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PICTURES

OF

SOUTHERN LIFE,

SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND MILITARY.

WRITTEN FOR THE LONDON TIMES,

BY

WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL, LL. D.,

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.

NEW YORK:

James G. Gregory,

(SUCCESSOR TO W. A. TOWNSEND & CO.,)

46 WALKER STREET.

1861.




PICTURES OF SOUTHERN LIFE.


CHARLESTON, _April_ 30, 1861.[A]

  [A] Mr. Russell wrote one letter from Charleston previous to
  this, but it is occupied exclusively with a description of the
  appearance of Fort Sumter after the siege. His “Pictures of Southern
  Life” properly begin at the date above.

NOTHING I could say can be worth one fact which has forced itself upon
my mind in reference to the sentiments which prevail among the gentlemen
of this state. I have been among them for several days. I have visited
their plantations; I have conversed with them freely and fully, and I
have enjoyed that frank, courteous, and graceful intercourse which
constitutes an irresistible charm of their society. From all quarters
have come to my ears the echoes of the same voice; it may be feigned,
but there is no discord in the note, and it sounds in wonderful strength
and monotony all over the country. Shades of George III., of North, of
Johnson, of all who contended against the great rebellion which tore
these colonies from England, can you hear the chorus which rings through
the state of Marion, Sumter, and Pinckney, and not clap your ghostly
hands in triumph? That voice says, “If we could only get one of the
royal race of England to rule over us, we should be content.” Let there
be no misconception on this point. That sentiment, varied in a hundred
ways, has been repeated to me over and over again. There is a general
admission that the means to such an end are wanting, and that the desire
cannot be gratified. But the admiration for monarchical institutions on
the English model, for privileged classes, and for a landed aristocracy
and gentry, is undisguised and apparently genuine. With the pride of
having achieved their independence is mingled in the South Carolinians’
hearts a strange regret at the result and consequences, and many are
they who “would go back to-morrow if we could.” An intense affection for
the British connection, a love of British habits and customs, a respect
for British sentiment, law, authority, order, civilization, and
literature, pre-eminently distinguish the inhabitants of this state,
who, glorying in their descent from ancient families on the three
islands, whose fortunes they still follow, and with whose members they
maintain not unfrequently familiar relations, regard with an aversion of
which it is impossible to give an idea to one who has not seen its
manifestations, the people of New England and the populations of the
Northern States, whom they regard as tainted beyond cure by the venom of
“Puritanism.” Whatever may be the cause, this is the fact and the
effect. “The state of South Carolina was,” I am told, “founded by
gentlemen.” It was not established by witch-burning Puritans, by cruel
persecuting fanatics, who implanted in the North the standard of
Torquemada, and breathed into the nostrils of their newly-born colonies
all the ferocity, bloodthirstiness, and rabid intolerance of the
Inquisition. It is absolutely astounding to a stranger who aims at the
preservation of a decent neutrality to mark the violence of these
opinions. “If that confounded ship had sunk with those ---- Pilgrim
Fathers on board,” says one, “we never should have been driven to these
extremities!” “We could have got on with the fanatics if they had been
either Christians or gentlemen,” says another; “for in the first case
they would have acted with common charity, and in the second they would
have fought when they insulted us; but there are neither Christians nor
gentlemen among them!” “Any thing on the earth!” exclaims a third, “any
form of government, any tyranny or despotism you will; but”--and here is
an appeal more terrible than the adjuration of all the gods--“nothing on
earth shall ever induce us to submit to any union with the brutal,
bigoted blackguards of the New England States, who neither comprehend
nor regard the feelings of gentlemen! Man, woman, and child, we’ll die
first.” Imagine these and an infinite variety of similar sentiments
uttered by courtly, well-educated men, who set great store on a nice
observance of the usages of society, and who are only moved to extreme
bitterness and anger when they speak of the North, and you will fail to
conceive the intensity of the dislike of the South Carolinians for the
free states. There are national antipathies on our side of the Atlantic
which are tolerably strong, and have been unfortunately pertinacious and
long-lived. The hatred of the Italian for the Tedesco, of the Greek for
the Turk, of the Turk for the Russ, is warm and fierce enough to satisfy
the Prince of Darkness, not to speak of a few little pet aversions among
allied powers and the atoms of composite empires; but they are all mere
indifference and neutrality of feeling compared to the animosity evinced
the “gentry” of South Carolina for the “rabble of the North.”

The contests of Cavalier and Roundhead, of Vendean and Republican, even
of Orangeman and Croppy, have been elegant joustings, regulated by the
finest rules of chivalry, compared with those which North and South will
carry on if their deeds support their words. “Immortal hate, the study
of revenge,” will actuate every blow, and never in the history of the
world, perhaps, will go forth such a dreadful _væ victis_ as that which
may be heard before the fight has begun. There is nothing in all the
dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South
Carolinians profess for the Yankees. That hatred has been swelling for
years till it is the very life-blood of the state. It has set South
Carolina to work steadily to organize her resources for the struggle
which she intended to provoke if it did not come in the course of time.
“Incompatibility of temper” would have been sufficient ground for the
divorce, and I am satisfied that there has been a deep-rooted design,
conceived in some men’s minds thirty years ago, and extended gradually
year after year to others, to break away from the Union at the very
first opportunity. The North is to South Carolina a corrupt and evil
thing, to which for long years she has been bound by burning chains,
while monopolists and manufacturers fed on her tender limbs. She has
been bound in a Maxentian union to the object she loathes. New England
is to her the incarnation of moral and political wickedness and social
corruption. It is the source of every thing which South Carolina hates,
and of the torrents of free thought and taxed manufactures, of
Abolitionism and of Filibustering, which have flooded the land. Believe
a Southern man as he believes himself, and you must regard New England
and the kindred states as the birthplace of impurity of mind among men
and of unchastity in women--the home of Free Love, of Fourierism, of
Infidelity, of Abolitionism, of false teachings in political economy and
in social life; a land saturated with the drippings of rotten
philosophy, with the poisonous infections of a fanatic press; without
honor or modesty; whose wisdom is paltry cunning, whose valor and
manhood have been swallowed up in a corrupt, howling demagogy, and in
the marts of a dishonest commerce. It is the merchants of New York who
fit out ships for the slave-trade, and carry it on in Yankee ships. It
is the capital of the North which supports, and it is Northern men who
concoct and execute, the filibustering expeditions which have brought
discredit on the slave-holding states. In the large cities people are
corrupted by itinerant and ignorant lecturers--in the towns and in the
country by an unprincipled press. The populations, indeed, know how to
read and write, but they don’t know how to think, and they are the easy
victims of the wretched impostors on all the ’ologies and ’isms who
swarm over the region, and subsist by lecturing on subjects which the
innate vices of mankind induce them to accept with eagerness, while they
assume the garb of philosophical abstractions to cover their nastiness,
in deference to a contemptible and universal hypocrisy.

    “Who fills the butchers’ shops with large blue flies?”

Assuredly the New England demon, who has been persecuting the South
until its intolerable cruelty and insolence forced her, in a spasm of
agony, to rend her chains asunder. The New Englander must have something
to persecute, and as he has hunted down all his Indians, burnt all his
witches, and persecuted all his opponents to the death, he invented
Abolitionism as the sole resource left to him for the gratification of
his favorite passion. Next to this motive principle is his desire to
make money dishonestly, trickily, meanly, and shabbily. He has acted on
it in all his relations with the South, and has cheated and plundered
her in all his dealings by villainous tariffs. If one objects that the
South must have been a party to this, because her boast is that her
statesmen have ruled the government of the country, you are told that
the South yielded out of pure good-nature. Now, however, she will have
free-trade, and will open the coasting trade to foreign nations, and
shut out from it the hated Yankees, who so long monopolized and made
their fortunes by it. Under all the varied burdens and miseries to which
she was subjected, the South held fast to her sheet-anchor. South
Carolina was the mooring-ground in which it found the surest hold. The
doctrine of State Rights was her salvation, and the fiercer the storm
raged against her--the more stoutly demagogy, immigrant preponderance,
and the blasts of universal suffrage bore down on her, threatening to
sweep away the vested interests of the South in her right to govern the
states--the greater was her confidence and the more resolutely she held
on her cable. The North attracted “hordes of ignorant Germans and
Irish,” and the scum of Europe, while the South repelled them. The
industry, the capital of the North increased with enormous rapidity,
under the influence of cheap labor and manufacturing ingenuity and
enterprise, in the villages which swelled into towns, and the towns
which became cities, under the unenvious eye of the South. She, on the
contrary, toiled on slowly, clearing forests and draining swamps to find
new cotton-grounds and rice-fields, for the employment of her only
industry and for the development of her only capital--“involuntary
labor.” The tide of immigration waxed stronger, and by degrees she saw
the districts into which she claimed the right to introduce that capital
closed against her, and occupied by free labor. The doctrine of squatter
“sovereignty,” and the force of hostile tariffs, which placed a heavy
duty on the very articles which the South most required, completed the
measure of injuries to which she was subjected, and the spirit of
discontent found vent in fiery debate, in personal insults, and in
acrimonious speaking and writing, which increased in intensity in
proportion as the Abolition movement, and the contest between the
Federal principle and State Rights became more vehement. I am desirous
of showing in a few words, for the information of English readers, how
it is that the Confederacy which Europe knew simply as a political
entity has succeeded in dividing itself. The slave states held the
doctrine, or say they did, that each state was independent, as France or
as England, but that for certain purposes they chose a common agent to
deal with foreign nations, and to impose taxes for the purpose of paying
the expenses of the agency. We, it appears, talked of American citizens
when there were no such beings at all. There were, indeed, citizens of
the sovereign state of South Carolina, or of Georgia or Florida, who
permitted themselves to pass under that designation, but it was merely
as a matter of personal convenience. It will be difficult for Europeans
to understand this doctrine, as nothing like it has been heard before,
and no such Confederation of sovereign states has ever existed in any
country in the world. The Northern men deny that it existed here, and
claim for the Federal Government powers not compatible with such
assumptions. _They_ have lived for the Union, they served it, they
labored for and made money by it. A man as a New York man was
nothing--as an American citizen he was a great deal. A South Carolinian
objected to lose his identity in any description which included him and
a “Yankee clockmaker” in the same category. The Union was against him;
he remembered that he came from a race of English gentlemen who had been
persecuted by the representatives--for he will not call them the
ancestors--of the Puritans of New England, and he thought that they were
animated by the same hostility to himself. He was proud of old names,
and he felt pleasure in tracing his connection with old families in the
old country. His plantations were held by old charters, or had been in
the hands of his fathers for several generations; and he delighted to
remember that when the Stuarts were banished from their throne and their
country, the burgesses of South Carolina had solemnly elected the
wandering Charles king of their state, and had offered him an asylum and
a kingdom. The philosophical historian may exercise his ingenuity in
conjecturing what would have been the result if this fugitive had
carried his fortunes to Charleston.

South Carolina contains 34,000 square miles, and a population of 720,000
inhabitants, of whom 385,000 are black slaves. In the old rebellion it
was distracted between revolutionary principles and the loyalist
predilections, and at least one half of the planters were faithful to
George III., nor did they yield till Washington sent an army to support
their antagonists, and drove them from the colony.

In my next letter I shall give a brief account of a visit to some of
the planters, as far as it can be made consistent with the obligations
which the rites and rights of hospitality impose on the guest as well as
upon the host. These gentlemen are well-bred, courteous, and hospitable.
A genuine aristocracy, they have time to cultivate their minds, to apply
themselves to politics and the guidance of public affairs. They travel
and read, love field-sports, racing, shooting, hunting, and fishing, are
bold horsemen, and good shots. But, after all, their state is a modern
Sparta--an aristocracy resting on a helotry, and with nothing else to
rest upon. Although they profess (and I believe, indeed, sincerely) to
hold opinions in opposition to the opening of the slave-trade, it is
nevertheless true that the clause in the constitution of the Confederate
States which prohibited the importation of <DW64>s was especially and
energetically resisted by them, because, as they say, it seemed to be an
admission that slavery was in itself an evil and a wrong. Their whole
system rests on slavery, and as such they defend it. They entertain very
exaggerated ideas of the military strength of their little community,
although one may do full justice to its military spirit. Out of their
whole population they cannot reckon more than 60,000 adult men by any
arithmetic, and as there are nearly 30,000 plantations which must be,
according to law, superintended by white men, a considerable number of
these adults cannot be spared from the state for service in the open
field. The planters boast that they can raise their crops without any
inconvenience by the labor of their <DW64>s, and they seem confident
that the <DW64>s will work without superintendence. But the experiment
is rather dangerous, and it will only be tried in the last extremity.

       *       *       *       *       *

SAVANNAH, GA., _May_ 1, 1861.

It is said that “fools build houses for wise men to live in.” Be that
true or not, it is certain that “Uncle Sam” has built strong places for
his enemies to occupy. To-day I have visited Fort Pulaski, which defends
the mouth of the Savannah River and the approaches to the city. It was
left to take care of itself, and the Georgians quietly stepped into it,
and have been busied in completing its defences, so that it is now
capable of stopping a fleet very effectually. Pulaski was a Pole who
fell in the defence of Savannah against the British, and whose memory is
perpetuated in the name of the fort, which is now under the Confederate
flag, and garrisoned by bitter foes of the United States. Among our
party were Commodore Tatnall, whose name will be familiar to English
ears in connection with the attack on the Peiho Forts, where the gallant
American showed the world that “blood was thicker than water;”
Brigadier-General Lawton, in command of the forces of Georgia, and a
number of naval and military officers, of whom many had belonged to the
United States regular services. It was strange to look at such a man as
the commodore, who, for forty-nine long years, had served under the
stars and stripes, quietly preparing to meet his old comrades and
friends, if needs be, in the battle-field--his allegiance to the country
and to the flag renounced, his long service flung away, his old ties and
connections severed--and all this in defence of the sacred right of
rebellion on the part of “his state.” He is not now, nor has he been for