When dubious about safety from highwaymen, Lyell was assured that in the South this class was unknown; the working class being the slave class there was no poor made desperate by want. And that the Texas wars had relieved the different communities of their dare-devil spirits. Lyell was often amused and astonished at the Southerner’s loyal support of an ultra-Democratic notion of white equality, which in practice must have been thoroughly uncongenial to all classes concerned. He visited a lawyer at his country home--the family a cultivated one, used to the best society of a large city--but the host regarded it as an obligation to invite Lyell’s driver, who was half Indian, to sit down to the table with them. Perhaps a consciousness that this boasted equality was more or less fictitious may have been responsible for the vindictive envy which flourished in the midst of this “aristocratic democracy.” A jealousy so intense that a gentleman growing rich and settling in a quiet part of the country was apt to have his fences pulled down, cattle turned out to roam, and other indignities perpetrated. Many anecdotes of the genuineness and prevalence of this feeling were told to Lyell. The daughter of a member of the Legislature visited Mobile, had a dress made with flounces according to the latest fashion, and on her return home wore it to a ball. At the next election her father was defeated, and on asking a former supporter the cause received the reply, “Do you think they would vote for you, after your daughter came to the ball in them fixings?” Lyell found drunkenness very common, yet heard many speak of the great temperance reform, it being no longer considered an insult to refuse to drink with one’s host. While he saw no cruelty to slaves, he felt that when drunkenness was so general among the owners their power might often be an abusive one. He states that it was not the object of his visit to study slavery, but his interesting observations would fill a chapter and are characterized by a keenness and fairness which make them very valuable. The stories told him by disgruntled and misinformed Northerners had prepared him for blood-curdling atrocities, but throughout Alabama he saw the negro in many phases: in his churches, about his pleasures, and at his occupations that ranged from farmhand to mechanic; in the slave-market, as the indulged domestic, and as the faithful and cheerful follower of his master into new and unknown regions; and on no occasion had he reason to suspect maltreatment. When speaking to a Northern man of his favorable impressions, he was told that “great pains had been taken by the planters to conceal the true state of things”--that he had been “propitiated by hospitable attentions.” Lyell found his own experience corroborated in a _Tradesman’s Journal_, written by William Thompson, a Scotch weaver, who supported himself by his trade as he journeyed through the South.