Very warm, and no cold water, unless one went to the river.
The hotel baths were not promising. This hotel is worse than the Mills House or
Willard's. The feeding and the flies are intolerable. One of our party comes in
to say that he could scarce get down to the hall on account of the crowd, and
that all the people who passed him had very hard, sharp bones. He remarks
thereupon to the clerk at the bar, who tells him that the particular
projections he alludes to are implements of defence or offence, as the case may
be, and adds, “I suppose you and your friends are the only people in the house
who haven't a bowie-knife, or a six-shooter, or Derringer about them.” The
house is full of Confederate congressmen, politicians, colonels, and place-men
with or without places, and a vast number of speculators, contractors, and the
like, attracted by the embryo government. Among the visitors are many
filibusters, such as Henningsen, Pickett, Tochman, Wheat.1 I hear a
good deal about the association called the Knights of the Golden Circle, a
Protestant association for securing the Gulf provinces and States, including—
which has been largely developed by recent events — them in the Southern
Confederacy, and creating them into an independent government.
Montgomery has little claims to be called a capital. The
streets are very hot, unpleasant, and uninteresting. I have rarely seen a more
dull, lifeless place; it looks like a small Russian town in the interior. The
names of the shopkeepers indicate German and French origin. I looked in at one
or two of the slave magazines, which are not unlike similar establishments in
Cairo and Smyrna. A certain degree of freedom is enjoyed by some of the men,
who lounge about the doors, and are careless of escape or liberty, knowing too
well the difficulties of either.
It is not in its external aspects generally that slavery is
so painful. The observer must go with Sterne, and gaze in on the captives’
dungeons through the bars. The condition of a pig in a sty is not, in an animal
sense, anything but good. Well fed, over fed, covered from the winds and storms
of heaven, with clothing, food, medicine, provided, children taken care of,
aged relatives and old age itself succored and guarded — is not this——? Get
thee behind us, slave philosopher! The hour comes when the butcher steals to
the sty, and the knife leaps from the sheath.
Now there is this one thing in being an [ăvaέ ăvδpὣv1] that be the race of men bad as it may, a kind of
grandiose character is given to their leader. The stag which sweeps his rivals from
his course is the largest of the herd; but a man who drives the largest drove
of sheep is no better than he who drives the smallest. The flock he compels,
must consist of human beings to develop the property of which I speak, and so
the very superiority of the slave master in the ways and habits of command
proves that the negro is a man. But, at the same time the law which regulates
all these relations between man and his fellows, asserts itself here. The
dominant race becomes dependent on some other body of men, less martial,
arrogant, and wealthy, for its elegances, luxuries, and necessaries. The poor
villeins round the Norman castle forge the armor, make the furniture, and
exercise the mechanical arts which the baron and his followers are too ignorant
and too proud to pursue; if there is no population to serve this purpose, some
energetic race comes in their place, and the Yankee does the part of the little
hungry Greek to the Roman patrician.
The South has at present little or no manufactures, takes
everything from the Yankee outside or the mean white within her gates, and
despises both. Both are reconciled by interest. The one gets a good price for
his manufacture and the fruit of his ingenuity from a careless, spendthrift
proprietor; the other hopes to be as good as his master some day, and sees the
beginning of his fortune in the possession of a negro. It is fortunate for our
great British Catherine-wheel, which is continually throwing off light and heat
to the remotest parts of the world — I hope not burning down to a dull red
cinder in the centre at last — that it had not to send its emigrants to the
Southern States, as assuredly the emigration would soon have been checked. The United
States has been represented to the British and Irish emigrants by the Free
States — the Northern States and the great West — and the British and German
emigrant who finds himself in the South, has drifted there through the Northern
States, and either is a migratory laborer, or hopes to return with a little
money to the North and West, if he does not see his way to the possession of
land and negroes.
After dinner at the hotel table, which was crowded with
officers, and where I met Mr. Howell Cobb and several senators of the new
Congress, I spent the evening with Colonel Deas, Quartermaster-General, and a
number of his staff, in their quarters. As I was walking over to the house, one
of the detached villa-like residences so common in Southern cities, I perceived
a crowd of very well-dressed negroes, men and women, in front of a plain brick
building which I was informed was their Baptist meeting-house, into which white
people rarely or never intrude. These were domestic servants, or persons
employed in stores, and their general appearance indicated much comfort and
even luxury. I doubted if they all were slaves. One of my companions went up to
a young woman in a straw-hat, with bright red-and-green ribbon trimmings and
artificial flowers, a gaudy Paisley shawl, and a rainbow-like gown, blown out
over her yellow boots by a prodigious crinoline, and asked her “Whom do you
belong to?” She replied,
“I b'long to Massa Smith, sar.” Well, we have men who “belong” to horses in
England. I am not sure if Americans, North and South, do not consider their
superiority to all Englishmen so thoroughly established, that they can speak of
them as if they were talking of inferior animals. To-night, for example, a
gallant young South Carolinian, one Ransome Calhoun,3 was good
enough to say that “Great Britain was in mortal fear of France, and was abjectly
subdued by her great rival.” Hence came controversy, short and acrimonious
_______________
1 Since killed in action.
2 This is as close of an approximation to the
words printed in the original text as I could get. Please see original text for the exact
typography.
3 Since killed.
SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and
South, p. 164-7
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