Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation: 1838-1839

Hamilton struck me very much,—I mean the whole appearance of the place; the situation of the house, the noble water prospect it commanded, the magnificent old oaks near it, a luxuriant vine trellis, and a splendid hedge of Yucca gloriosa, were all objects of great delight to me. The latter was most curious to me, who had never seen any but single specimens of the plant, and not many of these. I think our green house at the north boasts but two; but here they were growing close together, and in such a manner as to form a compact and impenetrable hedge, their spiky leaves striking out on all sides like chevaux de frise, and the tall slender stems that bear those delicate ivory-coloured bells of blossoms, springing up against the sky in a regular row. I wish I could see that hedge in blossom. It must be wonderfully strange and lovely, and must look by moonlight like a whole range of fairy Chinese pagodas carved in ivory.

At dinner we had some delicious green peas, so much in advance of you are we down here with the seasons. Don't you think one might accept the rattlesnakes, or perhaps indeed the slavery, for the sake of the green peas? 'Tis a world of compensations—a life of compromises, you know; and one should learn to set one thing against another if one means to thrive and fare well, i.e. eat green peas on the twenty-eighth of March.

After dinner I walked up and down before the house for a long while with Mrs. F–, and had a most interesting conversation with her about the negroes and all the details of their condition. She is a kind-hearted, intelligent woman; but though she seemed to me to acquiesce, as a matter of inevitable necessity, in the social system in the midst of which she was born and lives, she did not appear to me, by several things she said, to be by any means in love with it. She gave me a very sad character of Mr. K–, confirming by her general description of him the impression produced by all the details I have received from our own people. As for any care for the moral or religious training of the slaves, that, she said, was a matter that never troubled his thoughts; indeed, his only notion upon the subject of religion, she said, was, that it was something not bad for white women and children.

We drove home by moonlight; and as we came towards the woods in the middle of the island, the fire-flies glittered out from the dusky thickets as if some magical golden veil was every now and then shaken out into the darkness. The air was enchantingly mild and soft, and the whole way through the silvery night delightful.

My dear friend, I have at length made acquaintance with a live rattlesnake. Old Scylla had the pleasure of discovering it while hunting for some wood to burn. Israel captured it, and brought it to the house for my edification. I thought it an evil-looking beast, and could not help feeling rather nervous while contemplating it, though the poor thing had a noose round its neck and could by no manner of means have extricated itself. The flat head, and vivid vicious eye, and darting tongue, were none of them lovely to behold; but the sort of threatening whirr produced by its rattle, together with the deepening and fading of the marks on its skin, either with its respiration or the emotions of fear and anger it was enduring, were peculiarly dreadful and fascinating. It was quite a young one, having only two or three rattles in its tail. These, as you probably know, increase in number by one annually; so that you can always tell the age of the amiable serpent you are examining—if it will let you count the number of joints of its rattle. Captain F– gave me the rattle of one which had as many as twelve joints. He said it had belonged to a very large snake which had crawled from under a fallen tree trunk on which his children were playing. After exhibiting his interesting captive, Israel killed, stuffed, and presented it to me for preservation as a trophy, and made me extremely happy by informing me that there was a nest of them where this one was found. I think with terror of S– running about with her little socks not reaching half-way up her legs, and her little frocks not reaching half-way down them. However, we shall probably not make acquaintance with many more of these natives of Georgia, as we are to return as soon as possible now to the north. We shall soon be free again.

This morning I rode to the burnt district, and attempted to go through it at St. Clair's, but unsuccessfully: it was impossible to penetrate through the charred and blackened thickets. In the afternoon I walked round the point, and visited the houses of the people who are our nearest neighbours. I found poor Edie in sad tribulation at the prospect of resuming her field labour. It is really shameful treatment of a woman just after child labour. She was confined exactly three weeks ago to-day, and she tells me she is ordered out to field work on Monday. She seems to dread the approaching hardships of her task-labour extremely. Her baby was born dead, she thinks in consequence of a fall she had while carrying a heavy weight of water. She is suffering great pain in one of her legs and sides, and seems to me in a condition utterly unfit for any work, much less hoeing in the fields; but I dare not interfere to prevent this cruelty. She says she has already had to go out to work three weeks after her confinement with each of her other children, and does not complain of it as anything special in her case. She says that is now the invariable rule of the whole plantation, though it used not to be so formerly.

I have let my letter lie since I wrote the above, dear E–; but as mine is a story without beginning, middle, or end, it matters extremely little where I leave it off or where I take it up; and if you have not, between my wood rides and sick slaves, come to Falstaff's conclusion that I have 'damnable iteration,' you are patient of sameness. But the days are like each other; and the rides and the people, and, alas! their conditions, do not vary.

To-day, however, my visit to the infirmary was marked by an event which has not occurred before—the death of one of the poor slaves while I was there. I found on entering the first ward,—to use a most inapplicable term for the dark, filthy, forlorn room I have so christened,—an old negro called Friday lying on the ground. I asked what ailed him, and was told he was dying. I approached him, and perceived, from the glazed eyes and the feeble rattling breath, that he was at the point of expiring. His tattered shirt and trousers barely covered his poor body; his appearance was that of utter exhaustion from age and feebleness; he had nothing under him but a mere handful of straw that did not cover the earth he was stretched on; and under his head, by way of pillow for his dying agony, two or three rough sticks just raising his skull a few inches from the ground. The flies were all gathering around his mouth, and not a creature was near him. There he lay,—the worn-out slave, whose life had been spent in unrequited labour for me and mine,—without one physical alleviation, one Christian solace, one human sympathy, to cheer him in his extremity,—panting out the last breath of his wretched existence, like some forsaken, over-worked, wearied-out beast of burthen, rotting where it falls! I bent over the poor awful human creature in the supreme hour of his mortality; and while my eyes, blinded with tears of unavailing pity and horror, were fixed upon him, there was a sudden quivering of the eyelids and falling of the jaw,—and he was free. I stood up, and remained long lost in the imagination of the change that creature had undergone, and in the tremendous overwhelming consciousness of the deliverance God had granted the soul whose cast-off vesture of decay lay at my feet. How I rejoiced for him—and how, as I turned to the wretches who were calling to me from the inner room, whence they could see me as I stood contemplating the piteous object, I wished they all were gone away with him, the delivered, the freed by death from bitter bitter bondage. In the next room, I found a miserable, decrepid, old negress, called Charity, lying sick, and I should think near too to die; but she did not think her work was over, much as she looked unfit for further work on earth; but with feeble voice and beseeching hands implored me to have her work lightened when she was sent back to it from the hospital. She is one of the oldest slaves on the plantation, and has to walk to her field labour, and back again at night, a distance of nearly four miles. There were an unusual number of sick women in the room to-day; among them quite a young girl, daughter of Boatman Quash's, with a sick baby, who has a father, though she has no husband. Poor thing! she looks like a mere child herself. I returned home so very sad and heart-sick that I could not rouse myself to the effort of going up to St. Annie's with the presents I had promised the people there. I sent M– up in the wood wagon with them, and remained in the house with my thoughts, which were none of the merriest.

Dearest E–. On Friday, I rode to where the rattlesnake was found, and where I was informed by the negroes there was a nest of them—a pleasing domestic picture of home and infancy that word suggests, not altogether appropriate to rattlesnakes, I think. On horseback I felt bold to accomplish this adventure, which I certainly should not have attempted on foot; however, I could discover no sign of either snake or nest—(perhaps it is of the nature of a mare's nest, and undiscoverable); but, having done my duty by myself in endeavouring to find it, I rode off and coasted the estate by the side of the marsh, till I came to the causeway. There I found a new cleared field, and stopped to admire the beautiful appearance of the stumps of the trees scattered all about it, and wreathed and garlanded with the most profuse and fantastic growth of various plants—wild roses being among the most abundant. What a lovely aspect one side of nature presents here, and how hideous is the other!

In the afternoon, I drove to pay a visit to old Mrs. A–, the lady proprietress whose estate immediately adjoins ours. On my way thither, I passed a woman called Margaret walking rapidly and powerfully along the road. She was returning home from the field, having done her task at three o'clock; and told me, with a merry beaming black face, that she was going 'to clean up de house, to please de missis.' On driving through my neighbour's grounds, I was disgusted more than I can express with the miserable negro huts of her people; they were not fit to shelter cattle—they were not fit to shelter anything, for they were literally in holes, and, as we used to say of our stockings at school, too bad to darn. To be sure, I will say, in excuse for their old mistress, her own habitation was but a very few degrees less ruinous and disgusting. What would one of your Yankee farmers say to such abodes? When I think of the white houses, the green blinds, and the flower plots, of the villages in New England, and look at these dwellings of lazy filth and inert degradation, it does seem amazing to think that physical and moral conditions so widely opposite should be found among people occupying a similar place in the social scale of the same country. The Northern farmer, however, thinks it no shame to work, the Southern planter does; and there begins and ends the difference. Industry, man's crown of honour elsewhere, is here his badge of utter degradation; and so comes all by which I am here surrounded—pride, profligacy, idleness, cruelty, cowardice, ignorance, squalor, dirt, and ineffable abasement.

When I returned home, I found that Mrs. F– had sent me some magnificent prawns. I think of having them served singly, and divided as one does a lobster—their size really suggests no less respect.

Saturday, 31st.—I rode all through the burnt district and the bush to Mrs. W–'s field, in making my way out of which I was very nearly swamped, and, but for the valuable assistance of a certain sable Scipio who came up and extricated me, I might be floundering hopelessly there still. He got me out of my Slough of Despond, and put me in the way to a charming wood ride which runs between Mrs. W–'s and Colonel H–'s grounds. While going along this delightful boundary of these two neighbouring estates, my mind not unnaturally dwelt upon the terms of deadly feud in which the two families owning them are living with each other. A horrible quarrel has occurred quite lately upon the subject of the ownership of this very ground I was skirting, between Dr. H– and young Mr. W–; they have challenged each other, and what I am going to tell you is a good sample of the sort of spirit which grows up among slaveholders. So read it, for it is curious to people who have not lived habitually among savages. The terms of the challenge that has passed between them have appeared like a sort of advertisement in the local paper, and are to the effect that they are to fight at a certain distance with certain weapons—fire-arms, of course; that there is to be on the person of each a white paper, or mark, immediately over the region of the heart, as a point for direct aim; and whoever kills the other is to have the privilege of cutting off his head, and sticking it up on a pole on the piece of land which was the origin of the debate; so that, some fine day, I might have come hither as I did to-day and found myself riding under the shadow of the gory locks of Dr. H– or Mr. W–, my peaceful and pleasant neighbours.

I came home through our own pine woods, which are actually a wilderness of black desolation. The scorched and charred tree trunks are still smoking and smouldering; the ground is a sort of charcoal pavement, and the fire is still burning on all sides, for the smoke was rapidly rising in several directions on each hand of the path I pursued. Across this dismal scene of strange destruction, bright blue and red birds, like living jewels, darted in the brilliant sunshine. I wonder if the fire has killed and scared away many of these beautiful creatures. In the afternoon I took Jack with me to clear some more of the wood paths; but the weather is what I call hot, and what the people here think warm, and the air was literally thick with little black points of insects, which they call sand flies, and which settle upon one's head and face literally like a black net; you hardly see them or feel them at the time, but the irritation occasioned by them is intolerable, and I had to relinquish my work and fly before this winged plague as fast as I could from my new acquaintance the rattlesnakes. Jack informed me, in the course of our expedition, that the woods on the island were sometimes burnt away in order to leave the ground in grass for fodder for the cattle, and that the very beautiful ones he and I had been clearing paths through were not unlikely to be so doomed, which strikes me as a horrible idea.

In the evening, poor Edie came up to the house to see me, with an old negress called Sackey, who has been one of the chief nurses on the island for many years. I suppose she has made some application to Mr. G– for a respite for Edie, on finding how terribly unfit she is for work; or perhaps Mr. –, to whom I represented her case, may have ordered her reprieve; but she came with much gratitude to me (who have, as far as I know, had nothing to do with it), to tell me that she is not able to be sent into the field for another week. Old Sackey fully confirmed Edie's account of the terrible hardships the women underwent in being thus driven to labour before they had recovered from child-bearing. She said that old Major – allowed the women at the rice island five weeks, and those here four weeks, to recover from a confinement, and then never permitted them for some time after they resumed their work to labour in the fields before sunrise or after sunset; but Mr. K– had altered that arrangement, allowing the women at the rice island only four weeks, and those here only three weeks, for their recovery; 'and then, missis,' continued the old woman, 'out into the field again, through dew and dry, as if nothing had happened; that is why, missis, so many of the women have falling of the womb, and weakness in the back; and if he had continued on the estate, he would have utterly destroyed all the breeding women.' Sometimes, after sending them back into the field, at the expiration of their three weeks, they would work for a day or two, she said, and then fall down in the field with exhaustion, and be brought to the hospital almost at the point of death.

Yesterday, Sunday, I had my last service at home with these poor people; nearly thirty of them came, all clean, neat, and decent, in their dress and appearance. S– had begged very hard to join the congregation, and upon the most solemn promise of remaining still she was admitted; but in spite of the perfect honour with which she kept her promise, her presence disturbed my thoughts not a little, and added much to the poignancy of the feeling with which I saw her father's poor slaves gathered round me. The child's exquisite complexion, large grey eyes, and solemn and at the same time eager countenance, was such a wonderful piece of contrast to their sable faces, so many of them so uncouth in their outlines and proportions, and yet all of them so pathetic, and some so sublime in their expression of patient suffering and religious fervour; their eyes never wandered from me and my child, who sat close by my knee, their little mistress, their future providence, my poor baby! Dear E–, bless God that you have never reared a child with such an awful expectation: and at the end of the prayers, the tears were streaming over their faces, and one chorus of blessings rose round me and the child—farewell blessings, and prayers that we would return; and thanks so fervent in their incoherency, it was more than I could bear, and I begged them to go away and leave me to recover myself. And then I remained with S–, and for quite a long while even her restless spirit was still in wondering amazement at my bitter crying. I am to go next Sunday to the church on the island, where there is to be service; and so this is my last Sunday with the people.

When I had recovered from the emotion of this scene, I walked out with S– a little way, but meeting M– and the baby, she turned home with them, and I pursued my walk alone up the road, and home by the shore. They are threatening to burn down all my woods to make grass land for the cattle, and I have terrified them by telling them that I will never come back if they destroy the woods. I went and paid a visit to Mrs. G–; poor little, well-meaning, helpless woman! what can she do for these poor people, where I who am supposed to own them can do nothing? and yet how much may be done, is done, by the brain and heart of one human being in contact with another! We are answerable for incalculable opportunities of good and evil in our daily intercourse with every soul with whom we have to deal; every meeting, every parting, every chance greeting, and every appointed encounter, are occasions open to us for which we are to account. To our children, our servants, our friends, our acquaintances,—to each and all every day, and all day long, we are distributing that which is best or worst in existence,—influence: with every word, with every look, with every gesture, something is given or withheld of great importance it may be to the receiver, of inestimable importance to the giver.

Certainly the laws and enacted statutes on which this detestable system is built up are potent enough; the social prejudice that buttresses it is almost more potent still; and yet a few hearts and brains well bent to do the work, would bring within this almost impenetrable dungeon of ignorance, misery, and degradation, in which so many millions of human souls lie buried, that freedom of God which would presently conquer for them their earthly liberty. With some such thoughts I commended the slaves on the plantation to the little overseer's wife; I did not tell my thoughts to her, they would have scared the poor little woman half out of her senses. To begin with, her bread, her husband's occupation, has its root in slavery; it would be difficult for her to think as I do of it. I am afraid her care, even of the bodily habits and sicknesses of the people left in Mrs. G–'s charge, will not be worth much, for nobody treats others better than they do themselves; and she is certainly doing her best to injure herself and her own poor baby, who is two and a-half years old, and whom she is still suckling.

This is, I think, the worst case of this extraordinary delusion so prevalent among your women that I have ever met with yet; but they all nurse their children much longer than is good for either baby or mother. The summer heat, particularly when a young baby is cutting teeth, is, I know, considered by young American mothers an exceedingly critical time, and therefore I always hear of babies being nursed till after the second summer; so that a child born in January would be suckled till it was eighteen or nineteen months old, in order that it might not be weaned till its second summer was over. I am sure that nothing can be worse than this system, and I attribute much of the wretched ill health of young American mothers to over nursing; and of course a process that destroys their health and vigour completely must affect most unfavourably the child they are suckling. It is a grievous mistake. I remember my charming friend F– D– telling me that she had nursed her first child till her second was born—a miraculous statement, which I can only believe because she told it me herself. Whenever anything seems absolutely impossible, the word of a true person is the only proof of it worth anything.

Dear E–. I have been riding into the swamp behind the new house; I had a mind to survey the ground all round it before going away, to see what capabilities it afforded for the founding of a garden, but I confess it looked very unpromising. Trying to return by another way, I came to a morass, which, after contemplating, and making my horse try for a few paces, I thought it expedient not to attempt. A woman called Charlotte, who was working in the field, seeing my dilemma and the inglorious retreat I was about to make, shouted to me at the top of her voice, 'You no turn back, missis! if you want to go through, send, missis, send! you hab slave enough, nigger enough, let 'em come, let 'em fetch planks, and make de bridge; what you say dey must do,—send, missis, send, missis!' It seemed to me, from the lady's imperative tone in my behalf, that if she had been in my place, she would presently have had a corduroy road through the swamp of prostrate 'niggers,' as she called her family in Ham, and ridden over the same dry-hoofed; and to be sure, if I pleased, so might I, for, as she very truly said, 'what you say, missis, they must do.' Instead of summoning her sooty tribe, however, I backed my horse out of the swamp, and betook myself to another pretty woodpath, which only wants widening to be quite charming. At the end of this, however, I found swamp the second, and out of this having been helped by a grinning facetious personage, most appropriately named Pun, I returned home in dudgeon, in spite of what dear Miss M– calls the 'moral suitability' of finding a foul bog at the end of every charming wood path or forest ride in this region.

In the afternoon, I drove to Busson Hill, to visit the people there. I found that both the men and women had done their work at half-past three. Saw Jema with her child, that ridiculous image of Driver Bran, in her arms, in spite of whose whitey brown skin she still maintains that its father is a man as black as herself—and she (to use a most extraordinary comparison I heard of a negro girl making with regard to her mother) is as black as 'de hinges of hell.' Query: Did she really mean hinges—or angels? The angels of hell is a polite and pretty paraphrase for devils, certainly. In complimenting a woman, called Joan, upon the tidy condition of her house, she answered, with that cruel humility that is so bad an element in their character, 'Missis no 'spect to find coloured folks' house clean as white folks.' The mode in which they have learned to accept the idea of their own degradation and unalterable inferiority, is the most serious impediment that I see in the way of their progress, since assuredly, 'self-love is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.' In the same way yesterday, Abraham the cook, in speaking of his brother's theft at the rice island, said 'it was a shame even for a coloured man to do such things.' I labour hard, whenever any such observation is made, to explain to them that the question is one of moral and mental culture,—not the colour of an integument,—and assure them, much to my own comfort, whatever it may be to theirs, that white people are as dirty and as dishonest as coloured folks, when they have suffered the same lack of decent training. If I could but find one of these women, on whose mind the idea had dawned that she was neither more nor less than my equal, I think I should embrace her in an ecstacy of hopefulness.