THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH
I’m
reading The Cotton Kingdom by
Frederick Law Olmstead, a journalist who traveled about the South in the 1850s
and recorded experiences which were published in the New York Times and NY Tribune. First-hand accounts, whether or not they are biased, give insight
into the physical world of our past.
The
first collection of Olmstead’s articles was published in 1857 as From the
Journal of a Northern Traveler on Horse back. Eventually his works were consolidated into this 600 page book. This
is social history with limited academic overtones. What makes it so interesting
is the immediacy of Olmstead’s journey. We travel with him and sweat in the
heat, slosh through muddy roads, worry about the horse, and get fleas from
dirty beds. We’re bit by mosquitoes. Get caught at night in the rain.
Because
of the detail he gives us—he recounts conversations—Olmstead must have taken
copious notes. I can see him pulling his horse to the side of a wagon track
road to sit on a stump and write down the events and people he’s just
experienced. Given the length of his work, you’d think he’d need a cart to
carry his many notes, obviously written long hand. I can only wonder what he
did with them as he went from farm house to farm.
If
you think the wild west was wild, read Olmstead. There were white people in the
Nineteenth Century South less civilized than the Indians they disparaged. Many
were illiterate and more unwilling than unable to take care of basic needs such
as shelter and food. According to Olmstead:
...for every rich man’s
house, I am sure that I passed a dozen shabby and half-furnished cottages, and
at least a hundred cabins—mere hovels, such as none but a poor farmer would
house his cattle in at the North.
I
came to realize how little prepared the antebellum South was for travelers. And
I’m not just talking about the absence of trains, stagecoaches, and passable
roads. Maps were inadequate, roads unmarked, and when Olmstead got lost, he
found that the local population couldn’t give directions to landmarks that
turned out to be nearby.
As
a matter of course, he overnighted in the homes of people. Their hospitality
wasn’t necessarily free, but he was always able to find a place to stay, even
in the backwoods of Mississippi and Louisiana. To find accommodations, he stopped
at one farm and then another as night approached until somebody took him in.
Though he found “white houses with groves of evergreen trees about them,” more
often than not, he encountered “a hilly wilderness, with a few dreary villages,
and many isolated cotton farms, with comfortless habitations for black and
white upon them.”
His
observations on the Southern attitude toward slavery breaks no new ground, but
the examples he provides will make us squirm. Southern abolitionists weren’t
uncommon, but they usually wanted slaves freed and sent back to Africa. At the
other end of the spectrum were the whites who took it as their God-given right
to own slaves. Many of them took better care of their dogs and horses.
Olmstead:
I do not think that I have
ever seen the sudden death of a negro noticed in a Southern newspaper, or heard
it referred to in conversation, that the loss of property, rather than the
extinction of life, was not the evident occasion of interest.
Olmstead
quotes a conversation he overheard on a steamboat. A passenger describes a
runaway slave who was caught by a river captain, put in irons, and left exposed
to weather. The man died as a result and the owner said that “[an attorney]
offered to take the case and prosecute the captain; and he says if he don’t
recover every red cent the man was worth he won’t ask me for a fee. It comes
kinder hard on me. I bought the nigger up, counting I should make a speculation
on him…I expect ‘twas a dead loss of eight hundred dollars, right out of
pocket.”
Many
religious slave owners, including preachers, tried to give slavery a good name
by claiming it Christianized heathens. Olmstead, who had given this credence,
revised his view after visiting the South.
Whatever of civilization,
and…of Christianity, they [the slaves] were acquiring…but poorly compensate the
effect of the systematic withdrawal from them of all the usual influences which
tend to nourish the moral nature and develop the intellectual faculties…
In
the latter chapters of the book, Olmstead makes the argument that slavery
created a privileged class which used its resources to buy more slaves rather
than establish cultural amenities, such as schools and libraries, which might
have developed a community spirit. His sentences become long winded and the
story tone didactic.
When
we read of the conditions in the South less than two centuries ago, our faults
fly into our face. It’s easy to fall victim to wholesale condemnation. But
there were Southerners like this Mississippian, who said, “it [slavery] is
unfortunately fixed upon us; we could not do away with it if we wished; our
duty is only to make the best of a bad thing; to lessen its evils as much as we
can, so far as we have to do with it individually.”
Olmstead’s
account reminds us of how much progress we’ve made, but there are writers today
giving us good reasons to keep up the effort, to continue to improve.
