats and railway-cars, but far less
so as we journey northward ; and T never saw, even in the south,
:uiy chewing of the weed in drawing-rooms, although we were
told in South Carolina that some old gentlemen still indulged in
I his habit. That it is comparatively rare in the New England
stales, was attested by an anecdote related to me of a captain
\\lio commands one of the steamers on Lake Champlain, who
prided himself on the whiteness of his deck, intended to be kept
as a promenade. Observing a southerner occasionally polluting
its clean iloor, he ordered a boy to follow him up and down with
a s\v;ib, to the infinite diversion of the passengers, and the no
small indignation of the southerner, when at length he discovered
how his footsteps had been dodged. The governor of a peniten
tiary told me, that to deprive prisoners of tobacco was found to
be a very efficient punishment, and that its use was prohibited
in the New England madhouses, as being too exciting.
From Boston we went to Ipswich, in Massachusetts, to visit
Mr. Oakes, the botanist, with whom we had spent many pleasant
days in the White Mountains.* lie set out with us on an ex
cursion to Wenham Lake, from which so much ice is annually
exported 1o England and other parts of the world.
This lake lies about twenty miles to the northeast of Boston.
It has a small island in the middle of it, is about a mile long and
lorl y feet deep, arid is surrounded by hills of sand and gravel, from
forty to a hundred feel high. The water is always clear and pure,
and the bottom covered with white quartzose sand. It is fed by
springs, and receives no mud from any stream flowing into it ;
but at the lower extremity a small brook of transparent water
Hows out. In some parts, however, there must, I presume, be a
soft and muddy bottom, as it is inhabited by eels, as well as by
* See vol. i. p. 64.
CHAP. XL.] WENHAM LAKE ICE. 267
pickerel and perch. Mr. Oakes had recently received a present
of a snapping turtle, weighing 25 Ibs., taken from the lake. The
ice is conveyed by railway to Boston to be shipped, and the in
crease of business has of late been such as to cause the erection
of new buildings, measuring 127 feet by 120, and 24 feet high.
They stand on the water's edge, by the side of the old store
houses, which are very extensive, built of wood, with double
walls two feet apart, the space between being filled with saw
dust, which excludes the external air ; while tan is heaped up,
for the same purpose, on the outside. The work of cutting and
storing the ice is carried on in winter, and is not commenced till
the ice is at least a foot thick. The surface is always carefully
swept and kept free from snow ; and as none but the most com
pact and solid ice is fit for the market, it is necessary to shave
off three inches or more of the superficial ice, by means of a
machine called an ice-plane, drawn by a horse. This operation
is especially required after a thaw or a fall of rain, succeeded by a
frost, which causes the lake to be covered with opaque, porous ice.
Sir Francis Head, in his "Emigrant," 1846, has attributed
the durability of the Wenham Lake ice, or its power of resisting
liquefaction, to the intense cold of a North American winter. It
is perfectly true that this ice does not melt so fast as English ice ;
but the cause of this phenomenon is, I believe, very different from
that assigned for it by the late governor of Upper Canada.
" People in England/' he says, " are prone to think that ice is
ice; but the truth is, that the temperature of 32° Fahrenheit,
that at which water freezes, is only the commencement of an
operation that is almost infinite ; for after its congelation, water
is as competent to continue to receive cold, as it was when it was
fluid. The application of cold to a block of ice does not, as in
the case of heat applied beneath boiling water, cause what is added
at one end to fly out at the other : but, on the contrary, the cen*
ter cold is added to and retained by the mass, and thus the tem
perature of the ice falls with the temperature of the air, until in
Lower Canada it occasionally sinks to 40° below zero, or 72°
below the temperature of ice just congealed. It is evident, there
fore, that if two ice-houses were to be filled, the one with Canada
268 WENHAM LAKE IOE. [CHAP. XL.
ice, and the other with English ice, the difference between the
quantity of cold stored up in each would be as appreciable as the
difference between a cellar full of gold and a cellar full of copper ;
that is to say, a cubic foot of Lower Canada ice is infinitely more
valuable, or, in other words, it contains infinitely more cold, than.
a cubic foot of Upper Canada ice, which again contains more
cold than a cubic foot of Wenham ice, which contains infinitely
more cold than a cubic foot of English ice ; and thus, although
each of these four cubic feet of ice has precisely the same shape,
they each, as summer approaches, diminish in value ; that is to
say, they each gradually lose a portion of their cold, until, long
before the Lower Canada ice has melted, the English ice has
been converted into lukewarm water."
There can be no doubt that where an intense frost gives rise
to a great thickness of ice, permitting large cubic masses to be
obtained after the superficial and porous ice has been planed off,
a great advantage is afforded to the American ice merchant, and
the low temperature acquired by the mass must prevent it from
melting so readily when the hot season comes on, since it has first
to be warmed up to 32° Fahrenheit, before it can begin to melt.
Nevertheless, each fragment of ice, when removed from the store
house, very soon acquires the temperature of 32° Fahrenheit,
and yet when a lump of Wenham ice has been brought to En
gland, it does not melt by any means so readily as a similar lump
of common English ice. Mr. Faraday tells me that Wenham
Lake ice is exceedingly pure, being both free from air-bubbles and
from salts. The presence of the first makes it extremely difficult
to succeed in making a lens of English ice which will concentrate
the solar rays and readily fire gunpowder, whereas nothing is
easier than to perform this singular feat of igniting a combustible
body by the aid of a frozen mass, if Wenham ice be employed.
The absence of salts conduces greatly to the permanence of
the ice, for where water is so frozen that the salts expelled are
still contained in air-cavities and cracks, or form thin films be
tween the layers of the ice, these entangled salts cause the ice to
melt at a lower temperature than 32°, and the liquefied portions
give rise to streams and currents within the body of the ice, which
CHAP. XL.] RETURN TO BOSTON. 269
rapidly carry heat to the interior. The mass then goes on thaw
ing within as well as without, and at temperatures below 32° ;
whereas pure and compact Wenham ice can only thaw at 32°,
and only on the outside of the mass.
Boston, May, 23. — Sir Humphrey Davy, in his " Consola
tions in Travel,"*1 has said, that he never entered London, after
having been absent for some time, without feelings of pleasure
and hope ; for there he could enjoy the most refined society in
the grand theater of intellectual activity, the metropolis of the
world of business, thought, and action, in politics, literature, and
science.
I have more than once experienced the same feelings of hope
and pleasure after having wandered over the less populous and
civilized parts of the United States, when I returned to Boston,
and never more so than on this occasion, when, after traveling
over so large a space in the southern and western states, we
spent ten days in the society of our literary and scientific friends
in the metropolis of Massachusetts, and in the flourishing univer
sity in its suburbs. They who wish to give a true picture of the
national character of America, what it now is, and is destined to
become, must study chiefly those towns which contain the great
est number of native-born Citizens. They must sojourn in the
east, rather than in the west or south, not among the six millions
who are one half African and the other half the owners of negroes,
nor among the settlers in the back-woods, who are half Irish,
German, or Norwegians, nor among the people of French origin
in Louisiana ; for, however faithfully they may portray the pecu
liarities of such districts, they will give no better a representation
of America, than an accurate description of Tipperary, Conne-
mara, the West Indies, French Canada, Australia, and the vari
ous lands into which Great Britain is pouring her surplus popu
lation, would convey of England.
Among other scientific novelties at Boston, I was taken to see
two magnificent skeletons, recently obtained, of the huge masto
don, one of them found in Warren County, New Jersey, which a
farmer had met with six feet below the surface, when digging
* P. 168.
270 FOSSIL MASTODON. [CHAP. XL.
out the rich mud from a small pond newly drained. There were
no less than six skeletons, five of them lying together, and the
sixth and largest about ten feet apart from the rest. A large
portion of the bones crumbled to pieces as soon as they were
exposed to the air, but nearly the whole of the separate specimen
was preserved. Dr. John Jackson called my attention to the in
teresting fact that this perfect skeleton proved the correctness of
Cuvier's conjecture respecting this extinct animal, namely, that
it had twenty ribs, like the elephant, although no more than nine
teen had ever been previously found. From the clay in the in
terior within the ribs, just where the contents of the stomach
might naturally have been looked for, seven bushels of vegetable
matter had been extracted ; and Professor Webster, of Harvard
College, had the kindness to present me with some of it, which
has since been microscopically examined for me in London by
Mr. A. Henfrey, of the Geological Survey. He informs me that
it consists of pieces of the small twigs of a coniferous tree of the
cypress family ; and they resemble in structure the young shoots
of the white cedar ( Thuja occidentalis), still a native of North
America, on which, therefore, we may conclude that the masto
don fed.
But a still nobler specimen of this great proboscidian quadru
ped was exhumed in August, 1845, in the town of Newburg,
New York, and purchased by Dr. John C. Warren, Professor of
Anatomy in Harvard University. It is the most complete, and,
perhaps, the largest ever met with. The bones contain a consid
erable proportion of their original gelatine, and are firm in text
ure. The tusks, when discovered, were ten feet long ; but the
larger part of them had decomposed, and could not be preserved.
The length of the skeleton was twenty-five feet, and its height
twelve feet, the anchylosing of the two last ribs on the right side
affording the comparative anatomist a true guage for the space
occupied by the intervertebrate substance, so as to enable him to
form a correct estimate of the entire length. Dr. Warren gave
me an excellent Daguerreotype of this skeleton for Mr. Clift, of
the College of Surgeons in London.
Nothing is more remarkable than the large proportion of ani-
CHAP. XL.] ANTI-WAR DEMONSTRATION. 271
mal matter in the tusks, teeth, and bones of many of these extinct
mammalia, amounting in some cases, as Dr. C. T. Jackson has
ascertained by analysis, to 27 per cent., so that when all the
earthy ingredients are removed by acids, the form of the bone
remains as perfect, and the mass of animal matter is almost as
firm, as in a recent bone subjected to similar treatment. It
would be rash, however, to infer confidently from such data that
these quadrupeds were mired at periods more modern than the
fossil elephants found imbedded in similar clayey deposits in
Europe, for the climate prevailing in this part of America may
possibly have been colder than it was on the eastern side of the
Atlantic. At the same time, I have stated in my former "Trav
els,"* that all the mastodons whose geological position I was
able to examine into, in Canada and the United States, lived
subsequently to the period of erratic blocks, and the formations
commonly called glacial. I have also shown that the contempo
rary fresh- water and land shells were of such species as now live
in the same region, so that the climate could scarcely have differed
very materially from that now prevailing in the same latitudes.
During my stay at Boston, as I was returning one evening
through Washington-street, I fell in with a noisy rabble of young
men and boys, some of whom were dressed up for the occasion in
rags, and provided with drums, sticks, whistles, tin-kettles, and
pans, with other musical instruments, most of them on foot, but
some mounted arid sitting with their faces toward the horse's Gl
ass's tail, others with banners, calling out, " Hurrah for Texas,"
for they styled themselves "the Texas volunteers." This I found
was an anti-war demonstration, and shows that there is a portion
even of the humblest class here, who are inclined to turn the
agressive spirit and thirst for conquest of the Washington Cabinet
into ridicule.
June 1. — Sailed for England in the Britannia, one of the
Cunard line of steamers, the same in which we had made our
outward voyage. For several days a white fog had been setting
in from the sea at Boston, and we were therefore not surprised
to find the mist so dense off the harbor of Halifax that the light-
* Vol. i. pp. 51, 55. Vol. ii. p. 65.
VOYAGE TO HALIFAX. [CHAP. XL.
house was invisible. By a continual discharge of guns, which
were answered by the firing of cannon at the light-house, our
captain was able safely to steer his ship into the harbor. In the
post office we found letters from England, left by a steamer
which had touched there two days before, and had come from
Liverpool in nine days.
June 7. — When wo had quitted Halifax five days, and were
on the wide ocean, the monotony of the scene was suddenly
broken by the approach of a group of icebergs, several hundred
in number, varying in height from 100 to 250 feet, all of the
purest white, except such portions as, being in shade, assumed a
greenish hue, or such as acquired a delicate rose-color tint from
the rays of the evening sun. These splendid bergs were supposed
to have floated from Placentia Bay, in Newfoundland, where a
great many merchantmen had been imprisoned for several months
by a huge barrier of ice. They were almost all of picturesque
shapes, and some of them of most fantastic form ; three in par
ticular, which came within a mile of us. One presented a huge
dome, rising from the center of a flat tabular mass ; another,
more than 100 feet high, was precisely in the form of a pyramid,
quite sharp at the top, and the angle formed by the meeting of
two sides, very well defined ; at the base of it rose a hummock,
which we called the Egyptian Sphinx. The third was covered
Avith pinnacles, and seemed like a portion of the Glacier des
Bossons, in the valley of Chamouni, detached and afloat Kreet
on one side of it stood an isolated obelisk of ice, 100 feet high,
which increased A^ery slightly in size toward the base. Some of
these bodies appeared to the north, others far to the south of us,
the loftiest of the whole rising out of the water to the height of
•!00 feet, according to the conjecture of the seamen, Avho thought
they could not be far out in their estimate, as there Avas a schooner
alongside of it, and they could tell the height of her mast Avithin
a few feet. We sailed within half a mile of several bergs, Avhich
were :2T)0 feet, and within a quarter of a mile of one 150 feet in
height, on which, by aid of the telescope, AVC distinctly observed
a great number of sea-birds, which looked like minute black specks
on a white ground. I Avas most anxious to ascertain whether
CHAP. XL.] ICEBERGS. 273
there was any mud, stones, or fragments of rock on any one of
these floating masses, but after examining about forty of them
without perceiving any signs of foreign matter, I left the deck
when it was growing dusk. My questions had excited the
curiosity of the captain and officers of the ship, who assured me
they had never seen any stones on a berg, observing, at the same
time, that they had always been so eager to get out of their
way, and in such a state of anxiety when near them, that such
objects might easily have been overlooked. I had scarcely gone
below ten minutes, when one of the passengers came to tell me
that the captain had seen a black mass as large as a boat on an
iceberg, about 150 feet high, which was very near. By aid of a
glass, it was made out distinctly to be a space about nine feet
square covered with black stones. The base of the berg on the
side toward the steamer was GOO feet long, and from the dark
spot to the water's edge, there was a stripe of soiled ice, as if the
water streaming down a slope, as the ice melted, had carried
mud suspended in it. In the soiled channel were seen two
blocks, each about the size of a man's head. Although I re
turned instantly to the deck when the berg was still in sight,
such was then the haziness of the air, and the rapidity of our
motion, that the dark spot was no longer discernible. Such in
stances of the transportation of rocks by ice, occurrences most
interesting to geologists, were first recorded by Scoresby, in the
northern hemisphere ; but from the accounts given me by Sir
James Ross and Dr. Joseph Hooker, they are evidently much
more common in the icebergs drifted from the antarctic than
from those of the arctic regions.
When we were among the ice, the temperature of the water
was 45° Fahrenheit. On the day before we came up with it,
the passengers had already begun to look out warmer clothing,
and shawls and great coats were in requisition. Occasionally we
were steering among small pieces of ice, and the wheel at the
helm was turned iirst one way and then another, reminding me
of the dangers of the Mississippi, when we were avoiding the
bumping against logs. In the fore part of the vessel the watch
was trebled, some aloft and others below, and we went on at the
M*
274 AURORA BOREALIS. [CHAP. XL.
rate of nine miles an hour, and once in the night came within
less than a ship's length of a large berg. A naval officer on
board declared to me next morning that the peril had been im
minent ; that he had weathered a typhoon in the Chinese seas,
and would rather brave another than sail so fast in the night
through a pack of icebergs. He now thought it most probable
that the President steam-ship had been lost by striking a berg.
He reminded me that we had seen a pinnacle of ice, distant 100
yards or more from the main body of a berg, of which it was
evidently a part, the intervening submerged ice being concealed
under water. How easily, therefore, might we have struck
against similar hidden masses, where no such projecting pinnacle
remained to warn us of our danger.
At half-past nine o'clock on the evening of the 8th June, it
being bright moonlight, some hours after we had lost sight of the
ice, when we were in a latitude corresponding to the south of
France, we saw in the north a most brilliant exhibition of the
Aurora Borealis ; the sky seemed to open and close, emitting,
for a short period, silvery streams of light like comets' tails, and
then a large space became overspread with a most delicate
roseate hue. The occurrence of this phenomenon in the summer
season, and in so southern a latitude, seemed to point to its con
nection with the ice which was drifting over the sea between us
and Newfoundland, now to the N. W. of us. We learn from
Sir James Ross's narrative of the late antarctic expedition, the
highly interesting fact, that when the Aurora Borealis was playing
over the great barrier of coast ice on the shores of the antarctic
land, it partook distinctly of the irregular and broken shape of
the icy cliffs over which it hovered.*
June 12. — A pilot came on board from Ireland, with English
newspapers, filled with debates on the repeal of the corn-laws.
Among the foreign news, a considerable space was occupied with
the affairs of France, Germany, Italy, India, China, and there
was only a short paragraph or two about America, North and
South. I had been traveling long enough in the New World to
sympathize fully with the feelings of some of my American fellow-
* Vol. ii. p. 221. 1842.
CHAP. XL.] RETURN TO LIVERPOOL. 275
passengers, who were coming abroad for the first time, when they
expressed their surprise at the small space which the affairs of
the United States occupied even in English journals. It is a
lesson which every traveler has to learn when he is far from home,
and seeks in a foreign newspaper to gain some intelligence of his
native land. He is soon accustomed to find that day after day
even the name of his country is not mentioned.
The speed of our steamer had been constantly increasing as the
weight of coal diminished. The length of the voyage, therefore,
to America might be considerably abridged if the quantity of coal
were lessened by a day and a half's consumption, the steamer
starting from the west of Ireland, to which passengers might be
conveyed in a few hours, by steamboat and railway, from Liv
erpool.
June 13, Saturday. — Anchored off Liverpool at half-past ten
o'clock in the evening, having made the passage from Boston in
twelve days and a half, it being nine months and nine days since
we left that port.
INDEX.
INDEX.
ABOLITIONIST " wrecker," ii 39.
Abolitionists, i. 239, 240 ; ii. 127.
, colored, i. 103, 104.
Absenteeism in Southern States, ii. 70.
Acquia Creek, ii. 247.
Actors in steamer, ii. 165.
Advocates and attorneys, i. 46.
African Tom, i. 266.
Age of delta of Mississippi, ii. 189.
Agelaius phaeniceus, i. 245.
Alabama geology, ii. 75.
, traveling bad, ii. 70.
, coal-field, ii. 69.
Altamaha River, i. 243., 256.
Albany, excursion to, ii. 259.
Alcaeus, ii. 103.
Alleghany Mountains, ii. 240.
Alligators, i. 237, 250 ; ii. 156.
Alligator's nest, i. 251.
Alluvium of Missippi, ii. 183.
Alpine plants, i. 69.
American oratory, i. 142.
Antarctic ice, i. 37.
Anthracite coal, i. 188.
Anti-British antipathies, ii. 217.
Anti-Corn-Law-League, ii. 170.
Anti-English feeling, i. 225.
Anti-negro feeling, ii. 125.
Anti-renters, N. Y., ii. 260.
Arbitration, i. 198.
Arctic Flora on Mount Washington, i,
69.
Arisaig, i. 108.
Artesian wells, ii. 76.
, near Montgomery, ii. 41.
Arundo phragmitis, ii. 118.
Ateuchus volvens, ii. 245.
Attakapas, ii. 136.
Audubon, Mr., visit to, ii. 249.
Augusta, in Maine, i. 44.
Aurora Borealis, ii. 274.
B.
B achraan, Dr., i. 227.
Backwoods, inconveniences of, ii. 62.
Bald region of Mount Washington, i.
Balize, ii. 113, 116,
, houses on piles, ii. 117.
look-out, ii. 117.
Bankruptcies, i. 127.
Baptist and Atheist, i. 140.
and Methodists, i. 269.
Barn moved, i. 100.
Bartram, i. 250, 261 ; ii. 137.
Basking shark, i. 118.
Baton Rouge, ii. 99, 137.
Battle-ground, New Orleans, ii. 122.
Bayou Liere, ii. 114.
la Fourche, ii. 136.
Plaquemine, ii. 136.
Sara, ii. 147.
St. John, ii. 177.
Bear in New England, i. 60.
Beaufort, i. 230.
Beetle, ball-rolling, ii. 245.
Beetles called bugs, ii. 158.
Bequests, i. 155.
Berkeley, Sir William, i. 161.
Bibles distributed, i. 271.
Big Black River, ii. 160.
Bone Lick, ii. 194.
Birds, i. 236.
on Mount Washington, i. 67.
of Indiana, ii. 202.
Bishop of St. Asaph, i. 28.
Black Baptist church, ii. 14.
mechanics, i. 267.
Methodist church, ii. 213.
Blanco White, i. 184.
Blind asylum, i. 133.
Blocks of granite and gneiss, ii. 27.
Bluff of St. Stephen's, ii. 77.
Bluffs, fossils of, ii. 4d.
, shipping cotton at, ii. 47.
Bonaventure, i. 238.
Bony pike used for manure, ii. 246.
Boot factory, i. 91.
Boston, i. 24, 122.
, public buildings, i. 27.
, militia, i. 28.
, environs of, i. 30.
, suburbs of, i. 93.
, lodgings in, i. 122.
. mode of living, i. 124.
278
INDEX.
Boulders, i. 87.
Bowie knives, ii. 206.
Brazilian caves, i. 259.
Bridgeport, repudiation, ii. 242.
Bringier, Mr., ii. 109, 175.
British aggrandizement, i. 194.
Brown, Mr. A., ii. 191.
Brumby, Mr., professor of chemistry, ii.
69.
Brunswick Canal, i. 258.
Buffalo Island, ii. 179.
Bunker Hill monument, i. 24.
Buried trees, ii. 109, 137, 140, 147.
Butler's Island, i. 248.
Cabbage-palm, i. 235
Cairo on the Ohio, ii.
201.
Campbell, life of, i. 116.
, Gertrude of Wyoming, ii. 240.
Canadian legislature, i. 198.
Canadians, ii. 124.
Canal cut through the ice, i. 25.
Canes on bank of river, ii. 68.
Cannon's Point, i. 252.
Cape Cod, i. 94.
Capitol, i. 200.
Captains of steamers, ii. 170.
Caravel of Columbus, i. 13.
Carlyle, Mr., ii. 236.
Carnival, ii. 91.
at New Orleans, ii. 91.
Carolina, North, i. 218.
Carpenter, Dr., ii. 106, 111, 138, 188.
Carriages, i. 125.
Carthage Crevasse, ii. 132.
Carver Governor, i. 99.
Carya aquatica, ii. 114.
Cass, General, i. 197.
Cathedral, Catholic, New Orleans, ii. 93.
Cattle, Miring of, ii. 86.
Cercis canadensis, ii. 153.
Chamaerops adansonia, ii. 107.
— palmetto, i. 235.
Chambersburg, ii. 241.
Channing, Dr., i. 135, 152.
on Milton, i. 157.
on Slavery, i. 241.
Channing's Works, i. 138.
Charleston, i. 221.
, gardens, i. 229.
, society in, i. 223.
Charlevoix, ii. 119.
Charlottesville, ii. 135.
Chatahoochie, Fall of, ii. 35.
Cheapness of books in the U. S-, ii. 252.
Cheirotherium of Saxony, ii. 232.
in coal of Pennsylvania, ii. 230.
Cherokee rose, ii. 153.
Chicken-thieves, ii. 131.
Children, spoilt, ii. 168.
Christians, sect so called, i. 136.
Christinas Day, i. 220.
Christians, i. 136.
Churches in Maine,!. 54.
in New York, i. 181.
, none in New Harmony, ii. 204.
Cincinnati, progress of, ii. 218.
Civilization among negroes, i. 268.
Claiborne, fossil remains at, ii. 53.
, landing at, ii. 53.
Clapp, Dr., ii. 208.
Clay, Mr., ii. 103.
Clergy, pay of, i. 174.
Climate of Boston i. ] 23.
, change of, affecting plants, i. 72.
of New England, i. 123.
Clipper Steamer, ii. 223.
Coal-fields, i. 215.
of Alabama, ii. 69.
seams, i. 213.
strata, foot-prints of reptiles in. ii.
231.
, vegetable structure,!. 214.
measures, origin of, ii. 185.
Cobblers, i. 100.
Cockburn, Admiral, i. 266.
Cocoa-grass, ii. 122.
Cogswell, Mr., ii. 250.
Cold, indifference to, ii. 21.
Colored race, exclusiveness of whites
toward, ii. 52.
Colored servants, i. 201.
domestics, ii. 72.
Coluber constrictor, i. 112.
Columbus, ii. 35.
Competition of negro and white me
chanics, ii. 36.
Complaint of the Captive, ii. 103.
Concord, town of, i. 90.
Congregationalists, i. 164.
Consumption, common in Maine, i. 57.
Converts to Rome, i. 183.
Coolies in W. Indies, i. 21.
Copyright, international, ii. 253.
Coral reef, fossil, ii. 208.
Cottagers of Glenburme, ii. 168.
Cotting, Dr. J. Jd., ii. 27.
Cotton, ii. 130.
Cotton-wood, ii. 149, 176.
Cotton Mather on Day of Doom, i. 49.
Couper, Mr. Hamilton, i. 244.
Couthoy, Captain, i. 17.
Cowley, i. 157.
INDEX.
279
Crackers, i. 244.
Creeds, variations in, i. 166.
Creek Indians, departure of, ii. 35.
Creole ladies, ii. 93.
Crescent city, ii. 106.
Cretaceous strata near Montgomery, ii.
41.
Crevasses, ii. 106.
Crimes among negroes, i. 266.
Croton water, ii. 250.
water- works, i. 180.
Cupressus disticha, i. 327; ii. 191.
Curfew at Montgomery, ii. 42.
Currents, oceanic, i. 17.
Custom-house officers, i. 26.
Cyperus hydra, ii. 122.
Cypress trees, i. 244.
roots, ii. 185.
knees, ii. 139.
deciduous, age of, ii. 191.
I).
Dana, i. 153.
Darby on mud of Red River, ii. 192.
Darien, i. 243; ii. 13.
Darwin, Mr , i. 38, 258, 260.
, Pampean formation, i. 258.
Date palms, i. 253; ii. 109.
Davy, Sir Humphrey, ii. 269.
Dawson, J. W., i. 108.
Day of Doom, poem, i. 48.
De Candolle, i. 247.
Declaration of Independence, i. 29.
Decomposition of gneiss, ii. 28.
Decoy pond, i. 100.
Delta advance of, ii. 119. -
, subsidence of, ii. 142.
Democracy and Romanism, ii. 218.
Democrats, coalition of, with slave
owners, i. 82.
Devil's Punch Bowl, ii. 153.
Swamp, ii. 145.
Dewey, Dr., sermon against war, ii. 257,
Dickeson, Dr., ii. 151, 191.
Diplomatists i. 203.
Diron, Sieur, ii. 120.
Dirt-eating, ii. 17.
Dissenters' Chapels Bill, i. 167.
Division of property, i. 58.
Divorced man, ii. 167.
Dog-wood in Virginia, ii. 244.
Domestic tea, ii. 160.
Donaldsonville, ii. 99, 136.
Dreissena, ii. 107.
Dressmakers, i. 131.
at Boston, i. 132.
Drift, Northern, relative age of, ii. 199.
Drift-wood, ii. 133.
Driver, black, i. 265.
Drunkenness in Alabama, ii. 60, 77.
Duelling, new law against, ii. 60.
Dunbar, Mr., ii. 120.
Dwarf firs, i. 67.
E.
Eagle, i. 233.
Earthquake at New Madrid, ii. 174.
Echo, mountain, i. 64.
Education of ladies, 126.
— , popular, ii. 237, 238.
, secular, i. 148.
Educational movement, i. 151.
Eldon, Lord, i. 90.
Election, i. 143.
— at Boston, i. 143.
Electoral franchise, i. 195.
Electric telegraph, i. 184, 185, 186.
Elliot, Dr.. i. 269.
Ellis's Cliffs, ii. 149.
Eloquence, inflated, i. 199.
Emancipation, effects of, ii. 83.
Emigrants, ii. 169.
— to the West, ii. 63.
Eminent preachers, i. 137.
Emmons, Dr., ii. 262.
Engine room, i. 19.
Engine, revolutions of, i. 20
Engines, high pressure, ii. 45.
English newspapers, ii. 170.
— pronunciation, ii. 95.
- Turn, ii. 122.
Envy in a democracy, i. 84.
Episcopal churches, i. 136.
clergyman in steamer, ii. 73.
Episcopalian asceticism, i. 139.
Equality, ii. 169, 181.
, social, i. 78.
in society, ii. 64.
Eulalie, lake, ii. 176.
Evansville, Indiana, ii. 207.
Everett, Mr., i. 27.
on cheap literature, ii. 253.
Eye-glass, ii. 166.
F.
Factories, Lowell, i. 91.
Fanaticism of New England, i. 78.
Faneuil Hall, i. 27.
Faraday, Mr., ii. 268.
Fashion in the back woods, ii. 181.
280
INDEX.
Fashionists, ii. 22.
Faulkner, Mr., ii. 143.
Fausse Riviere, ii. 143.
Ferry boat, i. 31.
Fire, alarms of, i. 132.
Fire-clays of coal, ii. 185.
Fires, i. 219.
at New York, i. 180.
Firs, Dwarf, i. 67.
First juvenile, ii. 165.
Fish, fossil, i. 33.
Fissures during earthquake, ii. 177.
Flat boats, ii. 130, 131.
Fleming, Dr., i. 118.
Fletcher, Mr., ii. 180.
Flint, the geographer, ii. 175.
Fog off Halifax, ii. 271.
Fogs, ii. 135.
on river Piscataqua, i. 36.
Fontania ii. 143.
Food for negroes, i. 264.
Forefather's Day, i. 95.
Forest scenery, ii. 180.
Forshey, Mr., ii. 121, 137, 156, 184.
Fort Adams, ii. 149.
Jackson, ii. 114.
" Forty-five or fight," ii. 227.
Foot-prints, fossil, of Greensburg, ii. 228.
Fossil-trees, i. 212.
human bone, ii. 151.
remains, i. 258.
Fossils in drift, i. 33.
at Gardiner, i. 43.
Fox, Mr., i. 202.
Franconia, i. 86.
Free school, i. 147.
visit to a, i. 147.
schools, i. 158.
Free trade and protectionism, ii. 243.
French Creoles, ii. 122.
" French settlements," ii. 179.
Fresh-water loam, ii. 149.
Frost, severe at Boston, i. 24.
Funeral of Northern man, ii. 23.
Gale off Great Bank, i. 14.
Gallatin, Mr., on Indian corn, ii. 255.
• , on Oregon question, ii. 255.
Gallows Hill, i. 102.
Gardenia, ii. 153.
Gardens at Mobile, ii. 87.
Gar-fish, ii. 144.
Gas, explosion of, i. 215.
Gas-works, New Orleans, ii. 108.
Geese, i. 100,
Gelasimus, ii. 114.
Gelsemium nitidum, ii. 145.
General Jackson's log cabin, ii. 172.
Geological epoch of White Mountains,
i. 72.
Geology, prejudices opposed to, ii. 236.
of Georgia, ii. 18.
round Portsmouth, i. 33.
, Alabama, ii. 75.
Georgia, Bishop of, i. 269.
German baker, ii. 172.
baker's wife, ii. 181.
Germans in Cincinnati, ii. 218.
Gertrude of Wyoming, ii. 240.
Giant's Grave, i. 65.
Grammer school for boys, i. 148.
Gravel terraces, ii. 244.
Gifford, Mr. A. F., i. 211, 217 ; ii. 245.
Gist, Dr., ii. 160.
Glacial grooves, i. 36.
Glynn county, i. 271.
Gnathodon, ii. 118.
cuneatus, ii. 107.
Gneiss, decomposition of, ii. 28.
Goldfuss, Professor, on reptiles in coal,
ii. 235.
Goldsmith, Vicar of Wakefield, ii. 237.
Gordonia pubescens, i. 261.
Governesses, i. 223.
Governor's lady, ii. 26.
Grand Gulf, ii. 157.
Greenland subsidence of, ii. 144,
Greensburg, Pennsylvania, ii. 227.
Gulf of Mexico shells, ii. 86.
Gum tree, i. 247.
II.
Hale, Sir Mathew, i. 102.
Half breeds, i. 106.
Halifax, i. 22.
, lighthouse, ii. 272.
Hall, Captain Basil, ii. 103.
, Mr. James, ii. 262.
Halsydrus Pontoppidani, i. 116.
Hand car on railway, ii. 18.
Harlanus Americanus, i. 258.
Harpers' printing establishment, ii. 250.
Harrisburg, ii. 241.
Hawkes, Dr., ii. 103.
Hay, vessels laden with, i. 42.
Hayes, Mr. J. L., i. 32, 35.
Head, Sir Francis, ii. 267.
Health in New England, i. 124.
inU. S., i. 124.
Heavenly witnesses, i. 170.
Helderberg war, ii. 260.
INDEX.
281
Hitchcock, Professor, i. 18.
Hockmar or shark, i. 117.
Hogarth's Election Feast, 172.
Home, Sir Everard, 116.
Hooker, Dr. Joseph, i. 38 ; ii. 273.
Horticultural show, i. 27.
Hospitality in South, i. 245.
Hotel, St.' Louis, at New Orleans.
91.
Hotels, Boston, i. 122.
House of Commons, i. 199.
Howe, Dr.. i. 133.
Hoyt, Jesse, letters of, ii. 261
Huguenots, ii. 124.
Humboldt, ii. 174.
Humming-bird, migration of, ii. 247.
Hunter, Mr., ii. 177.
Hurst Castle, i. 94.
Hydrarchos, ii. 65.
Ice of Wenham Lake, ii. 268.
— , antarctic, inclosing whale, i. 38.
Iceberg, i. 16.
Icebergs, i. 39.
, rocks transported by, ii. 273.
, danger of collison with, ii. 274.
, drifting of, i. 18.
011 homeward voyage, ii. 273
Iberville River, ii. 136.
Illegitimate children, i. 271.
Immersion in baptism, i. 269.
Income tax, i. 193.
Independence day, i. 144.
Independents, i. 168.
India tree, pi'ide of. i. 219, 231.
Indian blood, ii. 169.
carvings of foot-prints, ii. 234.
mound, Wheeling, ii. 224.
mounds, ii. 15.
mounds near Macon, ii. 22.
corn, uncertain crop, ii. 64.
shell mound, i. 252.
Indiana, fossil erect trees in coal strata,
ii. 205.
Inflated oratory, ii. 99.
Initial letters, i, 142.
Inns of Southern States, ii. 57.
Inquisitiveness, ii. 167.
Inundations, ii. 132.
Ipswich, i. 126.
Irish repeal meeting, i. 146, 147.
voters, i. 189.
servants, ii. 98.
emigrants, i. 145, 146.
Island Eighty four, ii. 164.
Jackson, ii. 159.
, hotel at, ii. 160.
, Dr. John, ii. 270.
Jealousy of wealth, ii. 61.
Jefferson College, ii. 134.
Jeffrey, Lord, works reprinted in U. S.
ii. 226.
Johnson on Milton, i. 157.
Judas-tree, ii. 153.
Judges at Tuscaloosa, ii. 74.
cashiered, ii. 101.
elected, ii. 162.
Julian calendar, i. 172.
Juniata River, ii. 240.
K.
Kean, Mr. and Mrs., ii. 95.
, Mrs., ii. 165.
Kendall, Captain, i. 38.
Kenebec river, i. 42.
King, Dr., on fossil footprints in coal
strata, ii. 229.
Kingfisher, i. 247.
Koch, i. 107.
L.
Ladies, educated, i. 126.
' ordinary, ii. 96.
Laing, Malcolm, i. 115, 116.
Lake Solitude, ii. 143, 144.
Pontchartrain, ii. 90, 106, 107.
Concordia, ii. 155.
Eulalie, ii. 176.
Lalaurie, Madame, ii. 127.
Land tortoises, ii. 220.
— quadrupeds, chiefly nocturnal) ii.
250.
crabs, ii. 114.
Landed proprietors, i. 58.
Landslip, ii. 141.
Language, i. 128
— , peculiarities of, i. 128, 129.
Laura Bridgeman, i. 133.
Law against black mechanics, ii. 81.
Lay teachers, i. 173.
Le Conte, Dr.. i. 237.
Lectures, i. 153.
Leg "bitten off," ii. 167.
Legal profession, i. 45.
Legislators, paid, i. 84.
Legislature of Louisiana, ii. 99.
Lending libraries, i. 154.
282
INDEX.
Lepidosteus, ii. 144.
Levee, New Orleans, ii. 105.
Levees, artificial, ii. 133.
Leveling up and down, ii. 169.
Leyden Street, i. 96.
Liberia, ii. 241.
Liebig, i. 247.
Lightning, i. 236.
Lighthouse, Halifax, guns fired at, ii. 272.
Lighthouse near Mobile, ii. 84.
Lightwood, i. 220.
Lignite, ii. 176.
Linnaea borealis, i. 64.
Literary clerk of Steamer, ii. 147.
tastes, i. 130.
Little Prairie, ii. 174.
Live oaks, i. 238.
Liverpool, landing at, ii. 275.
, voyage from, i. 13.
Living, cost of at Boston, i. 131.
Loam, ii. 171.
or loess, ii. 159.
Loblolly pine, i. 236.
Loess, ii. 150.
Long Island Railway, ii. 265.
Louisiana, ii. 123.
, loess of, ii. 192.
Louisville, Kentucky, ii, 210
Love, Mr., ii. 178.
Lowell Factories, i. 91.
Loxia cardinalis, i. 247:
Luxury of New Orleans, ii. 100.
Luzenberger, Dr., i. 251.
Lynch Law in Florida, ii. 31.
M.
Maoaulay'sHistory.saleof, in U.S., ii.252.
Maclarty, Mrs., ii. 168.
Macon, Georgia, ii. 22.
— , Alabama, ii. 58.
M'Connell, i. 147.
M'Cormac, Dr., ii. 106.
Madam, use of term, i. 129.
M'llvaine, Mr. William, i. 113.
Mackenzie letters, ii. 261.
Maclean, Rev. Donald, i. 117.
M'Quhae, Captain, i. 120.
Magnolia steamer, ii. 129, 158.
Mai, Cardinal, i. 171.
Mallotus, i. 33.
Mammoth ravine, ii. 151.
Man shot in a brawl, ii. 31.
Manchester, i. 91.
Manners, familliar, ii. 166.
Marriage between colored and white, ii.
215.
Marriages in Boston, i. 127.
, early, i. 127.
Marine shells, i. 94.
Market at New Orleans, ii. 104.
Marsh blackbird, i. 245.
Martineau, Miss, ii. 127.
Martins killed by storm, i. 36.
Mastodon, skeletons of, ii. 269.
, food of, ii. 270.
Maximilian, Prince, ii. 203.
Mayflower, i. 95.
, table of, i. 98.
Medical students, ii. 211.
Megatherium, i. 258.
Melville, Dr., i. 119.
Memphis, ii. 171.
Mendicity, i. 255.
Merigomish, i. 108.
Merrimack River, i. 91.
Metairie ridge, ii. 108.
Methodist church, black, ii. 213.
prayer meetings, i. 270.
church, Montgomery, ii. 213.
sermon, i. 88.
Mexico, war with, ii. 256.
Michaud on the age of cypress, ii. 191.
Migration of plants, i. 70.
Mill Creek, geology of, ii. 219.
Milledgeville, ii. 25.
Millerite Movement, i. 75.
Mississsipi, banks of, ii. 163.
River, ii. 105.
water, ii. 158.
coast, ii. 129.
bank caving in, ii. 173.
delta of, ii. 183.
sediment, ii. 121.
age of delta, ii. 187.
Missouri, slavery in, ii. 182.
Mixture of races, i. 271.
Mob of Gentlemen, i. 222.
Mobile built on bed of shells, ii. 86.
, gardens at, ii. 87.
Mocking birds, ii. 181.
Montgomery, journey to, ii. 37, 41.
Mormons, i. 77.
— and Stephanists, ii. 51.
Morals of Puritans, i. 127.
Morlot on Subsidence in Adriatic, ii. 187.
Morse, i. 186.
Geography, ii. 251.
Moss, Spanish, i. 220.
Mount Auburn, i. 135.
Vernon, ii. 200.
Washington, i. 66.
Mountains of New Hampshire, i. 59.
Movers" to Texas, ii. 55, 88.
Mud cracks, casts of, ii. 231.
INDEX.
283
Mulattoes, i. 271.
Museum, Salem, i. 99.
Musk rats, ii. 179.
, habitations of, ii. 240.
Musquitoes, ii. 97, 136.
N.
Nahant, i. 113.
Napoleon ii. 164.
Natchez, country houses* ii. 153.
, ii. 149.
, tornado, ii. 152.
National fair at Washington, ii. 242.
Nativism, i. 190.
Naval arsenal, ii. 171.
Names of Negroes, i. 263.
Negro Baptists, ii. 14.
brain, i. 105.
houses, i. 249, 263.
— episcopal clergyman, ii. 243.
prayer, ii. 15.
hospital, i. 264.
slaves, ii. 34.
children, ii. 24.
maid servants, i. 255.
names, i. 263.
porters, i. 243,
preacher, Louisville, ii. 214.
intelligence, ii. 16.
and white mechanics, ii. 36.
• shot by an overseer, ii. 78.
instruction, i. 208.
mistaken for white, ii. 165.
Negroes, i. 224.
, civilization of, ii. 80.
, emancipation of, i. 21.
, increase of, ii. 79.
, in Louisana, ii. 126.
, in mines, i. 216.
, intelligence of, ii. 19.
, kindness to, i. 210.
, more progressive in upper country,
ii. 19.
on sale, ii. 125.
, position of, in the South, ii. 82.
, prejudice against, i. 221.
, progress of, i. 268 ; ii. 71.
, runaway, i. 221.
, treatment of, ii. 78.
Neill, Mr., i. 115.
New Albany, ii. 208.
New Harmony, ii. 202.
New Jersey, i. 191.
New London, ii. 265.
New Madrid, ii. 172.
, departure from, ii. 200.
earthquake, ii. 174.
New Orleans, French appearance of, ii.
)0.
-, Hotel St. Louis, ii. 91.
-, Catholic cathedral, ii. 93.
-, theaters, ii. 95.
-, tombs at, ii. 96.
— , shops at, ii. 96.
-, Ladies' ordinary, ii. 96.
— , procession at, ii. 96.
, Salubrity of, ii. 97.
Newberne, i. 259.
Newfoundland, i. 19.
New Haven, i. 179.
Newman, Mr., i. 183.
Newsboys, ii. 40.
Newspaper press, ii. 41.
Newspapers, i. 55.
— , distribution of, i. 26.
• , from England, ii. 170.
New York, gay dresses in, ii. 248.
— , omnibuses in, ii. 249.
— , naming of streets, ii. 249.
Nicol, Mr. J., ii. 189.
North and South split, i. 270.
Northern prices, ii. 98.
Norton, Mr., i. 137.
Nothingarians, i. 139.
Novels, sale of by Newsboys, ii. 41.
Nuttall, i. 259.
O.
Oak,es,Mr. William, i. 64; ii. 266.
Obion, ii. 180.
Observatory, Cincinati, ii. 220.
Ocmulgee River, i. 256 ; ii. 23.
Oconee River, i. 256.
Oglethorpe, i. 253.
" Old Virginia," i. 268.
Omnibuses in New York, ii. 249.
Oolitic coal, i. 212.
Opossum, ii. 17.
Oregon ii. 170.
, war about, i. 232.
Organic remains in ice, i. 37.
Oscillation of level, ii. 198.
Ostracism of wealth, i. 82.
Owen, Professor, i. 44.
, Mr., i. 105.
, Robert, of Lanark, ii. 203.
Oxenstiern, i. 86.
Oysters, i. 233.
P.
Pacific, whale fishery in, ii. 265.
Palenque, i. 202.
284
INDEX.
Palisades, i. 191.
Palmetto, i. 235.
Parker, Theodore, i. 184.
Patent Office, i. 201.
Pauperism, absence of, i. 145.
Peace Association, i. 28.
Pearl River fossils, ii. 160.
Peltier, i. 227.
Peltries, ii. 179.
Pemigewasset River, i. 87, 88.
Pendlefcon, Capt. Benj., i. 37.
Pere Antoine, ii. 110.
Perkins, Colonel, i. 97, 112.
Peytona steamer, ii. 157.
Philadelphia, ii. 241.
Physical science, i. 169.
Pilgrim relics, i. 96.
Pilgrim fathers, names of, i. 95.
Pilots, ii. 118, 173.
Pine-trees, age of, ii. 37.
Pine-barrens want of elbow-room in, ii.
21.
Pinus taeda, i. 237.
Piscataqua River, i. 36.
Pittsburg, fire at, ii. 225.
Place-hunter, disappointed, ii. 31.
Placentia Bay, ii. 272.
Planters, i. 245, 261.
Plants, i. 53.
Alpine, i. 69.
at New Orleans, ii. 107.
in Virginia, ii. 244.
migrations of, i. 70.
near Saratoga, ii. 263.
spring flowers of Indiana, ii. 203.
wild, N. Hampshire, i. 34.
Plassy, ii. 122.
Pledges at elections, i. 85.
Plymouth Beach, i. 94.
, Massachusetts, i. 93.
• , New Hampshire, i. 86.
Politics in Massachusetts, i. 143.
Polk, i.202.
Pontoppidan, i. 110.
Popular education, i. 155; ii. 237.
• instruction, i. 175.
Populus angulata, ii. 149, 176.
Pork merchant, ii. 207.
Porpoises, i. 15.
Person, i. 170.
Port Hudson, ii. 129, 137, 180.
Portland in Maine, i. 41, 46.
Portsmouth, N. Hampshire, i. 32.
Post-office abuses, i. 90.
Potter, Bishop, i. 91.
Preachers, eminent, i. 137.
Prejudices opposed to geology, ii. 236.
Preston, Mr., ii. 135.
Primogeniture, opinion of, i. 58.
Proclamation of Thanksgiving Day, i.
144.
Procession at New Orleans, ii. 96.
Protectionist doctrines, i. 127.
Protracted meetings at Montgomery, ii.
43.
| Pond, Mr., ii. 35.
i Powers the sculptoi', ii. 222.
! Public meetings, want of, i. 143.
Purgstall, Countess, ii. 103.
Puritans, i. 47, 127.
a.
Quadroons, ii. 94, 165.
Quadrupeds, extinction of, i. 259.
Quicksand, Plymouth, i. 95.
Q,uincy, i. 93.
R,
Races, mixture of, i. 271.
Raccourci cut-off, ii. 148.
Railway cars, i. 30; ii. 38.
traveling, i. 31.
Railways, i. 178.
in U. S., ii. 264.
i Rattle-snakes, i. 228.
Ravine near Milledgeville, ii. 29.
Ravines, modern, ii. 28.
Recruiting in U. S., facility of, ii. 257.
Red-bird, i. 247.
Red maple, ii. 145.
Red River, red mud of, ii. 149, 192.
Redfield, Mr., i. 17.
Reelfoot, ii. 180.
Relics, authenticity of, i. 98.
Religion and politics, i. 140.
, progress in, i. 162.
Religious toleration, i. 47.
Rennie, Mr. G-., ii. 189.
Repeal of English corn laws, ii. 32.
meeting, i. 146.
Reptile, fossil, air-breathing, in coal
strata, ii. 234.
Repudiation, i. 193.
Revival at Bethlehem, i. 73 ; ii. 16.
Rice plantations, i. 262.
Richmond, i. 205.
coal-field, i. 211.
Riddell, Dr.. ii. 107.
— , on sediment of Mississipi, ii. 187.
Rise of Sweden, ii. 194.
River- fogs, ii. 113, 114.
Robin drunk with berries, ii. 55.
Robinson, Pastor, i. 162.
INDEX.
285
Rogers, Prof. W. B., i. 206, 211.
Roman law, ii. 98.
— Catholics, i. 177.
Romanism and democracy, ii. 218.
Ross, Sir James, i. 17, 39 ; ii. 273.
Rotation of trees, i. 246.
Ruggles, Mr.: ii. 188.
S.
Saco, valley of the, i. 63.
Sailing, rate of, i. 20.
Salem Museum, i. 100.
Salt marshes, i. 249.
Salubrity of New Orleans, ii. 97.
San Francisco, ii. 265.
Sand-bursts, ii. 176.
Saratoga, plants near, ii. 263.
Savage, Mr., i. 99.
Savannah, i. 234 ; ii. 13.
Schlegel, A. W., Prof., ii. 213.
Schools, common, i. 54.
iu New York, i. 187.
Scoliophys atlanticus, i. 112.
Sea-serpent, Norwegian, i. 107, 108, 113.
— , Cape Ann, i. 111.
Section, geological, from Darien to
Vicksburg, ii. 196.
Sects, equality of, i. 47.
Secular education, i. 188.
Sellick, Captain, ii. 139.
Sensitiveness, American, i. 131.
Servants, i. 125, 263 ; ii. 167.
, position of, i. 81.
, scarcity of, ii. 227.
Shark, basking, i. 118.
Shells, i. 254.
on shore of Gulf of Mexico, ii. 85.
Shell-road, ii. 107.
Shepard, Professor, i. 229.
Shock of earthquake, ii. 178.
Shops at New Orleans, ii. 96.
Shrike, i. 247.
Sidell on Mississippi, ii. 189.
Silicified shells and corals, ii. 24.
Silliman, Professor, i. 179.
Sink-holes, ii. 175.
Skiddaway, i. 234.
Slave, marriage of, with white, Ken
tucky, ii. 216.
Slave labor, i. 207 ; ii. 72.
States, i. 231.
dealers, i. 209.
whip, i. 265.
, runaway, ii. 38.
Slaves, sale of, Macon, ii. 59.
Belling at Montgomery, ii. 42.
Slave-trade, i. 232 ; ii. 241.
Slave-dealer on steamer, ii. 90.
Slavery, i. 241, 261.
— , in Southern States, ii. 79.
— , party against extension, i. 143.
Smith Sydney, ii. 15.
Smoke, absence of, i. 188.
Snag-boats, ii. 133.
Snake and dog, ii. 245.
Snapping turtle, ii. 156.
Soap, home made, ii. 26.
Social equality, i. 80.
Southern steamboat, ii. 44.
planters' superior political tact, i.
81.
Spanish moss, i. 243 ; ii. 104.
Species, creation of, i. 228.
Specific centers, theory of i. 71.
Spiritual boulanger, i. 270.
Split north and south, i. 270,
Spoilt children, ii. 168.
Squalus maximus, i. 116.
Squirrels, i. 227.
Stage-coach, ii. 239.
from Macon to Columbus, ii. 35.
Stage-traveling, ii. 24.
j State debts, ii. 56.
education, i. 148.
Statehouse at Jackson, ii. 161.
Steamboats, ii. 46.
Steamboat passengers, ii. 49.
collision with trees, ii. 48.
accidents, ii. 111.
Steamer in Maine, i. 41.
Steamer to Tuscaloosa, ii. 67.
Steamers safest in storms, i. 14.
Steam ships, ii. 105.
Stephanists, ii. 50.
Stewardess, German, ii. 50.
Storer, Dr., on fish, i. 156.
Story, Judge, i. 22.
Stoves, i. 178.
Stronsa animal, i. 115.
St. Charles Hotel, New Orleans, ii. 105.
St. Francis River, ii. 174.
St. Mary's Hall, i. 192.
St. Rosalie, ii. 154.
St. Simon's Island, i. 252, 253.
Submarine forest, i. 34.
Subsidence of Delta of Mississippi, ii.
142.
Subsidence of land, i. 33.
Sumner, Mr. Charles, i. 28.
Sunday schools for negroes, ii. 215.
Supreme Court, i. 20.
Courts, i. 46.
Swallows at Portsmouth, i. 35.
Swamp rabbit, i. 228.
286
INDEX.
Swamps of Mississipi, ii. 184.
Sweden, rise of, ii. 194.
T.
Tabernacle at Boston, i. 76.
Taconic system of rocks, age of, ii. 263.
Tapir, fossil, in Texas, ii. 197.
Tariff; i. 192.
Tasso, love and madness, ii. 102.
Taxodium distichum, ii. 148.
Teachers, pay of, i. 149.
, position of, i. 150.
, their social position, i. 150.
Telescope, i. 156
Temperance hotel, i. 54.
hotels, i. 122.
Ten Hour Bill, ii. 225.
Tennessee, ii. 180.
Terraces, succession of, i. 257.
, of gravel, ii. 224.
Texas, i. 196.
Texas, fossil bones in, ii. 197.
Volunteers, ii. 271.
Thanksgiving day, i. 144.
Theater at New Orleans, ii. 95.
in Boston, i. 153.
Theological discussion, i. 89.
colleges, i. 174.
Thermometer low at Tuscaloosa, ii. 84.
Third House, thanks, voted to, at
Albany, ii. 260.
Three Heavenly Witnesses, i. 170.
Tillandsia, i. 243 ; ii. 104.
usneoides, i. 220.
Timber trade, i. 42.
Tobacco, chewing of, ii. 266.
Tombeckbee River, ii. 68.
Tombs at New Orleans, ii. 96.
Tortoises, i. 229.
, land, ii. 220.
Tractarians, i. 183.
Trapper, ii. 179.
Traveling roads, bad, ii. 70.
, rough, ii. 35.
— , New England, rate of, i. 41.
Trees, rotation of, i. 246.
on banks of Kennebec, i. 43.
and plants, i. 63.
on banks of river, ii. 41.
.fossil, erect, of coal, Indiana, ii. 204.
Trinity Church, i. 182.
Turkey buzzards, i. 229.
Tuscaloosa judges, ii. 75.
, acquaintances at, ii. 73.
, college of ii. 68.
, churches at, ii. 73.
V.
Unio spinosus, i. 248.
Unitarian Church, i. 47.
congregations, i. 136.
Unitarians, i. 136.
, cause of their influence, ii. 258.
Universal suffrage, i. 85.
University at Louisville, ii. 211.
Upotoy Creek, ii. 35.
V.
Vanessa atalanta, ii. 220.
Vegetation near Tuscaloosa, ii.69.
of Gulf of Mexico, ii. 84.
of Mount Washington, i. 66.
Vicksburg, ii. 159, 163.
Vidalia, ii. 155.
Vine, cultivation of, ii. 221.
Virginia, i. 206.
Vitreous tubes at Areola, ii. 76.
Vote by ballot, ii. 162.
Voters, bribery of, ii. 16.
Voyage from Mobile to New Orleans, ii.
88.
Voyage to Mobile, ii. 66.
W.
Wailes, Colonel, ii. 151.
Walhalla, i. 131.
Wandering Jew, by Eugene Sue, ii.
253.
Wandering Jew, great sale of, ii. 253.
, tendency of the work, ii. 254,
War, demonstration against, ii. 271.
panic, i. 224.
, preaching against, ii. 257.
spirit abating, ii. 32.
with England, i. 81, 242 ; ii. 57.
with Mexico, ii. 256.
Warren, Dr., ii. 270.
Washington, i. 196, 200 ; ii. 150.
, Mount, i. 66.
Museum, i. 201.
, national fair at, ii. 243.
Wealth, ostracism of, i. 82.
Webster, Mr., i. 141, 199.
, Daniel, i. 141.
Wenham Lake ice, ii. 268.
West Point, ii. 169.
Weymouth, East, i. 99.
Whale discovered in iceberg, i. 38.
fishery in Pacific, ii. 265.
Wheatland, Dr., i. 100.
INDEX.
287
Wheatstone, i. 186.
Wheeling Indian mound, ii. 224.
"Whig Caucus, i. 141.
White, Blanco, i. 184.
Mountains, i. 30.
, age of, i. 72.
, Peregrine, i. 96.
Water, ii. 179.
Wilde, Mr., ii. 129.
, Richard Henry, ii. 98.
Wilde's poetry, ii. 103.
Wilkes, Captain, i. 39.
Willey Slide, i. 61.
"Willows on Mississippi, ii. 115.
Wilmington, i. 218.
Winthrop, i. 185, 196, 197, 200.
Witches, i. 102.
, Salem, i. 101.
"Wood, cords of, ii. 135.
Woodpecker boring trees, ii. 202.
Woolly hair, ii. 166.
Wyman, Dr., excursion with, ii. 245.
Y.
Yandell, Dr.; ii. 211.
Yellow fever, ii. 87, 102.
jessamine, ii. 145.
Z.
Zeuglodon, bones of, ii. 18.
in Alabama, ii. 65.
Zoology, i. 288.
THE END.
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