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Updated: May 15, 2025
To some people Yankee thrift is disagreeable; to others, Southern shiftlessness is intolerable.
I give this rather shocking example of sophomoric shiftlessness for the purpose of illustrating my attitude toward my educational opportunities and what was possible in the way of dexterously avoiding them. All I had to do was to learn the names of the chief characters in the various plays and novels prescribed. If I could acquire a brief scenario of each so much the better.
At length they came out into a small clearing in the center of which stood a log cabin surrounded by every evidence of shiftlessness and neglect. A gunnysack did duty as a window and curtain also. The chimney at the end of the building was of sticks and clay while the roof was of "rived" shingles. At the approach of Lopez and the boys a large negro stepped out to meet them.
The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado.
Father judged Oliver in that way. He thought that Ollie's joyousness and his courtesy, even his way of taking off his hat, and holding it in his two hands for a moment you've seen him do it a hundred times was only a proof of his Southern shiftlessness caring more for manners than for work. Mother didn't; she understood Ollie better, and so did John, but father never could.
Delilah Joyce was sitting on her front doorstone with a fine disregard of the fact that her little clock had struck eight of the morning, while her bed was still unmade. The Tiverton folk who disapproved of her shiftlessness in letting the golden hours, run thus to waste, did grudgingly commend her for airing well.
It may even be worse than wasted; it may encourage shiftlessness, it may pauperize. There is no doubt that indiscriminate and thoughtless charity is dangerous; the crude largesse of a few rich Romans of the Empire bred vast corruption and pauperism.
Industry, economy, the love of fresh air, the enjoyment of the early morning, the hatred of laziness, shiftlessness, sharp practise and all that savors of graft, grab and get-by-any-means these characteristics were strong in both.
Charles Eliot Norton, who like Olmsted, Hall, Miss Martineau and most other travelers, was hostile to slavery, wrote after a journey to Charleston in 1855: "The change to a Northerner in coming South is always a great one when he steps over the boundary of the free states; and the farther you go towards the South the more absolutely do shiftlessness and careless indifference take the place of energy and active precaution and skilful management.... The outside first aspect of slavery has nothing horrible and repulsive about it.
He cannot be severely censured when their shiftlessness is borne in mind. He probably had already received many appeals from them. But Mary could not accept their troubles so passively. To add to her distress, she was weakened by the painful task she had just completed. She was low-spirited and broken-hearted, and really ill.
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