My Diary North and South – William Howard Russell

May Day.—Not unworthy of the best effort of English fine weather before the change in the calendar robbed the poets of twelve days, but still a little warm for choice. The young American artist Moses, who was to have called our party to meet the officers who were going to Fort Pulaski, for some reason known to himself remained on board the Camilla, and when at last we got down to the river-side I found Commodore Tatnall and Brigadier Lawton in full uniform waiting for me.

The river is about the width of the Thames below Gravesend, very muddy, with a strong current, and rather fetid. That effect might have been produced from the rice-swamps at the other side of it, where the land is quite low, and stretches away as far as the sea in one level green, smooth as a billiard-cloth. The bank at the city side is higher, so that the houses stand on a little eminence over the stream, affording convenient wharfage and slips for merchant vessels.

Of these there were few indeed visible—nearly all had cleared out for fear of the blockade; some coasting vessels were lying idle at the quay side, and in the middle of the stream near a floating dock the Camilla was moored, with her club ensign flying. These are the times for bold ventures, and if Uncle Sam is not very quick with his blockades, there will be plenty of privateers and the like under C. S. A. colors looking out for his fat merchantmen all over the world.

I have been trying to persuade my friends here they will find very few Englishmen willing to take letters of marque and reprisal.

The steamer which was waiting to receive us had the Confederate flag flying, and Commodore Tatnall, pointing to a young officer in a naval uniform, told me he had just “come over from the other side,” and that he had pressed hard to be allowed to hoist a Commodore or flag-officer’s ensign in honor of the visit, and of the occasion. I was much interested in the fine white-headed, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked old man—who suddenly found himself blown into the air by a great political explosion, and in doubt and wonderment was floating to shore, under a strange flag in unknown waters. He was full of anecdote too, as to strange flags in distant waters and well-known names. The gentry of Savannah had a sort of Celtic feeling towards him in regard of his old name, and seemed determined to support him.

He has served the Stars and Stripes for three fourths of a long life—his friends are in the North, his wife’s kindred are there, and so are all his best associations — but his State has gone out. How could he fight against the country that gave him birth! The United States is no country, in the sense we understand the words. It is a corporation or a body corporate for certain purposes, and a man might as well call himself a native of the common council of the city of London, or a native of the Swiss Diet, in the estimation of our Americans, as say he is a citizen of the United States; though it answers very well to say so when he is abroad, or for purposes of a legal character.

Of Fort Pulaski itself I wrote on my return a long account to the “Times.”

When I was venturing to point out to General Lawton the weakness of Fort Pulaski, placed as it is in low land, accessible to boats, and quite open enough for approaches from the city side, he said, “Oh, that is true enough. All our sea-coast works are liable to that remark, but the Commodore will take care of the Yankees at sea, and we shall manage them on land.” These people all make a mistake in referring to the events of the old war. “We beat off the British fleet at Charleston by the militia—ergo, we’ll sink the Yankees now.” They do not understand the nature of the new shell and heavy vertical fire, or the effect of projectiles from great distances falling into open works. The Commodore afterwards, smiling, remarked, “I have no fleet. Long before the Southern Confederacy has a fleet that can cope with the Stars and Stripes my bones will be white in the grave.”

We got back by eight o’clock P.M., after a pleasant day. What I saw did not satisfy me that Pulaski was strong, or Savannah very safe. At Bonaventure yesterday I saw a poor fort called “Thunderbolt,” on an inlet from which the city was quite accessible. It could be easily menaced from that point, while attempts at landing were made elsewhere as soon as Pulaski was reduced. At dinner met a very strong and very well informed Southerner—there are some who are neither — or either — whose name was spelled Gourdin and pronounced Go-dine—just as Huger is called Hugeë— and Tagliaferro, Telfer in these parts.

April 30th.—At 1·30 P.M. a small party started from Mr. Green’s to visit the cemetery of Bonaventure, to which every visitor to Savannah must pay his pilgrimage; difficiles aditus primos habet—a deep sandy road which strains the horses and the carriages; but at last “the shell road” is reached—a highway-several miles long, consisting of oyster shells—the pride of Savannah, which eats as many oysters as it can to add to the length of this wonderful road. There is no stone in the whole of the vast alluvial ranges of South Carolina and Maritime Georgia, and the only substance available for making a road is the oyster shell. There is a toll gate at each end to aid the oyster shells. Remember they are three times the size of any European crustacean of the sort.

A pleasant drive through the shady hedgerows and bordering trees lead to a dilapidated porter’s lodge and gateway, within which rose in a towering mass of green one of the finest pieces of forest architecture possible; nothing to be sure like Burnham Beeches, or some of the forest glades of Windsor, but possessed, nevertheless, of a character quite its own. What we gazed upon was, in fact, the ruin of grand avenues of live oak, so well-disposed that their peculiar mode of growth afforded an unusual development of the “Gothic idea,” worked out and elaborated by a superabundant fall from the overlacing arms and intertwined branches of the tillandsia, or Spanish moss, a weeping, drooping, plumaceous parasite, which oes to the tree what its animal type, the yellow fever—vomito prieto—does to man—clings to it everlastingly, drying up sap, poisoning blood, killing the principle of life till it dies. The only differ, as they say in Ireland, is, that the tillandsia all the time looks very pretty, and that the process lasts very long. Some there are who praise this tillandsia, hanging like the tresses of a witch’s hair over an invisible face, but to me it is a paltry parasite, destroying the grace and beauty of that it preys upon, and letting fall its dull tendrils over the fresh lovely green, as clouds drop over the face of some beautiful landscape. Despite all this, Bonaventure is a scene of remarkable interest; it seems to have been intended for a place of tombs. The Turks would have filled it with turbaned white pillars, and with warm ghosts at night. The French would have decorated it with interlaced hands of stone, with tears of red and black on white ground, with wreathes of immortelles. I am not sure that we would have done much more than have got up a cemetery company, interested Shillibeer, hired a beadle, and erected an iron paling. The Savannah people not following any of these fashions, all of which are adopted in Northern cities, have left everything to nature and the gatekeeper, and to the owner of one of the hotels, who has got up a grave yard in the ground. And there, scattered up and down under the grand old trees, which drop tears of Spanish moss, and weave wreathes of Spanish moss, and shake plumes of Spanish moss over them, are a few monumental stones to certain citizens of Savannah. There is a melancholy air about the place independently of these emblems of our mortality, which might recommend it specially for picnics. There never was before a cemetery where nature seemed to aid the effect intended by man so thoroughly. Everyone knows a weeping willow will cry over a wedding party if they sit under it, as well as over a grave. But here the Spanish moss looks like weepers wreathed by some fantastic hand out of the crape of Dreamland. Lucian’s Ghostlander, the son of Skeleton of the Tribe of the Juiceless, could tell us something of such weird trappings. They are known indeed as the best bunting for yellow fever to fight under. Wherever their flickering horsehair tresses wave in the breeze, taper end downwards, Squire Black Jack is bearing lance and sword. One great green oak says to the other, “This fellow is killing me. Take his deadly robes off my limbs!” “Alas ! See how he is ruining me! I have no life to help you.” It is, indeed, a strange and very ghastly place. Here are so many querci virentes, old enough to be strong, and big, and great, sapfull, lusty, wide armed, green-honoured — all dying out slowly beneath tillandsia, as if they were so many monarchies perishing of decay—or so many youthful republics dying of buncombe brag, richness of blood, and other diseases fatal to overgrown bodies politic.

The void left in the midst of all these designed walks and stately avenues, by the absence of any suitable centre, increases the seclusion and solitude. A house ought to be there somewhere you feel—in fact there was once the mansion of the Tatnalls, a good old English family, whose ancestors came from the old country, ere the rights of man were talked of, and lived among the Oglethorpes, and such men of the pigtail, school who would have been greatly astonished at finding them selves in company with Benjamin Franklin or his kind. I don’t know anything of old Tatnall. Indeed who does? But he had a fine idea of planting trees, which he never got in America, where he would have received scant praise for anything but his power to plant cotton or sugar cane just now. In his knee reeches, and top boots, I can fancy the old gentleman reproducing some home scene, and boasting to himself, “I will make it as fine as Lord Nihilo’s park.” Could he see it now?—A decaying army of the dead. The mansion was burned down during a Christmas merrymaking, and was never built again, and the young trees have grown up despite the Spanish moss, and now they stand, as it were in cathedral aisles, around the ruins of the departed house, shading the ground, and enshrining its memories in an antiquity which seems of the remotest, although it is not as ancient as that of the youngest oak in the Squire’s park at home.

I have before oftentimes in my short voyages here, wondered greatly at the reverence bestowed on a tree. In fact, it is because a tree of any decent growth is sure to be older than anything else around it; and although young America revels in her future, she is becoming old enough to think about her past.

In the evening Mr. Green gave a dinner to some very agreeable people, Mr. Ward, the Chinese Minister— (who tried, by-the-bye, to make it appear that his wooden box was the Pekin State carriage for distinguished foreigners)—Mr. Locke, the clever and intelligent editor of the principal journal in Savannah, Brigadier Lawton, one of the Judges, a Britisher, owner of the once renowned America which, under the name of Camilla, was now lying in the river (not perhaps without reference to a little speculation in running the blockade, hourly expected), Mr. Ward and Commodore Tatnall, so well known to us in England for his gallant conduct in the Peiho affair, when he offered and gave our vessels aid, though a neutral, and uttered the exclamation in doing so,— in his despatch at all events,—”that blood was thicker than water.” Of our party was also Mr. Hodgson, well known to most of our Mediterranean travelers some years back, when he was United States’ Consul in the East. He amuses his leisure still by inditing and reading monographs on the languages of divers barbarous tribes in Numidia and Mauritania.

The Georgians are not quite so vehement as the South Carolinians in their hate of the Northerners; but they are scarcely less determined to fight President Lincoln and all his men. And that is the test of this rebellion’s strength. I did not hear any profession of a desire to become subject to England, or to borrow a prince of us; but I have nowhere seen stronger determination to resist any reunion with the New England States. “They can’t conquer us, Sir?” “If they try it, we’ll whip them.”

April 29th.—This morning up at six A.M., bade farewell to our hostess and Barnwell Island, and proceeded with Trescot back to the Pocotaligo station, which we reached at 12·20. On our way Mr. Heyward and his son rode out of a field, looking very like a couple of English country squires in all but hats and saddles. The young gentleman was good enough to bring over a snake hawk he had shot for me. At the station, to which the Heywards accompanied us, were the Elliotts and others, who had come over with invitations and adieux; and I beguiled the time to Savannah reading the very interesting book by Mr. Elliott, senior, on the Wild Sports of Carolina, which was taken up by some one when I left the carriage for a moment and not returned to me. The country through which we passed was flat and flooded as usual, and the rail passed over dark deep rivers on lofty trestle-work, by pine wood and dogwood tree, by the green plantation clearing, with mud bank, dyke, and tiny canal mile by mile, the train stopping for the usual freight of ladies, and negro nurses, and young planters, all very much of the same class, till at 3 o’clock P.M., the cars rattled up alongside a large shed, and we were told we had arrived at Savannah.

Here was waiting for me Mr. Charles Green, who had already claimed me and my friend as his guests, and I found in his carriage the young American designer, who had preceded me from Charleston, and had informed Mr. Green of my coming.

The drive through such portion of Savannah as lay between the terminus and Mr. Green’s house, soon satisfied my eyes that it had two peculiarities. In the first place, it had the deepest sand in the streets I have ever seen; and next, the streets were composed of the most odd, quaint, green windowed, many colored little houses I ever beheld, with an odd population of lean, sallow, ill-dressed unwholesome-looking whites, lounging about the exchanges and corners, and a busy, well-clad, gaily-attired race of negroes, working their way through piles of children, under the shade of the trees which bordered all the streets. The fringe of green, and the height attained by the live oak, Pride of India, and magnolia, give a delicious freshness and novelty to the streets of Savannah, which is increased by the great number of squares and openings covered with something like sward, fenced round by white rail, and embellished with noble trees to be seen at every few hundred yards. It is difficult to believe you are in the midst of a city, and I was repeatedly reminded of the environs of a large Indian cantonment—the same kind of churches and detached houses, with their plantations and gardens not unlike. The wealthier classes, however, have houses of the New York Fifth Avenue character: one of the best of these, a handsome mansion of rich red sandstone, belonged to my host, who coming out from England many years ago, raised himself by industry and intelligence to the position of one of the first merchants in Savannah. Italian statuary graced the hall; finely carved tables and furniture, stained glass, and pictures from Europe set forth the sitting-rooms; and the luxury of bath-rooms and a supply of cold fresh water, rendered it an exception to the general run of Southern edifices. Mr. Green drove me through the town, which impressed me more than ever with its peculiar character. We visited Brigadier-General Lawton, who is charged with the defences of the place against the expected Yankees, and found him just setting out to inspect a band of volunteers, whose drums we heard in the distance, and whose bayonets were gleaming through the clouds of Savannah dust, close to the statue erected to the memory of one Pulaski, a Pole, who was mortally wounded in the unsuccessful defence of the city against the British in the war of Independence. He turned back and led us into his house. The hall was filled with little round rolls of flannel. “These,” said he, “are cartridges for cannon of various calibres, made by the ladies of Mrs. Lawton’s ‘cartridge class’” There were more cartridges in the back parlor, so that the house was not quite a safe place to smoke a cigar in. The General has been in the United States’ army, and has now come forward to head the people of this State in their resistance to the Yankees.

We took a stroll in the park, and I learned the news of the last few days. The people of the South, I find, are delighted at a snubbing which Mr. Seward has given to Governor Hicks of Maryland, for recommending the arbitration of Lord Lyons, and he is stated to have informed Governor Hicks that “our troubles could not be referred to foreign arbitration, least of all to that of the representative of a European monarchy.” The most terrible accounts are given of the state of things in Washington. Mr. Lincoln consoles himself for his miseries by drinking. Mr. Seward follows suit. The White House and capital are full of drunken border ruffians, headed by one Jim Lane of Kansas. But, on the other hand, the Yankees, under one Butler, a Massachusetts lawyer, have arrived at Annapolis, in Maryland, secured the “Constitution” man-of-war, and are raising masses of men for the invasion of the South all over the States. The most important thing, as it strikes me, is the proclamation of the Governor of Georgia, forbidding citizens to pay any money on account of debts due to Northerners, till the end of the war. General Robert E. Lee has been named Commander-in-Chief of the Forces of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and troops are flocking to that State from Alabama and other States. Governor Ellis has called out 30,000 volunteers in North Carolina, and Governor Rector of Arkansas has seized the United States’ military stores at Napoleon. There is a rumor that Fort Pickens has been taken also, but it is very probably untrue. In Texas and Arkansas the United States regulars have not made an attempt to defend any of the forts.

In the midst of all this warlike work, volunteers drilling, bands playing, it was pleasant to walk in the shady park, with its cool fountains, and to see the children playing about—many of them, alas! “playing at soldiers”—in charge of their nurses. Returning, sat in the verandah and smoked a cigar; but the mosquitoes were very keen and numerous. My host did not mind them, but my cuticle will never be sting-proof.

April 27th.—Mrs. Trescot, it seems, spent part of her night in attendance on a young gentleman of color, who was introduced into the world in a state of servitude by his poor chattel of a mother. Such kindly acts as these are more common than we may suppose; and it would be unfair to put a strict or unfair construction on the motives of slave owners in paying such attention to their property. Indeed, as Mrs. Trescot says, “When people talk of my having so many slaves, I always tell them it is the slaves who own me. Morning, noon, and night, I’m obliged to look after them, to doctor them, and attend to them in every way.” Property has its duties, you see, madam, as well as its rights.

The planter’s house is quite new, and was built by himself; the principal material being wood, and most of the work being done by his own negroes. Such work as window-sashes and panellings, however, was executed in Charleston. A pretty garden runs at the back, and from the windows there are wide stretches of cotton-fields visible, and glimpses of the river to be seen.

After breakfast our little party repaired to the riverside, and sat under the shade of some noble trees waiting for the boat which was to bear us to the fishing-grounds. The wind blew up stream, running with the tide, and we strained our eyes in vain for the boat. The river is here nearly a mile across,—a noble estuary rather,—with low banks lined with forests, into which the axe has made deep forays and clearings for cotton-fields.

It would have astonished a stray English traveler, if, penetrating the shade, he heard in such an out-of-the-way place familiar names and things spoken of by the three lazy persons who were stretched out— cigar in mouth—on the ant-haunted trunks which lay prostrate by the sea-shore. Mr. Trescot spent some time in London as attache to the United States Legation, was a club man, and had a large circle of acquaintance among the young men about town, of whom he remembered many anecdotes and peculiarities, and little adventures. Since that time he was Under-Secretary of State in Mr. Buchanan’s administration, and went out with Secession. He is the author of a very agreeable book on a dry subject, “The History of American Diplomacy,” which is curious enough as an unconscious exposition of the anti-British jealousies, and even antipathies, which have animated American statesmen since they were created. In fact, much of American diplomacy means hostility to England, and the skilful employment of the anti-British sentiment at their disposal in their own country and elsewhere. Now he was talking pleasantly of people he had met—many of them mutual friends. “Here is the boat at last!” I had been sweeping the broad river with my glass occasionally, and at length detected a speck on its broad surface moving down towards us, with a white dot marking the foam at its bows. Spite of wind and tideway, it came rapidly, and soon approached us, pulled by six powerful negroes, attired in red flannel jackets and white straw hats with broad ribands. The craft itself— a kind of monster canoe, some forty-five feet long, narrow, wall-sided, with high bow and raised stern— lay deep in the water, for there were extra negroes for the fishing, servants, baskets of provisions, water buckets, stone jars of less innocent drinking, and abaft there was a knot of great strong planters,— Elliotts all—cousins, uncles, and brothers. A friendly hail as they swept up alongside,—an exchange of salutations.

“Well, Trescot, have you got plenty of Crabs?” A groan burst forth at his insouciant reply. He had been charged to find bait, and he had told the negroes to do so, and the negroes had not done so. The fishermen looked grievously at each other, and fiercely at Trescot, who assumed an air of recklessness, and threw doubts on the existence of fish in the river, and resorted to similar miserable subterfuges; indeed, it was subsequently discovered that he was an utter infidel in regard to the delights of piscicapture.

“Now, all aboard! Over, you fellows, and take these gentlemen in!” The negroes were over in a moment, waist deep, and, each taking one on his back, deposited us dry in the boat. I only mention this to record the fact, that I was much impressed by a practical demonstration from my bearer respecting the strong odor of the skin of a heated African. I have been wedged up in a column of infantry on a hot day, and have marched to leeward of Ghoorkhas in India, but the overpowering pungent smell of the negro exceeds everything of the kind I have been unfortunate enough to experience.

The vessel was soon moving again, against a ripple, caused by the wind, which blew dead against us; and notwithstanding the praises bestowed on the boat, it was easy to perceive that the labor of pulling such a dead-log-like thing through the water told severely on the rowers, who had already come some twelve miles, I think. Nevertheless, they were, told to sing, and they began accordingly one of those wild Baptist chants about the Jordan in which they delight, —not destitute of music, but utterly unlike what is called an Ethiopian melody.

The banks of the river on both sides are low; on the left covered with wood, through which, here and there, at intervals, one could see a planter’s or overseer’s cottage. The course of this great combination of salt and fresh water sometimes changes, so that houses are swept away and plantations submerged; but the land is much valued nevertheless, on account of the fineness of the cotton grown among the islands. “Cotton at 12 cents a pound, and we don’t fear the world.”

As the boat was going to the fishing-ground, which lay towards the mouth of the river at Hilton Head, our friends talked politics and sporting combined,—the first of the usual character, the second quite new.

I heard much of the mighty devil-fish which frequents these waters. One of our party, Mr. Elliott, sen., a tall, knotty, gnarled sort of man, with a mellow eye and a hearty voice, was a famous hand at the sport, and had had some hair-breadth escapes in pursuit of it. The fish is described as of enormous size and strength, a monster ray, which possesses formidable antennæ-like horns, and a pair of huge fins, or flappers, one of which rises above the water as the creature moves below the surface. The hunters, as they may be called, go out in parties—three or four boats, or more, with good store of sharp harpoons and tow-lines, and lances. When they perceive the creature, one boat takes the lead, and moves down towards it, the others following, each with a harpooner standing in the bow. The devil-fish sometimes is wary, and dives, when it sees boat, taking such a long spell below that it is never seen again. At other times, however, it backs, and lets the boat come so near as to allow of the harpooner striking it, or it dives for a short way and comes up near the boats again. The moment the harpoon is fixed, the line is paid out by the rush of the creature, which is made with tremendous force, and all the boats at once hurry up, so that one after another they are made fast to that in which the lucky sportsman is seated. At length, when the line is run out, checked from time to time as much as can be done with safety, the crew take their oars and follow the course of the ray, which swims so fast, however, that it keeps the line taut, and drags the whole flotilla seawards. It depends on its size and strength to determine how soon it rises to the surface; by degrees the line is warped in and hove short till the boats are brought near, and when the ray comes up it is attacked with a shower of lances and harpoons, and dragged off into shoal water to die.

On one occasion, our Nimrod told us, he was standing in the bows of the boat, harpoon in hand, when a devil fish came up close to him ; he threw the harpoon, struck it, but at the same time the boat ran against the creature with a shock which threw him right forward on its back, and in an instant it caught him in its horrid arms and plunged down with him to the depths. Imagine the horror of the moment! Imagine the joy of the terrified drowning, dying man, when, for some inscrutable reason, the devil fish-relaxed its grip, and enabled him to strike for the surface, where he was dragged into the boat more dead than alive by his terror-smitten companions, — the only man who ever got out of the embraces of that thing alive. “Tom is so tough that even a devil-fish could make nothing out of him.”

At last we came to our fishing-ground. There was a substitute found for the favorite crab, and it was fondly hoped our toils might be rewarded with success. And these were toils, for the water is deep and the lines heavy. But to alleviate them, some hampers were produced from the stern, and wonderful pies from Mrs. Trescot’s hands, and from those of fair ladies up the river whom we shall never see, were spread out, and bottles which represented distant cellars in friendly nooks far away. “No drum here! Up anchor, and! pull away a few miles lower down.” Trescot shook his head, and again asserted his disbelief in fishing, or rather in catching, and indeed made a sort of pretence at arguing that it was wiser to remain quiet and talk philosophical politics; but, as judge of appeal, I gave it against him, and the negroes bent to their oars, and we went thumping through the spray, till, rounding a point of land, we saw pitched on the sandy shore ahead of us, on the right bank, a tent, and close by two boats. “There is a party at it!” A fire was burning on the beach, and as we came near, Tom and Jack and Harry were successively identified. “There’s no take on, or they would not be on shore. This is very unfortunate.”

All the regret of my friends was on my account, so to ease their minds I assured them I did not mind the disappointment much. “Hallo, Dick! Caught any drum?” “A few this morning; bad sport now, and will be till tide turns again.” I was introduced to all the party from a distance, and presently I saw one of them raising from a boat something in look and shape and color like a sack of flour, which he gave to a negro, who proceeded to carry it towards us in a little skiff. “Thank you, Charley. I just want to let Mr. Russell see a drum-fish.” And a very odd fish it was,—a thick lumpish form, about 4 and a half feet long, with enormous head and scales, and teeth like the grinders of a ruminant animal, acting on a great pad of bone in the roof of the mouth,— a very unlovely thing, swollen with roe, which is the great delicacy.

“No chance till the tide turned,”—but that would be too late for our return, and so unwillingly we were compelled to steer towards home, hearing now and then the singular noise like the tap on a large unbraced drum, from which the fish takes its name. At first, when I heard it, I was inclined to think it was made by some one in the boat, so near and close did it sound; but soon it came from all sides of us, and evidently from the depths of the water beneath us,— not a sharp rat-tat-tap, but a full muffled blow with a heavy thud on the sheepskin. Mr. Trescot told me that on a still evening by the river-side the effect sometimes is most curious,—the rolling and pattering is audible at a great distance. Our friends were in excellent humor with everything and everybody, except the Yankees, though they had caught no fish, and kept the negroes at singing and rowing till at nightfall we landed at the island, and so to bed after supper and a little conversation, in which Mrs. Trescot again explained how easily she could maintain a battalion on the island by her simple commissariat, already adapted to the niggers, and that it would therefore be very easy for the South to feed an army if the people were friendly.