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THE OLD PLANTATION
HOW WE LIVED IN GREAT HOUSE
AND CABIN BEFORE THE WAR

BY

JAMES BATTLE AVIRETT

Author of "Ashby and His Compeers,"
"Who Was the Traitor?" etc.

F. TENNYSON NEELY CO.
NEW YORK, CHICAGO, LONDON

Copyright, 1901
by
JAMES BATTLE AVIRETT.

THIS VOLUME IS GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED
TO THE MEMORY OF THE OLD PLANTER AND HIS WIFE -
THE ONLY REAL SLAVES ON THE OLD PLANTATION
OF MANY OVERGROWN CHILDREN, SERVANTS
ON THE ESTATE, FROM 1817 TO 1865 -
THE FATHER AND MOTHER OF
THE AUTHOR.

INTRODUCTION.

        ACTION and reaction - ebb and flow - seem to be the rule of life in its varied manifestations. Winter and Summer - Seedtime and Harvest, with their death into life - are in striking illustration of this rule. To the benumbing influences of that form of imperialism which swept over Europe, holding down as in a vise all effort at asserted individuality in citizenship, the student of history and its philosophies will recollect, came slow but sure reaction. Coming in form of the French Revolution, it was far, very far, from being an unmixed blessing. It liberated the individual from everybody and everything but himself. This it was powerless to do, because in its chaos it refused to recognize the condition precedent of all healthful life. It turned a deaf ear to the great truth, in its blind worship of Reason, that Order is Heaven's first Law. A power so strong as this social cyclone, working in the orbit of human weakness, could not be confined to France. It overleaped the channel and, though strongly resisted by the conservative forces of Anglo-Saxon England, it has left its influence upon that virile polity which had successfully withstood the mutations of centuries. Intrenching itself in Exeter Hall, London, it threw its

forces across the Atlantic and fortified them in Fanueil Hall, Boston. And thus it came about that it was the benumbing shadows of the French Revolution, in its contempt for law, order and precedent, which left such giants in the state as Mr. Webster, and Bishop Hopkins of Vermont in the Church without a counteracting following. Thus it was that the John Brown Raid, called into being by that bold, bad, strong book, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," proved to be the avant-coureur of the Civil War.

        This fearful struggle between the two sections, North and South, closed in one of its forms many long years ago. Pending this long, dark period of suffering, involving a proud people in some forms of sorrow, keener far than that known to either Poland or Hungary, in the manumission and enfranchisement of a race inferior both from heredity and servility, the South, possessing her soul in patience, has waited. Yes! wretchedly misunderstood, we have waited for the pendulum of public opinion to swing around to our side of the arc. God only knows in what bitterness of heart we have waited. We have waited in full loyalty to the Government, both State and Federal, and though in waiting we may not have grown strong, yet we have waited long enough, under the inspiring example and memory of the Christian Lee at Lexington, Virginia, to be full of hope that the tide is now setting in from the high seas of error, and that the day of our vindication in the world's judgment is nigh at hand.

        Men, very thoughtful men, lacking in no element of manly loyalty to the powers that be, are free to assert that in the reaction which has set in, erroneous views as to the causes which led up to the war, as well as the facts in its conduct, are giving place to the truth. The Supreme Court of the country, in its appellate jurisdiction of last

resort, is affirming and reaffirming the constitutional doctrine of Statehood in its distinct autonomy. Public opinion from the lakes to the gulf, is voicing American utterance as to the superiority of the Caucasian race. From ocean to ocean there is a growing recognition that the tide has turned, in the steadily increasing thrift of the South. And thus it would seem to be that all things come to him who waits.

        The writer of this book, the chaplain on the staff of that matchless Cavalier, Gen. Turner Ashby, Chief of Cavalry under Stonewall Jackson, has patiently waited for nearly forty years to tell his own story. While envy, hatred and malice ruled the hour, he well knew that it would be worse than "Love's Labor Lost," to do anything but wait - bide his time. He has waited until he hears falling from the lips of the distinguished Senator Hoar of Massachusetts largely the same arguments in his opposition to the imperialism at Manila as were employed by Southern senators in the United States Senate in the spring of 1861. He has waited until Colonel Henderson of the British Army, in his "Life of Stonewall Jackson," has placed Lee's lieutenant in the forefront of the world's great captains; and in doing so he has shown in a very striking manner that the appeal, which the silence of the South has slowly brought about, is largely vindicatory of her men and measures. He has waited, until the social conditions at the South before the war are necessarily assuming the misty forms of traditions, and will presently, unless rescued, become to the oncoming generations of the South as mythical as much of the Roman and Grecian stories. He has waited until to wait longer would be treasonable to duty. Having waited long, he now writes in loyalty to past generations of the South - such men

and women as those from whom sprang such pure patriots as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and that incomparable army of Northern Virginia and their comrades in gray all over the Southland.

        In vindicating his people from the ignorant aspersions of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and kindred exhalations from a distempered brain, he indulges in no criminations or recriminations. To the ex parte statement of this gifted member of a very gifted family, he simply says what the good old Common Law has said in all its wise judgments, "Audi alteram partem" - the wisdom of which legal maxim is further promulged by that higher injunction, "Judge nothing before the time."

        The author, a University man and bred to the law, has given nearly forty years of his life under the auspices of the Episcopal Church. We would, therefore, expect a thoughtful book from him. Born and reared to full manhood on one of the largest plantations on tidewater, North Carolina, one will see that with him is the great advantage of writing as an eyewitness, and not from hearsay or second hand. Urged to write this book by such men of the South as the late United States Senator Vance of North Carolina, and encouraged therein by the Bishop of Central New York and others of his Northern friends, we think he has justified their appreciation of his capacity for this work.

        The reader will observe that he takes hold of none of the many weak threads in the sensational and overwrought story, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which he might well have done by showing that the worst character in the book is a New Englander, while the best is largely the product of those social forces which Mrs. Stowe is undermining. He simply tells you how the servants on his father's estate

were treated, and unfolds, under that treatment, the gradual uplift of a pagan race to that point of high character which, in the judgment (?) of those in power, fitted them for all the high duties of that citizenship so gracefully adorning such men as Chauncey Depew and Mark Hanna.

        In laying the scene of his recitals on his father's plantation he is fortunate in knowing whereof he speaks, and he does not intimate that the treatment of the servants there was in anywise more humane than elsewhere in the South. In his painstaking portrayal of the social conditions on this plantation, of which he could write both creditably and intelligently, he says: "Ex uno disce omnia."

        Of all the arguments in his contention with Mrs. Stowe and all her kidney, our author uses this one most tellingly. He says if the system of labor on Southern estates was so cruel and barbarous, if the negroes were slaves abject and not servants trusted and well cared for, why was it that when the Southern homes were stripped of their defenders, then in the Confederate armies, the negroes did not reënact the bloody scenes of San Domingo - why did they not rise, with blazing torch in hand, and kill and burn? By so doing, in eight and forty hours they could have broken up the organized Confederate armies in front of Richmond and Atlanta, whose soldiers would have rushed back home to protect their wives and children. And yet, not one single torch of incendiarism was kindled. If any change came, the negroes of the old plantation, conscious of their power, were more loyal and tenderly dutiful than at any time in their history.

        No! no! The truth is, as shown on these pages, the institution had knit the hearts of the two races together too tenderly, in the happy life on the old plantation, to

suggest to either race any such bloody event. The negro of the South to-day knows, that when in trouble his best friend is his old master or his children; and if left alone by those who understand neither race at the South, he would reflect this knowledge in all the relations of life and the race problem of the South would be solved - not in the penalties of odious lynch law, but in the displacement of the fiendish crimes which lead up to it.

HUNTER MCGUIRE, M.D.,
Late Surgeon-in-Chief to General Stonewall Jackson.

RICHMOND, VA.

THE OLD PLANTATION.

CHAPTER I.

                        "Let fate do her worst, there are relics of joy,
                        Bright dreams of the past which she cannot destroy,
                        Which come in the night time of sorrow and care
                        And bring back the features which love used to wear.
                        Long, long be my heart with such memories filled,
                        Like the vase in which roses have once been distilled -
                        You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
                        But the scent of the roses will hang round it still."

        TO THE carefully discriminating mind nothing can be clearer than the following proposition: At Gettysburg, at Chickamauga and elsewhere, every memorial stone, cemented with gratitude for patriotic devotion to country, which has been erected either by Government or individuals, is in strong attestation of the social forces and political conditions which made the armies of the United States such terrible realities.

        At the South in Richmond, Virginia, in Winchester, in Raleigh, North Carolina, in fact all over the broad area embraced by the Confederacy, every effort made to perpetuate the memories of the wearers of the gray - every grassy hillock in God's acre or elsewhere marking the last bivouac of the men who followed Lee, Jackson and others - proclaims in trumpet tones the strength of the silent, subtle forces which underlay the grand struggle for Southern independence, expressed in separate and distinct autonomy.

        It is both fitting and just that these stones should have been so raised on both sides. The carping criticism which would deny to either the precious privilege of honoring its dead is foreign to the patriotic devotion which called

into existence those martial hosts which shook the continent in 1861 and '65. It is eminently natural and proper that both sections, which were lately arrayed in such bitter hostility, should accord to and join with each other in those high and holy observances which perpetuate the fame of those men, now rapidly becoming the property of a common country. The time is nigh at hand when all over this broad land the proud distinction of American citizen, so nobly worn by Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Forrest, Hampton, et id omne genus, will cause a thrill of high admiration, as well among the dwellers along our northern lakes as in the breasts of those who live amid the savannahs of the South. And this is so rightly, because naturally. It is well nigh axiomatic that a people which does not cherish with loving heart the memory of ancestral virtues will enrich its posterity with scant legacy.

        If then it be true that the memory of our dead is a duty, God imposed and heaven blessed, is it not both wise and profitable to analyze these social forces, which entered so largely into the formation of the character of those noble men, as well in the Army of the Potomac, led by Grant at the close of the struggle, as those who confronted them in battle's stern array for four long years, led by Lee? To the casual, careless observer there was a general sameness in high valor and devotion to duty, as seen in Hancock and Jackson and their followers. To the painstaking, patient student of history and its philosophies differentiations appear, as deep and broad as those which the careful study of Wellington and Napoleon brings to light. If it is true that the child is the father of the man - that we are all of us marvelously molded by the nursery influences at the mother's knee - that men out in the struggle with the world, in after years, are largely the product of hearthstone forces in childhood, then must we seek for some cause at home, in the structure of society, some one or more institutional forces, characterizing the environment and accounting for the difference between the people of the North and South.

        It will not satisfy the alert mind to say that these differences in products, customs, habits, propelling powers in

every-day life - those subtle differences in the mainspring of action - are traceable to differences in the climate. There is much in this. In the economy of nature the sun, with heat and light differing in varying degrees of latitude and longitude, stamps these differences on the orange groves of Florida, full of bloom and beauty, as well as upon the bleak, cold fisheries on the coast of Maine. In the natural world climate is self asserting and supreme. In the higher forms of life, when one passes into the realms of those strong forces swayed by the supernatural, where mind and spirit, acting either separately or conjointly, leave their enduring impress, do we not meet with products which deny and defy the strong influences of climate? It is true that climate has much, but not all to do in making us what we are. Soil and climate influence arm determine avocations or pursuits in life in no small degree. The many and marked points of difference between an agricultural and manufacturing or commercial community determine largely the habits of life, modes of thought and in some sense, the standards of action characterizing the two people of the North and South.

        At one time, in old England and elsewhere in Europe, under the unifying forces of one and the same environment, we were solidly one and the same people. When the exodus from Europe began social differences had already asserted themselves and to such a degree that in many respects the earlier settlers of New England differed largely from those who settled Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas. It is very difficult to satisfactorily account for these differences. Climate could have had but little to do with those differences which so strikingly obtained between those men who trod the decks of the Mayflower and those who followed Sir Walter Raleigh, that matchless Cavalier, of whom our own Lowell, in his inscription for the Raleigh memorial window in St. Margaret's Church, England, has so beautifully said:

                        "The new world's sons, from England's breast we drew
                        Such milk, as bids remember whence we came;
                        Proud of her past where from our future grew,
                        This window we inscribe with Raleigh's fame."

        The Gallic civilization, repressing and depressing, until at last Spain, in the loss of her American colonies, has nigh disappeared from among the nations of the earth, tells its own story of the influence of government upon the governed. If it be true, that the character of the government asserts itself in the character of its subjects - if, in other words, bad laws make a bad people - we think it equally susceptible of demonstration that whether the word of God occurs in the constitutional charter of its life and liberty or not a people's religion always expresses itself in the character of their government.

        So strikingly true is this that the gifted John S. Pendleton of Virginia was once heard to say that he never left his home in Piedmont, Virginia, and went as United States Minister to Brazil that, after a residence of six months in Rio Janiero, he was not forced to realize that he was a worse man than when he left his home in the United States. So much for the influence of environment and the subtle effects of government and religion on the temper and disposition of a man. When crystallized, these constitute his character. It will appear from this line of thought that when in the early settlement of this country, in the two sets of colonies of New England and Virginia, marked differences were at once recognized - the Puritan and the Cavalier on social lines were far apart. In the former of these two orders of civilization, the Puritan, there were many and marked excellences. The world has rarely, if ever seen among any people a higher standard of general thrift, the outcome largely of their industry and frugality. The marked influence they have exerted on the policy of this country, because of the large wealth they have amassed, is a striking comment on their methods and measures from a material standpoint. Their untiring energy; their calm self-contained equipoise; their ability at all times and under all circumstances to give themselves the full benefit of their resourcefulness; in the main, the absence of both breadth of acres and fertility of their landed estates; the marked intellectuality of many of their public men, anterior to and during the revolution; the deep set influence of the leading

dogma of their religious faith as held by the masterful Jonathan Edward - these and other causes, under the influence of climate, made the New England civilization a wonderful lever in the up-building of the young republic.

        And yet there were some aspects in which this civilization was very weak. It is in a large measure that weakness which is always found in those conditions caused by a dense population, with its numerous large towns and cities, the outcome of manufacturing and commercial enterprises wrought out by energy into a marked success. There is more truth than this materialistic age is willing to allow in the trite old saying, "That man made the town and God made the country." The various forms of social distemper, with which the human race in all ages have been accursed, have had their origin in those congested conditions of life found in thickly settled communiti