Studies in The South and West, With Comments on Canada. Warner Charles Dudley
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The South met the North in business and in politics, and in a limited social intercourse, but from one cause and another for three-quarters of a century it was practically isolated, and consequently developed a peculiar social life.
One result of this isolation was that the South was more homogeneous than the North, and perhaps more distinctly American in its characteristics. This was to be expected, since it had one common and overmastering interest in slavery, had little foreign admixture, and was removed from the currents of commerce and the disturbing ideas of Reform. The South, so far as society was concerned, was an agricultural aristocracy, based upon a perfectly defined lowest class in the slaves, and holding all trade, commerce, and industrial and mechanical pursuits in true mediæval contempt. Its literature was monarchical, tempered by some Jeffersonian, doctrinaire notions of the rights of man, which were satisfied, however, by an insistence upon the sovereignty of the States, and by equal privileges to a certain social order in each State. Looked at, then, from the outside, the South appeared to be homogeneous, but from its own point of view, socially, it was not at all so. Social life in these jealously independent States developed almost as freely and variously as it did in the Middle Ages in the free cities of Italy. Virginia was not at all like South Carolina (except in one common interest), and Louisiana—especially in its centre, New Orleans—more cosmopolitan than any other part of the South by reason of its foreign elements, more closely always in sympathy with Paris than with New York or Boston, was widely, in its social life, separated from its sisters. Indeed, in early days, before the slavery agitation, there was, owing to the heritage of English traditions, more in common between Boston and Charleston than between New Orleans and Charleston. And later, there was a marked social difference between towns and cities near together—as, for instance, between agricultural Lexington and commercial Louisville, in Kentucky.
The historian who writes the social life of the Southern States will be embarrassed with romantic and picturesque material. Nowhere else in this levelling age will he find a community developing so much of the dramatic, so much splendor and such pathetic contrasts in the highest social cultivation, as in the plantation and city life of South Carolina. Already, in regarding it, it assumes an air of unreality, and vanishes in its strong lights and heavy shades like a dream of the chivalric age. An allusion to its character is sufficient for the purposes of this paper. Persons are still alive who saw the prodigal style of living and the reckless hospitality of the planters in those days, when in the Charleston and Sea Island mansions the guests constantly entertained were only outnumbered by the swarms of servants; when it was not incongruous and scarcely ostentatious that the courtly company, which had the fine and free manner of another age, should dine off gold and silver plate; and when all that wealth and luxury could suggest was lavished in a princely magnificence that was almost barbaric in its profusion. The young men were educated in England; the young women were reared like helpless princesses, with a servant for every want and whim; it was a day of elegant accomplishments and deferential manners, but the men gamed like Fox and drank like Sheridan, and the duel was the ordinary arbiter of any difference of opinion or of any point of honor. Not even slavery itself could support existence on such a scale, and even before the war it began to give way to the conditions of our modern life. And now that old peculiar civilization of South. Carolina belongs to romance. It can never be repeated, even by the aid of such gigantic fortunes as are now accumulating in the North.
The agricultural life of Virginia appeals with scarcely less attraction to the imagination of the novelist. Mr. Thackeray caught the flavor of it in his “Virginians” from an actual study of it in the old houses, when it was becoming a faded memory. The vast estates—principalities in size—with troops of slaves attached to each plantation; the hospitality, less costly, but as free as that of South Carolina; the land in the hands of a few people; politics and society controlled by a small number of historic families, intermarried until all Virginians of a certain grade were related—all this forms a picture as feudal-like and foreign to this age as can be imagined. The writer recently read the will of a country gentleman of the last century in Virginia, which raises a distinct image of the landed aristocracy of the time. It devised his plantation of six thousand acres with its slaves attached, his plantation of eighteen hundred acres and slaves, his plantation of twelve hundred acres and slaves, with other farms and outlying property; it mentioned all the cattle, sheep, and hogs, the riding-horses in stables, the racing-steeds, the several coaches with the six horses that drew them (an acknowledgment of the wretched state of the roads), and so on in all the details of a vast domain. All the slaves are called by name, all the farming implements were enumerated, and all the homely articles of furniture down to the beds and kitchen utensils. This whole structure of a unique civilization is practically swept away now, and with it the peculiar social life it produced. Let us pause a moment upon a few details of it, as it had its highest development in Eastern Virginia.
The family was the fetich. In this high social caste the estates were entailed to the limit of the law, for one generation, and this entail was commonly religiously renewed by the heir. It was not expected that a widow would remarry; as a rule she did not, and it was almost a matter of course that the will of the husband should make the enjoyment of even the entailed estate dependent upon the non-marriage of the widow. These prohibitions upon her freedom of choice were not considered singular or cruel in a society whose chief gospel was the preservation of the family name.
The planters lived more simply than the great seaboard planters of South Carolina and Georgia, with not less pride, but with less ostentation and show. The houses were of the accepted colonial pattern, square, with four rooms on a floor, but with wide galleries (wherein they differed from the colonial houses in New England), and sometimes with additions in the way of offices and lodging-rooms. The furniture was very simple and plain—a few hundred dollars would cover the cost of it in most mansions. There were not in all Virginia more than two or three magnificent houses. It was the taste of gentlemen to adorn the ground in front of the house with evergreens, with the locust and acanthus, and perhaps the maple-trees not native to the spot; while the oak, which is nowhere more stately and noble than in Virginia, was never seen on the lawn or the drive-way, but might be found about the “quarters,” or in an adjacent forest park. As the interior of the houses was plain, so the taste of the people was simple in the matter of ornament—jewellery was very little worn; in fact, it is almost literally true that there were in Virginia no family jewels.
So thoroughly did this society believe in itself and keep to its traditions that the young gentleman of the house, educated in England, brought on his return nothing foreign home with him—no foreign tastes, no bric-à-brac for his home, and never a foreign wife. He came back unchanged, and married the cousin he met at the first country dance he went to.
The pride of the people, which was intense, did not manifest itself in ways that are common elsewhere—it was sufficient to itself in its own homespun independence. What would make one distinguished elsewhere was powerless here. Literary talent, and even acquired wealth, gave no distinction; aside from family and membership of the caste, nothing gave it to any native or visitor. There was no lion-hunting, no desire whatever to attract the attention of, or to pay any deference to, men of letters. If a member of society happened to be distinguished in letters or in scholarship, it made not the slightest difference in his social appreciation. There was absolutely no encouragement for men of letters, and consequently there was no literary class and little literature. There was only one thing that gave a man any distinction in this society, except a long pedigree, and that was the talent of oratory—that was prized, for that was connected with prestige in the State and the politics of the dominant class. The planters took few newspapers, and read those few very little. They were a fox-hunting, convivial race, generally Whig in politics, always orthodox in religion. The man of cultivation was rare, and, if he was cultivated, it was usually only on a single subject. But the planter might be an astute politician, and a man of wide knowledge and influence in public affairs. There was one thing, however, that was held in almost equal value with pedigree, and that was female beauty. There was always the recognized “belle,” the beauty of the day, who was the toast and the theme of talk, whose memory was always green with her chivalrous contemporaries; the veterans liked to recall over the old Madeira the wit and charms of the raving beauties who had long gone the way of the famous vintages of the cellar.
The position of the clergyman in the Episcopal Church was very much what his position was in England