"IN forming a judgment, lay your hearts void of foretaken opinions; else,
whatsoever is done or said will be measured by a wrong rule, like them who have the
jaundice, to whom every thing appeareth yellow."

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

"FAITHFUL are the wounds of a friend; while the kisses of an enemy are deceitful."

KING SOLOMON.

PREFACE.

IN one of his letters to Fum Hoam, First President of the Ceremonial Academy at Pekin, in China, Lien Chi Altangi, the Discontented Wanderer, gives us an amusing and graphic account of his introduction, by the Man in Black, to a certain bookseller in London. This bookseller was named Fudge, and being asked by the Man in Black whether he had recently published any thing new?—

"Excuse me, sir," says he, "it is not the season; books have their time as well as cucumbers. I would no more bring out a new book in summer, than I would sell pork in the dog-days. Nothing in my way goes off in summer except very light goods indeed. A review, a magazine, or a sessions’ paper, may amuse a summer reader; but all our stock of value we reserve for a spring and winter trade."

"I must confess," says Lien Chi Altangi, "a curiosity to know what you call a valuable stock, which can only bear a winter perusal."

"Sir," replied the bookseller, "it is not my way to cry up my own goods; but, without exaggeration, I will venture to show with any of the trade. My books at least have the peculiar advantage of being always new; and it is my way to clear off my old to the trunk-makers every season. I have ten new title-pages now about me, which only want books to be added to make them the finest things in nature. Others may pretend to direct the vulgar; but that is not my way; I always let the vulgar direct me; wherever popular clamor arises I always echo the million. For instance, should the people in general say that such a man is a rogue, I instantly give orders to set him down, in print, a villain; thus every man buys the book, not to learn new sentiments, but to have the pleasure of seeing his own reflected."

Sagacious Fudge! Neither is the race yet extinct. I dare say the Fudge family is as numerous now as it was in the days of Goldsmith. And we have our popular writers, too—the Fudge beau ideal of a great genius—who worthily, even when handling the gravest themes, follow the precedent furnished by the inimitable author of the Infernal Guide. "Ah! sir, that was a piece touched off by the hand of a master; filled with good things from one end to the other. The author had nothing but the jest in view; no dull, moral lurking beneath, nor ill-natured satire to sour the reader’s good humor; he wisely considered that moral and humor at the same time were quite overdoing the business."

But, my readers, this I would have you to understand at the very commencement of our acquaintance; you will assuredly find the writer of the following pages no Fudge, nor in the least ambitious to touch off such a master-piece of wit as that same In fernal Guide. I have endeavored to speak my sentiments plainly, to narrate facts impartially, and to treat a grave theme in a manner becoming its gravity and great importance. Read for yourselves, and determine. For, however faulty these papers may be thought in other respects, I have endeavored to portray, truthfully at least, what has been presented to my own mind, from my present stand-point. Others, I know, gazing it may be, from a higher point of observation, have professed to see the same objects in a different light; and they may possibly be right and I wrong; for, fully conscious of the imperfectness and general obliquity of all men’s vision, I am not so fool-hardy as to swear that the shield whose legend I read so plainly, bears the same device upon its other side. At the same time, however, permit me to suggest to those who may not view the matter in dispute the same as I do, that a peep at both sides will do no harm; since otherwise, they might be induced to wage a Quixotic war in defense of what may prove (when it is too late, alas!) of no greater merit or importance than that same senseless cause of quarrel which resulted in the untimely death of both the foolish one-idead knights of the old days of chivalry.

Jan. 1st, 1860.

THE AUTHOR.

SOCIAL RELATIONS
IN
OUR SOUTHERN STATES.

CHAPTER I.
THE SOUTHERN GENTLEMAN.

                         "HE is a noble gentleman; withal
                         Happy in’s endeavors: the gen’ral voice
                         Sounds him for courtesy, behavior, language,
                         And every fair demeanor, an example:
                         Titles of honor add not to his worth;
                         Who is himself an honor to his title."

JOHN FORD.

PERHAPS it would be altogether superfluous to remind our readers, that the fashion has been for several years, at least since the unlooked-for success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to write books about the South. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Down-Eastern men, the Bloomer style of men, as well as countless numbers of female scribblers, have not ceased to drum upon the public tympanum (almost to deafness, indeed) in praise or blame—generally the latter—of Southern peculiarities, social habits, manners, customs, observances, and domestic institutions. And yet we dare to presume, the untravelled reader who has never crossed the line which separates the North from the South, possesses but a very confused, and, in the main, erroneous opinion, touching the veritable and distinguishing characteristics of his much-abused fellow-citizens of the Slave States. Indeed, we are morally certain, if he have derived his information from no other sources than intemperate newspapers and exaggerated romances of the Uncle Tom school, he remains to this day in as profound ignorance of the Summer Land, as was poor John Brown when he made his foolish raid into Virginia at the head of his three and twenty fanatical followers. In truth, the Quixotic enterprise of these madmen is mainly due to the persistent misrepresentation of the South by the rancorous journals and unscrupulous demagogues of the Free States. Certainly, it is no easy matter for an entire stranger, let him be ever so capable and unbiased, impartially to delineate the peculiarities of any people whatever. But when a writer’s perception is rendered crooked by reason of prejudice, while his love of the almighty dollar and the plaudits of the rabble, urges him to cater to the tastes of his readers, who clamor unceasingly for senseless detraction and bloody murder—what are we to think of his productions? Certes, that they are to be credited by no manner of means; and whoever looks to such a source for any useful information, might just as reasonably expect to gather lilies off a bramble-bush, or to find the age of a maiden aunt in the family register.

And yet, if this can be truly said of all peoples— that one not to the manor born is incompetent fairly to discuss their social relations—of the South it can be said most truly and pertinently. Spreading over a vast area of country, and boasting but few large cities or great commercial centres, the different phases presented by Southern society are almost as various as the extent of her territory is diversified; and while it must not be denied that she sometimes does shock our humaner sensibilities with brutal displays of one sort or another; still these, happily, are the exceptions to the generally pleasing character of the landscape—the shadows, if you will, whose very darkness only serves to render more conspicuous those heights of moral grandeur, and more gratefully pleasing those broad savannahs of genial hospitality, which stretch all the way from Little Delaware to the cactus-clad banks of the Rio Grande. If the South has her Big Cypress, Okefenoke, and Dismal Swamps, she can also point to her noble Blue Ridge, her graceful Cumberland and other mountain ranges, as well as to many a lovely river embowered in forests of magnolia, beechwood, hemlock, the wide-branching cedar, and the stately pine.

It must not be forgotten, either, who were the early pioneers in the settlement of the Slave States. New-England was settled mainly by persons in the humbler walks of life, and who were essentially possessed of the same habits of thought and modes of speech; whereas the early pioneers in the occupancy of the South possessed no such homogeneal characteristics, but differed, on the contrary, widely in every particular—the two extremes being, on the one hand, the high-bred English courtier of aristocratic mien and faultless manners, and on the other, the thick-lipped African, fresh from the jungles of Congo and still reeking with the bloody stains of cannibalism; while between these were some half-dozen other classes, possessing different degrees of culture and refinement—all of whom yet have their descendants in the South, changed in many particulars from their original and aboriginal ancestors, but for all that, distinctly the representatives of the several classes whence they derive their origin.

Now, as the reader is aware, this very important fact has been persistently ignored by all those outside enemies of the South who are ever "harping on my daughter," and seeking to engender strife and all uncharitableness between the two sections of our common country. We know a few of the "unco pious" do occasionally condescend in their pulpits, and through the medium of quasi-religious newspapers, to refer in well-set phrase to the Convict Fathers of the South; but, as a general thing, the honey-tongued libellers of the Southern half of our Confederacy, appear to be totally unconscious that her citizens were ever divided into other than three classes—Cavaliers, Poor Whites, and Slaves. Can it be ignorance which prompts this discreet silence in regard to a solemn truth of history— a fact so essential to a proper understanding of the true relations of society in our Southern States? And yet if it be not ignorance, what are we to conclude? Why, that the accusers of the South fear to face the subject squarely, and hence are constrained to resort (with malice prepense) to base and unmanly subterfuges, in the hope of still longer bamboozling their poor dupes and trusting disciples; thus proving to the world how exceedingly nice is their sense of honor:

                         "Like dastard curres, that having at a bay
                         The noble stag embost in wearie chase,
                         Dare not adventure on the stubborn prey,
                         Ne byte before, but rome from place to place,
                         To steal a snatch when turned is his face!"

Now, as we conceive, the only proper method of arriving at any just conception of a nation’s merits or demerits, as of an individual’s, is, to study closely its antecedents—its past history, in a word. It would not be wise to judge of every individual man by the same standard; wherein, then, consists the wisdom of judging of communities of individuals after the like fashion? You say, that Jones is short, and Smith is tall, and Brown is corpulent. Because, sir, (being corpulent yourself, ah! ha?) you think a rotund beer-barrel to represent the highest style of man, physically speaking, do you dare to laugh at Jones and Smith—to call the former a duck of a man and the latter a bean-pole? Consider the misfortune of their birth; how Jones’ father was a dapper little gentleman of four feet six, while Smith’s mother stood five feet eleven, in her stockings. Consider, also, that while you are so enthusiastic in your admiration of Brown, Jones and Smith, on the other hand, feel for you and that jolly fat dog of a Brown, all the pity and commiseration which a profound sense of your unfortunate corpulency awakens in their friendly bosoms. So, too, when nations fall out and call one another hard names, they are only playing on a larger scale the petty parts of Messrs. Jones, Smith, and Brown. Thus have John Bull and Monsieur Jean Crapeaud lampooned each other for a thousand years; and both these have united in discharging their limping pasquinades at Brother Jonathan, ever since that immortal Fourth of July, on which this last-named individual came of age and cut loose from his mother’s apron-strings, to "set up on his own hook." And it is in the same spirit that the Cavaliers of Virginia have never ceased to "poke fun" at the sharp-nosed inhabitants of New-England, while the latter have returned the compliment in kind, with all sorts of brobdignagian stories in regard to the outrages on human rights daily perpetrated in the Southern States. A Yankee who visits the South, rarely troubles himself to consider what sort of society he ought reasonably to expect, in view of the different characteristics and dissimilar natures of her early settlers; but, having free access to the firesides of only one or two classes of her citizens, and ignorantly assuming those to be representations of all the rest, he very naturally blunders, often ludicrously, and always most egregiously, whenever he attempts to delineate the same. He reminds one of the sapient Englishman who went over to Boulogne, in France, tarried one night only, and returning home the next day, reported that all the women in France possessed red heads; and all because his hostess of Boulogne was blessed with such a flaming capillary ornament! In illustration whereof, we may further observe, that all the gentlemen of Mrs. Stowe’s novels are represented as being anti-slavery in sentiment, though slaveholders; while every Southerner who entertains an honest conviction that slavery is right, is invariably made to appear as a brute, a bully, a hardened wretch—one who is to be looked upon as any thing else than a gentleman or a Christian. How false in fact such a presentation of the subject is, must be obvious to every unbiased mind; and yet the fair authoress is not to be charged with having intended to convey a false impression. No more can the Hon. Miss Murray be accused of a similar intention, while presenting a diverse report in her Letters; for this lady’s associations led her to see a very different phase of Southern society from that presented to Mrs. Stowe, whose anti-slavery sentiments were well known, and who, for that reason, would be very apt to affiliate with persons of kindred convictions. Viewing the matter in this light, we are willing to concede, that both these ladies, as well as all other reputable authors who have devoted their attention to the South, are equally honest, so far as intentions go: and this, too, whether they have written in praise or blame of Southern institutions.

Indubitably, there is much in the Slave States to call forth either unqualified approbation, or equally unqualified denunciation; owing entirely to the nature of the individual’s sympathies who so applauds or denounces. We will even go a step further, and declare in all good conscience, that there is much in the South to call forth honest praise from honest men, as well as much to grieve the spirit of the most rational and conservative of philanthropists. But we have yet to stumble on that community, free or slave, of which the same remark can not be made with equal truth and pointedness. All human society, indeed, is faulty, more or less, and ever must remain so; and it is, therefore, a grave error either to praise or to denounce unqualifiedly, any system of human government whatever, however good or bad. Nothing good can ever come of such a policy, dictated, as it of necessity ever must be, by a very circumscribed knowledge of man’s imperfect nature, as well as by the most intolerant bigotry or the narrowest prejudice. Thus, in spite of fifty years’ unceasing denunciation of her peculiar domestic relations, the South is stronger to-day than at any former period, and fifty-fold more prosperous than when the denunciation first began. This, the reader will probably remark, is hardly to be considered as an unfavorable result, and so it is not; but there is an evil still, which has resulted from the indiscriminate blame of Southern institutions, and that is the indiscriminate praise of the same, indulged in to excess by the too intemperate and hot-headed advocates thereof; until, in consequence of the wild vagaries of the two extremes, so totally erroneous a public sentiment has been created, that few persons, if any, whose opinions have of necessity to be based upon the testimony of others, possess as accurate information as they should touching the true state of society south of Mason’s & Dixon’s line.

While one portion of the Northern people inclines to believe, that the citizens of our Southern States are so many Chevalier Bayards, sans peur et sans reproche; living upon their broad estates in all baronial splendor and hospitality, but being, nevertheless—like the slaveholding Catos and Brutuses of republican Rome, and the equally slaveholding Solons and Leonidases of democratic Greece—still true to the Constitution, the Commonwealth, and the Laws; another portion of the same community (and for the honor of humanity, we pray Heaven this portion be not so large as we fear) entertains in regard to the same people opinions not quite so flattering, to say the least. What evil thing has not been laid to the charge of the poor Southerners, indeed, by the very Christian, refined, and amiable people, of whom this latter portion of the Northern community is composed, it were difficult for even the most experienced Tombs lawyer to suggest. Only think of an ex-minister of the Gospel, who publicly declares that the hanging of John Brown, horse-thief, traitor, and murderer, by the Virginia authorities, would make the gallows as glorious as the cross! Oh! for shame! shame upon you, Massachusetts, when you can applaud to the echo such blasphemous utterances!

We hope our readers are not growing impatient, for we shall endeavor to get rid of this prosing style in a few more paragraphs; when we shall proceed immediately to the discussion of more entertaining topics. But we can not resist the temptation to prose just a little bit longer while we are in the vein.

And what we wish to impress upon the reader’s mind, is this (and we have been drawn to the subject almost unawares): The greatest villainies that were ever perpetrated, were perpetrated in the name of God and Justice. The bloody guillotine was erected to further the ends of justice. The Order of Jesus and the Holy Inquisition were instituted in behalf of God and justice. And alas! even while the Rabbins and Pharisees hanged the King Immanuel upon the cursed tree, they loudly professed that they were doing the will of Jehovah! Mark, however, had there been no public sentiment to justify the high Priest and Levites who consented to the death of Christ—a public sentiment which had been created and fostered by the false teachings and rabbinical traditions of the Levites themselves—such monstrous sacrilege never could have been consummated. Just so at the present time; did not a lamentably false public sentiment sustain our modern Levites in their political crusade against men as righteous as themselves, they never would dare to speak as the Phillipses and Beechers have spoken about John Brown, neither would they persuade themselves that to preach "Jesus Christ and him crucified" (which was the sole ambition of the noble Paul) consists in beating their drums ecclesiastic in a rage of fanatical zeal, or in actively consorting at primary political caucuses with every drunken vagabond who has a ballot, and who votes it according to their consciences.

Now, as every well-informed person knows, the fact is indisputable, and has often been boasted of by the infidel press, that anti-slavery sentiments were first propagated by the ultra socialists and communists—those miserable sans culottes, who, during the memorable French Revolution, raised the cry of Liberté, Fraternité et Egalité, and in the madness of their drunken folly enthroned a nude harlot in the Temple of Justice as the goddess Reason, the object of their admiration and worship. At that time England and Massachusetts were virtuously engaged in supplying the slave-marts of the world with cargoes fresh from Guinea and Loango, and our Northern divines had not the least suspicion that the Bible condemned slavery. But, sansculotteism being quelled in France, soon found a foothold in Exeter Hall, and thence spread to the United States. For a long time the clergy resisted the storm of radical ideas, but being only men like the rest of us, and having an eye to benefices, calls, surprise-parties, and the like, as well as "itching ears" to catch the sweet voices of the rabble, they have at last almost surrendered in a body in the Free States, and now seek to lead in the new crusade; yea, some of them have even gone so far as to doff the surplice to assume the uniform of a new master, and are now prominent political leaders: know how to pull the wires and the wool over the eyes of honest citizens, equal to the shrewdest; can turn off a five-dollar whisky-skin as coolly as the bloodiest Blood Tub, and entertain for the frailer daughters of Eve a benevolent regard which is truly affecting.

In truth, in some sections of New-England, the clergy have made this thing of free wool a part of their creeds —the great Open Sesame of their churches; the real party or sectarian shibboleth: the only test of piety, or benevolence, or humanity, or civilization; until, and we declare it with shamefacedness, in the transcendentally mystified atmosphere of that highly enlightened region, the substance of things is no longer regarded, only the name. Does the reader doubt our assertion? Behold, then, the proof! We quote a brief passage from the writings of one of the most popular of New England authors:

"Russia has sixty millions of people: who would not gladly swap her out of the world for glorious little Greece back again, and Plato, and Æschylus, and Epaminondas, still there? Who would exchange Concord or Cambridge in Massachusetts for any hundred thousand square miles of slave-breeding dead-level?"

Now, this is all good enough as high-sounding rhetoric, but it is also high-sounding nonsense as well. Is the writer ignorant that his "glorious little Greece," the whole pocketful thereof, was only "slave-breeding dead-level," in its palmiest days? Is he ignorant that "Plato, and Æschylus, and Epiminondas," and, all the rest of the Grecian worthies, were slaveholders as much as George Washington, or Henry A. Wise, or Gov. Hammond? with this difference, that these are Christian slaveholders, while those were profane heathens, ignorantly worshipping gods of wood and stone? And yet this amiable orthodox anti-slavery philosopher and dialectician of the "Modern Athens," would rejoice to see Christian Russia blotted out of existence, merely to have back again "glorious little Greece," with all her thirty thousand obscene gods and goddesses, and her slaveholding populace, whose morals were so bad, that Thucydides, after having driven in a car drawn by six nude Cyprians through the public thoroughfares of Athens, was by popular ballot elected to the highest office in the gift of his follow-citizens! Need we wonder the Old Bay State, while under the control and guidance of such perspicacious logicians, despite her acknowledged wealth and refinement, exerts no greater influence in the land than she does? Verily, in the days of Cotton Mather, when her godly sons were sorely exercised about Quakers, Baptists, witches, hobgoblins, broomsticks—and the like precious theological matters, they were not more befogged and befooled, than are their descendants of to-day on the subject of "slave-breeding dead-level." If, however, they will grant us a patient hearing, we hope to enlighten them somewhat in that regard, at least in so far as our own Slave States are concerned. Russia must take care of herself.

Of course, in order faithfully to perform the delicate task we have voluntarily undertaken, (for it is a delicate matter to presume to discuss the social relations of any community,) even if we were an author of well-established reputation, and long acquaintance with the public, it would behoove us to show some personal fitness for the work; but much more is this the case, when a young and unknown literary aspirant lays claim to a public audience. We trust the reader will pardon a seeming egotism, therefore, when we proceed first to state, that the writer has enjoyed more than ordinary opportunities for observing the different phases of Southern society. Born in the South, his education was chiefly acquired at Southern institutions of learning, in the States of Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. ’Tis true he left the University of Virginia to conclude his professional studies at Harvard University, Massachusetts; but this was because he had a strong desire to come in contact with the Northern people, and Northern prejudices, on their own soil; to correct his own sectional prejudices, should these require correction, as well as to demonstrate to those with whom he might have occasion to associate, that not all slaveholders are such "outside barbarians," as the enemies of the South strive so laboriously to make the Northern public believe. He has, besides, travelled in nearly every State in the Union, and for four years has been a freeholder and housekeeper in a Free State. Indeed, his pecuniary interests in the North and South are about equal, so that there will not be a sufficient preponderance of selfish interests to bias his judgment one way or the other. We shall aim all the time at strict impartiality. And although we do not deny that we entertain very warm sympathies for all classes of persons in the Slave States—not excepting those who are there held as property and sold as chattels—we are yet perfectly well aware, that many of them are in very bad odor with all honorable men, as they rightly deserve to be. When, therefore, we come to speak of such, while we shall take care to set naught down in malice, we shall endeavor nevertheless to state the plain, unvarnished truth; even if, as the great English novelist has suggested, it may occasionally scratch.

Having premised the above, more to introduce the writer to the reader than his subject, we now proceed to introduce to him the latter. And, imprimis, we beg to make him acquainted with the SOUTHERN GENTLEMAN. We know the usual practice with writers is, as with hod-carriers, to be-in at the bottom-round of their argument and thence ascend to its topmost; but we are pleased to reverse the usual order, and so beginning at the topmost, shall endeavor to descend as easily as possible until we reach the "mud-sills," known in the old-fashioned vernacular of the South as slaves.

In our description of the Southern Gentleman—his family and friends—his negroes, horses, dogs and estates—his manners, speech, opinions, excellencies, and faults—all indeed that appertains to him—we wish the reader to understand from the beginning, that we intend to confine ourself to such a gentleman as is peculiarly the outgrowth of the institutions of the South. Of course there is at the South a conventional gentleman, as there is at the North, or in England, or on the continent of Europe; but he is no more the Southern Gentleman, than was the Count D’Orsay such a gentleman. Although born in the Southern States, and never having been any where else, may be, he is yet simply a gentleman—the universally accredited gentleman of the civilized world. This conventional species of gentleman may be either an honest man or a knave—a blasé libertine, a wine-bibber, a coxcomb; or a hero as well, a Christian, and a sage. We know there are those who will cry out against this definition of the world’s gentleman; but let them bawl until their lungs are sore, yet they can not thereby change the facts. What was Beau Brummell, but a spendthrift, drunkard, and coxcomb? What was my Lord Chesterfield, but a polished sepulchre, fair outside to look upon, within black and unsightly with every rank corruption? What was King George the Fourth—that most "perfect gentleman in all Europe"—but a base deceiver, a proud and selfish ruler, and a heartless hypocrite? And coming down to these degenerate times, what shall we say of P. Barton Key? And do you presume, honest reader, that "the tower of Siloam," which fell upon him, crushed in his person all the polished, but false, Keys in the land, who are accustomed habitually to unlock the treasure-house of their bosom friend and steal thence his diamond without price? What, too, shall we say of Bulwig, the learned novelist, the titled playwright, and minister of her Christian Majesty—Bulwig, who notoriously beats his wife, and shuts her up in a mad-house without cause? Has not this same Bagwig, as Yellowplush blunderingly calls him, shot into the very centre and bull’s-eye of fashion? Is he not looked upon in all respects as being no less a gentleman than was our own immortal Washington, or is that purest of our statesmen and chastest of our orators, Edward Everett? Certainly: and all because the learned Baronet has read Chesterfield with profit, and possesses a certain external polish—a certain suavity of manner and speech, soon mastered by such as frequent courts and the palaces of the great—as well as a complete knowledge of all those conventional laws of etiquette, which the artificial nature of our social intercourse has rendered almost indispensably necessary to the completion of a polite education. Neither are such mere ornamental accomplishments to be despised; but whoever would lay too great store by them, let him not forget, that while blossoms and green leaves render the tree beautiful to look upon, still much more greatly to be prized are its black, misshapen roots, which, striking deep down into the earth, hourly extract from the soil those juices which supply both leaf and flower with all their fragrance and beauty.

Now, we are not going to say, that the Southern Gentleman does not frequently possess as much of Chesterfieldian polish as most others, for then we should say that which is not true; but we do say, that a great many persons in the Southern States possess equally as much polish and refinement, who are yet not to be considered as Southern Gentlemen, par excellence; while many of those who are to be so considered are not always what the beau monde calls au fait in matters of dress and deportment. Many of them are quite old-fashioned, indeed, and would crack in a trice any simpering coxcomb’s skull who should dare to whirl their daughters through the indecent mazes of some of those most popular modern waltzes, suitable to Germany and other parts of Europe perhaps, but as yet exotics in these States, and like all exotics so far of but feeble growth—though much affected by the codfish-ocrats of our large cities, as well as by all the ambitious inland villages, which so love to ape the vices of a metropolis, since they can not aspire to its virtues.

And we would also like to impress now at the commencement upon the mind of our reader, that the genuine Southern Gentlemen, like all real gentlemen, are not quite so plentiful as blackberries in summertime, or New-England robins in spring. To intelligent Northerners, who have travelled much, this information is superfluous, we know; but a great many citizens of the Free States—amiable, educated, and naturally shrewd people—on visiting the South for the first time, manifest great surprise because they meet there, as at home, many ill-bred and vulgar persons; just as they are disappointed, oftentimes, to discover that the Southern landscape is disfigured now and then with a reedy swamp, a long stretch of barren sand-hills, or many continuous miles of monotonous piney woods. They have been so accustomed from infancy to hear and read of Southern hospitality and wealth, as well as of the splendors of natural scenery in all Southern latitudes, they seem to anticipate at every step a princely mansion, and at every turn magnolia groves. Filled with such ideal conceptions of the Summer Land, it is not at all strange that such persons can not refrain at times from expressing their disappointment, when they come to realize the facts.

We remember travelling once on the Mississippi in company with an old gentleman from New-York, (it was in the autumn of ’57,)—a respectable member of the middle classes, intelligent and courteous, though somewhat of a cockney. He was quite a portly old gentleman—must have stood at least six feet in his stockings—with a red face and very white hair; a bachelor withal, hearty and jovial, and a pretty fair specimen of what one might fitly call an Old Boy. Being such an Old Boy, he was not above associating with young gentlemen many years his junior, but seemed on the contrary to prefer such company to that of the seniors; and so we became quite familiar. He was on his first visit Southward, and it was quite amusing to note the changes which came over his bachelor visage as we neared the tropics. He came aboard at Cairo, and besides having had to stay in that dull Illinois town one whole night, the ticket-agent at Chicago had swindled him out of a dollar, selling him a through-ticket to Memphis at a higher rate than the usual railroad and steamboat fares combined amounted to; and these two trials united had left our Old Boy in no very pleasant humor, although he was a jolly old bachelor. The steamer happened to be one of the best of the Louisville and New-Orleans packets—stately in its proportions, luxuriously furnished, and was besides fairly packed with first-class passengers. The bustle of landing, etc. etc., together with the novelty of the whole scene to our bachelor’s eyes, for a while made him forget his misfortunes, as well as his ill-humor; and the Old Boy manifested almost as much delight as any Young Boy would on his first escape from the maternal apron-strings. Rubbing his hands together with delight, and thridding his way nervously from deck to deck among the hundreds of travellers, in the brief space of half an hour he must have informed near upon twenty different individuals that he was a New-Yorker, Sir; and was on his first visit to the South, Sir; and hoped to spend the winter in the same, Sir! And at least half-a-dozen times he must have asked, pointing to the colored waiters, "And these are the slaves? eh, Sir, all slaves?" while at the moment he was evidently inclined to think very favorably of an institution which had succeeded in manufacturing into such decent and respectable, not to say important-looking personages, the raw material originally imported from Africa.

In truth, so long as the bustle and confusion lasted, our bachelor acquaintance seemed pleased with every thing about him. So long had he been used to the continuous hum and noise of a large city—so long had he been accustomed to being jostled about at every turn—that to him unrest seemed to be the only species of rest of which he knew any thing. This fact became painfully apparent after his first day’s travel on the Mississippi; we say painfully, for it was (save that it was ludicrous as well) really painful to witness the misery the old gentleman suffered day by day, as we steamed further and further down the broad bosom of the Father of Waters. He was evidently a kind-hearted man, national and patriotic, and did not wish to say any thing out of the way; but it was still plain as a pikestaff that in his own mind he connected the vast solitude, in the awful stillness whereof he seemed to be dying, with the "curse of slavery." For a long time he endured the horrors of his situation with the patience of a martyr, (and what be must have suffered in mental agony and bodily worriment before he did speak, it is frightful to conjecture;) but at last, after having walked his boots almost off, and after numerous ejaculations, as if to himself, while standing by the taffrail, of "Well! well!" "It’s no use!" "Yes! it must be so!" " It must be so!" he came up to us in a pompous manner, and says he, very energetically, giving his inexpressibles a nervous hitch at the same time, and striving hard to look unutterable things—says he: "WHERE’S YOUR TOWNS?" The question was so characteristic, and was uttered with such a meaning look and gesture, we could not refrain from turning aside to have a quiet laugh. And yet at least one half of the Northern people, used all their lives to the bustle of cities and towns, and the noisy clatter of mechanical trades, if similarly situated with our earnest New-York acquaintance, would propound just such a question as he did—never once reflecting that cotton, sugar, rice, wheat, corn, tobacco, and all other agricultural products, grow only in the country, and very quietly too at that. Hence, even while they are passing a princely plantation—hid from view though it be by the dense forest on the river’s bank—whose proprietor could with a single year’s crop buy up half-a-dozen New-England villages, they will whisper confidentially in your ear: "Ah! Sir, how unlike our thrifty Down East villages!" Observe, however, we are casting no stones at any body in particular. Nor yet do we complain of any man for doing what it is perfectly natural he should do, until he has learned to do better. It is natural for the city cockney to find the country dull, and to wonder without affectation how people manage to live there; and it is equally natural for the sun-embrowned farmer, after one week’s sojourn in the town, to find it excessively boring, and to wonder how any body can make money honestly where they neither sow turnips nor raise garden "sass."

But let us return to our subject.

To begin with his pedigree, then, we may say, the Southern Gentleman comes of a good stock. Indeed, to state the matter fairly, he comes usually of aristocratic parentage; for family pride prevails to a greater extent in the South than in the North. In Virginia, the ancestors of the Southern Gentleman were chiefly English cavaliers, after whom succeeded the French Huguenots and Scotch Jacobites. In Maryland, his ancestors were in the main Irish Catholics—the retainers and associates of Lord Baltimore—who sought in the wilds of the New World religious tolerance and political freedom. In South-Carolina, they were Huguenots —at least the better class of them—those dauntless chevaliers, who, fleeing from the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the bloody persecutions of priests and tyrants, drained France of her most generous blood to found in the Western Hemisphere a race of heroes and patriots. In Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and other portions of the far South, the progenitors of the Southern Gentleman were chiefly Spanish Dons and French Catholics.

Thus it will be seen that throughout the entire extent of the South, (for the new Southern States have been settled almost wholly by emigrants from those named above,) wherever you meet with the Southern Gentleman, you find him hijo dalgo, as the Spaniards phrase it: however, there are many notable exceptions in every Southern State. For, owing to the repeal of the Law of Primogeniture, and the gradual decay of some of the old families, as well as the levelling effects of many of Mr. Jefferson’s innovations, particularly the subsequent intermarriages between the sons and daughters of the gentry and persons of the middle class, (of whom we shall have something to say in the next chapter,) there are scattered throughout all the Southern States many gentlemen of the genuine Southern character, whose ancestry was only in part of the cavalier stock. Indeed, Mr. Jefferson himself was a fit representative of these; for, while his mother was a Randolph, his father was only a worthy descendant of the sturdy yeomanry of England.

Besides being of faultless pedigree, the Southern Gentleman is usually possessed of an equally faultless physical development. His average height is about six feet, yet he is rarely gawky in his movements, or in the least clumsily put together; and his entire physique conveys to the mind an impression of firmness united to flexibility. If the reader has ever read Lieutenant Strain’s account of his perilous Darien Expedition, he will have had presented to him a fit illustration of what the superior physical structure of the Southern Gentleman enables him to undergo, in the remarkable powers of endurance possessed by Capt. Maury.

We mention this subject, because the Northern people entertain in regard to it such very erroneous opinions. They have been told so incessantly of the lazy habits of Southerners, that they honestly believe them to be delicate good-for-nothings, like their own brainless fops and nincompoops—those amazingly good fellahs, who dawdle at watering-places during the summer months, and dance attendance all winter upon some fair Flora McFlimsy, who is in all respects as utterly stupid and worthless as themselves. Only those Northerners who have travelled in the Southern States, or whose associations otherwise have made them familiar with the gentlemen of the South, possess any correct knowledge of the physical perfectness of the latter. This these owe in part, doubtless, to those mailed ancestors who followed Godfrey and bold Coeur de Lion to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, or to those knightly sires, may be, who, like Front de Boeuf and most of the other gallant gentlemen of those days, were great with battle-axes, and in every other kind of physical prowess, but who also always signed their names with a cross.

Much more reasonably, however, we think we may attribute the good size and graceful carriage of the Southern Gentleman, to his out-of-doors and a-horseback mode of living. For we might as well here inform our readers, the genuine Southern Gentleman almost invariably lives in the country. But let them not conclude from this circumstance that be is nothing more than the simple-hearted, swearing, hearty, and hospitable old English or Virginia Country Gentleman, of whom we have all heard so repeatedly. The time has been when such a conviction could have been truthfully entertained; but that was long ago. In those good old times the Southern Gentleman had little else to do than fox-hunt, drink, attend the races, fight chicken-cocks, and grievously lament that he was owner of a large horde of savages whom he knew not how to dispose of.

But times change, et nos mutamur in illis. The new order of things which succeeded the innovations of Mr. Jefferson made it necessary for the Gentlemen of the South, for all the old families who had before lived upon their hereditary wealth and influence, to struggle to maintain their position, else to be pushed aside by the thrifty middle classes, who thought it no disgrace to work by the side of their slaves, and who were, in consequence, yearly becoming more wealthy and influential. Besides, after the repeal of the Law of Primogeniture, the large landed estates, the former pride and boast of the first families, very soon were divided up into smaller freeholds, and the owners of these, of necessity, were frequently forced to lay aside the old manners and customs, the air and arrogance of the grand seignor, and to content themselves with the plain, unostentatious mode of life which at present characterizes most gentlemen in the South. The result of all which has been, that the Southern Gentleman of to-day is less an idler and dreamer than he was in the old days, is more practical, and, although not so great a lover of the almighty dollar as his Northern kinsman, still is far from being as great a spendthrift as his fathers were before him.

But, notwithstanding the old style of Southern Gentlemen has in a measure passed away, the young South is nurtured in pretty much the same school as formerly—at least so far as physical education is concerned—and participates more or less in all those rollicking out-door sports and amusements still common in England to this day. Scarcely has he gotten fairly rid of his bibs and tuckers, therefore, before we find him mounted a-horseback; and this not a hobbyhorse either, (which the poor little wall-flower of cities is so proud to straddle,) but a genuine live pony—sometimes a Canadian, sometimes a Mustang, but always a pony. By the time he is five years of age he rides well; and in a little while thereafter has a fowling-piece put into his hands, and a little black of double his age put en croupe behind him, (or in case mamma is particularly cautious, his father’s faithful serving-man accompanies him, mounted on another horse,) and so accoutred, he sallies forth into the fields and pastures in search of adventures. At first he bangs away at every thing indiscriminately, and the red-headed woodpeckers more often grace his game-bag than quail or snipe; but by degrees he acquires the art and imbibes the spirit of the genuine sportsman, and ever after keeps his father’s hospitable board amply supplied with the choicest viands the woods or fields or floods afford. By floods, the reader will please understand rivers, creeks, and ponds; for our young Southerner is as much of a fisherman as a Nimrod. When he tires of his gun, he takes his fishing-rods and other tackle, and goes angling; and when he tires of angling, provided the weather is favorable, he denudes himself and plunges into the water for a swim, of which he tires not at all. Indeed, he will remain in the watery element until the sun blisters his back, and if thus forced to seek terra firma, he does it "upon compulsion," and under protest. As a general thing, the blue-noses of Nova Scotia, or the natives of South-America, are not greater lovers of the healthy exercise of swimming than the boys of the South, of all classes.

In his every foray, whether by flood or field, our young gentleman has for his constant attendant, Cuffee, junior, who sticks to him like his shadow. At the expiration of five years or so of this manner of living, (provided there is no family tutor, and in that case his mother has already learned him to read,) the master is sent to the nearest village, or district, or select school, returning home every night. Sometimes this school is from five to ten miles distant, and so he has to ride from ten to twenty miles every day, Saturdays and Sundays alone excepted. Again Cuffee is sent with his young master, and morning and evening the two are to be seen cantering to or from the school-house, the negro taking charge of their joint lunch for dinner, (to be eaten during "play-time,") and the master carrying on the pommel of his saddle or his arm the bag which contains his books and papers, and maybe a stray apple or peach to exchange with the village urchins for fishing-rods, or to present to some schoolboy friend, who has a rosy-cheeked little sister, with a roguish black eye and a silvery laugh.

And although every day in the week, from Monday to Friday inclusive, is thus occupied, both master and slave sit up nearly all of Friday night, cleaning guns, arranging fishing-lines, and discussing enthusiastically the sports to be followed on the morrow. These change very materially, as our young Southerner begins to get higher and higher in his teens. He very soon surfeits of the tame pastime of shooting squirrels and ducks, woodcock and plover, or chasing of hares; when for a short while, say a couple of years, his chief delight is to hunt wild turkeys—a rare sport where turkeys are abundant and when one has a well-trained dog. But even this soon ceases to be attractive, and is succeeded by fox-hunting. Preparatory to entering upon the latter rare old English sport, our young gentleman gets some one of the many dusky uncles on his father’s plantation, to procure him a deep intoned horn; which procured, he proceeds immediately to exchange his pony for the fleetest and most active of his father’s stud. On a great many Southern plantations there are kept hunting horses, regularly trained for the sport as in England; and it is astonishing in what a little time they become as fond of the same as their riders. Even mules, after having been used a few times, will prick up their heavy ears at the sound of a merry horn, and will follow the hounds with all the eagerness of the best-blooded of their sires.

Having selected his steed, and mounted Cuffee on another, (usually a mule, by the way,) our young fox-hunter gives his horn a merry wind in the "wee sma’ hours atween the twal" in the morning, answering to which well-known call, Ringwood, and Jowler, and Don, with all their yelping and barking mates, soon gather together and hasten after their master to the appointed place of rendezvous. Here soon assemble the sons of the neighboring gentry, or such of them at least as intend to participate in the morning’s sport. Masters and negroes, horses and dogs, all sniff keenly the bracing morning air, and, after a brief parley, having settled the preliminaries, away they all hie to some old field filled with broom-sedge, or to some scarcely penetrable copse—these being Reynard’s usual habitats; and ere a great while the rattling music of the "pack in full cry" breaks on the stillness of the hour:

                         —"For the fox is found,
                         And over the stream, at a mighty bound,
                         And over the highlands and over the low,
                         O’er furrows, o’er meadows the hunters go:
                         Away! away! As a hawk flies full at his prey,
                         So flieth the hunter, away, away!
                         He flies from the burst at the cover, till set of sun,
                         When the red fox dies, and the day is done!"

Ah! it is impossible for your pale denizens of the dusty town, whose horizon on every side is bounded by dull brick walls and flaming side-boards, to appreciate the wild delight of a steeple-chase ride through brake and briars, over gullies and fences, adown green lanes and under the overshadowing boughs of majestic forests, with a whoop and halloo, and hark, tallyho! and all the accompanying bustle and excitement of a regular old-fashioned Virginia fox-hunt! We say Virginia fox-hunt, not that it is peculiar to the Old Dominion, but because the red fox most abounds in that ancient commonwealth, and this is the fox which gives the longest run and the greatest sport, and to win whose "brush" is the ambition of all aspiring hunters. Fox-hunting is more or less followed in all the Slave States, both by the sons of the gentry and of the middle-class planters and farmers; and such has been the practice ever since the first settlement of the country. It was originally introduced by the English cavaliers, was a favorite pastime with the Father of his Country, and in those days was adhered to by the lovers of the sport, even until their "frosty pows" admonished them that the greatest of huntsmen, Death, was about to "earth" them in his turn, as they had "earthed" many a noble fox before. At present, however, it is chiefly patronized by boys and young men, and in consequence, occupies much less of public attention than formerly, or than it still does in England. Nor have we ever known an instance in the South of a lady’s indulging in the sport, which is a common practice in the old fatherland; and the foxes are so plenty, the copses, woods, and other breeding and hiding-places, being so abundant, instead of having to take the precaution to insure a continuance of the breed, as our English cousins have to do, the Southern farmers complain that the cunning rascals only breed too fast, despite the hunters and their hounds.

We are thus particular to speak of these matters, since they are so imperfectly understood in the Free States, wherein every species of pastime which hinders the making of money is regarded as sinful; and wherein also the usual custom is, to hunt foxes with any kind of dog, while such a thing as a horse, or merry-sounding horn, is never once thought of. We remember being in Concord, Massachusetts, on a certain occasion, indeed, having driven thither from Cambridge in a sleigh, and stopping at a country-looking tavern, the bar-room whereof reminded one of the South-west. This licensed rum-hole was full of rough, unpolished people, dressed like laborers and farmers, and dogs—old dogs and young dogs, puppies, sluts, and snarling curs. After we had sufficiently thawed our frozen fingers to listen to the conversation of the bipeds in the room, (one of whom, in a kind of drunken glee, held an overgrown pup between his knees, and, while the brute made frantic efforts to lick its master’s face, descanted in a doting, maudlin way on the pup’s pints—for one we thought the master could boast of more pints than the dog,) we gathered that some of the company present had just returned from a fox-hunt; and learned, to our astonishment, that they actually had taken guns along to shoot poor Reynard, in case their "mongrel curs" should fail to catch him—which indeed happened; while, from the manner in which they recounted over and over again the various incidents of the chase, laughing the while immoderately, they certainly fancied they had had a deal of sport.

Now, the sport of a properly conducted fox-hunt consists in its adventurous character, in the wild excitement and general abandon of the long chase, and the eager cries of the hounds—all which are heightened and rendered more delightful by reason of the "merry bold voice of the hunter’s horn." Even when one is not a participant in the chase itself, there is an indescribable charm in listening to the various sounds which accompany it. Let any person, no matter how prejudiced he may be against the sport, only be aroused from his slumbers some still frosty morning, when the sky is cloudless and the moon is just beginning to wane in the first blush of the dawn, and all at once have borne to his ears, as in a dream, the distant winding of the hunter’s horn, the echoing shouts of a dozen horsemen, the deep and varied cries of fifty hounds in hot pursuit, the whole mellowed by the distance and sweetly confused—at times almost indistinct, as the huntsmen dash madly through some sequestered glen—then again ringing clear and melodious as they brush past the brow of a neighboring hill, only to be lost so soon as they drive helter-skelter down its thither side; and he will prove singularly phlegmatic and lacking in enthusiasm who does not feel, for the moment, that he can heartily and conscientiously approve the sentiment so beautifully and musically uttered by Barry Cornwall:

                         "Sound, sound the horn! to the hunter good,
                         What’s the gully deep, or the roaring flood?
                         Right over he bounds (as the wild stag bounds,)
                         At the heels of his swift, sure, silent hounds.
                         Oh! what delight can a mortal lack,
                         When he once is firm on his horse’s back,
                         With his stirrups short, and his snaffle strong,
                         And the blast of the horn for his morning’s song?"

After fox-hunting succeeds deer-hunting, which, in the Southern States, among gentlemen, is usually conducted somewhat after the same fashion as the former, or by what in hunter’s parlance is called "driving," although scholars, and men of quiet contemplative natures, frequently prefer to "still-hunt," which is likewise much in favor with all "pot-hunters;" these latter adopting such a mode of killing their vension from necessity, and their inability to afford the horses and dogs necessary to a successful drive, while the former, being usually of a taciturn bent of mind, find opportunities in still-hunting to gratify their penchant for meditation and solitude. And truly there is a wondrous charm in being all alone in the shadowy woods—shut out as it were from the bright sunlight above, which only trickles down in little golden showers through the thick green leaves over one’s head—and where the stillness is so profound, you distinctly hear even the faintest wimbling of the wriggling wood-worm in the very heart of the old log on which you sit down to rest. How pleasant a place, indeed, for one to look after the interests of his Chateaux en Espagne! In reality you sit on a very common sort of rusty old log, and rest your gun idly on your knee, while a red-headed woodpecker drums in a very prosy monotone on the decayed branch of the old oak over your head, and little gray squirrels skip about around you, stopping now and then merely to taste a savory acorn, or chasing one another from root to root and tree to tree; but oh! what different scenes does the arch magician Fancy spread out before you! You are in your own enchanted castle, and your trusty vassals are keeping faithful watch in the tower and at the portcullised gate. Yon are "monarch of all you survey," and dream your dream of love, or fame, or wealth, with none to molest you or make you afraid. But when the dream has ended, (as all such dreams will end, alas!) and you awake to find the sun fast sinking in the West, it is not so pleasant to trudge homeward many a weary mile through marsh and bog and reedy swamp, with the gloomy shades of darkness fast gathering around your head, and the brambles and tangled grass growing every minute more tangled and intricate beneath your feet. Besides, one is sure almost to get wood-ticks and chigas on his person, by reason of his contact with the old log on which he sits down to ruminate; and these pestiferous little varlets render his night-dreams for a long time the very antipodes of the pleasant day-dreams in which he may have indulged, while they managed to fasten on his breeches.

But, even conceding that "still-hunting" has its charms for quiet people of an imaginative turn, despite a few drawbacks of the kind we have adverted to, we still think that most persons would prefer "driving." This is in truth a right royal sport, and engages the attention of the Southern Gentleman in matured life, after he has given up most other field-sports, although it is followed by the younger men and boys also. It is most popular in the far South and South-west, because of the greater abundance of deer in these parts of the country; for in the more northerly Slave States it is rarely indulged in more than once in a twelvemonth, and then parties of gentlemen have to retreat to the mountains in the autumn, and participate in what is called a camp-hunt, which lasts from two to six weeks. Driving, to prove successful, requires a skillful horsemanship, a quick eye and steady aim, thoroughly trained horses and dogs, and a partial familiarity at least with the geography of the hunting-ground, as well as the "range" of the deer thereon. Above all things else, however, the hunter should be endowed with steady nerves; for even the oldest and most experienced hand sometimes trembles and fails to draw the trigger until the right moment has been lost forever; while, if you were to station an ordinary cockney sportsman at a "stand," and some lordly "monarch of the forest" were to come bounding towards him, with tail waving a like a banner in the breeze, his kingly head thrown back and the branching antlers thereof tossing a proud defiance to both hounds and huntsmen, ninety-nine times in a hundred he would be suffered to pass by unharmed, receiving only a bewildered stare from his ambushed enemy, who for the moment is totally oblivious that he has a gun in his hands; or even did he recall this circumstance, it would be all the same, since a hundred guns would be of no service whatever to a man already nearly shaken out of his boots by the terrible "buck-ague."

It is mainly owing, as we conceive, to such out-door sports as we have briefly described above, and others like them—which are common in most parts of the South—that the Southern Gentleman possesses that fine physical development which we have already adverted to. Such pastimes, aided materially by plenty of pure country air, do almost if not wholly counteract the pernicious influences of certain dissipations—unfortunately too prevalent in the South—but more particularly the dissipations and close confinement incident to college-life. Herein, indeed, lies the chief reason why the Southern people, though living in a warmer climate, are far less nervous and spasmodic than their fellow-citizens of the Free States. The latter pay so little regard to the proper culture of the physical man—have so persistently banned and anathematized all rollicking field-sports and healthy out-door amusements, and at the same time have taken such great pains to stimulate into undue and excessive activity the mental faculties— that we are by no means surprised the London Times should conclude that the Americans have physically deteriorated in the last hundred years. Nor do we wonder that Spiritualism, and every other blind fanaticism of the hour, should possess the minds of men, whose bodies are unsound and whose secretions are altogether abnormal. We do not wonder that, from Maine to Minnesota, there should have been one general bonfire on the success of the Atlantic Cable, while the English continued to eat their roast-beef as quietly as usual, and scarcely a bell was rung in a single Slave State. Comparisons are "odorous," we know, as the learned Dogberry hath said; but the writer means nothing unkind by these remarks. We entertain for our Northern fellow-citizens the highest regard, take them en masse . Among them we have many personal friends also; but we never allow our friendships to blur our vision. The fault is not confined to one class alone at the North, but to all those above the laboring or farming classes. Foreigners, when they visit America, see it and speak of it. Sir Charles Fox, one of the Commissioners of the Crystal Palace, while in Boston, visited one of the high-schools for girls. On coming away he remarked to his friend: "You seem to be training your girls for the lunatic asylum." Such was the impression made upon this practical Englishman by their wonderful intellectual achievements, in connection with their pale and sallow faces. And as for the Northern boys, here is what Mr. Theodore Sedgwick said, in a recent address before the Alumni of Columbia College, New-York:

"From the time that the boy whose fortune it is to be educated is immured in school, till the period when he is again to be immured in a lawyer’s office or counting-room, and from that time again until he enters upon the profession of his life, no systematic attention whatever is paid to the subject of physical education. All the health, all the exercise that he gets, he gets by nature or by chance. No regular opportunity is provided for it—no authoritative encouragement is given to it, no stimulus, no prize; all the ambition, all the zeal, all the ardor of his young, ignorant, and unreflecting nature is concentrated on the vigil and the midnight lamp. Severe labor, long terms, short vacations, crowded rooms, late hours, bad air—what is the result?"

Must we answer for Mr. Sedgwick and our readers? Who are the leaders of the Northern masses at this time? Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, Ward Beecher, Dr. Cheever, John Brown, and their "compatriots!"—men whose early excesses of one kind or another have impaired their reason, and who ought, as has been found necessary in the case of Gerrit Smith, to be confined in a Maison de Santé.

                         "To this complexion will it come at last!"

Believe us, our readers, without a sound body a well-balanced mind is not to be thought of. In all seriousness, we think a good digestion has about as much to do with great thoughts and great actions as a good brain. The fable of the freedman Æsop is as true today as it was when the old fellow uttered it. If you keep a bow bent too long, in time it will lose its elasticity; and if you tax the mind too greatly, both it and the body must suffer. It is all work and no play, you know, that makes Jack a dull boy.

Now, as has been intimated already, the natural manner of living in the Slave States helps to cover up a multitude of Southern shortcomings—tobacco-chewing, brandy-drinking, and other excesses of a like character —which would otherwise without doubt render the masses of the Southern people as fickle and unstable, as nervous and spasmodic, as the masses of the North. God knows dissipation and debauchery are rife enough in all conscience over the whole land; and our own opinion is, neither the North or the South would be justifiable in casting the first stone at the head of the other. Such irregularities, however, are not so frequently committed by the gentlemen of the South as by a certain class of underbred snobs, whose money enables them for a time to pretend to the character and standing of gentlemen, but whose natural inborn coarseness and vulgarity invariably lead them to disgrace the honorable title they assume to wear. The real gentlemen of the South are restrained by considerations of family pride, and family prestige, if by none more honorable, from participating in those disgraceful practices so well calculated to tarnish the family escutcheon, and to render themselves the unworthy descendants of the compatriots of the Hero of Mt. Vernon. Perhaps in no one place in the South is the truth of the above observation illustrated with greater force and clearness than at the University of Virginia. Here congregate from all portions of the South the flower and bloom of her chivalrous youth, as well as the scum and dregs of her whisky-swilling snobs and bullies. While the writer attended this first of our Universities, there were about five hundred students, either actually or nominally pursuing their studies in its various departments. Of this number, at least one hundred were more or less dissipated; while of these not more than a dozen at the farthest could have been the sons of gentlemen. The rest were either needy adventurers—beggared in purse as in character—living in a kind of shabby-genteel way, and indulging in cards, and wine, and loose women only to that extent which insured their becoming intimate with vulgar greenhorns and new-rich swells, whom they hoped to fleece, and who formed the larger proportion of those given to dissipation; for, besides themselves, and the chevaliers d’ industrie whom they helped to support, and the single dozen of gentlemen already named, there were but a few others, and these, singularly enough, were State students. What is meant by "State students" may need some explanation. The University of Virginia is a State institution, (as the reader is doubtless aware,) and undertakes to educate free of charge a certain number of Virginia young men every year—boarding and lodging them gratuitously also, unless we misremember; at all events they have lodgings separate and apart from the rest of the students, and dress very poorly, being usually selected from the most destitute families in the State. Under such circumstances it is hard to credit the statement, but it is true, that some of this very class are the most dissolute and worthless of all the young men who attend the University lectures. At first they come clothed in suits of russet, with freckled sun-tanned faces, large red bony hands, loose matted locks of hair, and having in their pockets neither scrip nor purse. But so soon as they begin to associate with the "spreeing fellows," by some sort of talismanic influence they seem to become transformed almost in a day—completely metamorphosed in their whole appearance. ’Tis true for a time they appear somewhat awkward in their flash apparel, and do not get rid very soon of their shuffling country gait; but they attempt, to the best of their ability, to imitate the swaggering strides of their more wealthy associates, and on the whole succeed pretty well, considering their "chances." They remind one, however, in some of their assumed airs, of Dr. Livingstone’s friend, Sambanza, a high functionary attached to the court of the royal Shinte, king of the Balondas, in Central Africa. Shinte’s chief dress consisted of a series of heavy brass rings, which reached, one above the other, from his ankles to his knees; and owing to their great weight, his sooty Majesty was perforce obliged to walk in a right royal straddling fashion. Sambanza, too poor to wear the same amount of brass on his legs as his royal master, made up the deficiency by another species of brass not wholly unknown in this country; and so out-Shinted Shinte himself in his performance of the fashionable royal straddle, making believe that he bore on his own stout calves all the brass in heathendom!

We shall not deny that one will occasionally meet in the South, as elsewhere, persons of the smallest possible calibre of mind—whose respectable position in society is owing to no merit of their own, but to that of their fathers—who imagine that their social status is a license to do wrong with impunity; but our readers need never fear to set down as a parvenu that Southerner who is openly and notoriously dissipated in his habits, or loose in his morals. They may sometimes mistake their man, but we apprehend they will do so very rarely. One of the most mortifying trials we ever had to endure was a day’s journey by rail through a Northern State in company with one of that class of drunken, snobbish, but ignorant as conceited Southerners, who claim to be Southern gentlemen, but whose claim is about as reasonable as was that of the painted jackdaw to a place in the dove-cot. So long as such worthies can manage to hold their tongues, they succeed in deceiving strangers very well; but, like most other shallow-pated fools, they would burst could they not way their unruly little members upon all occasions. Our companion, in personal appearance, was presentable enough, but his speech spoiled every thing; and yet claiming to know an intimate friend of ours, we could not well treat him with that contempt which his conduct merited. He was near upon "half-seas over" most of the time, and rendered himself peculiarly obnoxious to every body by insulting the sun-imbrowned but honest yeomanry who occupied the same car as ourselves—sneering at the customs of the country in a tone of supercilious hauteur altogether insufferable, and for which he deserved to be ejected from the train. On another occasion, we attended Chapel at Harvard, in company with another Southerner of the same stamp—a purse-proud upstart, as different from the gentlemen of his native State as a boor is from a prince. This fellow’s impudence and ill-breeding passed all bounds. Notwithstanding the chaplain was occupied with the morning services, he kept continually staring about the room, occasionally nudging us with his elbow while he indulged in the most disparaging remarks relative to different young gentlemen present, and in a tone sufficiently loud for the subjects of his criticisms to hear plainly every word he spoke. We never felt less devotional or much savager than we did on this occasion. It is a consolation to know that we have seldom met with such glaring instances of ill-breeding—only a few times in the persons of Southerners, and about as many in the persons of fanatical Down-Easters, whom either self-interest or some worse motive had induced to visit the Southern States. We recall at this moment one instance of the latter, which we will put on record as a set-off to what we have said touching the former, and because, also, it may enable some good people to see themselves as others see them.

The instance to which allusion is made attracted our notice while traveling in Virginia, in the depth of winter, on the route from Richmond to Washington by the Orange and Alexandria railroad. The train was crowded with passengers, and had been delayed for some hours by a heavy snow-drift—the thermometer standing meanwhile below zero, while the fires in the stoves seemed to give out not the least bit of warmth. It was truly a most uncomfortable situation, but the Virginians present took the matter pleasantly, chatting and laughing as unconcernedly as if they were in their own parlors. There chanced, however, to be some rude and untutored Yankees aboard, seated in different parts of the "coach"—as they call a rail-car in the Old Dominion—though, as afterwards appeared, evidently belonging to one and the same party. For some time these ascetic individuals discreetly kept their own counsel and their tongues between their tooth; but becoming cold and restless, one of them presently popped his sharp nose out of a window, designing, doubtless, to take a survey of the adjacent landscape. Through the driving snow nothing was visible but old field pines, with here and there a shivering darkey holding a lantern in one hand and a shovel in the other; without exaggeration, a gloomy picture enough, and was so reported by our observant Yankee, in a loud vulgar tone, and broad accent, as if addressing himself to the rest of his party. For immediately, like as when you have thrust a burning stick into a coil of snakes in winter time, the whole batch of Down-Easters opened their "shrivelled jaws" at once, and began right off a most abusive tirade, against the noble old "Mother of States and Presidents;" taking occasion meanwhile to sneer at the institutions and people of the South, cheering each other on to the glorious work, by laughing long and delightedly at their own coarse and vulgar witicisms. Filled with shame and mortification at such an unlooked-for display of ill-breeding on the part of their fellow-travellers, every gentleman present, whether Virginian or Yankee, remained silent until the poor boobies had sufficiently vented their spleen; and this was the only notice taken of them; for the moment they again relapsed into moody silence, the conversation once more became as lively and general as before the ungracious interruption. Doubtless there were those present who, in their ignorance of the "land of steady habits," imagined these loutish New-England provincials to be fair specimens of the noble stock of Puritans; as it is equally probable, that many of the pale students of the Chapel mistook the vulgar fellow from the South for a genuine representative of the chivalry; and with just about as much truth in the one case as in the other.

But to proceed once more with our subject.

When the Southern Gentleman has fully completed his academic labors—has honorably gone through the University Curriculum—if his means be ample, he seldom studies a profession, but gives his education a finishing polish by making the tour of Europe; or else marries and settles down to superintend his estates, and devotes his talents to the raising of wheat, tobacco, rice, sugar, or cotton; or turns his attention to politics, and runs for the State Legislature. Should, however, the patrimonial estate be small, or the heirs numerous, (and the generous clime of the South renders the latter supposition highly probable,) he then devotes himself to some one of the learned professions, or becomes an editor, or enters either the Army or the Navy. But of all things, he is most enamoured of politics and the Army; and it is owing to this cause, that the South has furnished us with all our great generals, from Washington to Scott, as well as most of our leading statesmen, from Jefferson to Calhoun. In order to attain either eminence or success, men must do whatever they undertake con amore. Hence the popular outcry against the undue political influence of the Slave Power, or the Southern Oligarchy, is just as senseless and absurd as if the little retail grocer, who sells brown sugar by the two-penny paper package, should denounce his fellow-citizens because they prefer "loaf" of the best quality, and in order to obtain it patronize his more wealthy neighbor on the opposite side of the street; for the laws of supply and demand govern in both cases— the best in the market will always be most eagerly sought after, as well as command the highest prices.

The Northern people have interested themselves chiefly in commerce, manufactures, literature, and the like; and we behold the result in the ships, the steamers, telegraphs, the thousand practical inventions, the works of art and genius they have already furnished the world. On the other hand, the South has interested herself in agriculture mainly, political economy, and the nurture of an adventurous and military race; and the fruits of her labors are to be witnessed in her long lists of Presidents, Cabinets, Generals, and Statesmen, as well as in her teeming agricultural resources, which add every year some two hundred millions of dollars’ worth of exports to our country’s commerce. It is also traceable to this marked difference between the two great sections of our Republic, that, while the North has not extended her limits Northward a single degree since the birth of the Constitution, the South has already seized on Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, and her eagle eye is even now burning with a desire to make a swoop on Cuba, Central America, and Mexico. Understand us, however. We do not claim that the South has any thing to boast over the North, no more than do we believe the latter possesses any superiority over the former. They each have their own separate sphere of action, and both, in their respective spheres, have done nobly and well. They each have their own "manifest destiny" too; but by Union alone can they ever hope to achieve the same—by a union such as existed when the first guns fired off in behalf of Independence reverberated along the bleak hills of Massachusetts—a Union of Hearts and of Hands—a Sacred Union which we trust will never be dissevered.

One chief reason why the North has never yet furnished what might be truly called a great party leader, is the fact that the Northern people are too intent on other pursuits to find time to study, much less to master, the great science of Political Economy. And moreover, owing to the great diversity of interests in the Free States, their public men are not continued long enough in service—an indispensable requisite to the thorough accomplishment of the statesman. If there were in the North some one predominating interest, no matter what, which would command always a popular support, it would not be a great while before a change for the better would be observable in her public men. As matters now stand, however, the wealthy and influential citizens of the Free States are so divided in interests—some being producers, while others are manufacturers; some being for protection, and others opposed thereto—that there seems to be only one subject upon which they can consent to agree; and in that not a single Northern citizen is interested, and all the addresses about which are only so many appeals to the passions of the unthinking rabble, who know not how to understand any more a profound State-paper than a doggerel political hymn sung by political mountebanks to the tune of "Du-dah" or "A Few Days," and who always elevate to office, by their "sweet voices," the oily demagogue who most flatters and cajoles them.

And so the practical effect of the unstatesmanlike proceedings consequent upon such a state of affairs has been to drive away from politics the choicest spirits in the North, until it is a common observation in the Free States, that no person who wishes to live "cleanly and like a gentleman" ever condescends to dabble in politics at all. Hence many Northerners of wealth and culture spend most of their time abroad, in idleness and fashionable dissipation, until they gradually lose all respect for their native land, as well as all love for free institutions, and in the end become nothing better than mere tuft-hunters and toad-eaters. Instead of leading useful lives themselves, and rearing up sons and daughters of whom a free people might be proud, they waste their own time and talents, and educate their children to be nothing better than obsequious flunkies to a titled and debauched aristocracy. This is why the historic names of New-England are so rapidly passing off the stage of modern action, the unworthy owners of the same preferring to bask in the questionable smiles of Old World princes to doing yeoman’s service in the country of their ancestors, (we shall not call it their own country, for theirs it is no longer.) A son of one of these degenerate sons—a descendant of one of our most illustrious families, of one of those noble gentlemen who stood shoulder to shoulder with the ever-loved Washington during the Revolutionary War—we once chanced to know. He was at that time a minor, as was the writer; but at the age of twenty-one he would fall heir to an annual income of thirty thousand dollars, and in this respect our fortunes were very dissimilar, alack-a-day! But how do you presume he was preparing himself to use his fortune? A man with thirty thousand a year could accomplish much good for himself and his fellowmen; a fool with the same income would accomplish his own ruin, and perhaps the ruin of many others more deserving than himself: and, alas! the fool’s part was the sole ambition of this unworthy scion of a noble stock. Although bordering on twenty years of age, he reasoned like a little child—amused himself like a boarding-school miss, with gilt-edged story-books and costly bijouteries for presents to his acquaintances, and felt as much pride in never knowing his lessons (that being vulgar in his eyes) as ever his great-grandfather felt while winning those laurels which have rendered the name illustrious. He had spent even then the greater portion of his life in Europe—had already tasted those forbidden pleasures which in Paris are to be had "for the asking"—and he solemnly asseverated that, so soon as he came of age and thereby got rid of the control of his governor, he should return to Europe again, and every year thereafter make it a point of honor to squander his whole income in riotous living, gratifying all the lasts of the flesh, the lusts of the eye, and the pride of life! Now we shall not charge that the sons of all American gentlemen who desert their native shores to play second-fiddle to some Lord Tomnoddy in the Old World, are so utterly brainless as this unfortunate youth; but let them beware, for if they are not, their children will yet come to be such, since it is God’s will that every man who is not a natural fool should have something to do, and whoever fails to find that something to keep alive the manhood that is in him, will eventually become both an unnatural as well as a natural fool.

Now, when the facts in regard to politics and parties in the North are duly weighed, we do not see why any intelligent man should express surprise that all our national parties should have originated in the South, or that the leaders of those parties should, generation after generation, prove to be Southern men. Neither is it astonishing that the Northern people, after having denounced every Southern statesman in turn, should in time come to adopt their several opinions. Thus, when Mr. Jefferson overthrew the New-England Federalists, and inaugurated the principles of Democracy, nearly every political pulpit in New England thundered anathemas against his administration, and both priests and people vilified him without measure. But to-day the worthy old Federalists celebrate with all the honors the tough old Democrat’s birth-day, and his chief panegyrist and encomiast is one who, when he was alive, thus damned him in flowing numbers:

                         "And thou, the scorn of every patriot name,
                         Thy country’s ruin and her council’s shame!
                         Go, scan, Philosophist, thy Sally’s charms,
                         And sink supinely in her sable arms;
                         But quit to abler hands the helm of State,
                         Nor image ruin on thy country’s fate."
So too when Jackson "set his face like a flint" against a National Bank, and all other great moneyed monopolies, he was denounced all through the Free States as an illiterate tyrant: but the name of Jackson is now an household word, and his memory is sacredly enshrined in the hearts of his countrymen. And as for the States-Rights doctrines of Mr. Calhoun, they are already beginning to find favor in the North; and by another decade we expect to see the name of Calhoun placed side by side with the names of Jefferson and Jackson; while the coming Southern leader, who shall inaugurate whatever new policy the shifting fortunes of our growing Republic must in time demand, will be vilified at first by the Northern people, until they learn to respect the wisdom and foresight of his measures, when they will inevitably applaud the same as heartily as they before condemned, and will embrace his principles with as much alacrity as the people of the South will ever continue to welcome the literary productions of Northern authors and the practical inventions of Northern mechanics, and to applaud the matchless eloquence and profound learning of those Northern statesmen whose constituents have the good sense to keep them in public life long enough to enable them to master the science and philosophy of government.

But to return.

No matter what may be the Southern Gentleman’s avocation, his dearest affections usually centre in the country. He longs to live as his fathers lived before him, in both the Old World and the New; and he ever turns with unfeigned delight from the bustle of cities, the hollow ceremonies of courts, the turmoil of politics, the glories and dangers of the battle-field, or the wearisome treadmill of professional routine, to the quiet and peaceful scenes of country life. The glare of gas and the glitter of tinsel, the pride, the pomp, the vanity, and all the grace and wit of la bonne compagnie, he surrenders without a sigh of regret, and joyfully retires to the seclusion of his own fireside, grateful for the auspicious and happy exchange. The old hall, the familiar voices of old friends, the trusty and well-remembered faces of the old domestics—these all are dearer to the heart of the Southern Gentleman than the short-lived plaudits of admiring throngs, or the hollow and unsatisfactory pleasures of sense. Indeed, with all classes in the South the home feeling is much stronger than it is in the North; for the bane of hotel life and the curse of boarding-houses have not as yet extended their pernicious influences to our Southern States, or at best in a very small degree. Nearly every citizen is a landholder, and therefore feels an interest in the permanency of his country’s institutions. This is one reason why the South has ever been the ready advocate of war, whenever the rights of the nation have been trampled on, or the national flag insulted. But if the patriotic feeling is strong in the breast of even the poorest citizen, whose home is a log-cabin and whose sole patrimony consists of less than a dozen acres of land, how must it be intensified in the bosoms of those whose plantations spread out into all the magnificence of old-country manors!

As it is our desire to present the reader faithful pictures of the home life of the Southern States, we wish we could fitly paint to his mind’s eye how the Southern Gentleman appears when reclining under his own vine and fig-tree. Much has been said of his generous hospitality, but this to be fully appreciated should be enjoyed. We doubt if there is any where on the globe its parallel. Certainly, in some portions of the South the Southern Gentleman does not live in very grand style—his house is not always showy, nor his furniture elegant, nor his pleasure-grounds in the best keeping— but he is always hospitable, gentlemanly, courteous, and more anxious to please than to be pleased. A city-bred gentleman from the North will not always find in the planter’s home "the rich curtains, the sumptuous sofas, the gorgeous picture-frames, or the thousand and one other dainty household gods, so carefully gathered and treasured in his own house;" but he will ever find a much heartier welcome, a warmer shake of the hand, a greater desire to please, and less frigidity of deportment, than will be found in any walled town upon the earth’s circumference. And, to quote the words of one of his class: "As he begins to feel at home, to discover the new pleasures at his command, and to fall into the way and spirit of the life around him, he will feel that the wants of one social condition and climate may not be the wants of another and very opposite one; that on the Southern plantations the people ’live out of doors;’ that their very houses, ever wide open, are themselves ’out of doors,’ and consequently but little more cared for than are the self-caring lawns and woods around them.

"When the few cold days come, and the stormy days, this provision for summer and sunshine only may prove for the moment inadequate. But then books, though not showily exposed, are forthcoming for in-door entertainment, and the best of pianos may be opened to good purpose, while your hosts, old and young, are at leisure and command to talk with you intelligently and heartily upon any theme, from the state of the Union to the state of the crops, or to fight over again bold encounters with bear and alligator, or with the quiet adversaries of the chess and the backgammon-boards. To revive the flagging interest in these and other resources there is, as at all times, the cordial relief of the well-supplied side-board, and the very model of generous and hospitable tables."

This writer also proceeds further, in the following very truthful and pertinent remarks:

"It would seem, and so indeed it is, as a rule, that the Southern Gentleman, even the most assiduous in business, labors only for occupation, or pour passer le temps, his daily toil being his daily pleasure; and not, as in busier and mere money-getting communities, a painful drudgery, submitted to but for the sake of a scarcely understood good beyond. He never buries the man in the business, but makes of his business itself his social enjoyment and his true life. Thus, whatever may be his engagements, he seems never to have any thing to do but to amuse himself and his family and the stranger within his gates. It is to these habits of life, in a great measure, that may be traced the certain air of gentlemanly and chivalrous character and manner which is so characteristic even of the humbler, of the most rude and unlettered—the rough diamonds of the race. Some of this result may possibly be laid also to the circumstance of the distinction between their class and that of the blacks by whom they are surrounded, and which makes them all of a certain necessity brothers and peers, and also to the habits of command, with the consciousness of noblesse and its incident obligations.

"Loving and accustomed to equestrian exercise, the ladies have enough of pleasant and profitable out-door life, while their large households furnish ample employment, even without the generally great cares of hospitality. It is much the custom, at least on the smaller plantations, for the mistress to charge herself with the labors and responsibility of supplying the wants of the blacks as well as the whites of the family, providing them with their rations of food and their stock of clothing, and ministering to them in hours of sickness."

"Immense stores of material have every season to be cut up for coats, and gowns, and trowsers, and shirts. Little quarrels have to be arbitrated at one moment, and little chastisements inflicted at another. Now Hannibal has broken his head, and vinegar and brown paper must be hunted up; or Lucy is going to be married, and white dresses and white cakes must, according to custom, be prepared; so that, on the whole, one way or another, black and white together, a Southern matron has no necessity, and but little opportunity, to be an idle woman. The gentlemen are equally well provided with occupation in the care of their plantations, the entertainment of their guests, and with studies in the library and sports in the field. The swamps are full of deer, which beguile them to the chase, and the peopled waters tempt them to wander forth with hook and line. Sometimes a bear has to be looked for, and now and then the alligators require some setting down. These last uncouth gentry are by means pleasant folk to encounter unexpectedly, though they are more apt to avoid than to seek you. Still they are given to the offensive when they dare, and often do they make short work of the unlucky hounds who stray within their precincts."

Thus far a discriminating Northerner.

Nor need you, philanthropic Madam, envy our Southerner because his eye may happen to sparkle with a natural pride, as he scans his broad acres stretching away many a rood in the shimmering sunshine; or because he gazes with delight upon his blooded horses prancing and pirouetting in their green pastures, and his countless herds of cattle lazily browsing the succulent twigs of sassafras growing here and there in the midst of the grassy meadows. Do not, we pray you, disturb that equanimity which has always been such a charming characteristic of your ladyship, by dwelling too intently upon supposititious pictures of the awful contrast between the sunshine that pervades the parlor, and the terrible gloom which always enshrouds the cabin. For, hark! do you not hear those sounds of revelry and mirth? The ceaseless tum tum of de ole banjo, and the merry twang of de fiddle and de bow? as well as the noisy shuffling of not very nimble feet, accompanied by that full-voiced chorus which bursts so merrily, ay, and musically too, upon the midnight air, telling of the free heart and the contented mind? Not even the lark, "singing at heaven’s gate," trills his matin song with more of unaffected joyousness, than do these simple Africans shout their evening choruses, until the very rafters of their humble cabins vibrate with the sound! And tell us, honestly; have you ever witnessed in the miserable tenant-houses of your own toiling poor, after the day’s weary labors are done, such evidences of unaffected light-heartedness and physical comfort? And do you suppose, O noble champion of Equal Rights; you, sir, who turn aside with a curse from the ragged starveling on your own doorsteps to clamor that the poor slave shall be freed, but afterwards refuse to sit with the freedman in the house of God, or in the theatres, or in public conveyances, or any where else, indeed, save at Dawson’s; do you suppose that your love for the sooty African equals that of his vilified master? If you do so delude yourself, the more’s the pity; for, despite what you or any other person may think to the contrary, the Southern Gentleman entertains more real love for his "human chattels," than all the hair-brained abolitionists the world ever saw. His love is not theoretical but practical. He has tried theory and found it would not do. Formerly he was theoretically an abolitionist, but he has long since got rid of such puerile sentimentality.

He remembers that, when the negroes were first sold to his ancestors by the Puritans of both New and Old England, they were nothing but naked, gibbering savages, heathenish and beastly; being but a single remove above the brutes that perish. He sees now, that a century and a half of slavery has changed them into intelligent human beings, compared with what they originally were, being elevated as high above their kindred, who still remain in Africa, as he is above themselves. He sees, moreover, that wherever the wholesome restraint and intelligent guidance of the master have been taken away, as in Jamaica and elsewhere, the poor blacks have invariably lapsed into a state of semi-barbarism, dragging with them also the white races with whom they have been permitted to associate on equal terms. With such undeniable facts before him, he would be the most jolter-headed fool alive, did he allow himself to be seduced by any spirit of a maudlin sentimentality or pseudo-philanthropy, to destroy by a misdirected benevolence all the good results which it has taken nearly two centuries to accomplish. Hence, the ceaseless clamor of the so-called civilized world—of those peoples whose bread comes through the sweat of the African’s brow, and whose commercial prosperity is mainly due to the products of slave-labor—passes by the Southern Gentleman as the idle wind which he heeds not. Yea, let them clamor, let them denounce, let them misrepresent and vilify to their heart’s content, although they may succeed in putting to the rack many good republican souls in the Free States, who are so ridiculously sensitive to the opinions entertained of America by the hoary old European tyrants, still never will one single Southern Gentleman be influenced by the very disinterested outcry. He knows that this is not the first time a successful burglar has joined in the general shout, "Stop thief!" "Stop thief!" bawling louder than all the rest, indeed, the more self-interest prompts him to direct public attention to some other sinner, or at least to some other head than his own. Of a truth, there is nothing pleasanter in the world, than to live up to the popular standard of morality; and there is no avocation in life more easy to master than that of a trimmer—one who sails always with the current, whose rudder is public opinion, whose right bower is vox populi , and whose left bower is populi vox. The Southern Gentleman is as well aware of all this as you, sir, or we; but he chooses to have an honest opinion of his own, and would rather stand in the shoes of the meanest slave on his plantation, of the laziest and most ignorant gumbo whose back was ever made to bleed under the overseer’s lash, than to become that thing—that most emasculate and miserable mockery of a man—the SLAVE OF PUBLIC OPINION. For the negro, although he may, as the Scriptures enjoin, serve faithfully his "master according to the flesh with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ," can still maintain his own self-respect, and be accounted by the Master of us all, a MAN; but the poor slave of public opinion—the shifting human weathercock, who is "every thing by starts and nothing long"—must in the very nature of things always loathe and abhor himself, and when he gets his deserts in the future life, will, if such things be, officiate as lick-spittle and boot-black to the devil himself, being accounted unworthy to receive even respectable torment.

Do not wonder, therefore, that the Southern Gentleman has never been, and is not now, influenced by the popular and world-wide denunciation of the "peculiar institution." For he is a man every inch, bold, self-reliant, conscientious; knowing his own convictions of duty, and daring to heed them. What that duty is, the Divine Teacher has inculcated in the well-known precept: "Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and impartial; knowing that you also have a Master in heaven." This the Southern Gentleman delights to do. It is almost impossible for a citizen of the North to realize the strong ties which bind the Southern Gentleman to his bond-servants, and vice versa. In most instances the slaves of gentlemen are all "family negroes," who have been in their master’s family for several generations, and their family pride is equal, if not superior, to that of the master himself. We do not deny that there are estates in the South, the negroes belonging to which are badly treated: the South is no second paradise, but has its evils like the rest of the world. But it is for the most part on the plantations of parvenues, or the children of such, that one witnesses those scenes of barbarity which so shock our humaner feelings; for on these estates are agglomerated a promiscuous rabble, bought here and there, without regard to any thing else than their capacity to hoe tobacco, or pick cotton; and the consequence is, they have to be controlled by brute force—just as those poor bachelor coolies, whom philanthropic England yearly sells to the Cubans for a term of years, have to be controlled, or those more savage and heathenish Africans, whom such men as Captain Townsend and other slaver captains are selling to the same people for a little longer term of years, have to be controlled.

We apprehend, however, that as a general thing the negroes on all the Southern plantations fare much better than the people of the North desire to believe. It is so very pleasant, you know, to pick splinters out of the eyes of one’s neighbors! And to pull the beam out of one’s own eyes, is such a deal of trouble! We should think though, that "mad Old Brown" must have helped to open the eyes of some of the blind leaders of the blind in the Free States. That poor old monomaniac imagined the slaves to be so oppressed, that they only waited a deliverer, when they would immediately throw off their shackles, and rally as one man under the flag of the Provisional government, trusting in the "sword of the Lord and of Gideon." Vain delusion! He brought his own neck to the gallows, but did not liberate a single slave.

No wonder the failure of the attempted Harper’s Ferry insurrection has puzzled the abolitionists. It controverts all their theories, and falsifies all their assertions. And in this connection we beg the reader will indulge our introducing the following editorial remarks of the New-York Herald, on the Harper’s Ferry raid, published at the time. They are very sensible, as well as truthful.

"Many of the country journals, either from a want of wit or a want of honesty, insist upon calling the invasion of Harper’s Ferry by a score of black and white abolitionists from the North, a slave insurrection.

"If there is any one point in the late proceedings of Osawatomie Brown, of Kansas notoriety, that is more prominent than any other, it is the singular fact that none of the Southern slaves were mixed up in the affair, nor did a single one of them voluntarily come forward to accept the great advantages which Brown and his fellow fanatics in the North held out to them. Within a circuit of a few hours’ ride of Harper’s Ferry fully five thousand slaves reside; but not a sign of disturbance or discontent was exhibited. Yet Brown had been busy for months round there, his means of communication were established, the underground railroad has its stations all along to the Canada frontier, and J. R. G. was a willing contributor from Ashtabula, Gerrit Smith applauded the ’Kansas work’ from Peterboro, F. B. S. sympathized in Concord, and many a scattering abolitionist all through the Northern States, no doubt wrestled in prayer that the slave might be freed from his bonds.

"But t