JOHN ALLSTON, of St. John’s, Berkeley, was born in England in 1666, and came to this country between 1685 and 1694. He was descended from the ancient family of Allstone, through John Allston, of Saxham Hall, Newton, Suffolk, which was the seat of the Allstons for several hundred years. An Allston was the Saxon Lord of Stanford in Norfolk before the Conquest, and was dispossessed by the Normans. The old Saxon names of Rath Alstan, Alstane, were but variants of the name which John of St. John’s spelled Alstane, until the signature of his will (1718), when he wrote it Allston. The motto was “Immotus,”“Az. ten stars, crest an estoile in a crescent argent.”
John Allston, of St. John’s, Berkeley, had a number of children, as self-respecting people of that date usually had, but we are concerned only with the descendants of his eldest son, John, who was the grandfather of Benjamin Allston, my father’s father, and those of his second son, William, who was the grandfather of Charlotte Ann Allston, my father’s mother. So his parents were second cousins.
Ben Allston died when his second son, Robert, was only eight years old. The boy was educated at Mr. Waldo’s school in Georgetown until he was sixteen, when his widowed mother determined to send him to West Point. He entered in 1817, graduating in June, 1821, this being the first class which made the four years’ course under Colonel Sylvanus Thayer. He was appointed lieutenant in the 3d Artillery, and assigned to duty on the Coast Survey under Lieutenant-Colonel Kearney, of the Topographical Engineers. In this position he assisted in surveying the harbors of Plymouth and Provincetown, Mass., and the entrance to Mobile Bay. While on duty here he got letters from his mother telling of her difficulties, which demanded his immediate presence at home. He asked for leave of absence, but being refused this by his commanding officer, he resigned his commission February, 1822, bought a horse and rode through northern Alabama and Georgia, then inhabited by Indians, to Charleston, and thence to Georgetown, S. C.
His mother’s difficulties in managing her property of landed estate and negroes had been great,and added to this was the effort of the purchaser of a plantation adjoining Chicora on the south to seize a tract of land (attempting to prove that this land belonged to his plantation), which when cleared became four of her best rice-fields. This had kept her in constant fiery correspondence, until my father felt it his duty to resign and come home and settle the matter.
He employed the lawyer of greatest repute at the moment, James L. Petigru; the case was brought into court, and my grandmother’s title to the land established beyond question. She did not long survive to enjoy having her son at home to take the burden of the management of her affairs, for she died October 24, 1824, after a short illness of pleurisy, in her fifty-fourth year. This was a very great sorrow to my father, for he had for her an intense affection with a sense of protection. She was beautiful and very small, so that the servants always spoke of her as “Little Miss” in distinction to Aunt Blythe, who was “Big Miss.” According to the custom of the day, the land was all left to the sons, charged with legacies to the daughters, so my father’s patrimony consisted of large tracts of swamp land in Georgetown and Marion and seventeen negroes, subject to a debt to his sisters which amounted to more than the value of the property. He entered upon its management with great energy, surveyed the land himself, cleared and drained the swamps and converted them into valuable rice-fields.
In this work his military education was of great service to him. In 1823 he was elected surveyor-general of the State, an office which he held for four years. In 1828 he was returned by the people of Winyah to the lower house of the legislature, and in 1832 was returned to the Senate. About this time he attained the rank of colonel of the militia, service of the State. He continued to be returned to the Senate, and was president of that body from 1850 to 1856, when he was elected governor. But I must go back. During the lawsuit about the land my father was entertained by James L. Petigru, came to know the lawyer’s sister, Adèle Petigru, and fell in love with her; and she finally yielded to his suit, and they were married in 1832 and went at once to his plantation, Chicora Wood, fourteen miles north of Georgetown, on the Great Pee Dee River.
I am always afraid of bursting out into praise of my father, for I adored him, and thought him the wisest and best man in the world, and still do think he was a most unusual mixture of firmness and gentleness, with rare executive ability. But I have always found, in reading biographies and sketches, that the unstinted and reiterated praises of the adoring writers rouses one’s opposition, and I write this with the hope of bringing to his grandchildren the knowledge and appreciation of my father’s character. I will try to draw his portrait with a few firm strokes, and leave the respect and admiration to be aroused by it. Now that slavery is a thing of the past, the younger generation in our Southland really know nothing about the actual working of it, and they should know to understand and see the past in its true light. Slavery was in many ways a terrible misfortune, but we know that in the ancient world it was universal, and no doubt the great Ruler of the world, “that great First Cause, least understood,” allowed it to exist for some reason of His own.
The colony of North and South Carolina, then one, entreated the mother country to send no more slaves. “We want cattle, horses, sheep, swine, we don’t want Africans.” But the Africans continued to come. The Northeastern States were the first to get rid of the objectionable human property when conscientious scruples arose as to the owning of slaves—in some instances by freeing them, but in many more instances by selling them in the Southern States. There is no doubt that in the colder climate slave labor was not profitable. When the Civil War came, the Southern planters were reduced from wealth to poverty by the seizure of their property which they held under the then existing laws of the country. It is a long and tangled story—and I do not pretend to judge of its rights and wrongs. I have no doubt that the Great Father’s time for allowing slavery was at an end. I myself am truly thankful that slavery is a thing of the past, and that I did not have to take up the burden of the ownership of the one hundred people my father left me in his will (all mentioned by name), with a pretty rice-plantation called Exchange two miles north of Chicora Wood. I much prefer to have had to make my own living, as I have had to do, except for the short six years of my married life, than to have had to assume the care and responsibility of those hundred negroes, soul and body. I have had a happy life, in spite of great sorrow and continued work and strain, but I am quite sure that with my sensitive temperament and fierce Huguenot conscience I never could have had a happy life under the burden of that ownership.
It would have been a comfort, however, if we could have gathered up something from my father’s large property, but we did not. Just before the war my mother’s brother, Captain Tom Petigru, of the navy, died, leaving a childless widow. She lived in Charleston, in her beautiful home with large yard and garden, at the corner of Bull and Rutledge Streets, and was a rich woman, as riches were counted in those days—owning a large farm in Abbeville County, where the Giberts and Petigrus had originally settled, and also a rice-plantation, “Pipe Down,” on Sandy Island on the Waccamaw, not far from my father’s estates, also one hundred negroes. As soon as Uncle Tom died, Aunt Ann wrote to my father, asking him as a great favor to buy her plantation and negroes, as she felt quite unequal to the management and care of them. My father replied immediately that it was impossible for him to comply with her request, that he had his hands full managing his own property, and that he specially felt he had already more negroes than he desired. Aunt Ann continued her entreaties. Then the negroes from Pipe Down began to send deputations over to beg my father to buy them. Philip Washington, a very tall, very black man, a splendid specimen of the negro race, after two generations of slavery, was their spokesman. My uncle had been devoted to Philip, and considered him far above the average negro in every way, and in his will had given him his freedom, along with two or three others; he pleaded the cause of his friends with much eloquence, saying they had fixed on him as the one owner they desired. Then my uncle, James L. Petigru, entered the lists, and appealed to my father’s chivalry for his old and feeble sister-in-law, and to the intense feeling of the negroes, who had selected him for their future owner, and were perfectly miserable at his refusal—if it were a question of money, he argued, my father need not hesitate, as “Sister Ann” did not desire any cash payment; she greatly preferred a bond and mortgage, and the interest paid yearly, as that would be the best investment she could have. At last my father yielded, and made a small cash payment, giving his bond and a mortgage for the rest. The deed was done—the Pipe Down people were overjoyed, and the debt assumed. This debt it was which rendered my father’s estate insolvent at the end of the war, for he died in 1864. The slaves having been freed, the property was gone, but the debt remained in mortgages on his landed estates, which had all to be sold. The plantations were: Chicora Wood, 890 acres, Ditchford, 350 acres, Exchange, 600 acres, Guendalos, 600 acres, Nightingale Hall, 400 acres, Waterford, 250 acres, beside Pipe Down itself. Also the two farms in Anson County, North Carolina, and our beautiful house in Charleston. Besides this, there were 6,000 acres of cypress timber at Britton’s Neck; 5,000 acres of cypress and pine land near Carver’s Bay; 300 acres at Canaan Seashore; house and 20 acres on Pawley’s Island. Of all this principality, not one of the heirs got anything!
My mother’s dower was all that could be claimed. In South Carolina the right of dower is one-third of the landed property, for life, or one-sixth, in fee simple. My mother preferred the last, and the Board of Appraisers found that the plantation Chicora Wood, where she had always lived, would represent a sixth value of the real estate, and that was awarded her as dower; but not an animal nor farm implement, no boats nor vehicles—just the land, with its dismantled dwelling-house. I tell this here, to explain how we came to face poverty at the end of the war.
NOW I must go back to my father’s early life, for I left him just married, and bringing his beautiful bride from the gay life of the city to the intense quiet, as far as social joys went, of the country. It was wonderful that their marriage proved a success, and a great credit to them both. They were so absolutely different in tastes and ideals that each had to give up a great deal that they had dreamed of in matrimony; but their principles and standards being the same, things always came right in the end. My father was always a very public-spirited man, and interested in the good of his county and his State. Of course, all this public life necessitated constant and prolonged absences from home, and the rejoicing was great always, when the legislature adjourned and he returned from Columbia. He was a scientific rice-planter and agriculturist; he wrote articles for De Bow’s Review that were regarded as authorities. His plantations were models of organization and management. All the negroes were taught a trade or to do some special work. On Chicora Wood there was a large carpenter’s shop, where a great number of skilled men were always at work, under one head carpenter. Daddy Thomas was this head, during all my childhood, and he was a great person in my eyes. He was so dignified, and treated us young daughters of the house as though we were princesses; just the self-respecting manner of a noble courtier. His wife was the head nurse of the “sick-house,” and the “children’s house,” also, so that she was also a personage—very black and tall, with a handkerchief turban of unusual height. We never went near her domain without returning with handsome presents of eggs, or potatoes, or figs, according to season, for Maum Ph?be was a very rich person and one of great authority. There were always four or five apprentices in the carpenter’s shop, so year by year skilled men were turned out, not “jack-legs,” which was Thomas Bonneau’s epithet for the incompetent. Then the blacksmith-shop, under Guy Walker, was a most complete and up-to-date affair, and there young lads were always being taught to make horseshoes, and to shoe horses, and do all the necessary mending of wheels and axles and other ironwork used on a plantation. The big flats and lighters needed to harvest the immense rice-crops were all made in the carpenter’s shop, also the flood-gates necessary to let the water on and off the fields. These were called “trunks,” and had to be made as tight as a fine piece of joiner’s work. There was almost a fleet of rowboats, of all sizes, needed on the plantation for all purposes, also canoes, or dugouts, made from cypress logs. There was one dugout, Rainbow, capable of carrying several tierces of rice. When I was a child, the threshing of the rice from the straw was done in mills run by horse-power; before I can remember it was generally done by water-power. The men and women learned to work in the mill; to do the best ploughing; the best trenching with the hoe—perfectly straight furrows, at an even depth, so as to insure the right position for the sprouting grain; the most even and best sowing of the rice. Then, skilfully to take all the grass and weeds out with the sharp, tooth-shaped hoes, yet never touch or bruise the grain or its roots, the best cultivation of the crop. Also they learned to cut the rice most dexterously, with reap-hooks, and lay the long golden heads carefully on the stubble, so that the hot sun could get through and dry it, as would not be possible if it were laid on the wet earth, so that it could be tied in sheaves the next day. For all these operations prizes were offered every year—pretty bright-colored calico frocks to the women, and forks and spoons; and to the men fine knives, and other things that they liked—so that there was a great pride in being the prize ploughman, or prize sower, or harvest hand, for the year.
Only the African race, who seem by inheritance immune from the dread malarial fever, could have made it possible and profitable to clear the dense cypress swamps and cultivate them in rice by a system of flooding the fields from the river by canals, ditches, and flood-gates, draining off the water when necessary, and leaving these wonderfully rich lands dry for cultivation. It has been said that, like the pyramids, slave labor only could have accomplished it; be that as it may, at this moment one has the pain of watching the annihilation of all this work now, when the world needs food; now when the starving nations are holding out their hands to our country for food, thousands and thousands of acres of this fertile land are reverting to the condition of swamps: land capable of bringing easily sixty bushels of rice to the acre without fertilizer is growing up in reeds and rushes and marsh, the haunt of the alligator and the moccasin. The crane and the bittern are always there, the fish-hawk and the soaring eagle build their nests on the tall cypress-trees left here and there on the banks of the river; the beautiful wood-duck is also always there, and at certain seasons the big mallard or English duck come in great flocks; but, alas, they no longer come in clouds, as they used to do (so that a single shot has been known to kill sixty on the wing). For them too the country is ruined, for them too all is changed. Those that come do not stay. It was the abundant shattered rice of the cultivated fields, flooded as soon as the harvest was over, which brought them in myriads from their nesting-grounds in the far north, to spend their winters in these fat feeding-grounds, in the congenial climate of Carolina. Now there is no shattered rice on which to feed, and in their wonderful zigzag flight they stop a day or two to see if the abundance of which their forefathers have quacked to them has returned, and not finding it they pass on to Florida and other warm climes to seek their winter food. Thus this rich storehouse and granary is desolate. With the modern machinery for making dikes and banks these fields could be restored to a productive condition and made to produce again, without a very heavy expenditure. But alas! those who owned them had absolutely no money, and after the destruction of the banks and flood-gates by the great storm of 1906 no restoration was made. A few of the plantations in Georgetown County have been bought by wealthy Northern men as game-preserves. One multimillionaire, Emerson, who bought a very fine rice-plantation, Prospect Hill, formerly property of William Allston, has some fields planted in rice every year, simply for the ducks, the grain not being harvested at all, but left to attract the flocks to settle down and stay there, ready for the sportsman’s gun.
Besides being a diligent, devoted, and scientific planter and manager of his estates, my father was greatly interested in the welfare of the poor whites of the pineland, spoken of always scornfully by the negroes as “Po’ Buchra”—nothing could express greater contempt. Negroes are by nature aristocrats, and have the keenest appreciation and perception of what constitutes a gentleman. The poor whites of the low country were at a terrible disadvantage, for they were never taught to do anything; they only understood the simplest farm work, and there was no market for their labor, the land-owners having their own workers and never needing to hire these untrained hands, who in their turn looked down on the negroes, and held aloof from them. These people, the yeomanry of the country, were the descendants of the early settlers, and those who fought through the Revolution. They were, as a general rule, honest, law-abiding, with good moral standards. Most of them owned land, some only a few acres, others large tracts, where their cattle and hogs roamed unfed but fat. Some owned large herds, and even the poorest usually had a cow and pair of oxen, while all had chickens and hogs—but never a cent of money. They planted corn enough to feed themselves and their stock, sweet potatoes, and a few of the common vegetables. They never begged or made known their needs, except by coming to offer for sale very roughly made baskets of split white oak, or some coarsely spun yarn, for the women knew how to spin, and some of them even could weave. There was something about them that suggested a certain refinement, and one always felt they came from better stock, though they never seemed to trace back. Their respect for the marriage vow, for instance, impressed one, and their speech was clear, good Anglo-Saxon, and their vocabulary included some old English words and expressions now obsolete. My father was most anxious to help them, and felt that to establish schools for them throughout the county would be the first step. In one of these schools a young girl proved such an apt scholar and learned so quickly all that she could acquire there that he engaged a place for her in a Northern school, and got the consent of her parents to her going, and she, being ambitious, was greatly pleased. He appointed a day to meet her in Georgetown, impressing on the parents to bring her in time for him to put her on the ship, before it sailed for New York. At the appointed time the parents arrived. My father asked for Hannah; the mother answered that they found they would miss Hannah too much, she was so smart and helpful, but they’d brought Maggie, and he could send her to school! My father was very angry; Hannah Mitchell was eighteen and clever and ambitious, while Maggie was fourteen, and dull and heavy-minded. Of course he did not send her. It was a great disappointment, for he had taken much trouble, and was willing to go to considerable expense to give Hannah the chance to develop, and hoped she would return prepared to teach in the school he had established. These people are still to be found in our pinelands, and have changed little.
The public roads were also my father’s constant care, and all through that country were beautifully kept. The method was simple; each land-owner sent out twice a year a number of hands, proportioned to his land, and the different gentlemen took turns to superintend the work. Our top-soil goes down about two feet, before reaching clay. The roads were kept in fine condition by digging a good ditch on each side of a sixty-foot highway; the clay from the ditch being originally thrown into the middle of the road, and then twice a year those ditches were cleared out, and a little more clay from them thrown on the road each time. The great difficulty in road-making and road-keeping, as I know from my personal observation in the present, is not the amount of labor, but the proper, intelligent direction of the work. In my father’s day, the office of road commissioner and supervisor were unpaid, and my father gave his time, work, and interest unstintedly.
My father’s love of art, and of music, and of all
ROBERT FRANCIS WITHERS ALLSTON, PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE.
Portrait by Flagg about 1850.
beauty was very great. It made all the difference in the world to us, his children, growing up in the country, so far from picture-galleries and concerts and every kind of music. At the sale of the Bonaparte collection of pictures in Baltimore my father commissioned the artist, Sully, to attend the sale and select and buy for him six pictures. Papa was much pleased with Mr. Sully’s selection. They included:
“A Turk’s Head,” by Rembrandt.
“The Supper at Emmaus,” by Gherardo del Notte.
“The Holy Family,” a very beautiful Gobelin tapestry. For this picture Mr. Sully was offered double the price he paid before it left the gallery.
“Io,” whom Juno in jealous rage had transformed into a white heifer. A very large and beautiful canvas, a landscape with the heifer ruminating in the foreground, watched by Cerberus, while on a mountainside Mercury sits playing on his flute, trying to lull him to sleep. (I still own this painting.)
“St. Paul on the Island of Melita,” a very large canvas representing a group of shipwrecked mariners around a fire of sticks; in the midst stands the figure of St. Paul just shaking from his finger a viper, into the fire, very dramatic.
“St. Peter in Prison,” awakened by the angel while his keepers sleep.
This is the match picture to the above and the same size.
These works of art on the walls of our country home awoke in us all an appreciation and recognition of fine paintings for which we can never be sufficiently grateful.
This great love for art and his confidence in its elevating influence is shown by his buying and having placed in the grounds of the State capitol a replica of Houdon’s statue of Washington.
Another and most characteristic evidence is furnished by the following note from a friend, to whom I wrote, asking for some facts as to my father’s public life, for I had thus far written of him entirely as I knew him in his family and home life, except for the bare outline by the dates of his election to different offices, and though I have no desire or intention of making this a history of his official and political career, feeling myself entirely unfitted for that, I felt I should give something to show his service in his own State. In reply Mr. Yates Snowden wrote:
“The day before your letter came my eye lit upon the invitation of R. F. W. Allston, president of the Carolina Art Association, inviting the members of the Convention Secession to visit the Gallery of Art in Meeting Street whilst deliberating here for the public weal. It is hoped that an hour bestowed occasionally in viewing some specimens of art, including Leutze’s illustration of Jasper and the old Palmetto Fort, may contribute an agreeable diversion to the minds of gentlemen habitually engrossed in the discussion of grave concerns of state.”—(“Journal of the (Secession) Convention,” p. W225, April 1, 1861.)
I can quite imagine that this invitation was a source, to some of the members of that convention, of great amusement, as being most unsuitable to their frame of mind.
My father’s full sympathy with the convention is shown by the following extract from Brant and Fuller’s “Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas”:
“Robert Francis Withers Allston, South Carolina statesman, scholar, and agriculturist, was born April 21, 1801.... During the nullification era and for many years afterward Mr. Allston was deputy adjutant-general of the militia, and from 1841 to 1864 was one of the trustees of South Carolina College at Columbia.... In politics he belonged to the Jefferson and Calhoun school, believing in the complete sovereignty of the States.”
During his prolonged absences in Columbia my father did not like to leave my mother alone on the plantation, with no one but the negroes to care for the children, so he secured a good, reliable Irishwoman to take charge of the children and the nursery, with the others under her. Strange to say, this was never resented, and Mary O’Shea stayed with us about fifteen years, when some of her kinfolk called her away. We called her “May” and were devoted to her. She had her trials, for my father did not approve of fire in the room where the children slept, and this, along with the open window, was a terrible ordeal to May. The day-nursery, with its roaring open wood-fire, only made the contrast more distressing to her; she never became reconciled to it, and I only wonder that she stayed all those years. As soon as the older children were big enough, we had an English governess—Miss Wells first, and afterward Miss Ayme.
I have asked my brother, Charles Petigru Allston, to write for me what he remembered of my father, and I will insert here what he has written for me.
MY holiday, the months of December, 1863, and January, 1864, were passed with my father on the coast, where he had planting, salt boiling, and freighting up the rivers, to look after. Salt was a very scarce article at that time, and my father had it boiled from sea-water on the salt creeks of the Waccamaw seashore, behind Pawley’s Island. The vats were made chiefly of old mill boilers, cut in half and mounted on brick, with furnace below for wood, and a light shed above, to protect from the weather. A scaffold was built out in the salt creek, and a pump placed there to lift the water about twenty feet, and from the pump a wooden trough carried the water to the boilers, some 300 yards away, in the forest. At flood-tide, when the water came in from the sea, was the best time to pump, as the water had then more salt and less of the seepage water from the marshlands. Sometimes, when a man was upon the scaffold, pumping, a federal gunboat, lying off the coast, would throw a shell over the island, which cut off the sight of the works, in the direction of the smoke from the boiling vats; when this happened the man came down in wild haste and made for the brush. These interruptions became so frequent that finally the boiling had to be done at night, when the smoke was not visible. My father sent me over to inspect the salt-works and report to him more than once, so that I was familiar with the situation. Wagons came long distances from the interior to buy or barter for salt. This work was carried on entirely by negroes, without any white man in charge. My father had the faculty for organization, and his negro men were remarkably well trained, intelligent, and self-reliant. Another work which he instituted and developed was the transporting of rice and salt up the rivers to the railroad. The ports, being blockaded, and no railroad within forty miles, it became necessary to make some outlet for the rice-crop to get to market and to the army. He had two lighters built, which were decked over and secured from weather, and carried from 150 to 200 tierces (600 pounds each) of clean or marketable rice. On each lighter he put a captain, with a crew of eight men. These lighters were loaded at the rice-mill and taken up the Pee Dee River, to the railroad bridge near Mars Bluff, to Society Hill, and sometimes to Cheraw. It was a long, hard trip, and when the freshet was up it seemed sometimes to be impossible to carry a loaded barge against the current, by hand—but it was done. At such times the only progress was made by carrying a line ahead, making fast to a tree on the river-bank, and then all hands warping the boat up by the capstan; then make fast and carry the line ahead again. The crew were all able men. They had plenty to eat and seemed to enjoy themselves. I have often been with my father when the boats returned from a trip and the captain came to make his report; it was worth listening to; the most minute account of the trip, with all its dangers and difficulties. There was seldom a charge of any serious character against any of the crew; each knew that such a charge made by the captain meant the immediate discharge from the crew and a return to field work.
My father also sent rice up the Black River to the Northeastern Railroad at Kingstree, and finally built a warehouse, making a new station, which is now Salter’s; here he put a very intelligent negro, Sam Maham, in charge; he received the rice from the captains of the river-craft, and delivered it to the railroad on orders, and I have never heard a word of complaint against him. Black River, however, had to be navigated by smaller craft than the Pee Dee, open flats, boats square at each end, and 50 feet long by 12 feet wide. I well remember the report made by the captain of the first crew sent up Black River. It was thrilling in parts. He had to cut his way through after leaving the lower river, which was open for navigation. The river had never been used high up for that sort of craft, and was full of logs, etc.; besides, in places it was difficult to find the right channel, and his description of going through a section where the river was broken up by low islands, or shoals into several apparent channels, all of which were shallow, except one, was most exciting. None of these men had ever been on this river or in that locality before, and only the drilling and direction given them by my father could have carried them through; but they went through, and after that there was a regular line going. But these flats being smaller and open and no decks, were much more liable to damage the cargo; still very little was lost, strange to say. They had good sailcloth covers, and the crews took an interest in the work. The captain and crew making the best record were always well rewarded.
I became familiar with all this work during the winter of 1863-64. My father wanted me to learn as much as possible of each branch of the work, and knew how to direct my attention to the chief details to be studied and worked out.
At night we sat together and had milk and potatoes, with sassafras tea for supper, and it was very good. One who has never had to depend on sassafras tea does not know how good it is. My father had many opportunities for getting in all the supplies that he wanted, as well as for making a good deal of money by exchanging his rice and salt for cotton, and then sending the cotton out by the blockade-runners to Nassau; but he was opposed to the running of the blockade for private gain. How often as we sat by the fire in the evenings did he talk to me on that and other subjects of public interest. His idea was that the Confederate Government should control the cotton; buy it up at home, pay for it in gold, ship it out by blockade-runners, sell it in Europe for the government, and bring in such supplies as were most needed—medicines, shoes, clothes, as well as arms, etc. In this way, he said, the government would be free from the horde of speculators who were making fortunes out of our misfortunes, and thus be able to build up a financial standing in Europe that would go far toward deciding the status of the Confederate States. He was most earnest on this subject, and I know that he made more than one trip to Richmond for the purpose of urging some such measure on President Davis, but he returned disappointed, and I remember after one trip he seemed entirely hopeless as to the outcome. Feeling, as he did, he would never avail himself of the many opportunities which offered, except to get such things as were prime necessities. In February, 1864, I returned to my school in Abbeville district. I drove away from the Chicora house on my way to the railroad, forty miles distant, leaving my father standing on the platform at the front door. That was my last sight of him. He died in April, 1864, and though I was written for, the mails and transportation were so slow that he was buried before I got home.
I returned to school after being at home a few weeks in April, and remained until the following October, when the school was dismissed. The call for recruits for the army was now from sixteen years up, and would include many who were at the school. I went to my mother at Society Hill and was to get ready to join the corps of State Cadets.
While I was at Society Hill my mother heard from the overseer at Chicora Wood, that he had some trouble about repairing the freight-lighters. This being a most important matter and requiring to be promptly attended to, my mother decided to send me down to see if I could help the overseer. So I started off on a little brown horse to ride the ninety miles down to the rice country. I arrived safely, and after a few days began to make headway with the work. The largest lighter had been in the water a good long time and was very heavy to haul out, but was badly in need of repairing. It was my first experience of unwilling labor; the hands were sulky. My father’s talks and teaching now came in to the aid of my own knowledge of the negro nature, and before long I had the big lighter hauled up, high and dry. We had and could get no oakum for calking, but my father had devised a very respectable substitute in cypress bark; it was stripped from the tree and then broken, somewhat as flax is, and then worked in the hands until quite pliable; this did wonderfully well, though it did not last as well as oakum. If pitch was freely applied to the freshly calked seams a very good job was made. We got the lighter calked and cleaned and simply painted, and put back in the water ready for work.
I then returned to my mother at Society Hill and remained there until I joined the Arsenal Cadets, and we entered the active service.
My father’s eldest brother, Joseph, while a student at the South Carolina College was appointed lieutenant in the United States army by President Madison and served in Florida in the War of 1812. He attained the rank of general, and all his life was given that title. Though he died at forty-five he had been married three times, his last wife, Mary Allan, only, having children. She had two sons, Joseph Blyth and William Allan. She lived only a few years after her husband, and the little boys were left to the guardianship of my father and the care of my mother, and Chicora Wood was their home until they grew up. Joseph Blyth Allston was a gifted man, a clever lawyer and eloquent pleader. His literary talent was above the ordinary; he has written some poems of great beauty; “Stack Arms” and the longer poem, “Sumter,” deserve a high place in the war poetry of the South. By the merest chance a sketch of my father, written by him, at the request of some one whose individuality is unknown to me, has fallen into my hands at this moment, and I gladly quote from it here, leaving out only the repetitions of facts already stated:
“All the offices held by Robert F. W. Allston in the State were filled by him with credit to himself and usefulness to the country, but his private virtues gave him a much more enduring claim to the regard of his contemporaries and of posterity. In the forties he had been offered the office of governor and had peremptorily declined it. This was not for want of ambition, but because he had dined at Colonel Hampton’s a few days before, in company with Mr. Hammond, who aspired to that office, and without formally pledging himself, had tacitly acquiesced in his candidacy. A liberal economy marked his expenditures, and a cultivated hospitality made his home the centre of a large circle of friends. The rector of the parish (Prince Frederick’s) dined with him every Sunday, with his wife. At dessert the Methodist minister generally arrived from some other appointment, took a glass of wine, and then preached to the negroes in the plantation chapel in the avenue, constructed in the Gothic style by his negro carpenters, under his direction.
“He did much to improve the breeds of cattle, sheep, and swine in his neighborhood, and was a constant correspondent of the Bureau of Agriculture at Washington. He was an active member of the South Carolina Jockey Club, of the St. Cecilia Society, and of the South Carolina Historical Society of Charleston; of the Winyah Indigo Society of Georgetown, of which he was long president; of the Hot and Hot Fish Club of Waccamaw; the Winyah and All Saints Agricultural Society, and the Agricultural Association of the Southern States. He was also a member of the Order of Masons.
“He was an eminently successful rice-planter and made many improvements in the cultivation of that crop and the drainage of the rice-lands.
“‘Allston on Sea-Coast Crops’ is the title of a valuable treatise on this subject, which unfortunately is now out of print. Yet one of his best overseers, when asked if he was not a great planter, replied:
“‘No, sir, he is no planter at all.’
“‘To what, then, do you attribute his great success?’
“‘To his power of organization, sir, and the system and order which he enforces on all whom he controls.’
“That was indeed the keynote of his character. He was most regular in his own habits, and all within his reach felt the influence of his example. Especially marked was it upon the negroes whom he owned. Even at this day (1900) they show by their thrift and industry the influence of his training and speak of him with pride and affection.
“Political matters and his duty as a member of the Protestant Episcopal Church often called him to the North, and sometimes he took a trip there with his family for pleasure. In 1855 he took his wife and eldest daughter abroad, and they travelled all over the Continent. He took a prize at the Paris Exposition that year for rice grown on his plantation, Chicora Wood, Pee Dee—a silver medal. The rice was presented to the war office, Department of Algeria, in the autumn, and was in such perfect preservation (in glass jars) that in the succeeding year it was again exhibited under the auspices of the Department of War, and was adjudged worthy of a gold medal [which has been placed in the National Museum in Washington for the present.—E. W. A. P.].
“Usually, however, he spent the summers on the sea-beach of Pawley’s Island, and enforced by example as well as precept the duty of the land-owner to those dependent on him. Here he fished and hunted deer, of which he has been known to send home two by 10 A.M., shot on his way to the plantation. Here he was within easy reach of his estates, and could exercise an intelligent and elevating control over the 600 negroes who called him master. This beautiful and bountiful country, watered by the noble stream of the Waccamaw and the Pee Dee, and washed by the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, was very near to his heart. And here, amid the scenes in which he had spent his life, he died at his home, Chicora Wood, April 7, 1864, and lies buried in the yard of the old Church of Prince George, Winyah, at Georgetown, South Carolina.”—(Extract from paper by Jos. Blyth Allston.)
And now I must leave this imperfect portrait of my father. Of his illness and death I shall tell elsewhere.
His taking away was softened to me afterward by the feeling that he did not live to see the downfall of the hopes he had cherished for the success of the Confederacy, nor the humiliation of the State he had so loved, when its legislative halls were given up to the riotous caricature of State government by the carpetbaggers and negroes, who disported themselves as officials of the State of South Carolina, from the surrender of Lee until 1876, when Wade Hampton redeemed the State from its degradation.
It was only Hampton’s wonderful power and influence over the men, brave as lions, whom he had led in battle, that prevented awful bloodshed and woe. In 1876 I heard a high-spirited, passionate man, who had been one of Butler’s most daring scouts, say, when hearing of a youth whose front teeth had been knocked out by a negro on the street: “Why, I would let a negro knock me down and trample on me, without lifting a hand, for Hampton has said: ‘Forbear from retaliation, lift not a hand, no matter what the provocation; the State must be redeemed!’” And, thank God, it was redeemed! Those brave men did not suffer and bear insult and assault in vain. My faith in my father is so great that I cannot help feeling that if he had lived he would have been able to prevent things from reaching the depths they did. Of one thing I am certain, that if his life had been spared until after the war we as a family would not have been financially ruined. He would have been able to evolve some system by which, with his own people, he could have worked the free labor successfully and continued to make large crops of rice and corn, as he had done all through the war. His was a noble life, and Milton’s words come to my mind:
“There’s no place here for tears or beating of the breast.”
MY mother, Adèle Petigru, was the granddaughter of Jean Louis Gibert, one of the Pasteurs du Desert, who brought the last colony of Huguenots to South Carolina in April, 1764, after enduring persecution in France, holding his little flock together through great peril and having the forbidden services of his church in forests, in barns, at the midnight hour, in order to escape imprisonment and death. There was a price set upon his head for some years before he made up his mind to leave his beloved land and escape with his little band of faithful to America. These perils and the martyrdom of some of his followers is told in “Les Frères Gibert.” It is a thrilling story, but too long to tell here. The two brothers, Etienne and Jean Louis, escaped to England, the little flock following one by one. King George III made a grant of land in South Carolina to Jean Louis for the settlement of the colony. He retained Etienne in England as his chaplain.
The difficulties and setbacks encountered by the little band were most harrowing and discouraging, but at last they reached the shores of what was to them the promised land, and disembarked at Charleston, South Carolina, April 14, 1764, from which city they made their way some 300 miles into the interior of the State where their grant was. Their difficulties were by no means over; indeed, to them it seemed sometimes as if they were only begun. The wild rugged wilderness where they were to establish themselves, they called by the names they had left in their beautiful France, New Bordeaux and Abbeville, and they set to work to clear land and plant the cuttings of grape-vines to make wine, and the cuttings of mulberry to carry on the manufacture of silk, which were their industries at home. It is hard for us now to realize what they had to encounter and endure—wild beasts, Indians, difficulties of transportation, of transforming the big trees of the forest into lumber suitable to building houses; but all these they conquered. They built homes, they planted vineyards and orchards and mulberry-groves, and succeeded in the manufacture of silk with their spinning-wheels and hand-looms. There is at the old home place in Abbeville now one of the little spinning-wheels with which the silk was spun, that the colony sent with pride as a gift to be made into a dress for the royal wardrobe of the Queen of England.
My great-grandfather was a man of executive ability and strength, with that personal charm which made him intensely beloved and revered by his little flock; and they prospered as long as he lived, but, alas, his life was cut short by an unfortunate accident. He had brought with him from France a devoted and capable attendant, Pierre Le Roy, who in this wilderness filled many and diverse offices; he delighted to vary the often very limited diet of the pasteur by preparing for him dainty dishes of mushrooms with which he was familiar in the old country. There are many varieties here unknown there, and any one who knows this delicious but dangerous vegetable, knows how easily confounded are the good and the poisonous; the deadly Aminita resembles very closely one of the best edible mushrooms; we know not exactly how, but one night the dainty dish proved fatal to the great and good pasteur, and his flock was left desolate in August, 1773, just nine years after their arrival in the New World.
Jean Louis Gibert had married Isabeau Boutiton, a fellow emigrant and sister of his assistant minister, Pierre Boutiton. She was left a widow very young, with two little daughters, Louise and Jeanne, and one son, Joseph, to struggle with the difficult new life. I cannot pursue the fortunes of the colony, but without the leader and counsellor on whom they leaned the colony soon began to disintegrate and disperse, and their descendants are now scattered all over the country. But of this I am sure, wherever they have gone they have carried their strong, upright influence, always raising the standards and ideals of the communities they entered.
Little Louise Gibert very early married William Pettigrew, a blue-eyed, fair-haired young neighbor, who was charmed by her dark beauty. His grandparents had come from Ireland and settled in Pennsylvania, from which State their sons had scattered, Charles settling in North Carolina, where he was to become the first bishop of the Episcopal Church, and William settling in South Carolina as a farmer.
They had a large family, four sons and five daughters:
James Louis, who became a very distinguished man, a lawyer.
JAMES LOUIS PETIGRU.
Miniature by Fraser.
John, clever and witty, but the ne’er-do-well of the family.
Tom, who died a captain in the U. S. navy.
Charles, who graduated at West Point.
The daughters were:
Jane Gibert, who married John North.
Mary, who never married.
Louise, married Philip Johnston Porcher.
Adèle, married Robert Francis Withers Allston.
Harriet, married Henry Deas Lesesne.
The sisters were all women of rare beauty, but Mary. Outsiders never could decide which was the most beautiful, but, of course, each family thought their own mother entitled to the golden apple. My mother was painted by the artist Sully when she was twenty-two, just a year after the birth of her first child, Benjamin, when she was so ill that her hair was cut, so she appears in the portrait with short brown curls, and is very lovely. There is a portrait of her painted by Flagg, in middle life. When she died in her eighty-seventh year she was still beautiful, with brown, wavy hair only sprinkled with gray.
The tradition in my mother’s father’s family was that the Pettigrews had come from France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and had gone to Scotland, when they had changed the spelling of the name from Petigru, and had eventually moved to Ireland. This idea was, of course, pleasant to the little Frenchwoman, and when her eldest son, James Louis, grew up and proposed to change the spelling of his name and revert to the French spelling she was delighted, and the father consented that the children should spell the name as they preferred, but he declined to change his. So on his and his wife’s tombstone in the most interesting little God’s acre at the old home in Abbeville, his name is William Pettigrew, while all his children are recorded as Petigru. My mother said to me not long before her death that she felt it had been a mistake, as there was no survivor of the Petigru name, all the sons having died. But I do not agree with her, for my uncle, James L. Petigru, was a great man—heart, soul, and mind—and left a mark in his State, having codified her laws with knowledge and wisdom. He was almost the only man in Charleston who was opposed to secession,—I may almost say the only man in the State.[2] But he was so revered and beloved that, at a time when party feeling was intense, he walked out of his pew in St. Michael’s Church (which he never failed to occupy on Sunday) the first time the Prayer for the President of the United States was left out of the service, and no one ever said one word of criticism or disapproval. In a period when party politics ran high and bitter feeling was intense, it was a wonderful tribute to a man’s character and integrity that, even though running counter to the intense united feeling of the community, love and respect for him should have protected him from attack.
My mother always talked with great pleasure of her early life. She spoke with admiration and love which amounted to adoration of her “little mother.” Her father took second place always in her narrative, though he was a most delightful companion—very clever and full of wit, a great reader, and it was his habit to read aloud in the evenings, while the family sat around the fire, each one with some appointed task. The elder girls sewed, while all the children had their baskets of cotton to pick, for in those days the gin had not been invented and the seed had to be carefully picked from the cotton by hand! It would seem a weary task to us, but they regarded it as a game, and ran races as to who should pick the most during the long winter evenings while my grandfather read Milton, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and other masters of literature. When one contrasts those evenings, those influences on the minds of children, with the amusements and diversions deemed necessary to the young of the present day, one does not wonder at the pleasure-loving race we are becoming. Add to this that there were no little story-books to dissipate the minds of children. My mother’s ideal of a story-book was her beloved Plutarch’s “Lives,” and I remember still with intense regret her disappointment when, I having accomplished the task of learning to read fluently, she one morning placed in my lap a large volume with very good print, and turned to the Life of Themistocles, which she had so loved. Perhaps if it had not been for the long s’s which adorned this beautiful edition of Plutarch it might have been more of a success, but at the end of the half-hour I announced that I saw no pleasure in such a dull book.... I would gladly read to her from one of my story-books, and then she would see what a really nice book was. My dear mother was so pained. She had had the same experience with the older children, but she thought me very bright and felt sure that she would find a congenial mind in her “little Bessie.” Seeing how hurt she was and that she had set her heart on that special book, I did not insist on my book but came every day and read the Plutarch aloud; but I never enjoyed it, which she could never understand.
This thing of bringing all reading matter presented to a child down to its level is a great mistake; it lowers ideals and taste. Stories while you are a child, and then romances, novels, detective tales, corrupt the taste until it is so reduced that there are not many young people now who can read Scott’s novels with any more pleasure than I read Plutarch at ten. My mother’s school was the old field school of the long ago. The country was thinly settled and the schools widely separated, so that children had to make an all-day business of it. The nearest school to the family home was on Long Cane, three miles away, and mamma, at first accompanied by an older sister and brother, later alone, walked three miles to school every day. She took her little basket of lunch, a substantial one, for she did not get home again until late afternoon. It is quite surprising to find what excellent instruction was given in these “old field schools.” Education was not so widely diversified, but it was more thorough and of a higher kind, as far as it went.
Mamma learned to prove sums by “casting out the nines” in a wonderful way, which no one else that I ever saw knew anything about. Her mind was stored with treasures of good poetry which she had been required to memorize in school. On her solitary walk home she was never lonely. The birds and the little inhabitants of the woods were her delight. At a big chestnut-tree about a mile from home she had special friends—two squirrels who ran down from their castle in the top of the tree when they heard her coming, and she always reserved some of her lunch for them. She sat at the root of the tree and played with them until she saw the sun about to sink below the horizon, when she picked up her little school-bag and started at a run for the last stretch of her way home.
THE farms of the up-country as a rule required few hands, and so each farmer owned only a few negroes, and, of course, the relations between master and slave were different from those in the low-country, where each plantation had a hundred or more negroes, which necessitated separate villages, where the negroes lived more or less to themselves. In the up-country it was more like one large family. In my mother’s home there were three quite remarkable, tall, fine-looking, and very intelligent Africans who had been bought by her grandfather from the ship which brought them to this country. Tom, Prince, and Maria—they occupied an important place in my mother’s recollections of her early childhood. They had been of a royal family in their own land, and had been taken in battle by an enemy tribe with which they were at war, and sold to a slave-ship. No one ever doubted their claim to royal blood, for they were so superior to the ordinary Africans brought out. They were skilled in the arts of their own country, and had artistic tastes and clever hands. Daddy Tom and Daddy Prince told tales of their wild forests, which the children were never tired of hearing nor they of telling. Maum Maria made wonderful baskets and wove beautiful rugs from the rushes that grew along Long Cane Creek. One day as she sat on the ground weaving a rug which she had hung from a tree, and my mother was listening to her stories of her home in Africa, the little girl said in a voice of sympathy: “Maum ’Ria, you must be dreadfully sorry they took you away from all that, and brought you to a strange land to work for other people.” Maum Maria stopped her work, rose to her full height—she was very tall and straight—clasped her hands and said, dropping a deep courtesy as she spoke: “My chile, ebery night on my knees I tank my Hebenly Father that he brought me here, for without that I wud neber hev known my Saviour!” She remained, hands clasped, and a look of ecstasy on her face, for some time before she sat down and resumed her work, and the little girl, greatly impressed, asked no more questions that day. When grandmother died, she left these three free, with a little sum to be given them yearly; not much, for she had little to leave. Daddy Tom took his freedom, but Daddy Prince and Maum Maria said they were grateful to their beloved mistress, but they would rather remain just as they were; they had all they needed and were happy and loved their white family, and they did not want to make any change.
My grandfather Pettigrew, with all his charming qualities of wit and good humor, had no power to make or keep money. And among the few sad memories my mother had of her childhood was that of seeing her beloved little mother sitting at the window looking out, while tears coursed down her cheeks, as she saw the sheriff taking off all their cattle, and two families of their negroes to be sold!... her husband having gone security for a worthless neighbor. My mother told it with tears, even when she was very old, the scene seemed to come so vividly before her of her mother’s silent grief.
It is curious to me that my paternal grandfather, Ben Allston, also lost his plantation for a security debt, having signed a paper when he was under age for a cousin who was in trouble pecuniarily. Grandfather was advised by a lawyer to contest the matter, as he had been a minor and it was not valid, but he would not avail himself of that plea, I am thankful to say, and lost the beautiful and valuable plantation which he had inherited, Brook Green on the Waccamaw. That is the only point of similarity between my two grandfathers, however, as they were totally different types, one Scotch-Irish, the other pure English.
The little Frenchwoman, so beloved by her children, did not live to show any sign of age, and the memory remained with my mother of her beauty, her olive skin and black hair, in which no strands of white appeared, and her graceful, small, active figure and tiny hands and feet. She always spoke broken English, but, as her husband did not speak or understand French, she never spoke it with her children through courtesy to him, and none of them spoke French. Her illness was short and the family had no idea it was to be fatal, but evidently she recognized it, for she called my mother and kissed her, and said: “My child, I want to tell you that you have been my greatest comfort. I want you to remember that always.”
AFTER the mother’s death the home seemed very desolate; and when the eldest brother’s, James L. Petigru’s, wife proposed most generously to take the younger girls to live with them in Charleston, so that their education might be carried on, their father gladly consented, and my mother from that time lived with her brother in Charleston until her marriage, having the best teachers that the city afforded and enjoying the most charming and witty social surroundings. Aunt Petigru, though a beauty and belle, was a great invalid, so that the care of the house and her two young children came much on the sisters-in-law. Louise, two years older than my mother, married first and was established in her own home. After two years in society, which was very gay then, my mother became engaged to Robert Allston. When the family heard of the engagement they were greatly disturbed that my mother should contemplate burying her beauty and brilliant social gifts in the country, and her sister Louise thought fit to remonstrate, being a matron properly established in her city residence. She made a formal visit and opened her batteries at once.
“My dear Adèle, I have come to remonstrate with you on this extraordinary announcement you have made! You cannot think of accepting this young man. Mr. Allston lives winter and summer in the country. He will take you away from all your friends and family. That he is good-looking I grant you, and I am told he is a man of means; but it is simply madness for you with your beauty and your gifts to bury yourself on a rice-plantation. Perhaps I would not feel so shocked and surprised if you did not have at your feet one of the very best matches in the city. As it is, I feel I should be criminal if I let you make this fatal mistake without doing all I can to prevent it. If you accept Mr. Blank, you will have one of the most beautiful homes in the city. You will have ample means at your command and you will be the centre of a brilliant social circle. My dear sister, my love for you is too great for me to be silent. I must warn you. I must ask you why you are going to do this dreadful thing?”
My mother was at first much amused; but as my aunt continued to grow more and more excited, contrasting her fate as my father’s wife with the rosy picture of what it would be if she accepted the city lover, mamma said: “Louise, you want to know why I am going to marry Robert Allston? I will tell you:—because he is as obstinate as the devil. In our family we lack willpower; that is our weakness.”
My aunt rose with great dignity, saying: “I will say good morning. Your reason is as extraordinary as your action.” And she swept out of the room, leaving my mother master of the field.
It was indeed a brave thing for my mother to do, to face the lonely, obscure life, as far as society went, of a rice-planter’s wife. She had been born in the country and lived there until she was fifteen, but it was a very different country from that to which she was going. It was in the upper part of the State, the hill country, where there were farms instead of plantations, and there were pleasant neighbors, the descendants of the French colony, all around, and each farmer had only one or two negroes, as the farms were small. In the rice country the plantations were very large, hundreds of acres in each, requiring hundreds of negroes to work them. And, the plantations being so big, the neighbors were far away and few in number. Whether my mother had any realization of the great difference I do not know. I hope she never repented her decision. I know she was very much in love with her blue-eyed, blond, silent suitor. They were complete contrasts and opposites in every way. Papa outside was considered a severe, stern man, but he had the tenderness of a very tender woman if you were hurt or in trouble—only expression was difficult to him, whereas to my mother it was absolutely necessary to express with a flow of beautiful speech all she felt.
They were married at St. Michael’s Church, Charleston, April 21, 1832, and went into the country at once. There was a terrible storm of wind and rain that day, which seemed to the disapproving family an appropriate sign of woe. But it was only the feminine members of the family who were so opposed to my father. My uncle approved of mamma’s choice, for he recognized in my father rare qualities of mind and spirit and that thing we call character which is so hard to define.
My uncle feared my mother would find only raw, untrained servants in her new home, so he gave her a well-trained maid and seamstress to whom she was accustomed, and who was devoted to her. Maum Lavinia was a thoroughly trained, competent house-servant, and must have been a great comfort, though she had a terrible temper. She married on the plantation and had a large family, dying only a few years ago, keeping all her faculties to extreme age. One of her grandsons is a prosperous, respected man in New York now, Hugh Roberton. I keep track of all the descendants of our family servants, and it gives me great pleasure when they make good and do credit to their ancestry. It does not always happen. In so many instances, to my great regret, they have fallen in character and good qualities instead of rising;—without training or discipline that is to be expected.
Mamma has told me of her dismay when she found what a big household she had to manage and control. Not long after they were married she went to my father, almost crying, and remonstrated: “There are too many servants; I do not know what to do with them. There is Mary, the cook; Milly, the laundress; Caroline, the housemaid; Cinda, the seamstress; Peter, the butler; Andrew, the second dining-room man; Aleck, the coachman; and Moses, the gardener. And George, the scullion, and the boy in the yard besides! I cannot find work for them! After breakfast, when they line up and ask, ‘Miss, wha’ yu’ want me fu’ do to-day?’ I feel like running away. Please send some of them away, for Lavinia is capable of doing the work of two of them. Please send them away, half of them, at least.”
But papa made her understand that he could not. These were house-servants; they had been trained for the work, even if they were not efficient and well trained. It would be a cruelty to send them into the field, to work which they were not accustomed to. Then he said: “As soon as you get accustomed to the life here you will know there is plenty for them to do. The house is large and to keep it perfectly clean takes constant work. Then there is the constant need of having clothes cut and made for the babies and little children on the place; the nourishment, soup, etc., to be made and sent to the sick. You will find that there is really more work than there are hands for, in a little while.” And truly she found it so. But it took all her own precious time to direct and plan and carry out the work. The calls to do something which seemed important and necessary were incessant. One day my father came in and asked her to go with him to see a very ill man. She answered: “My dear Mr. Urston” (she always called papa Mr. Allston, but she said it so fast that it sounded like that), “I know nothing about sickness, and there is no earthly use for me to go with you. I have been having the soup made and sending it to him regularly, but I cannot go to see him, for I can do him no good.” He answered with a grave, hurt look: “You are mistaken; you can do him good. At any rate, it is my wish that you go.” Mamma got her hat and came down the steps full of rebellion, but silent. He helped her into the buggy and they drove off down the beautiful avenue of live oaks, draped with gray moss, out to the negro quarter, which is always called by them “the street.”
The houses were built regularly about fifty yards apart on each side of a wide road, with fruit-trees on each side. There are generally about twelve houses on each side, so that it makes a little village. On Chicora Wood plantation there were three of these settlements, a little distance apart, each on a little elevation with good Southern exposure, and all named. One was called California, one Aunty Phibby Hill, and one Crick Hill, because Chapel Creek, a beautiful stream of water, ran along parallel with it and very near. In California, which was the middle settlement, was the hospital, called by the darkies “the sick-house.” To this, which was much larger than the other houses, built for one family each, my father drove. He helped mamma out and they entered; the room was large and airy, and there on one of the beds lay an ill man with closed eyes and labored breathing; one could not but see that death was near. He appeared unconscious, with a look of great pain on his face. My father called his name gently, “Pompey.” He opened his eyes and a look of delight replaced the one of pain. “My marster!” he exclaimed. “Yu cum! O, I tu glad! I tink I bin gwine, widout see yu once more.”
Papa said: “I’ve brought something good for you to look upon, Pompey. I brought your young mistress to see you,” and he took mamma’s hand and drew her to the side of the bed where Pompey could see her without effort.
His whole face lit up with pleasure as he looked and he lifted up his hands and exclaimed: “My mistis! I tank de Lawd. He let me lib fu’ see you! ’Tis like de light to my eye. God bless you, my missis.” And turning his eyes to papa, he said: “Maussa, yu sure is chuse a beauty! ’Tis like de face of a angel! I kin res’ better now, but, my marster, I’m goin’! I want yu to pray fur me.”
So papa knelt by the bed and offered a fervent prayer that Pompey, who had been faithful in all his earthly tasks, should receive the great reward, and that he might be spared great suffering and distress in his going. Then he rose and pressed the hand which was held out to him, and went out followed by my mother. As they drove home she was filled with penitence and love. She wanted to express both, but as she glanced at my father she saw that his mind was far away and she could not. He was, in mind, with the dying man; he was full of self-questioning and solemn thought: “Had he been as faithful to every duty through life as Pompey in his humbler sphere had been?” No thought of his bride came to him.
At last she spoke and said: “I thank you for having made me come with you, and I beg you to forgive my petulance about coming. I did not understand.” He pressed her hand and kissed her but spoke no word, and they returned to the house in silence.
My heart has always been filled with sympathy for my mother when she told me these things of her early life, for I was very like her, and I do not know how she stood that stern silence which came over papa when he was moved. And yet I adored him and I think she did, but all the same it must have been hard.
She found the life on the plantation a very full one and intensely interesting, but not at all the kind of life she had ever dreamed of or expected, a life full of service and responsibility. But where was the reading and study and self-improvement which she had planned? Something unexpected was always turning up to interrupt the programme laid out by her; little did she suspect that her mind and soul were growing apace in this apparently inferior life, as they could never have grown if her plans of self-improvement and study had been carried out.