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{13} 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{15} 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{16} 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{17} 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{18} 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{19} 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 consider{20}able 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
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robert francis withers allston, president of the senate.
portrait by flagg about 1850.
{21}
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{22} 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{23} 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 nullifica{24}tion 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{25} 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.
