American Notes for General Circulation

by Dickens, Chales

  American cries 'Go ahead!' which is somewhat expressive of the

  national character of the two countries.

  The first half-mile of the road is over bridges made of loose

  planks laid across two parallel poles, which tilt up as the wheels

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  roll over them; and IN the river. The river has a clayey bottom

  and is full of holes, so that half a horse is constantly

  disappearing unexpectedly, and can't be found again for some time.

  But we get past even this, and come to the road itself, which is a

  series of alternate swamps and gravel-pits. A tremendous place is

  close before us, the black driver rolls his eyes, screws his mouth

  up very round, and looks straight between the two leaders, as if he

  were saying to himself, 'We have done this often before, but NOW I

  think we shall have a crash.' He takes a rein in each hand; jerks

  and pulls at both; and dances on the splashboard with both feet

  (keeping his seat, of course) like the late lamented Ducrow on two

  of his fiery coursers. We come to the spot, sink down in the mire

  nearly to the coach windows, tilt on one side at an angle of fortyfive

  degrees, and stick there. The insides scream dismally; the

  coach stops; the horses flounder; all the other six coaches stop;

  and their four-and-twenty horses flounder likewise: but merely for

  company, and in sympathy with ours. Then the following

  circumstances occur.

  BLACK DRIVER (to the horses). 'Hi!'

  Nothing happens. Insides scream again.

  BLACK DRIVER (to the horses). 'Ho!'

  Horses plunge, and splash the black driver.

  GENTLEMAN INSIDE (looking out). 'Why, what on airth -

  Gentleman receives a variety of splashes and draws his head in

  again, without finishing his question or waiting for an answer.

  BLACK DRIVER (still to the horses). 'Jiddy! Jiddy!'

  Horses pull violently, drag the coach out of the hole, and draw it

  up a bank; so steep, that the black driver's legs fly up into the

  air, and he goes back among the luggage on the roof. But he

  immediately recovers himself, and cries (still to the horses),

  'Pill!'

  No effect. On the contrary, the coach begins to roll back upon No.

  2, which rolls back upon No. 3, which rolls back upon No. 4, and so

  on, until No. 7 is heard to curse and swear, nearly a quarter of a

  mile behind.

  BLACK DRIVER (louder than before). 'Pill!'

  Horses make another struggle to get up the bank, and again the

  coach rolls backward.

  BLACK DRIVER (louder than before). 'Pe-e-e-ill!'

  Horses make a desperate struggle.

  BLACK DRIVER (recovering spirits). 'Hi, Jiddy, Jiddy, Pill!'

  Horses make another effort.

  BLACK DRIVER (with great vigour). 'Ally Loo! Hi. Jiddy, Jiddy.

  Pill. Ally Loo!'

  Horses almost do it.

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  BLACK DRIVER (with his eyes starting out of his head). 'Lee, den.

  Lee, dere. Hi. Jiddy, Jiddy. Pill. Ally Loo. Lee-e-e-e-e!'

  They run up the bank, and go down again on the other side at a

  fearful pace. It is impossible to stop them, and at the bottom

  there is a deep hollow, full of water. The coach rolls

  frightfully. The insides scream. The mud and water fly about us.

  The black driver dances like a madman. Suddenly we are all right

  by some extraordinary means, and stop to breathe.

  A black friend of the black driver is sitting on a fence. The

  black driver recognises him by twirling his head round and round

  like a harlequin, rolling his eyes, shrugging his shoulders, and

  grinning from ear to ear. He stops short, turns to me, and says:

  'We shall get you through sa, like a fiddle, and hope a please you

  when we get you through sa. Old 'ooman at home sa:' chuckling very

  much. 'Outside gentleman sa, he often remember old 'ooman at home

  sa,' grinning again.

  'Ay ay, we'll take care of the old woman. Don't be afraid.'

  The black driver grins again, but there is another hole, and beyond

  that, another bank, close before us. So he stops short: cries (to

  the horses again) 'Easy. Easy den. Ease. Steady. Hi. Jiddy.

  Pill. Ally. Loo,' but never 'Lee!' until we are reduced to the

  very last extremity, and are in the midst of difficulties,

  extrication from which appears to be all but impossible.

  And so we do the ten miles or thereabouts in two hours and a half;

  breaking no bones, though bruising a great many; and in short

  getting through the distance, 'like a fiddle.'

  This singular kind of coaching terminates at Fredericksburgh,

  whence there is a railway to Richmond. The tract of country

  through which it takes its course was once productive; but the soil

  has been exhausted by the system of employing a great amount of

  slave labour in forcing crops, without strengthening the land: and

  it is now little better than a sandy desert overgrown with trees.

  Dreary and uninteresting as its aspect is, I was glad to the heart

  to find anything on which one of the curses of this horrible

  institution has fallen; and had greater pleasure in contemplating

  the withered ground, than the richest and most thriving cultivation

  in the same place could possibly have afforded me.

  In this district, as in all others where slavery sits brooding, (I

  have frequently heard this admitted, even by those who are its

  warmest advocates:) there is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which

  is inseparable from the system. The barns and outhouses are

  mouldering away; the sheds are patched and half roofless; the log

  cabins (built in Virginia with external chimneys made of clay or

  wood) are squalid in the last degree. There is no look of decent

  comfort anywhere. The miserable stations by the railway side, the

  great wild wood-yards, whence the engine is supplied with fuel; the

  negro children rolling on the ground before the cabin doors, with

  dogs and pigs; the biped beasts of burden slinking past: gloom and

  dejection are upon them all.

  In the negro car belonging to the train in which we made this

  journey, were a mother and her children who had just been

  purchased; the husband and father being left behind with their old

  owner. The children cried the whole way, and the mother was

  misery's picture. The champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit

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  of Happiness, who had bought them, rode in the same train; and,

  every time we stopped, got down to see that they were safe. The

  black in Sinbad's Travels with one eye in the middle of his

  forehead which shone like a burning coal, was nature's aristocrat

  compared with this white gentleman.

  It was between six and seven o'clock in the evening, when we drove

  to the hotel: in front of which, and on the top of the broad

  flight of steps leading to the door, two or three citizens were

  balancing themselves on rocking-chairs, and smoking cigars. We

  found it a very large and elegant
establishment, and were as well

  entertained as travellers need desire to be. The climate being a

  thirsty one, there was never, at any hour of the day, a scarcity of

  loungers in the spacious bar, or a cessation of the mixing of cool

  liquors: but they were a merrier people here, and had musical

  instruments playing to them o' nights, which it was a treat to hear

  again.

  The next day, and the next, we rode and walked about the town,

  which is delightfully situated on eight hills, overhanging James

  River; a sparkling stream, studded here and there with bright

  islands, or brawling over broken rocks. Although it was yet but

  the middle of March, the weather in this southern temperature was

  extremely warm; the peech-trees and magnolias were in full bloom;

  and the trees were green. In a low ground among the hills, is a

  valley known as 'Bloody Run,' from a terrible conflict with the

  Indians which once occurred there. It is a good place for such a

  struggle, and, like every other spot I saw associated with any

  legend of that wild people now so rapidly fading from the earth,

  interested me very much.

  The city is the seat of the local parliament of Virginia; and in

  its shady legislative halls, some orators were drowsily holding

  forth to the hot noon day. By dint of constant repetition,

  however, these constitutional sights had very little more interest

  for me than so many parochial vestries; and I was glad to exchange

  this one for a lounge in a well-arranged public library of some ten

  thousand volumes, and a visit to a tobacco manufactory, where the

  workmen are all slaves.

  I saw in this place the whole process of picking, rolling,

  pressing, drying, packing in casks, and branding. All the tobacco

  thus dealt with, was in course of manufacture for chewing; and one

  would have supposed there was enough in that one storehouse to have

  filled even the comprehensive jaws of America. In this form, the

  weed looks like the oil-cake on which we fatten cattle; and even

  without reference to its consequences, is sufficiently uninviting.

  Many of the workmen appeared to be strong men, and it is hardly

  necessary to add that they were all labouring quietly, then. After

  two o'clock in the day, they are allowed to sing, a certain number

  at a time. The hour striking while I was there, some twenty sang a

  hymn in parts, and sang it by no means ill; pursuing their work

  meanwhile. A bell rang as I was about to leave, and they all

  poured forth into a building on the opposite side of the street to

  dinner. I said several times that I should like to see them at

  their meal; but as the gentleman to whom I mentioned this desire

  appeared to be suddenly taken rather deaf, I did not pursue the

  request. Of their appearance I shall have something to say,

  presently.

  On the following day, I visited a plantation or farm, of about

  twelve hundred acres, on the opposite bank of the river. Here

  again, although I went down with the owner of the estate, to 'the

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  quarter,' as that part of it in which the slaves live is called, I

  was not invited to enter into any of their huts. All I saw of

  them, was, that they were very crazy, wretched cabins, near to

  which groups of half-naked children basked in the sun, or wallowed

  on the dusty ground. But I believe that this gentleman is a

  considerate and excellent master, who inherited his fifty slaves,

  and is neither a buyer nor a seller of human stock; and I am sure,

  from my own observation and conviction, that he is a kind-hearted,

  worthy man.

  The planter's house was an airy, rustic dwelling, that brought

  Defoe's description of such places strongly to my recollection.

  The day was very warm, but the blinds being all closed, and the

  windows and doors set wide open, a shady coolness rustled through

  the rooms, which was exquisitely refreshing after the glare and

  heat without. Before the windows was an open piazza, where, in

  what they call the hot weather - whatever that may be - they sling

  hammocks, and drink and doze luxuriously. I do not know how their

  cool rejections may taste within the hammocks, but, having

  experience, I can report that, out of them, the mounds of ices and

  the bowls of mint-julep and sherry-cobbler they make in these

  latitudes, are refreshments never to be thought of afterwards, in

  summer, by those who would preserve contented minds.

  There are two bridges across the river: one belongs to the

  railroad, and the other, which is a very crazy affair, is the

  private property of some old lady in the neighbourhood, who levies

  tolls upon the townspeople. Crossing this bridge, on my way back,

  I saw a notice painted on the gate, cautioning all persons to drive

  slowly: under a penalty, if the offender were a white man, of five

  dollars; if a negro, fifteen stripes.

  The same decay and gloom that overhang the way by which it is

  approached, hover above the town of Richmond. There are pretty

  villas and cheerful houses in its streets, and Nature smiles upon

  the country round; but jostling its handsome residences, like

  slavery itself going hand in hand with many lofty virtues, are

  deplorable tenements, fences unrepaired, walls crumbling into

  ruinous heaps. Hinting gloomily at things below the surface,

  these, and many other tokens of the same description, force

  themselves upon the notice, and are remembered with depressing

  influence, when livelier features are forgotten.

  To those who are happily unaccustomed to them, the countenances in

  the streets and labouring-places, too, are shocking. All men who

  know that there are laws against instructing slaves, of which the

  pains and penalties greatly exceed in their amount the fines

  imposed on those who maim and torture them, must be prepared to

  find their faces very low in the scale of intellectual expression.

  But the darkness - not of skin, but mind - which meets the

  stranger's eye at every turn; the brutalizing and blotting out of

  all fairer characters traced by Nature's hand; immeasurably outdo

  his worst belief. That travelled creation of the great satirist's

  brain, who fresh from living among horses, peered from a high

  casement down upon his own kind with trembling horror, was scarcely

  more repelled and daunted by the sight, than those who look upon

  some of these faces for the first time must surely be.

  I left the last of them behind me in the person of a wretched

  drudge, who, after running to and fro all day till midnight, and

  moping in his stealthy winks of sleep upon the stairs

  betweenwhiles, was washing the dark passages at four o'clock in the

  morning; and went upon my way with a grateful heart that I was not

  doomed to live where slavery was, and had never had my senses

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  blunted to its wrongs and horrors in a slave-rocked cradle.

  It had been my intention to proceed by James
River and Chesapeake

  Bay to Baltimore; but one of the steamboats being absent from her

  station through some accident, and the means of conveyance being

  consequently rendered uncertain, we returned to Washington by the

  way we had come (there were two constables on board the steamboat,

  in pursuit of runaway slaves), and halting there again for one

  night, went on to Baltimore next afternoon.

  The most comfortable of all the hotels of which I had any

  experience in the United States, and they were not a few, is

  Barnum's, in that city: where the English traveller will find

  curtains to his bed, for the first and probably the last time in

  America (this is a disinterested remark, for I never use them); and

  where he will be likely to have enough water for washing himself,

  which is not at all a common case.

  This capital of the state of Maryland is a bustling, busy town,

  with a great deal of traffic of various kinds, and in particular of

  water commerce. That portion of the town which it most favours is

  none of the cleanest, it is true; but the upper part is of a very

  different character, and has many agreeable streets and public

  buildings. The Washington Monument, which is a handsome pillar

  with a statue on its summit; the Medical College; and the Battle

  Monument in memory of an engagement with the British at North

  Point; are the most conspicuous among them.

  There is a very good prison in this city, and the State

  Penitentiary is also among its institutions. In this latter

  establishment there were two curious cases.

  One was that of a young man, who had been tried for the murder of

  his father. The evidence was entirely circumstantial, and was very

  conflicting and doubtful; nor was it possible to assign any motive

  which could have tempted him to the commission of so tremendous a

  crime. He had been tried twice; and on the second occasion the

  jury felt so much hesitation in convicting him, that they found a

  verdict of manslaughter, or murder in the second degree; which it

  could not possibly be, as there had, beyond all doubt, been no

  quarrel or provocation, and if he were guilty at all, he was

  unquestionably guilty of murder in its broadest and worst

  signification.

  The remarkable feature in the case was, that if the unfortunate

  deceased were not really murdered by this own son of his, he must

  have been murdered by his own brother. The evidence lay in a most