Robert Somers

Robert Somers was born in Scotland September 14, 1822. He was early a well known lecturer on social and political questions. He became editor of the Edinburgh weekly Scottish Herald about 1844, then assistant editor to Hugh Miller of the Witness, and in 1847 took a place on the staff of the North British Daily Mail. From 1849 to 1859 he was editor of the Mail, and for the next eleven years of the MorningJournal. He traveled in the Southern States in 1870–1, and his work gives a fair view of the conditions there after the war. He died July 7, 1891.

The South After the War

The land question is the absorbing question in Virginia. How to get the estates formerly productive again brought into cultivation—how to attract settlers of a superior class from England and Scotland, who would take their place in Virginian society as landowners and give a fresh impulse to the work of improvement going on—how to fertilise the soil and increase and improve the farm stock—how to turn the woods, the mines, the beds of marl, the streams and waterfalls, the fruits and game, and all the abundance of nature to productive account, and so fill with new blood the wasted frame of the old Commonwealth, occupies the minds of all classes with an intensity of interest to which no other public concern can be compared. The first question asked ofa stranger is whether he has come to look at land. I was not three minutes in Richmond till a pushing Irishman offered to sell me aver fine milch cow and calf on the spot, or tell me where I could get a nice bit of land on very economical terms. But the stranger who is landward-bound is not left to such chance means of information. There are dozens of respectable estate agents, every one of whom has list of farms and estate for sale which he advertises in the newspapers, and offers in fee-simple at a rate per acre that in England or Scotland, or even Ireland, would be deemed but a moderate annual rent, and payment of which he is willing to take in cash just enough to pay the expenses of suit, with the balance in instalments spread over three or four years. Every one of them states in private that he has even more lands on his list for sale than he advertises. Nor is this all. The State of Virginia has appointed a Board of Emigration, composed of gentlemen of the highest standing and reputation, with General Richardson the Adjutant-General of the State, as secretary, whose sole object is to guide and assist, by every kindly office, persons from abroad wishing to invest a little capital and settle on the soil of Virginia. I might fill pages with a description of farms and plantations, and lots, large and small, of land that are thus in the market. But I shall only mention a few particulars from a list presented to me by General Richardson. To show the great variety of choice, as regards situation for example, some of these farms and estates are in the immediate neighbourhood of Richmond, some are in Roxbridge county, some in Orange county, others in Culpeper county, Chesterfield county, King William county, Louisa county, James City county, New Kent county, and so on. One is a tobacco plantation in Fluvanna, one of the most famous tobacco counties in Virginia. In the county of Orange there is an estate of 6,000 acres of improved land, with several dwelling-houses on it, the purchaser of which could make a large home-farm for himself, and have besides half a dozen or even a dozen farm tenants. The lands are "very fertile, and suited to grass." The purchase-money of this estate would be taken in instalments, spread over ten years if necessary. There are also many small farms, and lots of 20 to 50 acres. The highest price asked for any of these lands, which are improved, is 4l. per acre. One estate of 800 acres, "land good, with abundance of green-sand marl only four feet below the surface," could be bought for fifteen dollars an acre. Among the number there are "2,000 acres of undeveloped coal lands." Land rights are carefully registered and guardedin Virginia, and there is seldom any difficulty in tracing a clear title back through a long period of years.

To understand the avalanche of land bargains at present in Virginia, one has to remember that before the war the soil was owned chiefly by slaveholders, who had large estates which they never fully cultivated, but on which they shifted their crops about from one place to another, and who, finding themselves with plenty of money and little trouble under this system, allowed their overseers and the slave-dealers to settle all the hard matters between them. At the close of the war, when the slaves became free, it is easy to perceive that with no means left to cultivate such large tracts of land under the new conditions, it became a necessity, as well as the best thing the owners could do, to sell large portions of their estates, and to retain just as much as they had capital and labour to cultivate; and this they have done and are doing to some extent. In many other cases, proprietors, not rich save in land before the war, have since become embarrassed, and, falling into debt and arrears of taxes, have had decrees passed against them in the courts, under which sales are ordered to proceed. There have been instances also of gentlemen "slain in battle," or driven from the country, or flying from it in despair, and of every form of vicissitude and ruin that follows in the train of war and social revolution. The consequence is that a large proportion of the landed property of a great and long settled State is literally going a-begging for people to come and take it. The like has seldom been seen before. The deluge of encumbered estates in Ireland was nothing. compared to it, for the land in Ireland, when brought to sale under a Parliamentary title, readily commanded purchasers at good prices. Yet there are no agrarian murders in Virginia. Nor is it a new and undeveloped country, where every element of civilization has to be introduced, but an old land of renown, where law and order prevail and every social comfort may be enjoyed. There is hardly any part of Virginia where a settler on the soil would not only find towns and markets, and roads and railways, but have as his neighbours gentlemen who are no mean agriculturists, who are versed in all the science of husbandry, many of them breeders of the rarest and finest stock, and deeply imbued with the spirit of agricultural progress and improvement.

Charleston—"old Charleston," fondly so called by its citizens—thathas braved "the battle and the breeze," if not a thousand, a good hundred years—the centre of Carolinian trade and commerce, the centre always of strong political emotion, and the centre also where the negro element was densest and negro slavery was intrenched as in a stronghold alike by fear and interest—is getting slowly, but surely, on its legs again from the downfall inflicted by the war. Never had a completer ruin fallen upon any city than fell upon Charleston in the years from 1860 to 1865. Her planters who, with noble country seats on the banks of pleasant streams, amid groves of live oaks affording deep shade from the summer sun, could afford to have their winter residences here in town, were reduced, as by the grinding of a nether millstone, from affluence to poverty—her merchants were scattered to the four winds of heaven—her shopkeepers closed their doors, or contrived to support a precarious existence on contraband of war—her young men went to die on the battlefield or in the military prisons of the North—her women and children, who could, fled to the country. The Federal Government, mindful of Fort Sumter and the first indignity to the Union flag, kept Charleston under close blockade, and added to its miseries by occasional bombardments. When this process in five years had reached the last stage of exhaustion, and the military surrender gave practical effect to emancipation, the negroes in the country parts, following up the childlike instinct of former days that Charleston was the El Dorado of the world, flocked into the ruined town, and made its aspect of misery and desolation more complete. The streets were empty of all but themselves; the houses had not only lost all their bright paint without, but were mostly tenantless within; many fine mansions, long deserted, were fast mouldering into decay and ruin; and the demand for labour and the supply of provisions were at the lowest point. Seldom, with a deeper ruin of the old, has there been a more hopeless chaos out of which to construct a new order of things than Charleston presented in those days. Yet the process of amelioration has year by year been going steadily forward. Many of the old merchants of the city, and many active agents of exchange, both new and old, have come to put the wheels of trade once more in motion. Some of the old planters have also survived, and are seen, though in diminished numbers and with saddened countenances, yet with the steady fire of Anglo-Saxon courage in their eyes, attending to affairs like men determined to conquer fortune even in the depths of ruin and on the brink of the grave; while others, not so much to be respected, unwilling to work and ashamed tobeg, seek to maintain some remnant of the ancient dignity no one knows how. The quays and wharves are busy; new ones, to meet new branches of trade, have been built with files of counting-rooms to suit; the cotton presses are again at work; lorries laden with the staple products of the interior pour the livelong day along the streets towards the river; revival is extending from the business parts of the town to the quiet quarters of private residence; and the hotels, always of the first consideration in America, are already, with their stately colonnades of white pillars, their freshly painted fronts, and their troops of polished waiters of various hues of ebony, magnificent in Charleston. I went down one evening to the Battery, an esplanade at the seaward end of the peninsula, formed by the Cooper and Ashley rivers, on which Charleston is built—not of great compass, seeing that the embouchure of the two rivers here draws the land to a narrow point, but beautiful and refreshing, looking out on the spacious bay direct to Fort Sumter and the far Atlantic, and calling up associations of the Spanish Main and the West Indies, the distant British Islands, and of naval and historic glory, at the crowding thoughts of which the heart of every English-speaking man leaps to his mouth. Though Charleston, like other cities, has its West End—as I have seen from the tower of the Orphan Asylum, a noble institution which the war has left in full vigour—where goodly houses along stretching avenues of trees, and ample garden grounds, afford a happy and elegant retreat to prosperous men of business, yet there is reason enough why the Battery should be a point of peculiar eminence and fashion in Charleston. The residences around the esplanade—palaces in their way—after long neglect, are undergoing rapid renovation. I am told that, apart from the "nabobs" who live in these charming marine villas, the Battery in ante-war times was the resort every evening of a long array of carriages, in which fair ladies reclined, and happy gentlemen cooled themselves after the heat and toil of the day. The only equipage I saw was the handsome buggy of a dry goods man from the North, who is rather liked for the spirit he displays. But the ladies of Charleston meantime take a constitutional walk on the Battery with their babies and nurses, and the gentlemen say the carriages will come again in due time.

Such is the hopeful uprising of commercial progress in Charleston just now. But the old town has much to recover. In the winter of 1862 a calamity more destructive and terrible than all the Federal bombardments befell the devoted city. A fire broke in some negro shantyon the Cooper river, and favoured by the wind, spread and swept down all before it in a curious zigzag but generally straight line through the centre of the town, till stopped by the Ashley river on the other side. This appalling conflagration, the desolation and misery caused and the hospitality evoked by which, amidst all the troubles of the war, cannot be described, still leaves its mark, like the course of a caterpillar that has eaten its way over a cotton leaf, upon the city of Charleston. Fires, once sprung, must propagate here with fearful rapidity. A large proportion of the side streets of Charleston are built of wood. The houses are simply frame erections. They are all dry as tinder, and airy as they can be made. An accidental spark or flame which in our British towns would be instantly smothered by the damp atmosphere, the stone walls, the dense fogs, and the absence of sun and ventilation, is here fraught sometimes with alarming consequences. Not the slightest suspicion of incendiarism rested upon the great Charleston fire of 1862. The negro is not given to the folly of setting his house on fire to roast an egg for somebody else to eat; and such is the power of discipline and habit over him, that he continues, save on election nights or other periods of great excitement, to turn into bed at the early hour in the evening prescribed to him by a sort of curfew law in the days of slavery. The question asked when one surveys the vast ruin caused by this fire is, What became of the insurance companies? The insurance companies of the South? The war soon rendered their position untenable. The number of persons caring to insure rapidly diminished, and as the destruction of fire and sword spread wider and wider, the companies went down by the board, till the whole insurance capital of the Southern States, and all the interests centred around it, shrivelled up like a scroll and disappeared. One must go to Charleston in order to hear all the ruin of the war summed up in good round emphatic English. Any old merchant citizen will reckon on his fingers what the war lost of property, capital, and substance of every kind to the South. First, the property in negroes, which, whether property in right reason and natural equity or not, was introduced under the sway of England, was recognised by the Constitution of the Republic, was protected by the laws of the United States, and was to all material intents and purposes as essentially property in the South as anything elsewhere which makes profit and can be bought and sold;—this property was abolished, and was four hundred millions sterling. The whole banking capital of the South, which cannot be estimated at less than two hundred millions more, was swampedin the extinction of all profitable banking business, and, finally, in a residuary flood of worthless Confederate money. The whole insurance capital of the South—probably a hundred millions more—also perished. The well organized cotton, sugar, and tobacco plantations, mills, factories, coal and iron mines, and commercial and industrial establishments, built up by private capital, the value of which in millions of pounds sterling cannot be computed—all sank and were engulfed in the same wave. Every form of mortgage claim, with the exception of two or three proud State stocks, shared for the time being the fate of the principal, and only now crops up amidst the subsiding deluge like the stumps of a submerged forest. And so on the account goes as long as the fingers hold out, till the demonstration made is that the South by the war was peeled to the bone, and left not only without a cent in its pocket, but without anything by which a cent could be made, save the rude but productive land and the bright sun, powerful indeed as natural germs of wealth and prosperity, but needing, to give them vitality, more capital and labour, more invention and ingenuity, more of everything which it seemed most difficult to supply. Terrible though the picture of ruin and impoverishment be, as thus drawn here in Charleston, I suspect it is in the main true of the whole South, and the marvel must be that affairs should already be so lively, so hopeful and elastic, as they everywhere appear. It was to be expected that the young men would enter upon business with fresh life and energy; but more remarkable than they are the men of advanced life who, still on the top of the wave, are guiding and controlling by their experience the new order of things.

Charleston, like Boston—for a good comparison there is nothing like the antipodes—has an English look about it. The old city has not fallen so mathematically into the parallelogram formation as the cities of the United States in general. The inhabitants still cast many a fond look towards the old country, and contrast the present misrule with the time when the laws of England were the laws of South Carolina. Such is the deep sense of change and revolution produced by the downfall of State Rights and the inroad of Federal power and innovation, that they profess not to know what the laws of South Carolina now are, or whether she has any laws at all. Ask what the system of rule is, and the reply will uniformly be that it is "nigger rule," which is in one sense true. The negroes are more numerous than the whites in South Carolina. Being all citizens of the United States, they have all the right ofvoting, while many of the whites are not naturalized; and the War Radicals who came in to take the lead in political affairs, and to hold offices for which the prominent men of the State were disqualified by the test oath, have succeeded in controlling the negro vote, and casting it almost en masse in their favour at the polls. There not being "carpetbaggers" or "scallowags" enough in the State to fill all the seats in the Legislature, the negroes have largely returned men of their own race to watch over "laws and learning," "ships, colonies, and commerce," at the Capitol. The House of Representatives consists of 80 coloured men and 44 whites, and the Senate of 11 coloured men and 20 whites—there being one seat vacant just now. The white people of South Carolina are thus practically disfranchised, and a proletariat Parliament has been constituted, the like of which could not be produced under the widest suffrage in any part of the world save in some of these Southern States. The outcry of misgovernment, extravagant expenditure, jobbery, and corruption is both loud and general. The negroes are declared to be the dupes of designing men, comparative strangers to the State, whose object is simply to fill their pockets out of the public spoil. Political charges are not minced in South Carolina. There is room, indeed, to hope for a good deal of exaggeration. The exclusion of the superior part of the population from all influence in public affairs must of itself tend to magnify the enormity of everything enormous, and to distort everything not quite square that is done. The members and dependants of the State Administration are said, after having depreciated the South Carolina bonds to 40 and 35 cents, and bought in largely at such prices, to have then offered gold interest at New York, which at once advanced the price to 95 cents, and enabled them to pocket millions. Possible and condemnatory enough, but it was a good thing in itself to restore the financial credit of the State; and in North Carolina, for example, the business men and the proprietors have since the war urged upon the Legislature to place the public credit of the State on the best footing, and will not desist till they succeed, under the conviction that honesty to the public creditor is the best policy, and the corner-stone of all progress and improvement. State Commissions are said to be issued on roads, lands, and other departments, the members of which do little but job and make profit to themselves and their friends. The State Government buys lands on which to settle and give homes to negroes. This is commissioned, and land is said to undergo sale and resale before it becomes the property of the State. It is not believed that the negroeswill in any considerable number make homes on these properties, and the only advantage I have incidentally discovered from such settlements is in one instance where the negroes, not having crops enough of their own to occupy their labour, formed a reserve force from which a neighbouring planter has drawn extra hands to gather in his cotton. Railway contracts and railway bonds, in which the State has its finger, are also suspected of offering opportunities not exactly consistent with the public good. The phosphate deposits in the bay and rivers have been leased at a royalty of a dollar per ton to a single company, not, I am to believe, without heavy sums distributed in the House of Representatives; but the principle of this transaction is discussed freely by all parties, and it is thought by some that the law of the United States will not sanction a commercial monopoly of what is public estate. A State census was taken last year, which is thought to have been a superfluous labour, seeing that the decennial census ordered by Congress fell to be taken this year, and the Governor is supposed to have sought in this way to give employment to partisans, and to secure votes. Everything thus moves in an atmosphere of political suspicion. One of the most favourable signs, indeed, is the keenness with which the acts of the State Government and Legislature are scrutinized, and the activity with which the native white population endeavour to recover influence and authority both in the State and in Congress. Prior to the recent elections, they organised a Reform Union on the basis of the political and civil equality of the negroes, turned out in large numbers to the ballot boxes, protected the negroes who were voting on their side, and in Charleston succeeded. But throughout the State the movement so far has failed to divide the negro vote with the Radical party, who remain in a large majority. The principles of the Reform Union seem to be consistently maintained in practice. Many of the white electors in the city voted for Delarge, a negro tailor, as representative of their district in Congress, because they believed him to be more trustworthy than his white opponents.

I allude at this length to political affairs in South Carolina, because it is very obvious that a system of government resting almost wholly on the votes of the negroes, is not a desirable state of affairs as regards either the State itself or the general interests of the Union. It destroys confidence in the integrity and stability of the Administration, prevents the investment of money, and renders impossible that hearty co-operation of the public authorities with the substantial people of the State which is so essential to the interests of all classes of the community.

Apart from the passing excitement of the elections just over, and the disappointment of the white population at the voting of the negroes en masse for the Republican or Radical party, the general tone of social life in Charleston is kindly and temperate, and all classes of society are working together with considerable harmony for mutual good. The negro is beset at present by two parties who claim to be his "best friends." The Republicans, who came in with the close of the war, appeal to him as his best if not only friends; and, looking at the political issues of the war, and the decree of emancipation, with its elaborate guarantees of reconstruction, the negroes could not but regard the Republican party politically as their friends. Nor can it be denied that the organs of the Federal Government have laboured to introduce institutions for the moral and social benefit of the negroes, and, as far as their limited means would allow, have befriended that large portion of the population. I have not found any one on the other side who is prepared to blame the negroes for voting almost universally as they did in the elections which raised General Grant to the Presidentship, or who appears to have expected that they would or should have been other than fast adherents of their emancipators. But the political agitators and hungry spoil-and-office hunters of the party are accused of appealing to the ignorance and passions of the negro population—of telling them that the—white people of the State are eagerly seeking an opportunity of restoring slavery, which they have certainly no wish to do, and which they could not do even if they would; and now, after five years of this, it is considered hard that the negroes—when there are great public objects of economy, protection from jobbery and corruption, and a sound and healthy administration of the affairs of the State to promote, in which the blacks are as closely interested as others—should cast their votes in a body against the great majority of the white population, and terrorize such of their own colour as are disposed to act differently. This feeling breaks out violently just now in bar-rooms and at street corners, and is often expressed more quietly and reasonably, yet firmly, in private circles. Many seem ready to despair of the negro as a politician, while others talk of a "war of races" and other disorders sure to arise. The feeling is no doubt all the stronger since the evils of "carpet-bagging" and negro demagoguery are apparent to respectable men of both parties, and, while violently denounced on one side, are not denied, but sometimes admitted and deplored, on the otherThough politics in South Carolina thus wear a somewhat sinister complexion, yet there is a healthy action and a sober practical opinion underneath the service that promise beneficial results. The issues left by the war are being rapidly closed; the Reform Union, which has figured prominently in the late elections as the organ of the native white people of the State, recognizes fully the civil and political equality of the negroes not only as an election platform, but as the fundamental law of the United States; this position is likely to be maintained, and may be expected soon to bring about in this, as in other Southern States, a better balance of parties. Meanwhile social bonds are being knit together, and many ameliorative influences are quietly at work. The ladies, who had a long apprenticeship of self-devotion during the war, are exerting themselves to give work, and to sell the work of poor needlewomen of both races. Nearly all the old charities of Charleston remain in operation, and schools and missions are doing much to improve the population.

By a law passed five years before the war a public school system was introduced into South Carolina, which became well developed in Charleston; and now the State has passed under the new free-school principle, embodied in the Constitutions of the Southern States under the Acts of Reconstruction. It is only by degrees that this system can get into general operation, and, indeed, it is doubtful whether the ground lost in education during the war has yet been recovered. The official statistics for 1860 give 20,716 pupils in 757 public schools, whereas they show for 1869 only 381 public schools and 16,418 pupils. The new law is now, however, being put into operation; the State has appropriated $50,000 to this object, and, aided by the Peabody Fund and other voluntary contributions, South Carolina may be expected soon to be tolerably well furnished with the means of education for the whole population. Charleston is probably more advanced in this respect than any other part of the State, and the education of negro children is already quite a prominent feature, one building devoted to the coloured people being capable of receiving 1,000 scholars.