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“A good deal has been said in respect to the monotony of
the prospect while passing through the North-Carolina country.
In respect to such influences as are derived from the moral
world, and by which places are lighted up by a brilliancy not
their own, the same thing may be said of most of the ordinary
stage and railway routes everywhere in our country. Roads
are usually drawn through the most accessible regions. The
lands commonly surrendered for this purpose are generally the
most inferior, and the man of taste rarely establishes a fine mansion
upon the common highway. In the South, this is particularly
the case. The finer dwellings of the planter are to be
approached through long and sinuous avenues, that open only a
green arch upon the roadside, and show you nothing to convey
any tolerable idea of the beauty, taste and comfort which are
buried in noble woods away from vulgar curiosity. The landscape,
in the eye of the hurrying traveller, needs to possess but
a single element — variety. Let it be broken into great inequalities—
steep rocks, and deep dells and valleys, overhanging
precipices, and thundering waterfalls — and the voyager, who is
only the pendant to a locomotive for the nonce, is quite satisfied.
Beauty of detail is, of course, quite imperceptible to his vision.
In the old countries of Europe, the site is illustrated by tower
and temple, picturesque ruin and votive tablet. The handbook
which you carry distinguishes the spot with some strange or
startling history. In our world of woods, we lack these adjuncts.
If we had the handbook, we should doubtlessly discover
much to interest us in the very scenes by which we hurry
with contempt. Dull and uninteresting as the railroad route
appears through North and South Carolina, were you familiar
with the facts in each locality — could you couple each with its

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local history or tradition — the fancy would instantly quicken,
and the mind would not only take a lively interest in the scene
through which you pass, but would, by a naturally-assimilative
process, begin to explore for its underlying beauties.”

“What a pity that handbooks for the South are not provided
by some patriotic author!”

“They will be furnished, no doubt, when the tide of travel
sets in this direction, and you will then be surprised at the discoveries
which shall be made. He who goes over these common
routes has no idea of the wondrous scenic beauties which
lie in wait to delight him, hidden from sight only by the roadside
umbrage. With a considerable knowledge of the history
of the country in all these states, I am able to identify scenes
of interest as I pass; and I find, at every step, in my course
along these regions which seem so barren to the stranger, fruitful
interests and moving influences, which exercise equally the
memory and the imagination — the imagination through the
memory. There is scarcely a mile in the passage over the
common roads, in South Carolina, which I do not thus find suggestive
of events and persons, legends and anecdotes, which
elevate the aspect of the baldest tracts, each with a befitting
moral. To him who can recall these events and traditions, the
scene becomes invested with a soft and rosy light — the sterile
sands put on features which sublime them to the thought, and
the gloomy wastes of pine and swamp forest commend themselves
to sympathies which lie much deeper than any which
we can reach through the medium of the external senses. No
doubt this is the same in all the wild states of the South, to
him who is of `the manor born.' There will be a thousand
local matters, of colonization, early adventure, peculiar strifes
and endurances — the long records of history and tradition, from
the first coming of the colonists — which, if known to the wayfarer,
would make him forgetful of the monotonous features of
his progress.”

“It is a great pity that for these we have no guide-books —
no monuments along the wayside — no `Old Mortality' to show
us where the stone lies half buried, and, with his chisel, to
deepen all its features to our eyes. Some of these days, no
doubt, we shall have rare chroniclers springing up, who shall

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reveal to our successors these things — these objects, as well of
mind as of sight — which we hourly hurry by unseeing.”

“Of this I have no sort of question. The development is in
progress. The mines of the South have been struck. The
vein is revealed. The quarry is discovered, and in due season
it will be worked. The very impatience with which we complain
that the thing is not done, is in some degree a guaranty
for the performance. We must wait upon Providence. The
great error of our people, as a whole, is that they live too fast,
and endeavor at too much. If suffered to go ahead, according
to the motive impulse in their veins, our posterity would have
neither necessity nor field for achievement. I am for leaving
something to be done by our children. To him who remembers
the South— North Carolina, for example — but twenty, nay,
ten years ago, her social and mental progress is absolutely
wonderful.”

“Hear that, young Turpentine, and be consoled at all my
flings at the old North state.”

“Ah, he knows it better than either you or me.”

“But, without looking to the social progress of North Carolina,
and regarding her as a region only for the exploration of
the picturesque and adventure-seeking traveller — the artist, the
man of taste, the lover of fine manly sports, — the good old
North state is one of the most attractive in all the confederacy.
Her vast ranges of mountain render her especially attractive to
all these classes.”

“Yet, how little promise of this is there along the Atlantic
shore!”

“Even here, to the painter of detail, to the contemplative and
musing taste and nature, there are thousands of scenes of great
interest and beauty. To find these, however, you need the eye
that sees; and the man whose eyes have been properly couched
by art may spend months and years along the Atlantic coast,
and discover new provinces of beauty with the ramble of each
succeeding day. Nature, in her arrangement of the scenery of
the South, differing from the rule of the artist, has thrown her
most imposing forms and aspects into the background. Her
mountains and majestic altar-places are nowhere visible along
the sea; and the superficial traveller is prepared to doubt the

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existence of any such throughout our land. Their absence on
the Atlantic would not, perhaps, be so greatly felt, if men were
not always most easily taken by the bald outline, the mere surface,
the simply salient and externally imposing. There is
much in the scenery along our coast which, closely examined,
would, by its exquisite delicacy and nice variety of detail, quite
as much attract the mere explorer as the artist. One of the
peculiarities of this region, as distinguished from the northern
coasts, is the presence of the numerous beautiful islets, that
seem to guard our shores and cities from the wave. Roving in
boat or steamer along these islets, or among them, they appeal
to a moral instinct, the exercise of which puts a thousand genial
fancies into activity. They rise up suddenly around you, like
gems from out the sea; fairy abodes at least; sometimes green
in shrub, and vine, and tree, to the very lips of ocean; and
again, spread out, a sandy plain, glittering with myriads of diamond
sparks, garlanded with myriads of fantastic shells, and
seeming, for all the world, — particularly when seen by the
moonlight — to have been devised and chosen as favorite places
for the sports of Oberon and Titania, of Puck and Little John,
the capricious Loline and the tricksy Anatilla. Southward as
you go, they spread away, diamonds or emeralds, till they conduct
you to the great waters of the Mississippi. They grow in
size and lose in beauty as you advance northwardly. But they
still constitute a remarkable feature of our whole coast; and to
him who spreads sail among them at moonlight, especially in
the more southwardly points, they compel the thought of all the
beings recognised by the old system of pneumatology. The
terrors of Cape Hatteras might well make it to be supposed a
region of mischief, upheaved from the sea, by races of ungentler
beings than such as harbor in those little sand-dunes which lie
so smilingly in the moonlight, with the sea moving between them
in such placid currents. At Hatteras, we may supposes, the malicious
elves, the grim Brownies, the savage Kobolds inhabit —
demon tribes that lie waiting, in malignant watch for the unconscious
bark — slyly slipping beneath the wave, seizing without
noise upon the prow of the vessel, and drawing her into the
insidious currents, and upon the sands of the treacherous islet.
The fancy that peoples the innocent islets, which wreck no

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vessels, with the `good people,' may with equal propriety refer
the dangerous capes and headlands to such hostile tribes of
demons as haunt the wilds of Scotland, the Harz mountains and
Black forests of the German, and the stormy shores of the
Scandinavian.”

“Not an unreasonable notion. But was not Hatterask the
old Indian name of the cape and the sea about it, as given by
the ancient chroniclers?”

“Yes: they varied, however; sounds imperfectly caught from
the Indian tongue were imperfectly rendered in the various
tongues of Dutchman, Spaniard, Frenchman, and Englishman.
We must content ourselves with making them euphonious, and
leave their absolute propriety in doubt.”

“And a pretty sort of euphony we should have of it, if we
leave the matter to American discretion.”

“This need occasion no concern. The poets settle this for
succeeding time, when our generations have no longer the
power to pervert the ears of the future. The necessity of
verse compels the gradual growth of harmony in every language.
The oral authority lasts no longer than it can compel
the echo. The poet, always resisted while he lives, leaves a
voice behind him that survives all others. Let him make his
record, and be satisfied to leave it to the decision of posterity.
There is no speech of the future that rises in conflict with his
own.”

“Are the historical and traditional material of North Carolina
of attractive character?”

“None more so. The very regions of country which are so
barren in the eyes of the stranger, pursuing the railway routes
along the Atlantic coast, would alone afford materials for a
thousand works of fiction. I have identified, along this very
route, the progress of more than one curious history. Take
an example: —

“Our first serious war with the redmen of the South, broke
out in 1712. The savages of the old North State took up the
tomahawk and scalping knife in that year, with terrible effect.
Numerous tribes were leagued together for the extermination of
the whites of the colony of New Berne. This colony was of
Swiss, from the Canton of Berne in Switzerland, and Germans

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of the Palatinate. They came out to America under the patronage
of Queen Anne. They were led by the Baron De Graffenreidt,
who was created a landgrave. He, with Louis Mitchell,
a leading man among the Swiss, received a grant of ten thousand
acres of land on either of the rivers Neuse and Cape Fear, or
their tributary branches, at the rate of ten pounds sterling for
every thousand acres, and a quitrent of five shillings. The
number of Germans is unknown; but the Swiss were fifteen
hundred. They reached the confluence of the Neuse and Trent
in December, 1710, and laid off the limits of the colony in that
neighborhood.

“The conditions upon which these people came to America,
were specious and encouraging. Each of them received, in England,
an outfit in clothes and money, of from five to ten pounds
sterling; and two hundred and fifty acres were allotted to each
family, which was to be five years exempt from rent or taxation.
At the end of that time, they were to pay at the rate of half per
cent, Carolina currency.— They were credited one year with
provisions, and seven years with the materiel for a certain farming
establishment. This included cows and calves, sows and
pigs, lambs, &c. Tools and implements for clearing land and
building, were furnished without any charge by the proprietors.

“To a poor people, driven from their native abodes, the prospect
was encouraging enough; and the treatment which they
received seemed very liberal. Indeed, the colony very soon began
to put on the most prosperous appearance — was flourishing
in fact, growing daily in numbers and affluence. But the Indians,
as the phrase goes, began to look on the whites with jealousy.
Jealousy, it probably was not. In brief the savages coveted
treasures which they beheld for the first time, and which were
indifferently guarded.

“In the fall of 1711, certain tribes agreed to combine their
forces for the purpose of massacre and plunder. The Tuscaroras
undertook to cut the throats of the settlers upon the Roanoke,
and between that river and Pamlico, otherwise Tar river. The
Cotheckneys and Corees arranged to do the same benevolent
office for the settlements on the Neuse and Trent. The Mattamaskettos
and Matchapangos had the duty assigned them of
scalping the whites in the neighborhood of Bath.

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“The work was done with little reservation at the designated
period. But a few days before the massacre, the Indians succeeded
in taking captive the Baron De Graffenreidt and John
Lawson, the surveyor-general of the province, whose book of
travels, a highly-interesting narrative, constitutes one of the best
of our Indian authorities of the South, and should be in every
good American library.

“These distinguished persons, totally unsuspicious of danger,
were engaged in an exploring expedition up the Neuse. Their
vessel was a mere dug-out, a cypress canoe of native manufacture:
and they were accompanied only by a negro, who paddled the
canoe, right and left. They landed at evening with the view
of encamping, when they were suddenly surrounded by more than
sixty Indians. They were made prisoners and marched off to
a village some distance up the river—a march that occupied the
whole night. Here the tribe and their neighbors met in solemn
consultation on the fate of their prisoners. The baron was an
intruder, but Lawson was an invader. As it was after his surveys
that they found their lands appropriated, they assumed him
to be the source of the evil of which they complained. Both the
captives underwent a severe preliminary beating, the better to
prepare them for what was to follow. They were then deliberately
doomed to the fire torture, carried to the field of sacrifice,
kept there in durance vile, and in the most gloomy apprehensions
for a day and night, when the number of the savages having
greatly increased to behold the spectacle, the preparations were
immediately begun for carrying the terrible judgment into effect.
The orgies and phrensied brutalities of the Indians may be
imagined. The hour for execution came. The parties were
bound to the stake; but at this moment the baron pleaded his
nobility, appealing to the chiefs for protection, for that he too
was a chief.

“Strange to say, the appeal was entertained. They concluded
to spare his life: but no entreaty could save Lawson and the
negro. They were subjected to the fiery ordeal, and perished
by a terrible and lingering death, protracted to their utmost capacity
to endure, with all the horrid ingenuity of savage art. Then
followed the general massacre, which spread consternation

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throughout the province. More than one hundred and sixty
persons were butchered in a night.”

“Certainly, the romancer could work up such a history with
good effect. What a terrible scene, in these awful forests, with
thousands of the begrimed and painted savages, howling terribly,
and dancing fiercely about them. Did the affair end here?”

“How could it? It is the necessity of civilization that it must
conquer. At the first tidings of the affair, the assembly of South
Carolina, then in session at Charleston, called out her militia,
and appropriated eighty thousand dollars to the relief of the sister
province. Six hundred militiamen, under Col. Barnwell, immediately
took the field. An auxiliary force of friendly Indians,
consisting of two hundred and eighteen Cherokees, seventy-nine
Creeks, forty-one Catawbas, twenty-eight Yemassees — all commanded
by white officers — were joined to the force under Barnwell—
the Indians being chiefly used as scouts and hunters.

Wild, tangled, gloomy, was the wilderness which they had to
traverse — a region utterly savage, inhabited by bear and panther,
or by tribes of men quite as ferocious and untameable.
The governor of North Carolina called out the militia of North
Carolina, but seemingly in vain. His proclamation was little
heeded.

Barnwell crossed the country, in spite of all impediments, and
came up with the Indians, who were in great strength upon the
Neuse, where they had erected a strong fort of logs, at a point
some thirty miles below the spot where the railroad crosses the
river. The battle that followed resulted in the utter defeat of the
Indians, and the annihilation of some of their tribes. More than
three hundred of the redmen were slain — we have no report of
the wounded — and one hundred were made prisoners. The
battle had taken place without their fortress, the Indians having
boldly become the assailants. The fugitives found shelter in
the fort, which, after much loss and great suffering, they surrendered,
and sued for peace; which was granted them by their
conqueror. Barnwell was censured for being too indulgent to
the vanquished; but what could he exact from the savages?
They had nothing farther to concede than submission — could
make no farther sacrifice but in their lives. The fortress thus
captured was called after the conqueror, and you may still trace

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out its ruins. Would these have no interest in the eyes of the
traveller who is familiar with the history?

“Now, if I say that all this region is marked in like interesting
manner, by wild, savage, bloody, strange, and wonderful
events, you will be no longer doubtful of the attraction with
which an ordinary handbook, such as in Europe distinguishes
every crumbling fabric or fortress with a human interest, would
invest this seemingly barren country. There are true histories
throughout all these old states of the south, not inferior to those
of Powhatan and Pocahontas, and that remarkable old Roman
red man of Virginia, the mighty Opechancanough.”

“It is curious,” said Selina Burroughs, “that our own people
are quite as ignorant of these local histories as anybody else.”

The remark stirred the bile in the bosom of our Alabama orator,
who was never more ready to lift the tomahawk than when opportunity
offered to indulge in a fling at the Yankees, and pour
out his sarcasms at the expense of those of the South, who were
adverse to decisive or hostile measures.

“Nothing curious about it, Miss Burroughs. We are a poor,
mouthing, meanspirited people after all, with long tongues and soft
brains, and no resolution. Our ignorance in respect to our own
history and own resources, and our own rights, is sufficiently conclusive
against our perpetually vaunted patriotism. Our constant
travel at the North among a people who are for ever assailing
us, is enough to shame and discredit all our boasting.”

“But there is a great change going on in this respect, sir.”

“Yes, indeed! I can acknowledge this, though the acknowledgment
does not a whit lessen the necessity of denouncing the
practice which is still too much continued. We must continue
to denounce until the reform is complete. It is a great consolation,
full of hope and promise, that it is at last begun.”

Here the orator dashed off into an essay, somewhat in the
vein of his anniversary oration, which, as it contains sundry
startling things, and striking sarcasms, our reporter has thought
it proper to preserve. In fact, there is a wholesome word for
North and South, in the very energetic expression of this man's
feelings. He is the true type and representative of a large portion
of the southern people, speaking the bitterness which they
have been taught to nourish, their jealous resentments, and the

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spirit with which they will seize upon any opportunity of obtaining
redress and remedy for the evils and injuries of which they complain.
Let North and South consider, and be wise in season.
The usual caprice in the destiny of nations precipitates catastrophes
which men may lament but never repair; and one of the
most dangerous of the errors which prevail among the people of
the North, is their obstinate faith in the integrity of the Union.
It is a faith against which all histories, in all periods, bear the
most unvarying testimony — testimony which we should be authorized
to disregard and reject, only when we shall be able to
assure ourselves that we have stronger claims, by reason of our
greater virtues, upon the protecting care of God, than any of
the myriad generations by which we have been preceded. But,
to the essay of our orator, which, though extempore, was delivered
as rapidly as an oration memorized; not as if read simply,
but with the freedom of one who declaims passionately, in hot
blood, and with the bold impetuous action of a fiery soul, in
which the long-fettered torrents have at length broken all their
barriers, and are dashing headlong, in foam and fury, over the
still resisting but incapable rock.

“Yes, soft-heads! soft-heads! That is the word — soft-heads!
But there is hope, even for a soft-head!”

“We should only be indulging in one of the commonest of all
truisms, were we to protest that there is no such thing as unmixed
evil in the world; and all the philosophy may be compassed in
a nut-shell, which chuckles over the `ill wind that blows nobody
good.' It will suffice if we insist that our bitter is, frequently,
the wholesome medicine whose benefit is in the future; and what
we regard as the mishap of the day, and lament accordingly,
becomes to our great surprise, the parent of a necessity that
leads to most pleasant and profitable results. To bring our maxims
to bear upon our present topic, we have but to remark, that
the cholera, which devastated the cities of the North last summer,
and the abolition mania, — which is destined to root them out,
and raze them utterly from the face of the earth, if not seasonably
arrested, — have proved, in some degree, highly serviceable,
if not saving influences, for the people of the South. How
many thousand of our wandering idlers, our absentees who periodically
crave a wearisome pilgrimage to northern regions,

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instead of finding greater good in a profitable investment of thought
and curiosity at home — who wander away in mere listlessness
and return wearied and unrefreshed — were denied their usual
inane indulgences by the dread of pestilence. And how many
other thousands, capable of appreciating the charms of nature,
and the delights of a glorious landscape, were, in like manner,
compelled to forego the same progress, by the patriotic sentiment
which revolts at the thought of spending time and money among a
people whose daily labor seems to be addressed to the neighborly
desire of defaming our character and destroying our institutions.

“The result of these hostile influences has been highly favorable
to the development of the resources of the soil. We have,
in the South, a race of `soft-heads,' — a tribe that corresponds
admirably with the `dough-faces' of Yankee-land. These are
people born and wedded to a sort of provincial servility that
finds nothing grateful but the foreign. They prefer the stranger
to the native, if for no other reason than because they are reluctant
to admit the existence of any persons, in their own precincts,
who might come in conflict with their own importance.
In like manner, and for a similar reason, they refuse to give faith
to their own possessions of scenery and climate. Their dignity
requires foreign travel for its proper maintenance. It is distance
only, in their eyes, that can possibly `lend enchantment to the
view.' They are unwilling to admit the charms of a region
which might be readily explored by humbler persons; and they
turn up their lordly noses at any reference to the claims of
mountain, valley, or waterfall, in their own section, if for no other
reason than because they may also be seen by vulgar people.
To despise the native and domestic, seems to them, in their inflated
folly, the only true way to show that they have tastes infinitely
superior to those of the common herdlings.

“For such people, it was absolutely necessary that they should
speed abroad in summer. The habit required it, and the self-esteem,
even if the tastes did not. It is true that they were
wearied with the monotonous routine. It is true that they were
tired of the scenery so often witnessed; tired of the flatness of
northern pastimes, and outraged constantly by the bad manners,
and the unqualified monstrosity of the bores whom they constantly
encountered, from the moment that they got beyond the

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line of Mason and Dixon. All the social training of a polished
society at home, was disparaged by the reckless obtrusiveness
by which that was distinguished which they met abroad — the
free, familiar pertness of moneyed vulgarity, or the insolent assumptions
of a class whose fortunes have been realized at the
expense of their education. A thousand offensive traits in the
social world which they sought, added to the utter deficiency of
all freshness in the associations which they periodically made,
combined to lessen or destroy everything like a positive attraction
in the regions to which they wandered; but, in spite of all,
they went. Habit was too inflexible for sense or taste; and,
possibly, the fear that the world might not get on so well as before,
unless they appeared as usual at the opening of the season
in Broadway, and found themselves, for a week at least each
year, at Newport and Saratoga, seemed to make it a duty
that they should, at large pecuniary sacrifice, submit to a dreary
penance every summer.

“But the cholera came in conflict with the habit. It unsettled
the routine which was only endurable in the absence of thought
and energy. It suggested unpleasant associations to those who,
perhaps, would suffer under any sort of excitement, the wholesome
as well as the pernicious; and the idea of eating cherries
and cream, at the peril of utter revolution in the abdominal
domain, had the effect of startling into thought and speculation
the inane intellect which, hitherto, had taken no share in regulating
the habits of the wanderer. When, at the same time, it
was found that the pestilence confined its ravages to the
North, — that either the climate of the South was too pure,
or the habits of its people too proper, to yield it the requisite
field for operation, — and that Charleston, Savannah and other
cities in the low latitudes, were not within the reach of its terrors, —
then it was that patriotism had leave to suggest, for the
first time, the beauties and attractions of home, and to make the
most of them. Her argument found succor, as we have hinted,
from other influences. Our `Soft-heads' no longer found that
unlimited deference, and servile acknowledgment, which the
societies they visited had uniformly shown, in return for their
patronage. Society at the North was in revolution. Old things
were about to pass away; all things were to become new.

[figure description] Page 392.[end figure description]

Property was to undergo general distribution in equal shares. Every
man, it was argued, had a natural right to a farmstead, and a
poultry-yard; as every woman, not wholly past bearing, had a
right to a husband. The old Patroons of Albany were not permitted
to rent, but must sell their lands, at prices prescribed by
the buyer, or the tenant. Debtors liquidated their bonds in the
blood of their creditors. The law of divorce gave every sort
of liberty to wife and husband. The wife, if she did not avail
herself of the extreme privileges accorded to her by this benevolent
enactment, was, at all events, allowed to keep her own
purse, and to spend her money, however viciously, without accounting
to her lord. If he was lord, she was lady. She was
not simply his master, but her own; and a precious household
they made of it between them. Churches multiplied, mostly, at
the very moment when a restless and powerful party — avowedly
hostile to all religion — was denouncing and striving to abolish
the Sabbath itself, as immoral, and in conflict with the privileges
of labor and the citizen.

“In this universal disorder in laws and morals — this confusion
of society, worse confounded every day — in its general aspects
so wonderfully like those which, in France, preceded, and properly
paved the way for, a purging reign of terror — all the usual
amenities and courtesies were fairly at an end, even in those
places, hotels and haunts of summer festivity, in which decency
and policy, if not charity and good-will to men, requires that
everything should be foreborne, of manner or remark, that might
be offensive to any sensibilities. But the cloud and blindness
which everywhere overspread society, was a madness too sweeping
to forbear any subject, in which envy, malice, conceit, and
a peevish discontent, could find exercise at the expense of one's
neighbor. In destroying, at home, the securities of religion, the
domestic peace of families, the inviolability of the laws, the guarantees
of the creditor — nay, taking his life, as that of an insolent,
when he presumed to urge his bond — these reckless incendiaries
(like the French, exactly) must carry their beautiful system
to the hearts of other communities. They are by no means
selfish. They must share their admirable blessings with others—
nay, force them, even against their desires, to partake of their
drunken mixtures. No situation, accordingly, is sacred from

[figure description] Page 393.[end figure description]

their invasion. No refuge is left for society, unembarrassed by
their presence. They rage in all places, fireside, street, exchange,
hotel, and, not so much seeking to reform and teach,
as to outrage and annoy, they studiously thrust upon you, at
every turn, the picture of the miserable fanatic, whose vanity
prompted him to fire a temple only that he might be seen in
its blaze.

“Our `Soft-heads,' who have been busily engaged, for the
last thirty years, in feeding these fanatics, by draining the profits
from their own soil, are, at length, beginning to feel somewhat
uncomfortable, sitting cheek-by-jowl, at Saratoga, and
other places of vulgar resort, and hearing themselves described
as robbers and wretches by the very people whose thieving ancestors
stole the negro with whom to swindle our forefathers.
They begin to suspect that their pride is not wholly unimpaired,
when they hearken quietly to such savory communications. A
lurking doubt whether they are not the persons meant, all the
while, begins to stir uneasily within them; and in a half-drowsy
state, between dozing and thought, they ask themselves the
question, whether it were not much more to their credit to resolve,
henceforward, neither to taste, nor touch, nor commune
with a people, who, in mere wantonness and insolence, are making
so free with all the securities of their country, its reputation,
and its property!

“The `Soft-head,' it is true, is not without grateful assurances,
from one class of his neighbors, that his assailants are very sorry
fanatics who deserve no sort of consideration; that, though Tray,
Blanche, and Sweetheart, bark at him furiously, yet he, Dick,
and his brother Tom, and his cousin, Harry, all tavern-keepers,
living in the broad route of southern travel, are his friends —
are the true, sturdy butcher's dogs, who will keep the curs in
proper fear and at a proper distance. But, after a while, `Soft-head'
asks himself — having asked the question fruitlessly of
Tom, Dick, and Harry — why do these curs, which are said to
be so despicable — why do they continue this barking? nay,
why, when the barking becomes biting — why do not these
famous butcher's dogs use their teeth for the protection of their
friends? Why are Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart — worthless
puppies as they are — why are they in full possession of the

[figure description] Page 394.[end figure description]

roast? The fanatics of abolition are said to be few; but why
do they shape the laws, dictate the policy, control the whole action
of society? `Soft-head' gets no answer to all this; and
now naturally begins to suspect that all parties either think entirely
with the offenders, or possess too little courage, honesty,
or proper sympathy with the south, ever to be relied upon as
allies. In fact, our `soft-head' discovers that, whether guilty or
otherwise, the party denounced as so weak and worthless, wields,
in reality, the entire power, and represents wholly the principles
and feelings of the north. The thing is not to be gainsayed.
Your merchant, having large dealings with the `soft-heads,'
makes little of it; your hotel-keeper, entertaining large squadrons
of `soft-heads,' `for a consideration,' every summer,
gravely insists that it is nothing but the buzz of a bee in a tarbarrel;
your Yankee editor, crossing the line of Mason and
Dixon — a northern man with southern principles! who teaches
the `soft-head southron,' from `hard-head northern schoolbooks'—
he is potent in the asseveration that there is no sort of
danger — that it is the cry of `wolf,' only, made by the cunning
boys, who wish to see the fun of the false chase; and that, in
his hands, as grand conservator of the peace, everything that's
worth saving is in a place of eminent security. Your thorough
slave of party, whig or democrat, who hopes for a secretaryship,
or a vice-presidentship, or a foreign mission — or who, with commendable
modesty, resigns himself to a postmastership, or a
tide-waitership — all these come in to the assistance of our `soft-heads,
' and take monstrous pains to reassure them and restore
their equanimity! Governed by self, rather than by nation or
section, they cry `peace' — all — when there is no peace!
When there can not be peace, so long as the south is in the
minority, and so long as the spirit and temper of the north are
so universally hostile to our most vital and most cherished institutions.
Until you reconcile this inequality, and exorcise this
evil spirit, that now rages rampant through the Northern States—
allied with all sorts of fanatical passions and principles —
Agrarianism, Communism, Fourierism, Wrightism, Millerism,
Mormonism, etc.,— you may cry peace and union till you split
your lungs, but you will neither make peace nor secure union.

“Well, our `soft-head' begins to discover this. He has been

[figure description] Page 395.[end figure description]

weak and lazy — listless and indifferent — vain, and an idler;
weary, and a wanderer; but he still has latent sympathies that
remind him of his home, and he is not blind to the warnings
which tell him that he has a property which is threatened, and
may possibly be destroyed. He rubs his eyes, and shakes himself
accordingly. He begins to bestir himself. It is high time.
He is no longer in the condition to say with the sluggard, `A
little more sleep — a little more folding of the arms to slumber.'
`Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart,' the full-mouthed abolition
curs, are at his heels, and, with their incessant barking, they
suffer nobody to sleep. `Soft-head' soon finds that they are
not satisfied to bark simply. They are anxious to use their
teeth upon him as well as their tongues. His wife's maid, Sally,
is persuaded to leave his bonds, for a condition of unexampled
human felicity, which is promised her in the neighborhood of the
Five Points; and his man, Charles, walks off with two loving
white brothers, who soon show him how much more moral it is
to become a burglar than to remain a slave. `Soft-head' very
soon hears of both in their new Utopia. Sally writes to him
from the Tombs or Blackwell's Island, and Charley from Sing-Sing.
They relate a most horrid narrative of their condition;
their follies, their crimes, the sufferings and abuses they have undergone
at the hands of their sympathizing brethren, whose object
has been, not the good of the wretched slave, but the injury
and annoyance of the `soft-head' owner. They declare their
repentance, and entreat his assistance. They beg that he will release
them from prison, and make them once more humbly happy
in the condition which was so justly suited to their intellect and
morals. The heart of `soft-head' is touched. In this region he
is quite as tender as in his cranium. He obtains their discharge,
gives bail, pays fees, and suffers a world of trouble and expense,
in helping the poor wretches into daylight. But, will the abolitionists
suffer this triumph? Will they let the prey escape
them at the last? Oh no! They dart between, a mob at their
heels, and rend Charley and Sally away once more — this time
by violence — the poor darkies all the while struggling against
the cruel fate of freedom, for which they are so totally unfit, and
declaring, with tears in their eyes, how infinitely they prefer
being slaves to a gentleman, than brethren of such a gang of

[figure description] Page 396.[end figure description]

blackguards. `Soft-head,' himself, barely escapes by the skin
of his teeth. He is compelled to cast off the indolence which
he has hitherto fondly conceived to form a part of his dignity,
and, with all haste, to throw the Potomac between him and the
pursuing curs of abolition.

“Growling over the popular sentiment at the North, which
thus dogs their footsteps and disturbs their equanimity, or grumbling
at the sudden invasion of cholera, which makes them tremble
for their bowels, it is probable that more than twenty thousand
Southrons forebore, last summer, their usual route of travel.
Mason and Dixon's line, that season, constituted the ultima thule,
to which they looked with shiverings only. Thus `barred and
banned,' almost hopeless of enjoyment, but compelled to seek
for it where they were, and to find their summer routes and recreations
in long-neglected precincts, it was perfectly delightful
to behold the sudden glory which possessed them, as they
opened their eyes, for the first time in their lives, upon the
charming scenery, the pure retreats, the sweet quiet, and the
surprising resources which welcomed them — at home! Why
had they not seen these things before? How was it that
such glorious mountain ranges, such fertile and lovely valleys,
such mighty and beautiful cascades, such broad, hard and oceangirdled
beaches and islets, had been so completely hidden from
their eyes? By what fatuity was it that they had been so
blinded, to the waste of millions of expenditure, in the ungrateful
regions in which they had so long been satisfied to find retreats,
which afforded them so little of pleasure or content?
Poor, sneaking, drivelling, conceited, slavish provincialism never
received such a lesson of unmixed benefit before; and patriotism
never a happier stimulus and motive to future enjoyment as
well as independence.

“It is a too melancholy truth, and one that we would fain deny
if we dared, that, in sundry essentials, the Southern people have
long stood in nearly the same relation to the Northern states
of this confederacy, that the whole of the colonies, in 1775, occupied
to Great Britain. A people wholly devoted to grazing
and agriculture are necessarily wanting in large marts, which
alone give the natural impulse to trade and manufactures. A
people engaged in staple culture are necessarily scattered

[figure description] Page 397.[end figure description]

remotely over the surface of the earth. Now, the activity of the
common intellect depends chiefly upon the rough and incessant
attrition of the people. Wanting in this attrition, the best minds
sink into repose, that finally becomes sluggishness. As a natural
consequence, therefore, of the exclusive occupation of agriculture
in the South, the profits of this culture, and the sparseness
of our population, the Southern people left it to the Northern
States to supply all their wants. To them we looked for books
and opinion — and they thus substantially ruled us, through the
languor which we owed to our wealth, and the deficient self-esteem
naturally due to the infrequency of our struggle in the
common marts of nations. The Yankees furnished all our manufactures,
of whatever kind, and adroitly contrived to make it
appear to us that they were really our benefactors, at the very
moment when they were sapping our substance, degrading our
minds, and growing rich upon our raw material, and by the labor
of our slaves. Any nation that defers thus wholly to another
is soon emasculated, and finally subdued. To perfect, or even
secure, the powers of any people, it requires that they shall
leave no province of enterprise or industry neglected, which is
available to their labor, and not incompatible with their soil and
climate. And there is an intimate sympathy between the labors
of a people, and their higher morals and more ambitious sentiment.
The arts are all so far kindred, that the one necessarily
prepares the way for the other. The mechanic arts thrive as
well as the fine arts, in regions which prove friendly to the latter;
and Benvenuto Cellini was no less excellent as a goldsmith
and cannoneer than as one of the most bold and admirable
sculptors of his age. To secure a high rank in society, as well as
history, it is necessary that a people should do something more
than provide a raw material. It is required of them to provide
the genius also, which shall work the material up into forms and
fabrics equally beautiful and valuable. This duty has been
neglected by the South; abandoned to her enemies; and, in
the train of this neglect and self-abandonment, a thousand evils
follow, of even greater magnitude. The worst of these is a slavish
deference to the will, the wit, the wisdom, the art and ingenuity
of the people to whom we yield our manufactures; making
it the most difficult thing in the world, even when our own

[figure description] Page 398.[end figure description]

people achieve, to obtain for them the simplest justice, even among
themselves. We surrendered ourselves wholly into the hands
of our Yankee brethren — most loving kinsmen that they are —
and were quite content, in asserting the rank of gentlemen, to
forfeit the higher rank of men. We were sunk into a certain
imbecility — read from their books, thought from their standards,
shrunk from and submitted to their criticism — and (No! we
have not yet quite reached that point — Walker still holding his
ground in the South against Webster), almost began to adopt
their brogne! They dictated to our tastes and were alone allowed
to furnish the proper regions for their exercise. Above
all, theirs was all the scenery; and the tour to Saratoga, West
Point, Newport, Niagara, almost every season, was a sort of
pilgrimage, as necessary to the eternal happiness of our race of
`soft-heads,' as ever was that made, once in a life, to Mecca, by
the devout worshipper in the faith of Islam!

“But, owing to causes, already indicated, the change has come
over the spirit of that dream which constituted too much the
life of too large a portion of our wealthy gentry; and the last
summer, as we said before, left them at liberty to look about
their own homes, and appreciate their own resources. The discoveries
were marvellous; the developments as surprising as
those which followed the friction of the magic lamp in the hands
of Aladdin. Encountered, on the opposite side of Mason and
Dixon's Line, by the loathsome presence of Asiatic cholera and
African abolition, they averted their eyes from these equally offensive
aspects, and found a prospect, when looking backward
upon the South, at once calculated to relieve their annoyances,
and compensate admirably for all their privations. The tide of
travel was fairly turned; and, through the length and breadth
of the land, in the several States of Virginia, the two Carolinas,
Georgia, and even Florida, nothing was to be seen but the
chariots and the horsemen, the barge and the car, bearing to new
and lately discovered retreats of health and freshness, the hungering
wanderers after pleasure and excitement. For such an
event, the country was almost totally unprepared. A few ancient
places of resort excepted, the numerous points of assemblage
had scarcely ever been indicated on the maps. The means for
reaching them were rude and hastily provided. The roads were

[figure description] Page 399.[end figure description]

rough, and, with the vehicles employed to traverse them, admirably
adapted to give wholesome exercise to rheumatic joints and
dyspeptic systems. The craziest carriages were hastily put in
requisition, to run upon the wildest highways. Paths, only just
blazed out in the woods, conducted you to habitations scarcely
less wild, of frames covered with clapboards, — queer-looking
log tenements, unplastered chambers, and little uncouth cabins,
eight by twelve — where pride, in the lap of quiet, at all events,
if not of comfort, might learn upon what a small amount of capital
a man may realize large results in health and independence.
It was the strangest spectacle, in Georgia and South Carolina,
to see the thousands thus in motion along the highways, and
thus rioting in rustic pleasures. Such cars and carriages, as bore
the trooping adventurers, never figured in fashionable use before.
You might see the railway trains, long and massive frames of
timber, set on wheels, with unplaned benches, an interminable
range, crowded with the living multitudes, wedged affectionately
together, like herrings in boxes — sorted, if not salted masses —
without covering, speeding through sun by day, and rain by
night, to the appointed places of retreat; and, strange to say,
in the best of all possible humors with themselves and all mankind.
A certain grateful determination to make the most of the
novel désagremens of their situation, in acknowledgment of the
substantial good, in healthy excitement, and moral compensation,
which they enjoyed at home, operated to make cheerful all the
aspects of the scene, and to afford a pleasing animation to the
strangest combinations of society. Here encountered, to the
common benefit, circles and cliques that had never before been
subjected to attrition. The reserved gentleman of the lower
country, nice, staid, proper and particular, was pleased to receive
a freshening stimulus from the frank, free, eager and salient
manners of the gentleman of the interior. The over-refined
ladies of the city were enlivened by the informal, hearty, lively
and laughing tempers of the buoyant beauties of the mountain
and forest country. These shared equally in the benefits of the
association. The too frigid and stately reserves of the one region
were thawed insensibly by the genial and buoyant, the unsophisticated
impulse of the other; while the latter, insensibly
borrowed, in return, something of the elaborate grace, and the

[figure description] Page 400.[end figure description]

quiet dignity, which constitute the chief attractions of the former.
The result has compassed something more than was anticipated
by the several parties. Seeking only to waste a summer gratefully,
to find health and gentle excitements, — the simple object
of the whole, — they yet found more precious benefits in the unwonted
communion. Prejudices were worn away in the grateful
attrition; new lights were brought to bear upon the social
aspects of differing regions; thought was stimulated to fresh
researches; and the general resources of the country, moral as
well as physical, underwent a development, as grateful and encouraging
as they were strange and wonderful to all the parties.

“The désagremens of these extemporaneous progresses were
not limited to bad roads and clumsy or crazy vehicles, rude dwellings,
and the absence of the usual comforts upon which the
gentry of the low country of the South, trained in English
schools, are apt to insist with, perhaps, a little too much tenacity.
We are compelled to make one admission, in respect to our interior,
which we do in great grief of heart and much vexation
of spirit. If the schoolmaster is abroad, the cook is not! Our
cuisine is not well ordered in the forest country. The `Physiologie
de Goût' has never there been made a text-book, in the
schools of culinary philosophy. We doubt if a single copy of
this grave authority can be found in all the mountain ranges of
the Apalachian. They have the grace and the gravy; but these
are not made to mingle as they should. The art which weds
the vinegar and the oil, in happiest harmonies, so that neither
is suffered to prevail in the taste, has never, in this region, commanded
that careful study, or indeed consideration, which their
union properly demands. The rank of the cuisinier is not properly
recognised. The weight and importance of a grain of salt
in the adjustment (shall we say compromise?) of a salade, is, we
grieve to say, not justly understood in our forest watering-places;
and, skilful enough at a julep or a sherry-cobler, they betray
but `'prentice han's' when a steak, or a sauce, is the subject of
preparation. Monsieur Guizot, speaking in properly-dignified
language of the common sentiment of France, insists that she is
the most perfect representative of the civilization of Christendom.
Of course, he bases her claims to this position entirely on the
virtues of her cuisine. The moral of the nation comes from the

[figure description] Page 401.[end figure description]

kitchen. The `good digestion' which should `wait on appetite'
must be impossible where the chef de cuisine falls short of the
philosopher as well as the man of science. Now, of all that
philosophy, which prepares the food with a due regard, not only
to the meats and vegetables themselves, the graces and the
gravies, but to the temperaments of the consumers, we are sorry
to confess that we have but little in our vast interior. Our
mountain cooks think they have done everything when they
have murdered a fillet of veal or a haunch of venison, — sodden
them in lard or butter, baked or boiled them to a condition
which admirably resembles the pulpy masses of cotton rag, when
macerated for paper manufacture, — and wonders to see you
mince gingerly of a dish which he himself will devour with the
savage appetite of a Cumanche! You have seen a royal side
of venison brought in during the morning, and laid out upon the
tavern shambles; — you have set your heart upon the dinner of
that day. Fancy reminds you of the relish with which, at the
St. Charles, in New-Orleans, or the Pulaski, in Savannah, or the
Charleston Hotel, you have discussed the exquisitely dressed
loin, or haunch, done to a turn; the red just tinging the gravy,
the meat just offering such pleasant resistance to the knife as
leaves the intricate fibres still closely united, though shedding
their juices with the eagerness of the peach, pressed between
the lips in the very hour of its maturity; — or you see a fine
`mutton' brought in, of the wild flavor of the hills; and you
examine, with the eye of the epicure, the voluminous fat, fold
upon fold, lapping itself lovingly about the loins. Leg, or loin,
or saddle, or shoulder, suggests itself to your anticipation as the
probable subject of noonday discussion. You lay yourself out
for the argument, and naturally recur to the last famous dinner
which you enjoyed with the reverend father, who presides so
equally well at the Church of the St. Savori, and at his own excellent
hotel in the Rue des Huitres. You remember all the
company, admirable judges, every one of them, of the virtues
and the graces of a proper feast. The reverend father, himself,
belongs to that excellent school of which the English clergy
still show you so many grateful living examples, — men whose
sensibilities are not yielded to the barren empire of mind merely,
but who bring thought and philosophy equally to bear upon the

[figure description] Page 402.[end figure description]

humble and too frequently mortified flesh. With the spectacle
of the venerable host, presiding so gracefully and so amiably —
the napkin tucked beneath his chin, and falling over the ample
domain in which certain philosophers, with much show of reason,
have found the mortal abiding place of the soul — you associate
the happy action with which, slightly flourishing the bright steel
before he smites, he then passes the scimitar-like edge into the
rosy round before him. It is no rude or hurried act. He feels
the responsibility of the duty. He has properly studied the relations
of the parts. He knows just where to insinuate the blade;
and the mild dignity with which the act is performed, reminds
you of what you have seen in pictures, or read in books, of the
sacrifices of the high priests and magi, at Grecian or Egyptian
altars. What silence waits upon the stroke! and, as the warm
blood gushes forth, and the rubied edges of the wound lie bare
before your eyes, every bosom feels relieved! The augury has
been a fortunate one, and the feast begins under auspices that
drive all doubts of what to-morrow may bring forth, entirely
from the thought.

“With such recollections kindling the imagination, our extempore
hotels of the Apalachian regions will doom you to frequent
disappointment. You see yourself surrounded by masses that
may be boiled or roasted polypi for what you know. But where's
the mutton and the venison?

“You call upon the landlord — a gaunt-looking tyke of the
forest, who seems better fitted to hunt the game than take charge
of its toilet. He is serving a score at once; with one hand heaping
beef and bacon, with the other collards and cucumbers, into
conflicting plates; and you fall back speechless, with the sudden
dispersion of a thousand fancies of delight, as he tells you that
the mutton, or the venison, which has been the subject of your
revery all the morning, lies before you in the undistinguishable
mass that has distressed you with notions of the polypus and
sea-blubber, or some other unknown monstrosities of the deep or
forest. But the subject is one quite too distressing for dilation.
We have painful memories, and must forbear. But, we solemnly
say to our Apalachian landlord: —

“`Brother, this thing must be amended. You have no right
to sport thus with the hopes, the health, the happiness of your

[figure description] Page 403.[end figure description]

guests. You have no right, in this way, to mortify your neighbors'
flesh. Have you no sense of the evil which you are doing—
no bowels of sympathy for those of other people? Is it pride,
or indolence, or mere blindness and ignorance, which thus renders
you reckless of what is due to humanity and society, and
all that fine philosophy which the Roman epicure found essential
to reconcile to becoming sensibilities the mere brutish necessities
of the animal economy? You must import and educate your
cooks. You must appreciate justly the morals of the kitchen.
You must study with diligence, night and morning, the profound
pages of the Physiologie de Goût; you must forswear those
streams of lard, those cruel abuses of the flesh, those hard bakings
of meats otherwise tender; those salt and savage soddenings of
venison, otherwise sweet; those mountains of long collards, inadequately;
boiled and those indigestible masses of dough,
whether in the form of pies, or tarts, or biscuit, which need a
yesty levity before they can possibly assimilate with the human
system. We have often thought, seeing these heavy pasties
upon your tables, that, if they could only command a voice, they
would perpetually cry out to the needy and devouring guest, in
the language of the ghosts to Richard the Hunchback — `Let
us lie heavy on thy soul to-morrow.'”

Here was a pause. Our orator had fairly talked himself out.

“Have you been speaking, sir?” was the artlessly-expressed
inquiry, of Selina Burroughs.

“Good heavens, my dear little creature, you do not mean to
say that you have been sleeping all the while!”

Here was a laugh!

“Oh! no, sir,—I merely wished to suggest that there is a story
due to us from some quarter, and if you are in voice, sir,— I do
not see who can better satisfy our expectation than yourself.”

“Voice! I never was in better voice in all my life! You shall
have a story and, in tribute to yourself, it shall be a love-story.”

“Oh! thank you — a love story.”

“A love story, and of the red man.”

“Oh! that will be curious enough.”

“It shall be as malicious and pathetic, and sad and humorous,
and sedate, and fantastical, as Kotzebue himself could have
desired.”

[figure description] Page 404.[end figure description]

And the group composed itself around, and the bilious raconteur
told the following legend: —

“A token of the spirit land —
The fleeting gift of fairy hand:
A wither'd leaf, a flower whose stem
Once broke, we liken unto them;
Thus fleet and fading, ripe ere noon,
And vanishing like midnight moon;
A rainbow gleam, that now appears,
And melts, even as we gaze, to tears.”

There are certain races who are employed evidently as the
pioneers for a superior people — who seem to have no mission
of performance, — only one of preparation, — and who simply
keep the earth, a sort of rude possession, of which they make no
use, yeilding it, by an inevitable necessity, to the conquering
people, so soon as they appear. Our red men seem to have belonged
to this category. Their modes of life were inconsistent
with length of tenure; and, even had the white man never appeared,
their duration must have still been short. They would
have preyed upon one another, tribe against tribe, in compliance
with necessity, until all were destroyed; — and there is nothing
to be deplored in this spectacle! Either they had no further
uses, or they never, of themselves, developed them; and a people
that destroy only, and never create or build, are not designed,
anywhere, to cumber God's earth long! This is the substantial
condition upon which all human securities depend. We are to
advance. We are to build, create, endow; thus showing that
we are made in the likeness of the Creator. Those who destroy
only, by laws of strict moral justice, must perish, without having
been said to live!

And yet, surveying this spectacle thro' the medium of the
picturesque, one naturally broods with sympathy over the fate
of this people. There is a solitary grandeur in their fortunes,

[figure description] Page 405.[end figure description]

and the intense melancholy which they exhibit, which compels
us, in spite of philosophy, to regret the necessity under which
they perish. Their valor, their natural eloquence, their passionate
sense of freedom, the sad nobleness of their aspects, the
subtlety of their genius, — these forbid that we should regard
them with indifference; and we watch their prolonged battle for
existence and place, with that feeling of admiration with which
we behold the “great man struggling with the storms of fate.”
The conflict between rival races, one representing the highest
civilization, the other the totally opposite nature of the savage,
is always one of exquisite interest; and not an acre of our vast
country but exhibits scenes of struggle between these rivals,
which, properly delineated, would ravish from the canvass, and
thrill all passions from the stage. The thousand progresses, in
all directions, of the white pioneer; — the thousand trials of
strength, and skill, and spirit, between him and the red hunter;—
make of the face of the country one vast theatre, scene after
scene, swelling the great event, until all closes in the grand denou
ëment which exhibits the dying agonies of the savage, with
the conquering civilization striding triumphantly over his neck.
Tradition will help us in process of time to large elements of
romance in the survey of these events, and the red man is destined
to a longer life in art than he ever knew in reality.

The sketch which follows might as well be true of a thousand
histories, as of the one which it records. It is one which the
painter might crown with all the glories of his art; one which
future invention may weave into permanent song and story, for

[figure description] Page 406.[end figure description]

generations, to whom the memory of the red man will be nothing
but a dream, doubtful in all its changes, and casting doubts upon
the sober history.