Part 3

That knot of gentlemen issuing from a plain brick building--one of the banks--is composed of bank directors. Their decisions have elevated or depressed the mercury in many an anxious breast. Two or three faces resemble those one often sees in Wall-street, or on Change, in Boston. The resemblance is so striking that one is quite sure at the first glance that he has seen them there. But no; they are merchants of this city--thorough-going commercial men. The resemblance is only that of a species. Merchants resemble each other everywhere. Their features are strongly marked and characteristic. It has been said that a Boston merchant may be known all the world over. It has been proved that a sea-faring life, especially when commenced in early years, has a tendency to produce a physical change in the organ of vision. That a mercantile life, long and intently pursued, has a tendency to stamp a peculiar character upon the features, is equally certain, in the opinion of those whose habits of observation may have led them to such physiognomical investigations. Among the remainder, are two or three in white blanket coats, broad-brimmed white hats, with slender riding-whips in their hands, who will be readily designated as planters. A circumstance that very soon arrests the attention of the stranger, is the number of gentlemen with riding-whips in their hands to be met with in all parts of the city, particularly on days when any public meeting is held. Every third or fourth person is thus, to a northerner, singularly armed. At the north few ride except in gigs. But here all are horsemen; and it is unusual to see a gentleman in a gig or carriage. If his wife rides out, he attends her _a cheval_. Instead of gigs, therefore, which would fill the streets of a northern town, saddle-horses, usually with high pummelled Spanish saddles, and numerous private carriages, in which are the ladies of the family, drawn by long-tailed horses, throng the streets and line the outside of the pave. At least a third of the persons who fill the streets are planters and their families from the country, which every day pours forth its hundreds from many miles around the city, that like a magnet attracts all within its influence.

There are several public buildings in this street of which I shall make more particular mention hereafter. My object now is merely to give you some idea of things as, when presented to it in the novel hues of "first impressions," they strike the eye of a stranger.

XXVII.

First impressions--American want of taste in public buildings --Agricultural bank--Masonic hall--Natchez academy--Education of Mississippians--Cemetery--Theatre--Presbyterian church-- Court-house--Episcopal church--Light-house--Hotels--Planters' Houses and galleries--Jefferson hotel--Cotton square.

First impressions, if preserved, before the magnifying medium of novelty through which they are seen becomes dissipated, are far more lively and striking than the half-faded scenes which memory slowly and imperfectly brings up from the past. Yet, if immediately recorded, while the colours are fresh and glowing, there is danger of drawing too much upon the imagination in the description, and exaggerating the picture. On the other hand, if the impressions are suffered to become old and faint, invention is too apt to be called in unconsciously, to fill up and complete the half-forgotten and defective sketch. The medium is safer and more accurate. A period of time sufficiently long should be suffered to elapse, that the mind, by subsequent observation, may be enabled to correct and digest its early impressions, exercise its judgment without a bias, and from more matured experience, be prepared to form its opinions, and make its comparisons with certainty. How far I have attained this desirable medium, the general character and justice of my descriptions must alone determine.

The deficient perception of architectural beauty, in the composition of American minds, has frequently, and with some truth, been a subject upon which foreign tourists love to exercise their castigating pens--weapons always wielded fearlessly and pitilessly against every thing on this side of the Atlantic. The very small number of handsome public buildings in the United States, and the total contempt for order or style which, (with but here and there an honourable exception,) they evince, would give a very plausible foundation for this animadversion, did not Americans redeem their reputation in this point, by the pure and correct taste they universally exhibit in the construction of their private residences. Herein, they are not surpassed by any other nation. Natchez, like most of the minor cities of this country, cannot boast of any public buildings remarkable for harmonious conformity to the rules or orders of architecture. They are, nevertheless, well deserving of notice, highly ornamental to the city, and reflect honour upon the public spirit of its citizens. The Agricultural bank is unquestionably the finest structure in the city. It has been erected very recently on the south side of Main-street, presenting a noble colonnaded front, of the modernized Grecian style; being built somewhat after the model of the United States bank at Philadelphia; though brick and stucco are here substituted for marble, and heavy pillars for the graceful column. It is entered from the street by a broad and spacious flight of steps, leading to its lofty portico, from which three large doors give admission into its vast hall, decidedly the finest room south or west of Washington. The whole structure is a chaste and beautiful specimen of architecture. It is partially enclosed by a light, iron railing. To a stranger this edifice is a striking object, and, contrasted with the buildings of less pretension around it, will call forth his warmest admiration. The other banks, of which there are, in all, three, including a branch of the United States bank, are plain brick buildings, undistinguished from the adjoining stores, except by a colder and more unfurnished appearance, and the absence of signs. A short distance above this fine building is the Masonic Hall; a large square edifice, two lofty stories in height. Its front is beautifully stuccoed, and ornamented with white pilasters. The hall is in the second story; a large, plain, vaulted apartment, almost entirely destitute of the splendid furniture and rich decorations which characterise such places at the north. Here masonry, with its imposing forms, ceremonies, and honours, is yet preserved in all its pristine glory. The first story of the building is used as an academy--the only one in this state. It is a well-conducted institution, and its pupils are thoroughly instructed by competent officers, who are graduates of northern colleges, as are most of the public and private instructors of this state. The number of students is generally large. Those who are destined for professional life, after completing their preparatory course here, usually enter some one of the colleges at the north. Yale, Princeton, and Harvard annually receive several from this state; either from this academy or from under the hands of the private tutors, who are dispersed throughout the state, and from whom a great majority of the planters' sons receive their preparatory education. But on the subject of education in this country, I shall speak more fully hereafter. I could not pass by this institution, which reflects so much honour upon the city, without expressing my gratification at its flourishing condition and high character. It is the more gratifying from being unexpected at the south, which, till very lately, has been wholly dependent upon the northern seminaries or private institutions for the education of her sons. To see here an institution that cannot be surpassed by any of the same rank in other states, must not only be pleasing to the friends of education, but particularly so to the citizens of this state, to whom it is ably demonstrated, by the success of this academy, that literature is not an exotic, though its germs may heretofore have been transplanted from another soil. There is a female seminary also in the city, which, though of a very respectable character, is not so celebrated and flourishing as many others in the state.

On the south side of the next square is an old "burying-ground," crowning an eminence whose surface is covered with fragments of grave-stones and dismantled tombs. The street is excavated through it to its base, leaving a wall or bank of earth nearly thirty feet in height; upon the verge of which crumbling tombs are suspended, threatening to fall upon the passenger beneath. It has not been used for many years as a place of burial; the present cemetery being about a mile above the city, in a delightful spot among the green hills which cluster along the banks of the river. This old cemetery is a striking but disagreeable feature in the midst of so fair a city. Adjoining it, on the eastern side, and nearly at the extremity of the street and also of the city, stands the theatre; a large, commodious building, constructed of brick, with arched entrances and perfectly plain exterior. The citizens of Natchez are not a play-going community; consequently they take little pride in the possession of a fine theatre. Its interior, however, is well arranged, convenient, and handsomely painted and decorated. Its boards are supplied, for two or three months during every season, by performers from New-Orleans or New-York. Just beyond the theatre is the termination of Main-street, here intersected by another, from which, to the right and left, fine roads extend into the country--one to Washington, a pleasant village six miles distant, formerly the seat of government of the territory and the location of the public offices; but now a retired, unassuming and rural spot, boasting of a well-endowed college and female seminary--of which, more hereafter. Of the other public buildings of Natchez, the Presbyterian church is the finest and most imposing. It stands on a commanding site, overlooking the public square, a pleasant green flat, in the centre of which is the court-house. It is constructed of bricks, which are allowed to retain their original colour; and surrounded by buff-coloured pilasters of stucco work, which is here generally substituted for granite in facings. It is surmounted, at the west end, by a fine tower of successive stories; on one side of which is a clock, conspicuous from the most distant parts of the city and suburbs.--You are aware, probably, that there are in this country no Congregationalists, so called; Presbyterians supply the place of this denomination in the ecclesiastical society of all the south and west. The prevailing denomination, however, in this state, as in all this section of the United States, is that of the Methodists, which embraces men of all classes, including a large proportion of planters. I now merely allude to this and other subjects of the kind, as I intend, in subsequent letters, to treat of them more at large.

The court-house is a fine, large, square building, opposite to the church, surmounted by a cupola. It is surrounded by a beautiful, though not spacious, green. On the streets which bound the four sides of it are situated the lawyers' and public offices, which are generally plain, neat, wooden buildings, from one to two stories in height. Should they be denominated from the state of those who occupy them, they would be correctly designated "bachelors' halls." Shade trees half embower them and the court-house in their rich foliage. Opposite to the south side of the square is the county prison; a handsome two story brick building, resembling, save in its grated tier of windows in the upper story, a gentleman's private dwelling. There is a fine Episcopalian church in the south-east part of the town, adding much to its beauty. It is built of brick, and surmounted by a vast dome, which has a rather heavy, overgrown appearance, and is evidently too large for the building. It has a neat front, adorned with a portico of the usual brick pillars. There are not many Episcopalians here; but the few who are of this denomination are, as every where else in the United States, generally of the wealthy and educated class. There is also a Methodist church adjoining the Masonic hall; a plain, neat building, remarkable only for its unassuming simplicity, like all others of this denomination in America.

The light-house upon the bluff, at the north-west corner of the city, is well deserving of notice, though not properly ranked under the public buildings of Natchez. It is a simple tower, about forty feet in height, commanding a section of the river, north and south, of about twelve miles. But the natural inquiry of the stranger is, "What is its use?" A light-house on a river bank, three hundred miles from the sea, has certainly no place in the theory of the utilitarian. The use of it its projectors must determine. Were a good telescope placed in its lantern it would make a fine observatory, and become a source of amusement as well as of improvement to the citizens, to whom it is now merely a standing monument, in proof of the proverb, that "wisdom dwelleth not in all men." The hotels are very fine. Parker's, on one of the front squares, near the bluff, is a handsome, costly, and very extensive building, three stories in height, with a stuccoed front, in imitation of granite, and decidedly the largest edifice in the city. Its rooms are large, spacious, and elegantly furnished; suited rather for gentlemen and their families, who choose a temporary residence in town, than for transient travellers and single men, who more frequently resort to the "Mansion-house." This is not so large a structure as the former, though its proprietor is enlarging it, on an extensive scale. It has long been celebrated as an excellent house. Its accommodations for ladies are also very good, their rooms opening into ventilated piazzas, or galleries, as they are termed here, which are as necessary to every house in this country as fire-places to a northern dwelling. These galleries, or more properly verandas, are constructed--not like the New-England piazza, raised on columns half the height of the building, with a flat roof, and surrounded by a railing--but by extending a sloping roof beyond the main building, supported at its verge by slender columns; as the houses are usually of but one story in this country, southerners having a singular aversion to mounting stairs. Such porticoes are easily constructed. No house, particularly a planter's, is complete without this gallery, usually at both the back and front; which furnishes a fine promenade and dining-room in the warm season, and adds much to the lightness and beauty of the edifice.

There is another very good hotel here, equivalent to Richardson's, in New-Orleans, or the Elm-street house in Boston, where the country people usually put up when they come in from the distant counties to dispose of their cotton. It fronts on "Cotton-square," as a triangular area, formed by clipping off a corner of one of the city squares, is termed; which is filled every day, during the months of November, December, and January, with huge teams loaded with cotton bales, for which this is the peculiar market place.

The "City hotel," lately enlarged and refurnished, is now becoming quite a place of fashionable resort.

XXVIII.

Society of Natchez--New-England adventurers--Their prospects --The Yankee sisterhood--Southern bachelors--Southern society --Woman--Her past and present condition--Single combats-- Fireside pleasures unknown--A change--Town and country-- Characteristic discrepancies.

Until within a very short period, the society of Natchez has exhibited one peculiar characteristic, in the estimation of a northerner, in whose migrating land "seven women," literally fulfilling the prediction, "take hold of one man;" a prediction which has, moreover, been fulfilled, according to the redoubtable and most classical Crockett, in the west; but by no means in this place, or in any of the embryo cities, which are springing up like Jonah's gourd, along the banks of the great "father of waters." The predominance of male population in the countless villages that are dotting the great western valley, rising up amidst the forests, one after another, as stars come out at evening, and almost in as rapid succession, is a necessary consequence of the natural laws of migration. In the old Atlantic and New-England states, the sons, as they successively grow up to manhood, take the paternal blessing and their little patrimony, often all easily packed and carried in a knapsack, but oftener in their heads, and bend their way to the "great west," to seek their fortunes, with them no nursery tale, but a stern and hardly earned reality:--there to struggle--prosper or fail--with blighted hopes go down to early graves, or, building a fire-side of their own, gather around it sons, who, in their declining years, shall, in their turn, go forth from the paternal roof to seek beyond the mountains of the Pacific shore a name, a fire-side, and a home of their own. And such is human life!

To this migratory propensity is to be attributed the recent peculiar state of society in this city, and throughout the whole western country. The sons are the founders of these infant emporiums, but the daughters stay at home in a state of single blessedness--blessings (?) to the maternal roof, till some bold aspirants for the yoke of hymen return, after spying out the land, take them under their migratory wings and bear them to their new home. But unluckily for six out of every seven of the fair daughters of the east, the pioneers of the west feel disposed to pass their lives in all the solitary dignity of the bachelor state. Wrapped up in their speculations, their segars and their "clubs," not even a second Sabine device could move them to bend their reluctant necks to the noose. Those, however, who do take to themselves "helpmeets," are more gallant and chivalrous than their Roman predecessors in their mode of obtaining them, not demurring to travel, like Coelebs, many hundred leagues to the land of steady habits, to secure the possession of some one of its lovely flowers. The concentrating of a great number of young gentlemen for a permanent residence in one spot, without a suitable proportion of the gentler sex to enliven and relieve the rougher shades of such an assemblage, must produce a state of society, varying essentially from that in communities where the division is more equal. Hotels, or offices of professional business must be their residences--their leisure hours must be spent in lounging at each other's rooms like college students, (to whose mode of life their's is not dissimilar,) or in the public rooms of the hotels, cafes, or gambling houses. Habits difficult to eradicate are contracted, of dark and fatal consequences to many; and a rude, cavalier bearing is thereby imperceptibly acquired, more congenial with the wild, free spirit of the middle ages, than the refinement of modern times. The bold and rugged outlines natural to the sterner character of man, can only be softened by that refining influence which the cultivated female mind irresistibly exerts upon society. Wherever woman--

"Blessing and blest, where'er she moves,"

has exercised this gentle sway, the ruder attributes of man have been subdued and blended with the soft and lovely virtues so eminently her own. Second to Christianity, of which it is a striking effect, the exalted rank to which man has elevated woman, from that degrading and tyrannical subjugation to which she has in Pagan nations, in all ages, from the pride and ignorance of her _soi disant_ "lords," been subjected, has contributed more to the mental and personal refinement, dignity and moral excellence of men, than any other agency that has operated with a moral tendency directly upon the human mind. To the absence of this purifying influence, is to be attributed in a very great degree, that loose, immoral, and reckless state of society, peculiar to all border settlements and new towns, originating generally from communities of men. In such places that mysterious, yet indisputable power, exercised by the other sex upon society, is unknown; and men, throwing the reins upon the necks of their passions, plunge into vice and dissipation, unchecked and unrestrained. In such a state the duello had its origin--that blessed relic of that blessed age, when our thick-skulled ancestors broke each other's heads with mace and battle axe, for "faire ladye's love," or mere pleasant pastime--and a similar state of things will always preserve and encourage it. Hence the prevalence of this practice in the newly settled south and west, where the healthful restraint of female society has been till within a few years unknown. But as communities gain refinement through its influence, this mode of "healing honour's wounds," so unwise, unsatisfactory and sinful, gradually becomes less and less popular--till finally it is but a "theme of the past." To this state of disuse and oblivion it is rapidly advancing in this portion of the south-west, which, according to the theory before advanced, is an indication of the growing refinement, and moral and intellectual improvement of the community. Natchez has been, you are well aware, celebrated for the frequency and sanguinary character of its single combats; and this reputation it has once justly merited. Till within a few years, duels were alarmingly frequent. But more recently public opinion has changed, and the practice is now almost abandoned. The society has emerged from its peculiar bachelor cast, to that social and refined character, which constitutes the charm of well organized and cultivated communities. But a short time since, there were not three married men to ten unmarried. The latter predominating, gave the tone to society, which was, as I have before observed, that of a university, so far as habits and manners were concerned. And the resemblance was still greater, as a large majority of the young men were graduates of northern seminaries, or well informed young merchants. The social or domestic circle, so dear to every New-Englander, in which he delights to mingle wherever he reposes after his wanderings, was neglected or unvalued; and the young ladies, of whom there was found here and there one, (for their appearance in this desert of men was with the unfrequency of "Angel's visits,") were compelled to pine neglected, and

"To bloom unseen around their lonely hearths, And waste their sweetness on the desert air."

Such was the state of society here formerly, varied only, at long intervals, by a public ball at some one of the hotels, got up to kill _ennui_, a plant which, in such a soil, flourishes vigorously. But now "a change has come o'er the spirit of the town." A refined, intellectual, and highly educated class of females, both exotic and natural plants, enrich and diversify the moral features of the former lonely and monotonous scene: and as the vine entwining around the oak relieves with lines of grace and beauty its harsh, rugged outlines, so woman here, as every where, has assumed her brilliant sceptre, waved it over the heterogeneous mass, and "bidden it to live."