Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7. Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke

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СКАЧАТЬ of Capes Charles and Henry, the ship pressed on, under sail and steam, to enter Chesapeake Bay.

      Our sudden arrival amid shoals of sharks and kingfish, the keeping watch for flocks of canvas-back ducks, gave us enough and to spare of idle work till we fully sighted the Yorktown peninsula, overgrown with ancient memories—ancient for America. Three towns of lost grandeur, or their ruins, stand there still. Williamsburg, the former capital, graced even to our time by the palaces where once the royal governors held more than regal state; Yorktown, where Cornwallis surrendered to the continental troops; Jamestown, the earliest settlement, founded in 1607, thirteen years before old Governor Winthrop fixed the site of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

      A bump against the pier of Fort Monroe soon roused us from our musings, and we found ourselves invaded by a swarm of stalwart negro troopers, clothed in the cavalry uniform of the United States, who boarded us for the mails. Not a white man save those we brought was to be seen upon the pier, and the blazing sun made me thankful that I had declined an offered letter to Jeff. Davis.

      Pushing off again into the stream, we ran the gantlet of the Rip-Raps passage, and made for Norfolk, having on our left the many exits of the Dismal Swamp Canal. Crossing Hampton Roads—a grand bay with pleasant grassy shores, destined one day to become the best known, as by nature it is the noblest, of Atlantic ports—we nearly ran upon the wrecks of the Federal frigates Cumberland and Congress, sunk by the rebel ram Merrimac in the first great naval action of the war; but soon after, by a sort of poetic justice, we almost drifted into the black hull of the Merrimac herself. Great gangs of negroes were laboring laughingly at the removal, by blasting, of the sunken ships.

      When we were securely moored at Norfolk pier, I set off upon an inspection of the second city of Virginia. Again not a white man was to be seen, but hundreds of negroes were working in the heat, building, repairing, road-making, and happily chattering the while. At last, turning a corner, I came on a hotel, and, as a consequence, on a bar and its crowd of swaggering whites—“Johnny Rebs” all, you might see by the breadth of their brims, for across the Atlantic a broad brim denotes less the man of peace than the ex-member of a Southern guerrilla band, Morgan‘s, Mosby‘s, or Stuart‘s. No Southerner will wear the Yankee “stove-pipe” hat; a Panama or Palmetto for him, he says, though he keeps to the long black coat that rules from Maine to the Rio Grande.

      These Southerners were all alike—all were upright, tall, and heavily moustached; all had long black hair and glittering eyes, and I looked instinctively for the baldric and rapier. It needed no second glance to assure me that as far as the men of Norfolk were concerned, the saying of our Yankee skipper was not far from the truth: “The last idea that enters the mind of a Southerner is that of doing work.”

      Strangers are scarce in Norfolk, and it was not long before I found an excuse for entering into conversation with the “citizens.” My first question was not received with much cordiality by my new acquaintances. “How do the negroes work? Wall, we spells nigger with two ‘g‘s,’ I reckon.” (Virginians, I must explain, are used to “reckon” as much as are New Englanders to “guess,” while Western men “calculate” as often as they cease to swear.) “How does the niggers work? Wall, niggers is darned fools, certain, but they ain‘t quite sich fools as to work while the Yanks will feed ’em. No, sir, not quite sich fools as that.” Hardly deeming it wise to point to the negroes working in the sun-blaze within a hundred yards, while we sat rocking ourselves in the veranda of the inn, I changed my tack, and asked whether things were settling down in Norfolk. This query soon led my friends upon the line I wanted them to take, and in five minutes we were well through politics, and plunging into the very war. “You‘re a Britisher. Now, all that they tell you‘s darned lies. We‘re just as secesh as we ever was, only so many‘s killed that we can‘t fight—that‘s all, I reckon.” “We ain‘t going to fight the North and West again,” said an ex-colonel of rebel infantry; “next time we fight, ’twill be us and the West against the Yanks. We‘ll keep the old flag then, and be darned to them.” “If it hadn‘t been for the politicians, we shouldn‘t have seceded at all, I reckon: we should just have kept the old flag and the constitution, and the Yanks would have seceded from us. Reckon we‘d have let ’em go.” “Wall, boys, s‘pose we liquor?” closed in the colonel, shooting out his old quid, and filling in with another. “We‘d have fought for a lifetime if the cussed Southerners hadn‘t deserted like they did.” I asked who these “Southerners” were to whom such disrespect was being shown. “You didn‘t think Virginia was a Southern State over in Britain, did you? ’cause Virginia is a border State, sir. We didn‘t go to secede at all; it was them blasted Southerners that brought it on us. First they wouldn‘t give a command to General Robert E. Lee, then they made us do all the fighting for ’em, and then, when the pinch came, they left us in the lurch. Why, sir, I saw three Mississippi regiments surrender without a blow—yes, sir: that‘s right down good whisky; jess you sample it.” Here the steam-whistle of the Saratoga sounded with its deep bray. “Reckon you‘ll have to hurry up to make connections,” said one of my new friends, and I hurried off, not without a fear lest some of the group should shoot after me, to avenge the affront of my quitting them before the mixing of the drinks. They were but a pack of “mean whites,” “North Carolina crackers,” but their views were those which I found dominant in all ranks at Richmond, and up the country in Virginia.

      After all, the Southern planters are not “The South,” which for political purposes is composed of the “mean whites,” of the Irish of the towns, and of the Southwestern men—Missourians, Kentuckians, and Texans—fiercely anti-Northern, without being in sentiment what we should call Southern, certainly not representatives of the “Southern Chivalry.” The “mean whites,” or “poor trash,” are the whites who are not planters—members of the slaveholding race who never held a slave—white men looked down upon by the negroes. It is a necessary result of the despotic government of one race by another that the poor members of the dominant people are universally despised: the “destitute Europeans” of Bombay, the “white loafers” of the Punjaub, are familiar cases. Where slavery exists, the “poor trash” class must inevitably be both large and wretched: primogeniture is necessary to keep the plantations sufficiently great to allow for the payment of overseers and the supporting in luxury of the planter family, and younger sons and their descendants are not only left destitute, but debarred from earning their bread by honest industry, for in a slave country labor is degrading.

      The Southern planters were gentlemen, possessed of many aristocratic virtues, along with every aristocratic vice; but to each planter there were nine “mean whites,” who, though grossly ignorant, full of insolence, given to the use of the knife and pistol upon the slightest provocation, were, until the election of Lincoln to the presidency, as completely the rulers of America as they were afterward the leaders of the rebellion.

      At sunset we started up the James on our way to City Point and Richmond, sailing almost between the very masts of the famous rebel privateer the Florida, and seeing her as she lay under the still, gray waters. She was cut out from a Brizilian port, and when claimed by the imperial government, was to have been at once surrendered. While the dispatches were on their way to Norfolk, she was run into at her moorings by a Federal gunboat, and filled and sank directly. Friends of the Confederacy have hinted that the collision was strangely opportune; nevertheless, the fact remains that the commander of the gunboat was dismissed the navy for his carelessness.

      The twilight was beyond description lovely. The change from the auks and ice-birds of the Atlantic to the blue-birds and robins of Virginia was not more sudden than that from winter to tropical warmth and sensuous indolence; but the scenery, too, of the river is beautiful in its very changelessness. Those who can see no beauty but in boldness might call the James as monotonous as the lower Loire.

      After weeks of bitter cold, warm evenings favor meditation. The soft air, the antiquity of the forest, the languor of the sunset breeze, all dispose to dream and sleep. That oak has seen Powhatan; the founders of Jamestown may have pointed at that СКАЧАТЬ