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Updated: May 31, 2025
Again and again was there the lament that the Negroes of forty years after were both morally and intellectually inferior to their antebellum ancestors; and if college professors and lawyers and ministers of the Gospel wrote in this fashion one could not wonder that the politician made capital of choice propaganda.
I am not touching in this picture merely to attack it. It has been abundantly attacked; what it needs is definition. For there is much in this bourgeois, good-humored American literature of ours which rings true, which is as honest an expression of our individuality as was the more austere product of antebellum New England.
It is an unfamiliar, gloomy, mysterious place, is war-time Venice, but in certain respects I liked it better than the commercialized city of antebellum days. Gone are the droves of loud-voiced tourists, gone the impudent boatmen, the importunate beggars, the impertinent guides, gone the glare of lights and the blare of cheap music.
I arrived at Chehaw, the station where passengers transfer for Tuskegee, and taking passage in a wagonette, a crude substitute for our modern means of interurban transit the little train was not running on that day we drove through a picturesque country abounding in woods, vales, and cultivated fields, occasionally coming across landmarks of antebellum days.
And yet, while his verse is negligible although he always thought himself a greater poet than novelist some of his tales of the Carolinas and the Southwest possess a rude power and interest deserving of a better fate. Certainly Simms seems to have been the best imaginative writer the antebellum South produced.
The lordly manner of living, the immense estates, and the magnificent hospitality of our hosts, was a revelation to me; and an occasional reference by one of the older servants to the grandeur of antebellum days indicated a condition of even greater splendor and luxury.
She told me how she had been instrumental in making a match between her friend, Harriet Atkinson and a young scion of an ancient and haughty family of Charleston, and how after the marriage her friend's health had begun to give way, until now she was an utter wreck, living alone in a dilapidated antebellum mansion, seeing no one but negro servants, and praying for death to relieve her of her misery.
The better class, however, rapidly left the radical party as the character of the new regime became evident, taking with them whatever claims the party had to respectability, education, political experience, and property. The conservatives, hopelessly reduced by the operation of disfranchising laws, were at first not well organized, nor were they at any time as well led as in antebellum days.
In the antebellum days some of the Negro working women may have been lazy but their descendants of today are not lazy only fifty years after. Statistics prove how many homes have been bought through their labor, how many children are sent to school. Working women pay the family doctor bills, and support the churches and charities. "Every person should work or else she will need a doctor."
With the exception of what appears in Still's and Siebert's works on the Underground Railroad and the records of the meetings of the Quakers promoting this movement, there is little helpful material to be found in single volumes bearing on the antebellum period. Since the Civil War, however, more has been said and written concerning the movements of the Negro population.
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