I

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

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

fiction; and fiction appears to be the only form of statement that in the long run carries conviction.

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

The archaic lady of the South obeyed a law of her being in leaving very little written record of herself. Ladies from the real world penetrated into her territory from time to time, and gave accounts of what they saw. Two Englishwomen could hardly be more unlike in temperament and antecedents than Miss Martineau and Fanny Kemble, but they differed far more from

the Southern lady than from each other. They agreed in approaching the South with a lively interest, and each was stirred to write excellently in her own way of what she found. In the North a rather remarkable group of women arose in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, able to think and to speak, who associated, with a profounder logic than they were perhaps themselves aware of, the political and social limitations of women with those of the slave. A really noble eloquence sprang from the enthusiasm of Lucretia Mott.

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

The truth is that in the days of slavery nobody was free at the South. The planter, whose autocracy was his boast, who contrasted himself with the

men of other communities as being more completely a free agent than they, submitted to enact laws for himself that no other Anglo-Saxon society in the world at that time would have endured.

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

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

But in several states an act of the legislature was required to allow a man to relinquish his property. In Georgia the penalty for attempting to free a slave in any other way was not to exceed one thousand dollars. In the

use of his chattel, the owner was hampered in many ways by laws forbidding him to teach the slave to read or write. In Georgia any one was liable to fine and imprisonment 'who shall procure, suffer or permit a slave, negro, or person of color, to transact business for him in writing.'

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

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

II

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

Bearing in mind this function, characteristic of all women and more especially of the lady, the student of slavery is baffled by the difficulty of understanding how the planter's theories were able to convince his wife in the presence of their practical results. Fanny Kemble writes: 'Mr.

was called out this evening to listen to a complaint of overwork from a gang of pregnant women. I did not stay to listen to the details of their petition, for I am unable to command myself on such occasions, and Mr. seemed positively degraded in my eyes as he stood enforcing upon these women the necessity of fulfilling their appointed tasks. How honorable he would have appeared to me begrimed with the sweat and toil of the coarsest manual labour, to what he then seemed, setting forth to these wretched, ignorant women, as a duty, their unpaid, exacting labour! I turned away in bitter disgust.'

How did it happen that any gen

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

One answer to the puzzle in regard to the planter's wife is fairly obvious. The most vocal part of the South was Virginia. Nine persons out of ten in the North to-day use 'Virginia' and 'the South' as interchangeable terms. That state formed early the habit of producing distinguished men; the prestige of her Revolutionary history gave her great weight both North and South. The South (with the exception perhaps of South Carolina) was willing to make Virginia the spokesman, and the North was willing to accept her as representative. But Virginia was not representative. When an old Virginian recalls with rapture those rosy ante-bellum days which have become something of a jest to a world that knew them not, he is not touching up the picture very much as regards the relation between master and servant.

It is probably true that, at any rate after the soil was eaten up, the worst features of slavery were not visible in Virginia. A lady might live and die there without once seeing a Negro under the lash; or even witnessing, unless in exceptional circumstances, those forcible partings of families which the abolitionist rightly put his finger on as the greatest of social mistakes. She was surrounded by a community of sleek, well-fed, cheerful, comic creatures, as unlike Fanny Kemble's retinue as two groups of the same race could be. In her neighborhood, harsh treatment of servants was bad form and was punished by social ostracism. And if the Virginian emigrated to another state he took his traditions with him. If his neighbors in the new environment had a lower standard, they concealed it from him as long as possible.

'I cannot,' said Thomas Dabney, expressing a profound truth in social psychology, 'I cannot punish people with whom I associate every day.' The average Virginia gentleman could no more have a slave flogged than the average gentleman anywhere could deliberately infect a fellow creature with tuberculosis. We are so made that our victims must be out of our sight. But he could and did breed and rear strong, healthy men and women whom it would do you good to see, and sell them in large annual invoices for service in the sugar and cotton states. A Virginia gentleman told Olmsted that 'his women were uncommonly good breeders; he did not suppose there was a lot of women anywhere that bred faster than his'; and Rhodes notes a lady in Baltimore, 'richly and fashionably dressed, and apparently moving in the best society, who derived her income from the sale of children of a half-dozen Negro women she owned, although their husbands belonged to other masters.' But in the consciousness of the owner

of a human stock-farm, and still more of the owner's wife, there was a sincere contempt for the next link in the chain, the slave-trader and the auctioneer; while the overseer, the actual slavedriver of the cotton-field, the man who did the dirty work on which the whole social scheme depended, was despised by all. In fact, the lady of the plantation felt toward the overseer by whose exertions she lived, as the lady of other economic dispensations feels toward the proprietor of the sweat-shop whose product is on her back.

All the conditions that bore hardly on the man of talent were equally operative on the woman, and she had a special extinguisher of her own in the nature of the planter's conception of the lady. Her man did not wish her to be clever. There is at the first glance no obvious reason why the Southern lady should not have been a salonière; the type is sufficiently aristocratic and exclusive, one would think, to recommend it to the gregarious and leisured planter. The student is surprised to find that, on the contrary, the married woman had virtually no social existence. The woman of Southern romance is the young girl; the social intercourse of the little Southern cities consisted chiefly of balls and dances, at which the young girl might be seen by young men. When she was married, her husband carried her to his plantation, and there she lived in isolation. She reverted to a far earlier type than that of salonière, the type, namely, of the twelfth-century châtelaine. Only the few who maintained town-houses as well as country-houses, and spent part of every year in Richmond or Charleston or New Orleans, retained their hold upon communion with their kind, and for them a staid and modified social life was deemed fitting. Instead of being the means of a wider freedom, marriage was an abdication.

Mrs. Gilman, in her Recollections of a Southern Matron, describes the ideal lady of the plantation. 'Mamma possessed more than whole acres of charms, for though not brilliant she was good-tempered and sensible. A demure look and reserved manner concealed a close habit of observation. She would sit in company for hours, making scarcely a remark, and recollect afterwards every fact that had been stated, to the color of a riband or the stripe of a waistcoat. Home was her true sphere; there everything was managed with promptitude and decision; and papa, who was an active planter was glad to find his domestic arrangements quiet and orderly. No one ever managed an establishment better; but there was no appeal from her opinions, and I have known her even eloquent in defending a recipe.

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

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

If we turn to so romantic an account of Southern ante-bellum society as is contained in (for instance) Kennedy's Swallow Barn, we find a marked sentimental discrimination between the young girl and the matron. Lovely maidens are portrayed, brown and blond, madcap and demure. Their manners, their whims, their dresses, are important. Their love-affairs are the excitement of the countryside. But the matron, the respected head of the establishment, is touched in with some