Part 2

The next morning, the 8th, I was up in time to see the scramble for milk that was going on at the wooding-place. The moment we drew to the land and the plank was put out, the steward leaped on shore, and ran to the woodcutters' dwelling, pitcher in hand. The servants of the gentry on board followed, hoping to get milk for breakfast; but none succeeded except the servant of an exclusive. This family had better have been without milk to their coffee than have been tempted by it to such bad manners as they displayed at the breakfast-table. Two young ladies who had come on board the night before, who suspected nothing of private luxuries at a public table, and were not aware of the scarcity of milk, asked a waiter to hand them a pitcher which happened to belong to the exclusives. The exclusives' servant was instantly sent round to take it from them, and not a word of explanation was offered.

The woodcutters' dwelling before us was very different from the one we had seen the night before. It was a good-sized dwelling, with a cottonwood tree before it, casting a flickering shadow upon the porch, and behind it was a well-cleared field. The children were decently dressed, and several slaves peeped out from the places where they were pursuing their avocations. A passenger brought me a beautiful bunch of dwarf-roses which he had gathered over the garden paling. The piles of wood prepared for the steamboats were enormous, betokening that there were many stout arms in the household.

This morning we seemed to be lost among islands in a waste of waters. The vastness of the river now began to bear upon our imaginations. The flatboats we met looked as if they were at the mercy of the floods, their long oars bending like straws in the current. They are so picturesque, however, and there is something so fanciful in the canopy of green boughs under which the floating voyagers repose during the heat of the day, that some of us proposed building a flatboat on the Ohio, and floating down to New-Orleans at our leisure.

Adams Fort, in the state of Mississippi, afforded the most beautiful view we had yet seen on the river. The swelling hills, dropped with wood, closed in a reach of the waters, and gave them the appearance of a lake. White houses nestled in the clumps; goats, black and white, browsed on the points of the many hills; and a perfect harmony of colouring dissolved the whole into something like a dream. This last charm is as striking to us as any in the vast wilderness through which the "Father of Waters" takes his way. Even the turbid floods, varying their hues with the changes of light and shadow, are a fit element of the picture, and no one wishes them other than they are.

In the afternoon we ran over a log; the vessel trembled to her centre; the ladies raised their heads from their work; the gentlemen looked overboard; and I saw our yawl snagged as she was careering at the stern. The sharp end of the log pricked through her bottom as if she had been made of brown paper. She was dragged after us, full of water, till we stopped at the evening wooding-place, when I ran to the hurricane deck to see her pulled up on shore and mended. There I found the wind so high that it appeared to me equally impossible to keep my seat and to get down; my feather-fan blew away, and I expected to follow it myself--so strangling was the gust--one of the puffs which take the voyager by surprise amid the windings of this forest-banked river. The yawl was patched up in a surprisingly short time. The deck passengers clustered round to lend a hand, and the blows of the mallet resounded fitfully along the shore as the gust came and passed over.

Every one wished to reach and leave Natchez before dark, and this was accomplished. As soon as we came in sight of the bluff on which the city is built, we received a hint from the steward to lock our staterooms and leave nothing about, as there was no preventing the townspeople from coming on board. We went on shore. No place can be more beautifully situated; on a bend of the Mississippi, with a low platform on which all the ugly traffic of the place can be transacted; bluffs on each side; a steep road up to the town; and a noble prospect from thence. The streets are sloping, and the drains are remarkably well built; but the place is far from healthy, being subject to the yellow fever. It is one of the oldest of the southern cities, though with a new, that is, a perpetually-shifting population. It has handsome buildings, especially the Agricultural Bank, the Courthouse, and two or three private dwellings. Main-street commands a fine view from the ascent, and is lined with Pride-of-India trees. I believe the landing-place at Natchez has not improved its reputation since the descriptions which have been given of it by former travellers. When we returned to the boat after an hour's walk, we found the captain very anxious to clear his vessel of the townspeople and get away. The cabin was half full of the intruders, and the heated, wearied appearance of our company at tea bore testimony to the fatigues of the afternoon.

In the evening only one firefly was visible; the moon was misty, and faint lightning flashed incessantly. Before morning the weather was so cold that we shut our windows, and the next day there was a fire in the ladies' cabin. Such are the changes of temperature in this region.

The quantity of driftwood that we encountered above Natchez was amazing. Some of it was whirling slowly down with the current, but much more was entangled in the bays of the islands, and detained in incessant accumulation. It can scarcely be any longer necessary to explain that it is a mistake to suppose this driftwood to be the foundation of the islands of the Mississippi. Having itself no foundation, it could not serve any such purpose. The islands are formed by deposites of soil brought down from above by the strong force of the waters. The accumulation proceeds till it reaches the surface, when the seeds contained in the soil, or borne to it by the winds, sprout, and bind the soft earth by a network of roots, thus providing a basis for a stronger vegetation every year. It is no wonder that superficial observers have fallen into this error respecting the origin of the new lands of the Mississippi, the rafts of driftwood look so like incipient islands; and when one is fixed in a picturesque situation, the gazer longs to heap earth upon it, and clothe it with shrubbery.

When we came in sight of Vicksburg the little H.'s made a clamour for some new toys. Their mother told them how very silly they were; what a waste of money it would be to buy such toys as they would get at Vicksburg; that they would suck the paint, &c. Strange to say, none of these considerations availed anything. Somebody had told the children that toys were to be bought at Vicksburg, and all argument was to them worth less than the fact. The contention went on till the boat stopped, when the mother yielded, with the worst possible grace, and sent a slave nurse on shore to buy toys. An hour after we were again on our way, the lady showed me, in the presence of the children, the wrecks of the toys; horses' legs, dogs' heads, the broken body of a wagon, &c., all, whether green, scarlet, or yellow, sucked into an abominable daub. She complained bitterly of the children for their folly, and particularly for their waste of her money, as if the money were not her concern, and the fun theirs!

We walked through three or four streets of Vicksburg, but the captain could not allow us time to mount the hill. It is a raw-looking, straggling place, on the side of a steep ascent, the steeple of the Courthouse magnificently overlooking a huge expanse of wood and a deep bend of the river. It was three months after this time that the tremendous Vicksburg massacre took place; a deed at which the whole country shuddered, and much of the world beyond. In these disorders upward of twenty persons were executed, without trial by jury or pretence of justice. Some of the sufferers were gamblers, and men of bad character otherwise; some were wholly innocent of any offence whatever; and I believe it is now generally admitted that the plot for rousing the slaves to insurrection, which was the pretext for the whole proceeding, never had any real existence. It was the product of that peculiar faculty of imagination which is now monopolized by the slaveholder, as of old by imperial tyrants. Among the sufferers in this disturbance was a young farmer of Ohio, I think, who was proceeding to New-Orleans on business, and was merely resting on the eastern bank of the river on his way. I have seldom seen anything more touching than his brief letter to his parents, informing them that he was to be executed the next morning. Nothing could be quieter in its tone than this letter; and in it he desired that his family would not grieve too much for his sudden death, for he did not know that he could ever feel more ready for the event than then. His old father wrote an affecting appeal to the Governor of Mississippi, desiring, not vengeance, for that could be of no avail to a bereaved parent, but investigation, for the sake of his son's memory and the future security of innocent citizens. The governor did not recognise the appeal. The excuse made for him was that he could not; that if the citizens of the state preferred Lynch law to regular justice, the governor could do nothing against the will of the majority. The effect of barbarism like this is not to justify the imputation of its excesses to the country at large, but to doom the region in which it prevails to be peopled by barbarians. The lovers of justice and order will avoid the places where they are set at naught.

Every day reminded us of the superiority of our vessel, for we passed every boat going the same way, and saw some so delayed by accidents that we wondered what was to become of the passengers; at least, of their patience. A disabled boat was seen on the morning of this day, the 9th, crowded with Kentuckians, some of whom tried to win their way on board the "Henry Clay" by witticisms; but our captain was inexorable, declaring that we could hold no more. Then we passed the Ohio steamboat, which left New-Orleans three days before us, but was making her way very slowly, with cholera on board.

The 10th was Sunday. The children roared as usual; but the black damsels were dressed; there was no laundry-work going on, nor fancy-work in the cabin; and there was something of a Sunday look about the place. As I was sitting by my stateroom window, sometimes reading and sometimes looking out upon the sunny river, green woods, and flatboats that keep no Sabbath, a black servant entered to say that Mr. E. desired me "to come to the preachin'." I thought it unlikely that Mr. E. should be concerned in the affair, and knew too well what the service was likely to be in such a company, and conducted by such a clergyman as was to officiate, to wish to attend. I found afterward that the service had been held against the wishes of the captain, Mr. E., and many others; and that it had better, on all accounts, have been omitted. Some conversation which the young clergyman had thrust upon me had exhibited not only his extreme ignorance of the religious feelings and convictions of Christians who differed from him, but no little bitterness of contempt towards them; and he was, therefore, the last person to conduct the worship of a large company whose opinions and sentiments were almost as various as their faces. This reminds me that an old lady on board asked an acquaintance of mine what my religion was. On being told that I was a Unitarian, she exclaimed, "She had better have done with that; she won't find it go down with us." It never occurred to me before to determine my religion by what would please people on the Mississippi.

Before breakfast one morning, when I was walking on the hurricane deck, I was joined by a young man who had been educated at West Point, and who struck me as being a fair and creditable specimen of American youth. He told me that he was very poor, and described his difficulties from being disappointed of the promotion he had expected on leaving West Point. He was now turning to the law; and he related by what expedients he meant to obtain the advantage of two years' study of law before settling in Maine. His land-travelling was done on foot, and there was no pretension to more than his resources could command. His manners were not so good as those of American youths generally, and he was not, at first, very fluent, but expressed himself rather in schoolboy phrase. His conversation was, however, of a host of metaphysicians as well as lawyers; and I thought he would never have tired of analyzing Bentham, from whom he passed on, like every one who talks in America about books or authors, to Bulwer, dissecting his philosophy and politics very acutely. He gave me clear and sensible accounts of the various operation of more than one of the United States institutions, and furnished me with some very acceptable information. After our walk and conversation had lasted an hour and a half, we were summoned to breakfast, and I thought we had earned it.

During the morning I heard a friend of mine, in an earnest but amused tone, deprecating a compliment from two slave women who were trying to look most persuasive. They were imploring her to cut out a gown for each of them like the one she wore. They were so enormously fat and slovenly, and the lady's dress fitted so neatly, as to make the idea of the pattern being transferred to them most ludicrous. As long as we were on board, however, I believe they never doubted my friend's power of making them look like herself if she only would; and they continued to cast longing glances on the gown.

On the 11th we overtook another disabled steamboat, which had been lying forty-eight hours with both her cylinders burst; unable, of course, to move a yard. We towed her about two miles to a settlement, and the captain agreed to take on board two young ladies who were anxious to proceed, and a few deck-passengers.

The scenery was by this time very wild. These hundreds of miles of level woods, and turbid, rushing waters, and desert islands, are oppressive to the imagination. Very few dwellings were visible. We went ashore in the afternoon, just for the sake of having been in Arkansas. We could penetrate only a little way through the young cottonwood and the tangled forest, and we saw nothing.

In the evening we touched at Helena, and more passengers got on board, in defiance of the captain's shouts of refusal. He declared that the deck was giving way under the crowd, and that he would not go near the shore again, but anchor in the middle of the river, and send his boats for provisions.

While I was reading on the morning of the 12th, the report of a rifle from the lower deck summoned me to look out. There were frequent rifle-shots, and they always betokened our being near shore; generally under the bank, where the eye of the sportsman was in the way of temptation from some object in the forest. We were close under the eastern bank, whence we could peep through the massy beech-trunks into the dark recesses of the woods. For two days our eyes had rested on scenery of this kind; now it was about to change. We were approaching the fine Chickasaw bluffs, below Memphis, in the State of Tennessee. The captain expressed a wish that none of the passengers would go on shore at Memphis, where the cholera was raging. He intended to stay only a few minutes for bread and vegetables, and would not admit a single passenger on any consideration. We did not dream of disregarding his wishes, if, indeed, the heat had left us any desire to exert ourselves; but Mr. B. was so anxious that his lady should mount the bluff, that she yielded to his request; though, stout and elderly as she was, the ascent would have been a serious undertaking on a cool afternoon and with plenty of time. The entire company of passengers was assembled to watch the objects on shore; the cotton bales piled on the top of the bluff; the gentleman on horseback on the ridge, who was eying us in return; the old steamer, fitted up as a store, and moored by the bank, for the chance of traffic with voyagers; and, above all, the slaves, ascending and descending the steep path, with trays of provisions on their heads, the new bread and fresh vegetables with which we were to be cheered. Of course, all eyes were fixed upon Mr. and Mrs. B. as they attempted the ascent. The husband lent his best assistance, and dragged his poor lady about one third of the way up, when she suddenly found that she could not go a step forward or back; she stuck, in a most finished attitude of panic, with her face to the cliff and her back to us, her husband holding her up by one arm, and utterly at a loss what to do next. I hope they did not hear the shout of laughter which went up from our vessel. A stout boatman ran to their assistance, and enabled the lady to turn round, after which she came down without accident. She won everybody's esteem by her perfect good-humour on the occasion. Heated and flurried as she was, she was perfectly contented with having tried to oblige her husband. This was her object, and she gained it; and more, more than she was aware of, unless, indeed, she found that her fellow-passengers were more eager to give her pleasure after this adventure than before.

The town of Memphis looked bare and hot; and the bluffs, though a relief from the level vastness on which we had been gazing for two days, are not so beautiful as the eminences four or five hundred miles below.

The air was damp and close this night; the moon dim, the lightning blue, and glaring incessantly, and the woodashes from the chimneys very annoying. It was not weather for the deck; and, seeing that Mr. E. and two other gentlemen wanted to make up a rubber, I joined them. In our well-lighted cabin the lightning seemed to pour in in streams, and the thunder soon began to crack overhead. Mrs. H. came to us, and rebuked us for playing cards while it thundered, which she thought very blasphemous. When our rubber was over, and I retired to the ladies' cabin, I found that the lady had been doing something which had at least as much levity in it. After undressing, she had put on her life-preserver, and floundered on the floor to show how she should swim if the boat sank. Her slaves had got under the table to laugh. They little thought how near we might come to swimming for our lives before morning. I believe it was about three hours after midnight when I was awakened by a tremendous and unaccountable noise overhead. It was most like ploughing through a forest, and crashing all the trees down. The lady who shared my stateroom was up, pale and frightened, and lights were moving in the ladies' cabin. I did not choose to cause alarm by inquiry; but the motion of the boat was so strange, that I thought it must waken every one on board. The commotion lasted, I should think, about twenty minutes, when I suppose it subsided, for I fell asleep. In the morning I was shown the remains of hailstones, which must have been of an enormous size, to judge by what was left of them at the end of three hours. Mr. E. told me that we had been in the utmost danger for above a quarter of an hour, from one of the irresistible squalls to which this navigation is liable. Both the pilots had been blown away from the helm, and were obliged to leave the vessel to its fate. It was impossible to preserve a footing for an instant on the top; and the poor passengers who lay there had attempted to come down, bruised with the tremendous hail (which caused the noise we could not account for), and seeing, with the pilot, no other probability than that the hurricane deck would be blown completely away; but there was actually no standing room for these men, and they had to remain above and take their chance. The vessel drove madly from side to side of the dangerous channel, and the pilots expected every moment that she would founder. I find that we usually made much more way by night than by day, the balance of the boat being kept even while the passengers are equally dispersed and quiet, instead of running from side to side, or crowding the one gallery and deserting the other.

I was on the lookout for alligators all the way up the river, but could never see one. A deck passenger declared that a small specimen slipped off a log into the water one day when nobody else was looking; but his companions supposed he might be mistaken, as alligators are now rarely seen in this region. Terrapins were very numerous, sometimes sunning themselves on floating logs, and sometimes swimming, with only their pert little heads visible above water. Wood-pigeons might be seen flitting in the forest when we were so close under the banks as to pry into the shades, and the beautiful blue jay often gleamed before our eyes. No object was more striking than the canoes which we frequently saw, looking fearfully light and frail amid the strong current. The rower used a spoon-shaped paddle, and advanced with amazing swiftness; sometimes crossing before our bows, sometimes darting along under the bank, sometimes shooting across a track of moonlight. Very often there was only one person in the canoe, as in the instance I have elsewhere mentioned[1] of a woman who was supposed to be going on a visit twenty or thirty miles up the stream. I could hardly have conceived of a solitude so intense as this appeared to me, the being alone on that rushing sea of waters, shut in by untrodden forests; the slow fishhawk wheeling overhead, and perilous masses of driftwood whirling down the current; trunks obviously uprooted by the forces of nature, and not laid low by the hand of man. What a spectacle must our boat, with its gay crowds, have appeared to such a solitary! what a revelation that there was a busy world still stirring somewhere; a fact which, I think, I should soon discredit if I lived in the depths of this wilderness, for life would become tolerable there only by the spirit growing into harmony with the scene, wild and solemn as the objects around it.

[Footnote 1: Society in America, vol. ii., p. 101.]

The morning after the storm the landscape looked its wildest. The clouds were drifting away, and a sungleam came out as I was peeping into the forest at the wooding-place. The vines look beautiful on the black trunks of the trees after rain. Scarcely a habitation was to be seen, and it was like being set back to the days of creation, we passed so many islands in every stage of growth. I spent part of the morning with the L.'s, and we were more than once alarmed by a fearful scream, followed by a trampling and scuffling in the neighbouring gallery. It was only some young ladies, with their work and guitar, who were in a state of terror because some green boughs _would_ sweep over when we were close under the bank. They could not be reassured by the gentlemen who waited upon them, nor would they change their seats; so that we were treated with a long series of screams, till the winding of the channel carried us across to the opposite bank.