Chapter I: September 8, 1877

Having just returned from a few weeks' stay in Virginia it has occurred to me as probable that your readers would be interested in hearing how such changes in Southern manners and tone of thought and economical outlook as could be noted in a brief visit strike one who had travelled in that region before the war had revolutionized it. It is now twenty years since I spent a winter traversing the Cotton States on horseback, sleeping at the house which happened to be nearest when the night caught me. Buchanan had just been elected; the friends of slavery, though anxious, were exultant and defiant, and the possibility of a separate political future had begun to take definite shape in the public mind, at least in the Gulf States. I am unable to compare the economical condition of that part of the country at that time with its condition to-day, because both slavery and agriculture in Virginia differed then in many important respects from slavery and agriculture farther south. But the habits and modes of thought and feeling bred by slavery were essentially the same all over the South; and I do not think that I shall go far astray in assuming that the changes in these which I have noticed in Virginia would be found to-day in all the other States.

The first which struck me, and it was a most agreeable one, was what I may call the emancipation which conversation and social intercourse with Northerners had undergone. In 1857 the tone of nearly everybody with whom I came in contact, however veiled by politeness, was in some degree irritable and defiant. My host and I were never long before the evening fire without my finding that he was impatient to talk about slavery, that he suspected me of disliking it, and yet that he wished to have me understand that he did not care, and that nobody at the South cared two cents what I thought about it, and that it was a little impertinent in me, who knew so little of the negro, to have any opinion about it at all. I was obliged, too, to confess inwardly that there was a good deal of justification for his bad temper. There was I, a curious stranger, roving through his country and eating at his board, and all the while secretly or openly criticising or condemning his relations with his laborers and servants, and, in fact, the whole scheme of his domestic life. I was not a pleasant companion, and nothing could make me one, and no matter on what themes our talk ran, it was colored by our opinions on the institution. He looked at nearly everything in politics and society from what might be called the slaveholder's point of view, and suspected me, on the other hand, of disguising reprobation of the South and its institutions in any praise of the North or of France or England which I might utter. So that there was a certain acridity and a sense of strong and deep limitations and reserves in our discussions, somewhat like those which are felt in the talk of a pious evangelical Protestant with a pious Catholic.

In Virginia of to-day I was conscious of a curious change in the atmosphere, as if the windows of a close room had been suddenly opened. I found that I was in a country where all things were debatable, and where I had not to be on the lookout for susceptibilities. The negro, too, about whom I used to have to be so careful, with whom I used to make it a point of honor not to talk privately or apart from his master when I was staying on a plantation, was wandering about loose, as it were, and nobody seemed to care anything about him any more than about any poor man. I found every Southerner I spoke to as ready to discuss him as to discuss sheep or oxen, to let you have your own views about him just as you had them about sheep or oxen. Moreover, I found instead of the stereotyped orthodox view of his place and capacity which prevailed in 1857, a great variety of opinions about him, mostly depreciatory, it is true, but still varying in degree as well as in kind. It is difficult to give anyone who has never had any experience of the old slave society an idea of the difference this makes in a stranger's position at the South. In short, as one Southerner expressed it to me on my mentioning the change, "Yes, sir, we have been brought into intellectual and moral relations with the rest of the civilized world." All subjects are now open at the South in conversation.

Is this true? it will probably be asked, with regard to the late war. Can you talk freely about that? Not exactly; but then the limitations on your discourse on this point are not peculiar to the South; they are such as would be put upon the discourse of two parties to a bloody contest in any civilized country among well-bred men or women. The events of the war you can discuss freely, but you are hardly at liberty to denounce Southern soldiers or officers, or accuse them of "rebellion," or to assume that they fought for base or wicked motives. Moreover, in a certain sense, all Southerners are still "unrepentant rebels." Doubtless, in view of the result, they will acknowledge that the war was a gigantic mistake; but I found that if I sought for an admission that, if it was all to do over again, they would not fight, I was touching on a very tender point, and I was gently but firmly repelled. The reason is plain enough. In confessing this, they would, they think, be confessing that their sons and brothers and fathers had perished miserably in a causeless struggle on which they ought never to have entered, and this, of course, would look like a slur on their memory, and their memory is still, after the lapse of twelve years, very sacred and very dear. I doubt if many people at the North have an adequate notion of the intensity of the emotions with which Southerners look back on the war; and I mean tender and not revengeful or malignant emotions. The losses of the battle-field were deeply felt at the North--in many households down to the very roots of life; but on the whole they fell on a large and prosperous population, on a community which in the very thick of the fray seemed to be rolling up wealth, which revelled as it fought, and came out of the battle triumphant, exultant, and powerful. At the South they swept through a scanty population with the most searching destructiveness, and when all was over they had to be wept over in ruined homes and in the midst of a society which was wrecked from top to bottom, and in which all relatives and friends had sunk together to common perdition. There has been no other such cataclysm in history. Great states have been conquered before now, but conquest did not mean a sudden and desolating social revolution; so that to a Southerner the loss of relatives on the battle-field or in the hospital is associated with the loss of everything else. A gentleman told me of his going, at the close of the war, into a little church in South Carolina on Sunday, and finding it filled with women, who were all in black, and who cried during the singing. It reminded one of the scene in the cathedral at Leyden, when the people got together to chant a _Te Deum_ on hearing that the besieging army was gone; but, the music suddenly dying out, the air was filled with the sounds of sobbing. The Leydeners, however, were weak and half-starved people, weeping over a great deliverance; these South Carolinians were weeping before endless bereavement and hopeless poverty. I doubt much if any community in the modern world was ever so ruthlessly brought face to face with what is sternest and hardest in human life; and those of them who have looked at it without flinching have something which any of us may envy them.

But then I think it would be a mistake to suppose that Southerners came out of the war simply sorrowful. At the close, and for some time afterward, they undoubtedly felt fiercely and bitterly, and hated while they wept; and this was the primal difficulty of reconstruction. Frequently in conversation I heard some violent speech or act occurring soon after the war mentioned with the parenthetical explanation, "You know, I felt very bitterly at that time." But, then, I have always heard it from persons who are to day good-tempered, conciliatory, and hopeful, and desirous of cultivating good relations with Northerners; from which the inference, which so many Northern politicians find it so hard to swallow, is easy--viz., that time produces on Southerners its usual effects. What Mr. Boutwell and Mr. Blaine would have us believe is that Southerners are a peculiar breed of men, on whom time produces no effect whatever, and who feel about things that happened twenty years ago just as they feel about things which happened a month ago.

The fact is, however, that they are in this respect like the rest of the human race. Time has done for their hearts and heads what it has done for the old Virginia battle-fields. There was not in 1865 a fence standing between the Potomac and Gordonsville, and but few, if any, undamaged houses. When I passed Manassas Junction the other day there was a hospitable-looking tavern and several houses at the station; the flowers were blooming in the yard, and crowds of young men and women in their Sunday clothes were gathered from the country around to see a base-ball match, and a well-tilled and well-fenced and smiling farming country stretched before my eyes in every direction. The only trace of the old fights was a rude graveyard filled, as a large sign informed us, with "the Confederate dead." All the rest of the way down to the springs the road ran through farms which looked as prosperous and peaceful as if the tide of war had not rolled over them inside a hundred years, and it is impossible to talk with the farmers ten minutes without seeing how thoroughly human and Anglo-Saxon they are. With them the war is history--tender, touching, and heroic history if you will, but having no sort of connection with the practical life of to-day. Some of us at the North think their minds are occupied with schemes for the assassination and spoliation of negroes, and for a "new rebellion." Their minds are really occupied with making money, and the farms show it, and their designs on the negro are confined to getting him to work for low wages. His wages are low--forty cents a day and rations, which cost ten cents--but he is content with it. I saw negroes seeking employment at this rate, and glad to get it; and in the making of the bargain nothing could be more commercial, apparently, than the relations of the parties. They were evidently laborer and employer to each other, and nothing more.

The state of things on two farms which I visited may serve as illustrations of the process of regeneration which is going on all over Virginia. They are two hundred miles apart. On one of two thousand acres there were, before the war, about one hundred and fifty slaves of all ages. The owner, at emancipation, put them in wagons and deposited them in Ohio. His successor now works the plantation with twelve hired men, who see to his cattle, of which he raises and feeds large herds. His cultivation is carried on on shares by white tenants. He has an overseer, makes a snug income, and spends a good part of his winters in Baltimore and New York. He laughs when you ask him if he regrets slavery. Nothing would induce him to take care of one hundred and fifty men, women, and children, furnishing perhaps thirty able-bodied men, littering the house with a swarm of lazy servants, and making heavy drafts on the meat-house and corn-crib, and running up doctor's bills.

The other was owned at the close of the war by a regular "Virginia gentleman," with the usual swarm of negroes, and who was in debt. He sold it to an enterprising young farmer from another county, paid his debts, and retired to a small place, where, with two or three hired men, he makes a living. The young farmer, instead of seventy-five slaves, works it with twelve hands in the busy season and three in winter, is up at five o'clock in the morning superintending them himself, raises all raisable crops, and is as intent on the markets and the experiments made by his neighbors as if he lived in Illinois or the Carse of Gowrie. He was led by Colonel Waring's book to try tile-draining, and made the tiles for the purpose on his own land. He was so successful that he now manufactures and soils tiles extensively to others. It would be difficult to meet at the North or in England two men with their faces turned away from the old times more completely than these, more averse from the old plantation ways; and, as far as I could learn or hear, they are fair specimens of the kind of men who are taking possession of the Old Dominion. Their neighbors consist of three classes: men who had by extraordinary exertions saved some or all of their land after the war, and had by borrowing or economizing managed to stock it, and are now prospering, by dint of close management and constant attention, on the Northern plan; young and enterprising men who had bought at low rates from original proprietors whom the war left hopelessly involved, and too old or incapable to recover; and a sprinkling of Northern and English immigrants.