At 1:30 P. M. a small party started from Mr. Green's to
visit the cemetery of Bonaventure, to which every visitor to Savannah must pay
his pilgrimage; difficiles aditus primos habet — a deep sandy road which
strains the horses and the carriages; but at last “the shell road is reached —
a highway several miles long, consisting of oyster shells — the pride of
Savannah, which eats as many oysters as it can to add to the length of this
wonderful road. There is no stone in the whole of the vast alluvial ranges of
South Carolina and Maritime Georgia, and the only substance available for
making a road is the oyster-shell. There is a toll-gate at each end to aid the
oyster-shells. Remember they are three times the size of any European crustacean
of the sort.
A pleasant drive through the shady hedgerows and bordering
trees lead to a dilapidated porter's lodge and gateway, within which rose in a
towering mass of green one of the finest pieces of forest architecture
possible; nothing to be sure like Burnham Beeches, or some of the forest glades
of Windsor, but possessed, nevertheless, of a character quite its own. What we
gazed upon was, in fact, the ruin of grand avenues of live-oak, so
well-disposed that their peculiar mode of growth afforded an unusual
development of the “Gothic idea,” worked out and elaborated by a superabundant
fall from the overlacing arms and intertwined branches of the tillandsia, or
Spanish moss, a weeping, drooping, plumaceous parasite, which does to the tree
what its animal type, the yellow fever — vomitoprieto — does to man —
clings to it everlastingly, drying up sap, poisoning blood, killing the
principle of life till it dies. The only differ, as they say in Ireland, is,
that the tillandsia all the time looks very pretty, and that the process lasts
very long. Some there are who praise this tillandsia, hanging like the tresses
of a witch's hair over an invisible face, but to me it is a paltry parasite,
destroying the grace and beauty of that it preys upon, and letting fall its
dull tendrils over the fresh lovely green, as clouds drop over the face of some
beautiful landscape. Despite all this, Bonaventure is a scene of remarkable
interest; it seems to have been intended for a place of tombs. The Turks would
have filled it with turbaned white pillars, and with warm ghosts at night. The
French would have decorated it with interlaced hands of stone, with tears of
red and black on white ground, with wreaths of immortelles. I am not sure that
we would have done much more than have got up a cemetery company, interested
Shilliber, hired a beadle, and erected an iron paling. The Savannah people not
following any of these fashions, all of which are adopted in Northern cities,
have left everything to nature and the gatekeeper, and to the owner of one of
the hotels, who has got up a grave-yard in the ground. And there, scattered up
and down under the grand old trees, which drop tears of Spanish moss, and weave
wreaths of Spanish moss, and shake plumes of Spanish moss over them, are a few
monumental stones to certain citizens of Savannah. There is a melancholy air
about the place independently of these emblems of our mortality, which might
recommend it specially for picnics. There never was before a cemetery where
nature seemed to aid the effect intended by man so thoroughly. Every one knows
a weeping willow will cry over a wedding party if they sit under it, as well as
over a grave. But here the Spanish moss looks like weepers wreathed by some
fantastic hand out of the crape of dreamland. Lucian's Ghostlander, the son of
Skeleton of the Tribe of the Juiceless, could tell us something of such weird
trappings. They are known indeed as the best bunting for yellow fever to fight
under. Wherever their flickering horsehair tresses wave in the breeze, taper
end downwards, Squire Black Jack is bearing lance and sword. One great green
oak says to the other, “This fellow is killing me. Take his deadly robes off my
limbs!” “Alas! see how he is ruining me! I have, no life to help you.” It is,
indeed, a strange and very ghastly place. Here are so many querci virentes, old
enough to be strong, and big, and great, sapful, lusty, wide-armed, green-honored
— all dying out slowly beneath tillandsia, as if they were so many monarchies
perishing of decay — or so many youthful republics dying of buncombe brag,
richness of blood, and other diseases fatal to overgrown bodies politic.
The void left in the midst of all these designed walks and
stately avenues, by the absence of any suitable centre, increases the seclusion
and solitude. A house ought to be there somewhere you feel — in fact there was
once the mansion of the Tatnalls, a good old English family, whose ancestors
came from the old country, ere the rights of man were talked of, and lived
among the Oglethorpes, and such men of the pigtail school, who would have been
greatly astonished at finding themselves in company with Benjamin Franklin or
his kind. I don't know anything of old Tatnall. Indeed who does? But he had a
fine idea of planting trees, which he never got in America, where he would have
received scant praise for anything but his power to plant cotton or sugar-cane
just now. In his knee breeches, and top boots, I can fancy the old gentleman
reproducing some home scene, and boasting to himself, “I will make it as fine
as Lord Nihilo's park.” Could he see it now? — A decaying army of the dead. The
mansion was burned down during a Christmas merrymaking, and was never built
again, and the young trees have grown up despite the Spanish moss, and now they
stand, as it were in cathedral aisles, around the ruins of the departed house,
shading the ground, and enshrining its memories in an antiquity which seems of
the remotest, although it is not as ancient as that of the youngest oak in the
Squire's park at home.
I have before oftentimes in my short voyages here, wondered
greatly at the reverence bestowed on a tree. In fact, it is because a tree of
any decent growth is sure to be older than anything else around it; and
although young America revels in her future, she is becoming old enough to
think about her past.
In the evening Mr. Green gave a dinner to some very
agreeable people, Mr. Ward, the Chinese Minister — (who tried, by the by, to
make it appear that his wooden box was the Pekin State carriage for
distinguished foreigners) — Mr. Locke, the clever and intelligent editor of the
principal journal in Savannah, Brigadier Lawton, one of the Judges, a Britisher,
owner of the once renowned America which, under the name of Camilla, was now
lying in the river (not perhaps without reference to a little speculation in
running the blockade, hourly expected), Mr. Ward and Commodore Tatnall, so well
known to us in England for his gallant conduct in the Peiho affair, when he
offered and gave our vessels aid, though a neutral, and uttered the exclamation
in doing so, — in his despatch at all events, — “that blood was thicker than
water.” Of our party was also Mr. Hodgson, well known to most of our
Mediterranean travellers some years back, when he was United States Consul in
the East. He amuses his leisure still by inditing and reading monographs on the
languages of divers barbarous tribes in Numidia and Mauritania.
The Georgians are not quite so vehement as the South
Carolinians in their hate of the Northerners; but they are scarcely less
determined to fight President Lincoln and all his men. And that is the test of
this rebellion's strength. I did not hear any profession of a desire to become
subject to England, or to borrow a prince of us; but I have nowhere seen
stronger determination to resist any reunion with the New England States. “They
can't conquer us, sir?” “If they try it, we'll whip them.”
SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and
South, p. 151-4
