The Lady of the Slave States

I

THE archaic character of Southern ante-bellum society is illustrated by the rapidity with which since its collapse it has fled back in historical perspective to join the forms with which it should properly have been contemporary. It disappeared, not as things so widespread generally disappear in real life, a little at a time, and so gradually that the participants hardly notice the change. On the contrary, it disappeared as things do in dreams; it was held together, like M. Waldemar, by mesmeric passes, and when they were interrupted it was found to have been dead some time. It became immediately the theme of legend as though it had thriven in the ninth century, instead of in the nineteenth. Like most other archaic social forms, it has left but an unsatisfying documentary basis for history.

For the hundredth time fiction is proved to be incomparably more enduring than life, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin bids fair to be the form in which posterity will see the age of which it is so bewildering a mixture of ‘ Dichtung und Wahrheit.’ The Homeric poems and the romances of chivalry, the Hebrew Scriptures and Uncle Tom, have established ideas against which the scientific historian, if we may assume his existence, can but file his exceptions; the jury will not heed his technicalities. The South cried out against Uncle Tom, but was unable to oppose it by a similarly persuasive work of fiction; and fiction appears to be the only form of statement that in the long run carries conviction.

So far as the voice of the South itself has been effective in helping to shape the myth, it has spoken chiefly through the lips of amiable and estimable old ladies recalling honestly, but uncritically, the days of their youth. This is a class of literature in which, notoriously, dimensions expand and colors grow bright. After a course of it the reader who visits the physical remains of its world is amazed by their shrinkage. At Monticello and Mount Vernon the traveler feels, it is true, a touching and imperishable charm; but it is the charm of modesty, not the charm of grandeur. And apart from the historic seats of the mighty, he searches in vain for the stately mansions of his fancy. Surely they were not all burned by Yankee raiders or riotous freedmen. ‘Stately mansions’ is, in fact, very strong language. The traveler would not immediately recognize as deserving it the large two-storied house of wood or brick, with its double gallery, that formed the well-to-do planter’s residence.

The archaic lady of the South obeyed a law of her being in leaving very little written record of herself. Ladies from the real world penetrated into her territory from time to time, and gave accounts of what they saw. Two Englishwomen could hardly be more unlike in temperament and antecedents than Miss Martineau and Fanny Kemble, but they differed far more from the Southern lady than from each other. They agreed in approaching the South with a lively interest, and each was stirred to write excellently in her own way of what she found. In the North a rather remarkable group of women arose in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, able to think and to speak, who associated, with a profounder logic than they were perhaps themselves aware of, the political and social limitations of women with those of the slave. A really noble eloquence sprang from the enthusiasm of Lucretia Mott.

The lady of the South was equally enthusiastic. The time came when she sincerely believed that the chief end of slavery was the good of the slave. But she was unable to say so. She could suffer for her faith, see her sons die for it, cherish it long after the men who fought for it had laid it aside; but it never stirred her to effective defense of it. This is not attributable to any inherent defect in it; causes just as bad have been movingly and triumphantly argued. It is not attributable to any lack on the part of the Southern lady of the talents that we call literary; for soon after the war she gained a creditable place among American men and women of letters. The trouble was that the social system based on slavery discouraged general mental effort both in men and women, but especially in women. The planter’s high gifts of intelligence were concentrated on keeping his balance, and the lady in an even higher degree must make no gesture outside her prescribed rôle. Though the exigencies of the situation often made him a shrewd debater and a vigorous orator, they had no analogous effect upon his wife.

The truth is that in the days of slavery nobody was free at the South. The planter, whose autocracy was his boast, who contrasted himself with the men of other communities as being more completely a free agent than they, submitted to enact laws for himself that no other Anglo-Saxon society in the world at that time would have endured.

It may not be surprising that Louisiana, with its exotic social ideas, should make ‘imprisonment at hard labor not less than three years nor more than twenty-one years, or death, at the discretion of the court,’ the punishment for one who ‘shall make use of language in any public discourse ... or in private discourses, ... or shall make use of signs or actions having a tendency to produce discontent among the free colored population of this state, or to excite insubordination among the slaves.’ But it is hard to believe that the Code of Virginia of 1849 abridged the freedom of speech and press.

As the slave was a chattel of the owner, who could do what he liked with him except kill him (otherwise than ‘ by accident in giving such slave moderate correction’), it would seem evident that he could, if he liked, set him free. In Virginia he could generally do so, by his last will or by deed, provided his creditors were not prejudiced; though the Revised Code attached to the permission to emancipate, a rider that contained the oddest rapprochement of barbarism and civilization: ‘If any emancipated slave (infants excepted) shall remain within the state more than twelve months after his or her right to freedom shall have accrued, he or she shall forfeit all such right, and may be apprehended and sold by the overseers of the poor, etc., for the benefit of the Literary Fund.’

But in several states an act of the legislature was required to allow a man to relinquish his property. In Georgia the penalty for attempting to free a slave in any other way was not to exceed one thousand dollars. In the use of his chattel, the owner was hampered in many ways by laws forbidding him to teach the slave to read or write. In Georgia any one was liable to fine and imprisonment ‘who shall procure, suffer or permit a slave, negro, or person of color, to transact business for him in writing.’

All these abridgments of liberty, which would at that period have been intolerable to most English-speaking people, were but the reflection of a far more coercive social sentiment. The lawlessness of the planter in certain directions may be recognized as reaction against the restrictions on which his existence as a class depended. No man was ever more enslaved by public opinion. As the last traces of serfdom and slavery vanished in other societies, the planters came gradually to realize that they were alone in the world. They were mutineers against the course of civilization, and the only safety of mutineers is to hang together lest they hang separately.

Thus a rigorous and imperative social mandate was formulated, more tyrannous than the statute-book, and another mediæval characteristic was revivified. Nothing so ‘solid’ had existed since the effective days of the Holy Roman Empire. Once more the world saw a society so homogeneous that if one turned over, all must. Every planter must continue steadfastly to hold his wolf by the ears, or all must let go together. If slavery was to persist, its champions must uphold it incessantly in the Senate, and on the election-platform. The whole brains of the South were applied for fifty years to the mediæval task of erecting a logic and an ethic for slavery. This was as stimulating and exciting to the planter as was the theory and practice of resisting siege to the castellan. But what sort of life did it offer to the lady?

II

It is generally remarked that a woman, whether by some real psychological idiosyncrasy or as a result of her ordinary conditions of life, is apt to be more struck with details than by generalizations. This sometimes works to her own disadvantage and that of the community, as, for instance, when it makes her the supporter of the ‘bargain-counter.’ Her abstract knowledge of the principles of this phenomenon is not sufficiently vivid to enable her to withstand the appeal of a concrete instance. On the other hand, this feminine trait is of inestimable service, as society is now constituted, in keeping its owner incorrigibly individualistic, easily interested in the special case, ready to ignore the law when it is inept, and thus to constitute herself a perpetual court of equity.

Bearing in mind this function, characteristic of all women and more especially of the lady, the student of slavery is baffled by the difficulty of understanding how the planter’s theories were able to convince his wife in the presence of their practical results. Fanny Kemble writes: ’Mr. —was called out this evening to listen to a complaint of overwork from a gang of pregnant women. I did not stay to listen to the details of their petition, for I am unable to command myself on such occasions, and Mr.— seemed positively degraded in my eyes as he stood enforcing upon these women the necessity of fulfilling their appointed tasks. How honorable he would have appeared to me begrimed with the sweat, and toil of the coarsest manual labour, to what he then seemed, setting forth to these wretched, ignorant women, as a duty, their unpaid, exacting labour! I turned away in bitter disgust.’

How did it happen that any gentlewoman was able to command herself on such occasions? We are accustomed to think that our own social sins endure chiefly because the lady sees so little of them. In every case, others do the dirty work for her. If she had to shoot and skin her own bird, the plumage would disappear from her hat. A military journal has lately cried out against the proposition of sending out a woman as war-correspondent. If the world begins to learn through women what goes on at the front (cries this voice in the wilderness) we may as well say good-by to war! Similarly, if the sweat-shop, the tenement-house, and the Raines-law hotel were picturesquely grouped under the elms of her country-place; if her children spent their infancy in close playfellowship with the offspring of those institutions; if her husband were occasionally called out from his dinner to listen to a complaint of overwork from a gang of pregnant women, we like to imagine that the result would be a clean sweep of this class of our iniquities.

One answer to the puzzle in regard to the planter’s wife is fairly obvious. The most vocal part of the South was Virginia. Nine persons out of ten in the North to-day use ‘Virginia’ and ‘the South’ as interchangeable terms. That state formed early the habit of producing distinguished men; the prestige of her Revolutionary history gave her great weight both North and South. The South (with the exception perhaps of South Carolina) was willing to make Virginia the spokesman, and the North was willing to accept her as representative. But Virginia was not representative. When an old Virginian recalls with rapture those rosy ante-bellum days which have become something of a jest to a world that knew them not, he is not touching up the picture very much as regards the relation between master and servant. It is probably true that, at any rate after the soil was eaten up, the worst, features of slavery were not visible in Virginia. A lady might live and die there without once seeing a Negro under the lash; or even witnessing, unless in exceptional circumstances, those forcible partings of families which the abolitionist rightly put his finger on as the greatest of social mistakes. She was surrounded by a community of sleek, well-fed, cheerful, comic creatures, as unlike Fanny Kemble’s retinue as two groups of the same race could be. In her neighborhood, harsh treatment of servants was bad form and was punished by social ostracism. And if the Virginian emigrated to another state he took his traditions with him. If his neighbors in the new environment had a lower standard, they concealed it from him as long as possible.

‘I cannot,’ said Thomas Dabney, expressing a profound truth in social psychology, ‘I cannot punish people with whom I associate every day.’ The average Virginia gentleman could no more have a slave flogged than the average gentleman anywhere could deliberately infect a fellow creature with tuberculosis. We are so made that our victims must be out of our sight. But he could and did breed and rear strong, healthy men and women whom it would do you good to see, and sell them in large annual invoices for service in the sugar and cotton states. A Virginia gentleman told Olmsted that ‘ his women were uncommonly good breeders; he did not suppose there was a lot of women anywhere that bred faster than his’; and Rhodes notes a lady in Baltimore, ‘richly and fashionably dressed, and apparently moving in the best society, who derived her income from the sale of children of a half-dozen Negro women she owned, although their husbands belonged to other masters.’ But in the consciousness of the owner of a human stock-farm, and still more of the owner’s wife, there was a sincere contempt for the next link in the chain, the slave-trader and the auctioneer; while the overseer, the actual slavedriver of the cotton-field, the man who did the dirty work on which the whole social scheme depended, was despised by all. In fact, the lady of the plantation felt toward the overseer by whose exertions she lived, as the lady of other economic dispensations feels toward the proprietor of the sweat-shop whose product is on her back.

All the conditions that bore hardly on the man of talent were equally operative on the woman, and she had a special extinguisher of her own in the nature of the planter’s conception of the lady. Her man did not wish her to be clever. There is at the first glance no obvious reason why the Southern lady should not have been a salonière; the type is sufficiently aristocratic and exclusive, one would think, to recommend it to the gregarious and leisured planter. The student is surprised to find that, on the contrary, the married woman had virtually no social existence. The woman of Southern romance is the young girl; the social intercourse of the little Southern cities consisted chiefly of balls and dances, at which the young girl might be seen by young men. When she was married, her husband carried her to his plantation, and there she lived in isolation. She reverted to a far earlier type than that of salonière, the type, namely, of the twelfth-century châtelaine. Only the few who maintained town-houses as well as country-houses, and spent part of every year in Richmond or Charleston or New Orleans, retained their hold upon communion with their kind, and for them a staid and modified social life was deemed fitting. Instead of being the means of a wider freedom, marriage was an abdication. Mrs. Gilman, in her Recollections of a Southern Matron, describes the ideal lady of the plantation. ‘Mamma possessed more than whole acres of charms, for though not brilliant she was good-tempered and sensible. A demure look and reserved manner concealed a close habit of observation. She would sit in company for hours, making scarcely a remark, and recollect afterwards every fact that had been stated, to the color of a riband or the stripe of a waistcoat. Home was her true sphere; there everything was managed with promptitude and decision; and papa, who was . . . an active planter was glad to find his domestic arrangements quiet and orderly. No one ever managed an establishment better; but there was no appeal from her opinions, and I have known her even eloquent in defending a recipe.

. . . Her sausages were pronounced to be the best flavored in the neighborhood; her hog’s cheese was delicacy itself; her preserved watermelons were carved with the taste of a sculptor.’

When the heroine of the work was herself married, she remarked that the planter’s bride ‘dreams of an independent sway over her household, devoted love and unbroken intercourse with her husband, and indeed longs to be released from the eyes of others, that she may dwell only beneath the sunbeam of his.’

If we turn to so romantic an account of Southern ante-bellum society as is contained in (for instance) Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, we find a marked sentimental discrimination between the young girl and the matron. Lovely maidens are portrayed, brown and blond, madcap and demure. Their manners, their whims, their dresses, are important. Their love-affairs are the excitement of the countryside. But the matron, the respected head of the establishment, is touched in with something of satire. Her good qualities and achievements are duly set down; her affairs are said to go like clockwork; she rises with the lark and infuses vigor into her recalcitrant assistants. But her charms are not the author’s theme. ‘She is a thin woman to look upon and a feeble; with a sallow complexion, and a pair of animated black eyes which impart a portion of fire to a countenance otherwise demure from the paths worn across it in the frequent travel of a low-country ague.’ Her contribution to social enjoyment seems to have consisted in playing the harpsichord for the children to dance, and in singing The Rose-tree in Full Bearing. For the rest, her annalist, to describe her foibles, dips his pen in some medium which from the old-fashioned acidity of its flavor might be the lady’s own blackberry cordial. She takes more pride (says he) in her leechcraft than becomes a Christian woman, and prepares daily doses for the helpless youngsters of the family, both white and black. And there is an element of the mystical in some of her prescriptions: ‘Nine scoops of water in the hollow of the hand, from the sycamore spring, for three mornings, before sunrise, and a cup of strong coffee with lemon-juice, will break an ague, try it when you will.’ Her husband laughs at her, and depends upon her.

It is fair to say that Swallow Barn was written before the femme de trente ans had become domesticated in English literature. Mr. Page, writing in an age in which she is fully appreciated, feels it incumbent upon him to celebrate with more enthusiasm the lady of the plantation. Very charmingly he does it, yet in his page, as plain as in Kennedy’s, stands the record of her limitations. Her life was, on its professional side, the life of the Greek lady. The programme laid down by Ischomachus for his child-bride governed the days of the later mistress of slaves. Each was the wife and steward of a farmer. Each was responsible for the reception in the house of produce of the farm intended for home consumption. Each must keep order regnant among slaves and goods. A surprising amount of what the household used was in each case made under the lady’s direction from raw material produced on the estate. The Greek lady worked with wool, the modern lady with cotton; but each must understand spinning and weaving, shaping and sewing. Each was the chief executive of a large and motley community, in duty bound to enforce the laws. And each was responsible for the health of her household: it was her duty to prevent sickness, if possible, and when it came, to tend it. Each doubtless, if not overtaxed, derived satisfaction from the performance of important work bearing directly on the welfare and happiness of those she loved best; but neither could be called a free woman.

In the case of the Greek lady we see this plainly enough. No sentiment had arisen in her day to mask the issue. If she was constrained to an exacting profession, no one obscured the fact by calling her a queen, or, with a much stronger connotation of leisure, an angel. In the case of the lady of the plantation we are misled by her husband’s vocabulary, which is that of the twelfth century. It is hard to realize that he could combine the manner and the phrases of the minnesinger with the practice of the ancient Athenian. In some aspects the law-abiding and thrifty Athenian was the better husband of the two; for the planter indemnified himself for the fear he felt for his order by a careless courage in regard to his individual life, and for the lack in his existence of some of the ordinary sources of interest by the speculative habit. Thus he might shoot or be shot somewhat casually; and he might lose at cards anything, from his wife’s most valued houseservant to the cotton-crop for the year after next.

III

One of the great burdens of slavery was that it overworked the lady. She was typically undervitalized. Mr. Page, in the full swing of his dithyrambic, declares that she was ‘often delicate and feeble in frame, and of a nervous organization so sensitive as to be a great sufferer.’ Mrs. Smedes, who has left us so beautiful a picture of the best type of plantation life, complains of the heavy drain it made upon the vitality of the ruling class. ‘There were others who felt that slavery was a yoke upon the white man’s neck almost as galling as on the slave’s; and it was a saying that the mistress of a plantation was the most complete slave on it. I can testify to the truth of this in my mother’s life and experience. There was no hour of the day that she was not called upon to minister to their real or imaginary wants. Who can wonder that we longed for a lifting of the incubus, and that in the family of Thomas Dabney the first feeling, when the war was ended, was of joy that one dreadful responsibility, at least, was removed ? ’

It is quite plain from the record that Mrs. Dabney, mistress of hundreds of slaves, the happy wife of a faithful husband, died of nervous exhaustion. She was overworked. A slaveholder could not get rid of an unprofitable servant. The good abolitionist in Boston believed that if the omelette was scorched, Mammy Venus was strung up by the thumbs to receive forty lashes; but the owner of slaves was after all a man with bowels like another. He could not flog a person with whom he associated every day. At a time when timidity in the North and fear in the South ruled conversation, good Miss Martineau trod heavily through American society, asking terrible questions and making observations hardly less startling than obvious. Some deliberate fictions were poured into her ear-trumpet, which she was unable to check as another might have done to whom general conversation was audible; and sometimes doubtless she misunderstood what was said to her. But if her ears were not always trustworthy, her eyes enjoyed a compensating power. She passed two years in this country, devoting five months to a tour of the Southern States — Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. She was everywhere kindly received, and found the planter ready and willing to talk of the chief circumstance of his life. Fanny Kemble, five years later, decided to set down nothing in her plantation journal that was not the result of her own observation, because she had heard people boasting how gloriously they had gulled Miss Martineau. But it will hardly be supposed that any slaveowner exerted his powers of mystification to give the stranger an unduly dark view of the peculiar institution; if we are to read her story with allowance for misinformation willfully supplied, our confidence must be least in the passages most favorable to slavery.

Miss Martineau was astonished, as other travelers were, by the hardships of the lady of the plantation. She must rise early, and but late take rest. A comfortable house is to be had only as the result of systematic arrangement, but systematic arrangement was impossible to slaves. The Englishwoman stood aghast at seeing so many servants accomplish so little. She would have preferred to serve herself rather than wait for the tardy and ineffective service of the blacks. She found them lolling against the bed-posts before she was up in the morning, leaning against sofas during the day, officiously offering service at every turn, and generally making a mess of it.

She found little real comfort in the planter’s house; and said, indeed, in her downright way that with one exception she never saw a clean room or bed within the boundaries of the slave states. She saw the lady without leisure save as it was bought at the price of despair, and a momentary determination to let things go. She saw the great bunch of keys at the lady’s girdle in constant requisition, for everything consumable must be locked up, and yet must be forthcoming at the whimsical demand of ministrants whose orbits were incalculable. She saw the lady constrained to follow up personally every order she gave, lest the result be confusion. She found and noted many remarkable women whose powers were equal to their responsibilities, women competent to rule over a little barbarous society, who realized the gravity of the duty that lay upon them to watch over the health and regulate the lives of a number of persons who could in no wise take care of themselves. Often she found a lady who was unequal to her task, timid, languid, and unintelligent. The house of that woman would not be a pleasant one in which to stay. But in the main she was impressed by the lady’s capacity for making the best of a system for which she was not responsible, and of which she was the garlanded victim.

Miss Martineau had no hesitation in asking any lady she met for a candid expression of opinion of the system, and some very singular confessions were poured into the sympathetic ear-trumpet, if it reported truly to its ingenuous owner. Two ladies, ‘the distinguishing ornaments of a very superior society,’ were very unhappy, and told their new friend what a curse they found slavery to be. A planter’s wife, in the bitterness of her heart, declared that she was but ‘the chief slave of the harem.’ One singular little anecdote shows how the lady’s logic could work to her husband’s credit. ‘One sultry morning I was sitting with a friend who was giving me all manner of information about her husband’s slaves. While we were talking one of the house slaves passed us. I observed that she appeared superior to all the rest; to which my friend assented. “She is A’s wife?” said I. — “We call her A’s wife, but she has never been married to him. A and she came to my husband five years ago and asked him to let them marry; but he could not allow it, because he had not made up his mind whether to sell A; and he hates parting husband and wife. They have four children, but my husband has never been able to let them marry; he has not determined yet whether he shall sell A.”’

Another story is irresistible in this connection, though it came to Miss Martineau at one remove. A Southern lady told a group of friends the romantic story of a pretty mulatto girl whom she had once owned. A young man came to stay at her house who fell in love with the girl. The girl fled to her mistress for protection, and received it. Some weeks later the young man came again, saying that he was so desperately in love with the girl he could not live without her. ‘I pitied the young man,’ concluded the lady, ‘so I sold the girl to him for fifteen hundred dollars.’

The characteristic virtue of the lady of the plantation, Miss Martineau found to be patience. Only the native, born and bred among slaves, achieved it in perfection. Foreigners or Northerners who became slaveholders could not compass it; they were impatient and sometimes severe; their tempers broke down altogether; their nerves were racked, and their self-control shattered by the unconquerable inertia of the slave. But the mistress born in slavery hardly noticed that the company were waiting twenty minutes for the second course, and was willing to repeat an order unto seventy times seven. A certain amount of lying and stealing, of disobedience and procrastination, was allowed the slave daily with his other rations.

No problem-novel could be more interesting than the true narrative of the experiences of Frances Anne Kemble in connection with slavery. This young woman was of a strongly individualistic type, being not only English, but a Kemble, and an artist. Her appearance on the stage, followed by immediate popularity, had saved her father’s theatre from insolvency. London petted her; people of importance recognized her importance. After a triumphant tour of the United States, she made a love-match with Mr. Pierce Butler of Philadelphia, and in the winter of 1838-39, she, with her two little children, accompanied her husband to his plantations in Georgia. She had contemplated the theory of slavery with entire distaste, as she admitted in a letter written before she began her journey: ‘Assuredly I am going prejudiced against slavery, for I am an Englishwoman’ (it was precisely five years since slavery had been abolished in Jamaica, and the slave-trade that had filled the Southern colonies with Negroes had been continued by the British government in the face of earnest prayers from the colonies that it might be stopped), ‘in whom the absence of such a prejudice would be disgraceful. Nevertheless, I go prepared to find many mitigations in the practice to the general injustice and cruelty of the system — much kindness on the part of the masters, much content on the part of the slaves.' This impetuous and able young woman, not only warm-hearted, but highly intelligent, was forced by her qualities to judge for herself of the system by which she and her children were supported. Incidentally she was forced to judge her husband, and as all the world knows, she finally went back to her own people. Her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation naturally deals only gingerly with her personal relations. It is easy enough to fill in the details of the bewilderment of both young people: the irritation and dismay of the planter as his uncontrollable wife went about the estates cheerfully teaching insubordination to the hands, and the panic of the wife when she discovered that her husband was sincerely unconvinced of sin toward his black people.

The two estates, one devoted to cotton, the other to rice, had long been in the hands of overseers, unvisited by a master. The pecuniary returns had been satisfactory, and the plantations had a good repute as being well-managed. But they were very different from the long-established homestead plantations of Virginia. On the rice-plantation the planter’s residence consisted of ‘three small rooms and three still smaller, which would be more appropriately designated as closets, a wooden recess by way of pantry, and a kitchen detached from the dwelling — a mere wooden out-house, with no floor but the bare earth; and for furniture a congregation of filthy Negroes, who lounge in and out of it like hungry hounds at all hours of the day and night, picking up such scraps of food as they can find about, which they discuss squatting down upon their hams. Of our three apartments, one is our sitting, eating, and living room, and is sixteen feet by fifteen. The walls are plastered indeed, but neither papered nor painted; it is divided from our bedroom by a dingy wooden partition covered all over with hooks, pegs, and nails, to which hats, caps, keys, etc., are suspended in graceful irregularity. The doors open by means of wooden latches raised by means of small bits of packthread — I imagine the same primitive order of fastening celebrated in the touching chronicle of Red Riding Hood; how they shut I will not attempt to describe, as the shutting of a door is a process of extremely rare occurrence throughout the whole Southern country. The third room, a chamber with sloping ceiling, immediately over our sitting-room, and under the roof, is appropriated to the nurse and my two babies. Of the closets, one is the overseer’s bedroom, the other his office, and the third, adjoining our bedroom, is Mr.——’s dressing-room and cabinet d’affaires, where he gives audiences to the Negroes, redresses grievances, distributes red woolen caps, shaves himself, and performs the other offices of his toilet. Such being our abode, I think you will allow there is little danger of my being dazzled by the luxurious splendours of a Southern slave residence. ’

The plantation was in fact not a home but an industrial plant.

In paying her visits, Mrs. Butler, like Miss Martineau, plunged by preference into the most delicate of questions. How can you stand slavery? she would genially ask her hostess. Where the answers are recorded, the ladies seem naturally enough to have shirked the question of abstract justice and to have argued, on the assumption of the inevitability of slavery, that kindness and indulgence were so common among masters as to make the slave’s life far happier in practice than in theory. Mrs. Butler makes a shrewd comment which goes far to solve the whole problem. ‘They’ (women) ‘are very seldom just, and are generally treated with more indulgence than justice by men,'

In Mrs. Butler’s own reflections, her personal helplessness is the obstacle she comes up against when she tries to help the helpless slave. An intelligent boy of sixteen asked her to teach him to read. To do so was to break the law under which she lived, and though she would probably not have boggled at mere law-breaking, she was embarrassed by the consideration that her husband would have to pay the fines which she would incur for the first and second offenses. The third offense was punishable by imprisonment. She sighed to think that she could not begin with Aleck’s third lesson, so thal the penalty might light on the right shoulders. She winds up by saying, ‘I certainly intend to teach Aleck to read. I certainly won’t tell Mr.—anything about it. I’ll leave him to find it out, as slaves, and servants, and children, and all oppressed and ignorant and uneducated and unprincipled people do; then, if he forbids me, I can stop — perhaps before then the lad may have learned his letters.’ This brilliant and energetic young woman, who had demonstrated her ability to maintain herself in economic independence, found herself suddenly reduced to the stereotyped movements of the lady-acrobat; a spontaneous gesture would topple her husband over.

When the little girl who was afterwards to be Mrs. Roger A. Pryor was not ten years old the aunt with whom she lived realized the shortcomings of education on the plantation and took up her residence in Charlottesville, which was then beginning to be the centre of a little group of cultivated people. The child was entered at the Female Seminary. The headmaster examined her and prescribed her lessons. The books given her were Abercrombie’s Intellectual Philosophy, Watts’s Improvement of the Mind, Goldsmith’s History of Greece, and somebody’s Natural Philosophy. A more advanced little student blazed a trail for the child through these works, inclosing in brackets the briefest possible answers to the questions in Watts. Thus the little girl was enabled with labor and tears to say (when asked ‘What is logic?’), ‘Logic is the art of investigating and communicating Truth.’ After a few months in the seminary she was removed by the good aunt, and home education began again. She read classical English literature with her aunt, she learned French from a German, and she studied music under the direction of an itinerant master, whose relations with the sheriff frequently made it convenient for him to appear at midnight to give a lesson.

IV

A special piquancy is lent to the spectacle of the lady as mistress of slaves by a knowledge of her history, a review of which might be fitly entitled ‘Up from Slavery.’ Herr Bebel, in his striking way, declares that woman was the first slave, ‘she was a slave before the slave existed.’ The gradual promotion of an occasional slave to comparative idleness began to make a lady of her. When she was given control over other slaves, and when she was considered to be her master’s wife in some special sense which differentiated her from the other women who bore him children, the process was complete. Her idleness consisted in release from useful manual labor, and was an evidence of her husband’s wealth. As such it was valuable to him, and she preserved it at his command. Not only was she excused from labor, — she was forbidden it. The Chinese, a logical and direct people, cripple the little girls of the gentle class so that they may bear the outward visible sign of incapacity to labor. The hampering dress of the European lady has the same purpose.

The etiquette which everywhere forbids the lady to serve herself is closely bound up with her husband’s amour propre. He believes that his objection to seeing his wife occupied in useful toil is sheer consideration of the strong for the weak, whereas it is largely based on the fear that her exertions will reflect on his ability to compete with other men for the prizes of life. The lady of the proprietary household is therefore as much under orders as any of her subordinates, but her orders are not to work with her hands. This by no means dispenses her from other labor. She uses more nervous energy in causing a task to be done by incompetent servants than it would cost her to do it herself, but she is not allowed to do it herself.

In the presence of slavery, —in Constantinople, for instance, or in South Carolina,—the performance of manual labor would be, of course, more shameful than elsewhere. Writers dealing with the old South, naturally struck with its feudalistic survivals, are inclined to dwell upon them to the exclusion of its orientalism. The feudal lady was allowed to develop her mind. She was better educated than her husband. When circumstances made her a patron of literature, minnesong bloomed and the romance of chivalry. The orientalized lady of the South was discouraged from systematic education; in fact, it was virtually impossible for her to get it. Her husband was far better educated than she. The literature produced to supply her demands was that of Mrs. Southworth and Miss Evans.

It filled the planter with unfeigned horror to hear of the employment of women in the Northern States for useful purposes. Thomas Dabney was reduced to great poverty in his old age by his determination to pay debts incurred through the bad faith of another. The touching picture of the heroic old man and his daughters giving up such ease of life as the war had left them shows that some illusions had survived. His chivalrous nature (says his daughter) had always revolted from the sight of a woman doing hard work, and he could not have survived the knowledge that his daughters had stood at the washtub. So he did the washing himself, beginning in his seventieth year. So artfully is the human mind composed that he who had complacently employed women all his life to hoe his cotton without pay, could not stand the demolition of the lady. It remains to be said that it was not every planter whose orientalism was of so altogether lovable a type as Thomas Dabney’s.

The Southern lady was forced by war and ruin to make in a day the transition that the rest of the world had taken several centuries to effect. And she had to make it under the most disheartening conditions. In many cases she was mourning for a man who had died defending a cause of which no one but his fellows would take his point of view. It was plain that the men of the South would go down in history as having fought to retain an institution which the world at large had come to think altogether iniquitous. And they had been beaten. That the Southern lady should change her opinions was not to be expected; her mental training was not of a kind to make reasoning an easy or a familiar process. If she had been capable of changing her opinions, she would have been all the time a different kind of woman and slavery would have come to an end long before. It was not then with the inspiration of an awakening, but with the bitterness of uncomprehension— and therefore with all the more heroism —that after being so roughly tumbled from her high place she picked herself up, and made herself useful.

A Southern gentleman told Miss Martineau that nothing but the possession of genius, or the arrival of calamity, could rescue the lady of the plantation from her orientalism. What genius could at best have done but for an individual here and there, calamity did for a whole class. As the calamity was unexampled, so was the response. It has perhaps not happened twice in history, that so great a number of civilized women were reduced from comfort to misery in the same length of time as in the Confederate States during the last two years of the Civil War. The courage of their men and their own courage served but to prolong the struggle, and to deepen the misery. And the misery produced a type of heroism compounded of high spirit, endurance, and efficiency, that the world has agreed to honor as one of the most stimulating and admirable achievements of the race.