Last winter in the United States : $b being table talk collected during a tour through the late Southern Confederation, the Far West, the Rocky Mountains, &c.Zincke, F. Barham (Foster Barham)
History
Last winter in the United States : $b being table talk collected during a tour through the late Southern Confederation, the Far West, the Rocky Mountains, &c.
Zincke, F. Barham (Foster Barham)
United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
Baltimore was the first place in which I found the general sentiment
strongly Southern. Balls and bazaars were being got up, while I was
there, for the openly avowed purpose of collecting funds to support
those families in the South which had been reduced to poverty by the
late war. This made me feel as if I were among another people; for in
the North I had heard the South spoken of very vindictively, as ‘that
they needed more suffering to take their pride out of them;’ and ‘that
nothing could be done with the South till the present proprietors had
all been swept away, and Northern men substituted for them.’ I am not
aware, however, that I ever heard any remarks of this kind made by
persons whom we should describe as of the upper class.
There has been a large emigration to Baltimore, from the States of the
late Southern Confederacy, of people who would not live under negro
domination as long as they had the means of living elsewhere. Many
Northern men also had lately settled there, in expectation that the
business of the place would rapidly increase. As it has a fine harbour,
and the development of the railway system is now connecting it with the
whole of the interior, there appears to be no reason why it should not,
at no very distant day, become a dangerous rival of Philadelphia and
even of New York. I understood that as many as 4,000 houses were built
here in the last twelve months.
‘Sir,’ said a Maryland planter to me, ‘many Americans, of whom I am
one, think that the English government is the best in the world. No
system of government which, like ours, can breed nothing better than
trading politicians, can be either generous or just; and must sooner or
later fall, overwhelmed by the hatred of some and the contempt of other
sections of the community.’ The same gentleman was of opinion that the
animosity felt towards England after the revolutionary war had now
almost died out among native-born Americans; for instance, there is,
he said, not one Fenian lodge in the whole of New England. Whatever
ill-will there may be existing at present originates in the Irish, and
radiates from them, if in any instances it has spread beyond them. An
Englishman who had been long settled in America, and who took part in
the conversation, thought differently. He was of opinion, that at all
events a strong prejudice existed in the minds of native-born Americans
against the English.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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