Flint's Letters from America, 1818-1820Flint, James, active 19th century
History
Flint's Letters from America, 1818-1820
Flint, James, active 19th century
Ohio River Valley -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
in the manner in which sawyers erect piles of timber to be dried. The
roofs were covered with bark, and the interstices of the walls left
open, so that at a distance I could count the persons within, as if
they had been birds in a cage. Near to this place a family lately
lived, for several weeks, under an old waggon that was turned upside
down. In towns along the banks of the Ohio, a class of people are to
be seen, who depend on traffic with travellers, and with the scanty
population in the rear of them. Without extravagant profits on the
trifling capital employed, they could not subsist. Many of them seem to
be immoral, dissipated, and without rural or domestic industry. Few of
their lots are cultivated as gardens; and the spinning-wheel, (so far
as I have observed,) is not to be seen in their houses.
The evils of slave-keeping are not confined to the parts of the
country where involuntary labour {192} exists, but the neighbourhood
is infected. Certain kinds of labour are despised as being the work of
slaves. Shoe-blacking, and, in some instances, family manufactures, are
of this class of labours; and it is thus, that in some of the small
towns on the _north side_ of the Ohio, the mechanic and the labourer
are to be seen drawing water at the wells; their wives and daughters
not condescending to services that are looked upon to be opprobrious.
It was for the same reason, that on one occasion, some paupers in a
poor’s house at Cincinnati refused to carry water for their own use.
Elopements from Kentucky into Indiana are frequent. Since my arrival
in this very town, I have witnessed two examples. I do not now allude
to slave-keepers losing their negroes, but their white daughters, who
escape to get married. In a former letter I mentioned the watchfulness
of parents over young ladies in Kentucky, and would only add, that
there, as elsewhere, restraint does not seem to be conducive to
contentment. Those who are acquainted with the state of society in
Turkey, are perhaps the most able to give a decided opinion on this
very interesting subject.
Of upwards of a hundred banks that lately figured in Indiana, Ohio,
Kentucky, and Tennessee, the money of two is now only received in the
land-office, in payment for public lands. Many have perished, and the
remainder are struggling for existence. Still giving for their _rags_
“bills as _good as their own_;” but, except two, none pay in specie,
or bills of the United States Bank. Discount varies from thirty to one
hundred per cent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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