The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862

The lodging-houses of the lowest class of professed beggars, who do not trade on assumed respectability, or make a pretense of having once been better off, present to an American a spectacle, or chapter of spectacles, of which he can previously have no conception. They are situated in the most densely crowded and dirtiest quarters of the town, and are approached through lanes of the most noisome filth. No comparison holds good with any quarter of Boston, New-York, Philadelphia, or any city of the Union, for there is nothing in our cities to compare with them. Let us enter one of them. The common boarding-room, in which meals are taken, is about forty feet long by twenty broad. Either the floor has never been paved, or a thick layer of street-soil has hidden the stones for many a day past. Along each side of a long, narrow table, runs a wooden bench of rough construction, which is the only seat the place affords. The knives and forks are chained to the table. Strange implements they are, and a thief, one would think, must be reduced to shifts indeed if they could offer him a temptation. Almost every fork has lost one of its prongs, and every knife has been notched or otherwise abused. The plaster has mostly fallen from the walls of the room, the very laths are cut away, and the naked bricks and rude masonry are exposed. The ceiling is blackened with the tobacco-smoke of years, ascending every night from a hundred pipes. The filth that accumulates is seldom cleared away, but is swept into heaps in the corners, and remains there perhaps for weeks. A stench pervades the place, and a horrible moisture settles upon the walls. The room every night has the appearance of a market-place, where beggars vend and where beggars are the purchasers. From the roof a dim light is suspended, and candles stuck into glass bottles are placed upon the table. The daily contributions of the benevolent are here disposed of; what one has, another lacks. Old coats, old boots and shoes, old gowns, are freely bartered for tobacco and gin. Women from neighboring rag-shops attend to buy, and candle-makers send their agents to collect fat and grease. Every individual brings his own food, for the proprietor of the house finds lodging only, and not board. The atmosphere reeks with the smell of herrings and fried sausages. After supper is finished, a fiddler—one of their number, paid for his services by contributions of tobacco and beer—strikes up some merry music; dancing commences, and goes on till midnight, and often far into the morning. Save in such houses, such dancing and such dancers were never seen. The lame cast aside their crutches, the blind regain their sight, the paralyzed are alert and nimble, the trampers of every species jig in turn, or altogether, shaking their rags unto the jocund tune; and where is there a blither party? Burns has pictured the scene in his 'Jolly Beggars,' and he is the laureate of the night.

Would you know what kind of dormitories these people resort to when their dancing is finished? I will describe one out of many that I saw, which will serve as a specimen of the rest. Let us ascend the rickety staircase. The atmosphere is intolerably foul, and you feel that a week's confinement in such a den would cause your death. Well, these are the beds; a heap of straw, matted with long service, and a filthily foul rug for a coverlet. The sleepers have no other covering, in summer or winter. These beds change their occupants, perhaps, every night; for a tramper seldom sleeps two consecutive nights in the same place. Do not approach too near, for they are alive with loathsome vermin. There are twenty-five beds in a room thirty feet by fourteen, and in each bed two and sometimes three persons are placed. When the landlord is doing a good business, he puts three lodgers in each bed. Seventy-five sleepers in that confined space! For such accommodation the charge is six cents per night. And this is quite a respectable lodging-house. There are four-cent lodging-houses, where there is only straw without any covering; and there are three-cent houses, where there is no straw even, but only bare boards rotting beneath a crustation of dirt and filth, which is never washed off.

The frequenters of these places are professed beggars; and although their sufferings are at times great, they must not be classed with the deserving poor. You will see the latter lingering at the doors of work-houses. I have seen some two hundred of them on a winter's evening, when the frost has sharply bound up the lakes in the parks and the fountains in Trafalgar Square, shivering in semi-nudity on the bare and bitter pavement, waiting for admission. The houses of the rich—where lap-dogs were fed on hot and savory steaks, or even on daintier poultry—were standing around, and the heavens were as brass to the wails of the wretched crowd. I have been fairly staggered at such sights. I remember that one occasion a man dropped dead in the street where I was, while on his way to the workhouse, and it was found upon inquiry that he was really starved to death.

They sit and lie before the work-houses, at such times, huddled almost upon one another, and forming such groups of hungry, squalid, and degraded human beings, as no painter would venture to transfer from life to canvas. Of the number that apply for admission, one half will be rejected, who must shelter themselves under the dry arches of the bridges, or creep into hidden doorways, up narrow alleys, where the police are not likely to find them. For if found, they would be seized and taken before a magistrate, to be punished for being homeless and without food. Many of them do not dread this punishment, but will seek to deserve it by more criminal conditions than enforced indigence and helpless hunger. They will break street-lamps and tradesmen's windows, to get a month's imprisonment, with food, and rest, and shelter for that period. Others, and the majority, have a prouder spirit. They will escape a prison, with the help of God. Their number is very great. There are fifty thousand, it is said, in London, who rise every morning without knowing where to procure a breakfast. God be with them!

But all the want, and all the sin produced by want, in London, it would take all the volumes of the Conversations-Lexicon to recount. The streets—every street—is filled with it. Survey the thoroughfares at night. If any modest person is occasionally shocked at the exhibitions in Broadway, what would he say to Regent street, the Haymarket, the Strand, Fleet street, Cheapside, or fifty other streets in London? I have reckoned nearly three hundred unfortunate females, as they call themselves, in the space of one mile, on one side of the street alone, from Charing Cross to Temple Bar. These girls, as records testify, were mostly starved into the life of their adoption. They will tell you, if you converse with them in their serious moments—for they have such—that but for the mad excitement drawn from gin, they could not live. The river that flows sullenly along—what a catalogue of woes, what shame and frenzied despair, it has ended!

I was crossing Waterloo Bridge one night when there was suddenly a shout and a rush of people. A girl had thrown herself off the parapet, and was struggling in the water. The moon shone brightly down, and her figure was distinctly visible as she wrestled with the tide that was bearing her away. She was the third that had jumped into the river within twelve days; the average of such suicides in London being one in eight days. A vain effort was made to save her. Her body drifted down the river to be cast up at Greenwich or Woolwich, or perhaps the tide swept it out to sea, never to be found. I searched the newspapers for many days afterward, but saw no record of the poor creature's miserable end. These things happen so frequently in London, that the press seldom records them, unless they offer some peculiar features of interest.

In treating of the horrid want and misery that prevail among the very poorest class in London, I have as yet only partially uncovered the picture. We will draw the curtain back a little further, not to present the entire truth in all its fidelity, for that would be too harrowing.

In the streets of London I have seen women and children contending for the possession of a bone drawn from the slush of the kennel. I have seen boys fight and bruise each other for a crust of bread dropped upon the pavement, and covered with wet mud, or even unsightlier filth. I have entered the abode of this desperate poverty, led thither by children, who have clamored at my side for alms, and found such misery as I am incompetent to express in words. I have seen the living unable to rise from sickness, in the same bed with the dying and the dead. I have known an instance where a living man in strong health, bating the exhausting effects of privation and sorrow, has been compelled to seek repose in the straw beside the body of his dead wife, his children occupying the floor, and there being in the room neither chair in which he could seat himself, nor table on which he could stretch himself for rest. I have seen an infant crawl for nourishment to its dead mother's breast, and there was not in all the house the value of a cent to buy it food. I have seen a wife, in following her husband's body to the grave, drop in the road and die before medical assistance could be procured. A post-mortem examination proved that she died from hunger.

Let no one say that there are charitable asylums enough in London to furnish assistance in all deserving cases of extreme distress. If there are, their doors—and I appeal to all Englishmen who know any thing about the workings of the Poor Law System in their country, whether I do not record the truth—are closed in three cases out of five against the applicant. Besides, charity in London is reserved and suspicious. But its reserve is chilling to the deserving poor, who are usually too proud to disclose their sufferings to strangers, and are ashamed to solicit alms with an open hand. They strive as long as they are able; their history, if duly recorded, would swell the roll of martyrs. I have known among them heroes and heroines, as in all nations such, whether apparent to the world or not, are never wanting. Wives, who have been bred in comfort, working for their husbands who were out of employment, and supporting them by the scanty wages of such industry as many men would shrink from. Girls of tender years toiling to support a surviving parent, sisters toiling for their brothers. And all done not only without a murmur, but with cheerfulness and thankfulness to God that their condition was no worse. I have heard hopeful accents from the plodding charwoman, that have made me ashamed, as Wordsworth stood rebuked before the 'leech-gatherer, upon the lonely moor.' Let England look to it. These women, mothers of men, are abandoning her shores for foreign lands. When good and dutiful children desert the maternal home, what provocation must they have had from the parent?

'In the year ending Lady-day 1859,' said the London Times of February 15th, 1860, 'England and Wales spent five million seven hundred and ninety-two thousand nine hundred and sixty-three pounds in the relief of the poor. It is estimated that on July 1st, 1859, nine hundred and ninety-seven thousand seven hundred and ninety-six paupers were receiving relief in or out of the workhouse in this part of the empire. This is near a million of persons, at an average cost of about five pounds sixteen shillings a head, a considerable improvement on the previous year. The computation is, that every sixteenth person, or one person in every three households, is a pauper, hanging like a dead weight on the industry of the other fifteen. This, too, is only one form of charity, beside untold millions spent in endowed alms-houses, hospitals, asylums for every imaginable infirmity, coal-funds, clothing-funds, charity-schools, voluntary labor-rates, church-collections, alms done in secret, and several hundred other species of benevolence.'

Vainly does an American strive to realize such a state of society. Its effects are visible in the hatred of the poor toward the rich, which, if things continue as they are, will ultimately produce a war of classes. The work-houses and other alms-houses are always filled. There may be brief intervals when trade is brisk, and statesmen brag of the prosperity of the country, but these are only as the sane moments of a delirious patient. The general health of the community must not be judged from these. When in a year that it confesses is a favorable one, the leading political journal admits the proportion of paupers subsisting on alms to be one to fifteen, what must be the proportion in periods of great mercantile depression, which recur more frequently as time advances? I can not at all agree with Mr. Emerson, that England has not within her the elements of decay. She has. Her maritime supremacy is gone; her commercial advantages have vanished. In the world's market she possesses a stall, and nothing more. If it is better supplied than the stalls of some nations in the same market, it is, in its turn, inferior to those of others. I can not say, with her enemies, Let her decay. But I do bid her look to it in time, for her present condition is not one of promise.

A MILITARY NATION

The Confederates are vastly our superiors in the art of spreading plausible reports. Acting together 'like one man,' a falsehood from head-quarters is at once disseminated from Richmond to New-Orleans, and the North is promptly victimized. At present their game is to make us discredit their own forces, having learned that our belief in the extent of their army is only a stimulus to Northern exertions. The truth is, that the Confederacy never had so large an army as at present, or in such excellent condition. They have been gathering up the odds and ends; they have learned day by day to make better soldiers of them; they have abundant food, are on the whole well armed, and it is rank folly in us to rely on their weakness. Only an overwhelming force—the entire force of the North—can now conquer them, and to make even this available, our Government must have recourse to the most determined and daring measures. It is no longer a question of suppressing rebellion, but of defense; of conquering or being conquered. Were we at this instant to consent to the independence of the Confederacy, it would not be accepted. The Southerner, easily depressed by defeat, becomes arrogant in the hour of victory, and would exact such conditions as we could never endure.

The South, by successful secession, would take with it all our prosperity and all our power. It would take the Border States and the control of the Mississippi, and worse than this, it would establish a war which would rage without intermission until we should be crushed, perhaps into literal tribute and vassalage. Every dispute arising from our entangled neighborhood—and these would be innumerable—would be determined with an insolence and a cruelty far surpassing any thing which we have heretofore experienced; and at every manifestation of unwillingness on our part to submit, we should have the sword tauntingly thrown in the balance. With foreign aid and foreign allies they could soon make our condition more galling than death. We should be the butt of every nation, humiliated and trampled on in every international dispute, and in every such difficulty the South would become the great power of America, and its rising sun would easily find means to abuse us still further.

Is this picture exaggerated? Let the reader shake off the fetters of old custom and see the literal truths of life and what it is capable of becoming. The South seriously proposes to establish itself as a permanently military nation. The blacks are to do all the labor, raise all the food, perform all the menial labor, and, in fact, literally support all the white men. The aristocracy are to govern and fill all higher civil and military functions; the 'mean whites' are to be incorporated in the army. Year by year they will, it is hoped, become more and more identified with their cause and their calling, and firmer in their hatred of the North. Long ago this programme was published, this scheme of a great negro-supported military nation, and it is not difficult to see that recent events have rendered the leaders of the Confederacy sanguine of its success. The whole South is full of crops raised by the slaves—and the Virginia press triumphantly proclaims the success of the first part of the great experiment, a success well worth to them far greater sacrifices than they have already undergone. The negro, it seems, as a slave, can support the Southern Confederacy—feed and clothe it. One year of war has proved this.

'One year ago we might have prevented this,' some furious 'radical' may urge. Let such men be silent. On every hand there are cries for their blood, and it is boldly commended in conservative journals and meetings that they be hanged. However, the question is not now, what might have been done a year ago. It is, what the enemy hope for and what they are yet capable of doing.

By proving, undisturbed, the fact that the slaves can support them, the Confederates have gained a greater victory than the North dreams of. By forming a permanently military nation, they go a step further, and relieve their communities from the weight of a non-productive, idle, dangerous class of poor whites. When every 'bush-whacker,' 'sand-hiller,' 'Arab,' and other hanger-on shall have become a soldier, with his settled place in society, a few new troubles may be incurred, but much greater ones can not fail to be avoided. The leaders in a military government may preserve that unity which could never be hoped for under other conditions. We already know what unanimity prevails among them; we may imagine what this would become when further experience shall have still more coordinated and consolidated them.

It is not proposed in the South that other than military manufactures shall be encouraged. European goods are to flow in untaxed, and the 'military nation' proposes to do all in its power to smuggle them over the Northern frontier. To effect this darling scheme of vast profits to themselves and of ruin to us, any sacrifice will be made. It is urged that direct taxation will not prove sufficiently profitable to enable the South to dispense with a revenue tariff; but those who urge this, do not know the South. They do not know the infinite depths of hatred to the North and to everything Northern—the venom and vindictiveness with which they would pursue us. They forget that as a military nation whatever the rulers will, must and shall be done. The great planters—and Southern policy of capital tends to develop none save great planters and their adherents—will undoubtedly be taxed, but then they will on the other hand be directly interested in sustaining the government, and share in its power and patronage. Let the reader remember that after all, there are only at present in the South some two hundred thousand slaveholders, or men holding slaves sufficient to fairly rank among those whose interests are seriously allied to 'the institution.' Possibly the chances of war have still further diminished this number; it would be strange indeed, if between runaways and the sacrifices which adversity brings, and which fall most heavily on men of moderate means, the number of slaveholders has not been reduced. In such times negroes are sold at any price. This small number of slaveholders will understand their own political interests sufficiently well to admit foreign goods duty free, and to use every effort to smuggle them into the North.

We, on the other hand, who have no negroes to plant for us, who must pay our farmers far more than the wretched black earns, have no 'mud-sill' whereon to rest. We are manufacturers, and can not form a permanent military nation. We hold in horror the idea of a standing army, and of having our young men who might grow up wealthy and learned—and what Northern youth is there who has not his 'chances'?—become garrison-soldiers for life. We love learning, culture, independence, progress. Year by year sees noble schools rising among us—schools in which every man's son may obtain an excellent free education, and qualify himself for any position in any society. Year by year sees our manufacturers demanding fresh labor, more talent, more youth, more energy, and with them sees the condition of the mechanic becoming more and more ameliorated. Year by year finds the public lecture and library more used by the workman, and the masses rising little by little above their post. In short, we belong to a community whose conditions are those of refinement and of peace; ours is an advanced stage of civilization, and it is our duty to maintain this advance.

'The South' cares nothing for all these things. It 'loathes the very name of free schools,' despises industry and ingenuity, scorns the mechanic, and is altogether, as a community, behind us: as a merely agricultural and would-be merely military government, must essentially be. There are predicaments when the shrewd brute and cunning brigand has his superior at a disadvantage. Let the South prolong this contest till its military social system acquires sufficient strength, and it will drag us down to its own wretched lord-and-serf level. 'To its level!' rather let us say beneath it; yes, beneath its iron heel, to endless shame and ruin.

It can never be. The man who believes in peaceable secession must be an idiot. Secession means a military nation living side by side with a non-military nation, which it hates and will do its best to crush. It means a successful rebel flashing the sword in our face at every fancied insult, and all the work of war perennially renewed. It means conservative traitors and doughface scoundrels stirring up riot and ruin among us at every corner, with no man to make them afraid; nourishing the South in our faces and intriguing to bring us into the Confederacy. It means the breaking up of the Union into many fragments—for who supposes that Southern hatred will not intrigue to this effect, and that the pro-slavery Northern men of the present day who have worked so hard to secure to the South the successful solution of the first part of its problem will not be found laboring heart and soul to aid their old masters?

Væ victis! If we do not rise in our might and crush this rebellion root and branch, we shall be crushed—and no honest, observant man can deny it. Fire and water may as well mingle as we two hope to inhabit the same continent. It is hammer or anvil with us now, and no escape. They realize with delight that our year of procrastination has been to them more than two years of preparation, and so confident are they of success as to even wish to conceal their numbers.

Reader, this is not an emergency whose evil results may fall on others and not on yourself. There is not one loyal American to whom Southern success does not portend misery, poverty, degradation. We have not yet felt the foot of the enemy on our soil, but if we pour away the life-blood of the nation little by little, why, a day will come when the blood will be exhausted, and the enemy, grown to fearful strength, will come ravaging over the border. Do not fold your hands in fancied security and say of that day: 'It is far off.' When it comes, you will say, as you now say of the past year, that there was time lost and sad negligence. A year ago we 'progressives' cried aloud in bitter earnestness for one great, overwhelming effort, for decisive measures, and after debating, and delaying, and plucking all the feathers from our bird, they threw him, half-starved, at Bull Run, and then cried: There is your victory! A year ago we urged expediency and boldness; but 'Democracy' quibbled at every thing, hindered everything, and then laid the fault on us—as its friend Jeff Davis does when accusing the Federal Government of waging barbarous warfare—so as to excuse his own iniquities. But now we have come to the bitter need, and the country must choose between bold measures and measureless disgrace.

Lo! the country is responding heart and soul. From every township comes the cry of Union or death! What was the waking of Sumter, compared to this of the summer and autumn of eighteen hundred and sixty-two? At last the truth has gone home—we must conquer. Conquer or be conquered, it is, O friends! but if you will it, you shall have victory. You have the strength: in God's name put forth your hand and grasp the golden crown.

TOM WINTERS' STORY

I was taking an early walk on the morning after my arrival at the city of C–, in the spring of 186-, in order to sharpen my appetite for breakfast, when I observed a tall and stoutly-built man on the opposite sidewalk proceeding in the same direction with myself. There was something in his gait and his manner of swinging his right arm (he had a common market-basket on his left) that seemed not unfamiliar to me; and I hastened my pace to keep up with him while I observed him further. It was no easy matter; for he had a stride that, if hurried to its beat, would have put me to a run to save being distanced; but I succeeded in heading him off after a rapid walk of several squares, which brought us to the market-place, and I soon had the satisfaction of hearing his voice as he inquired the price of some of the marketing exposed for sale. This decided me, and I immediately threw myself in his way. He recognized me at once, and as he held out his huge hand, which I took in mine, we exclaimed simultaneously: 'How are you, Owen?' 'How are you, Tom?'

The greeting was something more than cordial. We had once been quite intimate, and it was seventeen years since we had met. I had lost sight of him that number of years before, and getting no satisfactory response to any inquiries I had from time to time made after him of mutual acquaintances, I had gradually dropped the subject, and never expected to meet him again.

Tom Winters was a Marylander by birth, and I had known him in Ohio during the Presidential canvass of 1844, when he had supported the gallant son of Kentucky, Henry Clay, with all the ardor of his generous, rash, and passionate nature; while I had supported James K. Polk, because—because he was nominated by the Democratic party.

I can appreciate at its true worth now that political infatuation which led me to reject the 'Mill Boy of the Slashes,' and to 'decline upon' Polk. There was no comparison between the two men.

——'That was, to this,'
Hyperion to a satyr.'

But that is passed. Polk was elected, and the gallant 'Harry of the West' died of a broken heart. Thence came Texas, the repeal of the Compromise, the Rebellion,

'Sin, and death, and all our woes.'

After a few hasty questions and answers on each side, we parted to meet at dinner at Tom's residence, and to sit down then for a general palabre.

I was punctual to my appointment, and after being introduced to Mrs. Winters, (Tom was now married and held an important position under the State government,) and after having been presented to Master Henry Clay Winters, a lad of three years, and being informed—in an aside—that the next was to be named John Fremont Winters, we sat down to the table and accomplished our dinner and our explanations 'by piece-meal simultaneously,'

Having satisfied my quondam friend upon the subject of my various wanderings, successes, and reverses since we parted—which were decidedly too dull and commonplace to interest the reader, although Tom, from a sense of duty, probably, listened to their rehearsal with a great deal of attention—I, in turn, questioned him of the events of his life. He ran them hastily over, and seemed inclined to treat them with so much brevity that I had frequently to call him back upon his narrative by a question on some point where I required more detailed information. But our dinner was over, and Mrs. Winters had retired, with Master Henry Clay Winters, ere he had half satisfied my curiosity.

Winters had left N–, the little county-town in Middle Ohio, where I had known him, in the spring of 1845, and had begun to travel as agent for a marble dealer of Pittsburgh, Pa. In this capacity he had roamed over all the Western States during several years, had made extensive acquaintances, and been rubbed against the world until he had acquired great knowledge of mankind and habits of self-reliance, without much of that polish of manner which worldly attrition usually gives a man. He was at that time between twenty-five and thirty years of age, in perfect health, and of herculean strength. He was considerably over six feet in height, compactly built, and that consciousness of power which such favored individuals possess, rendered him, in a great measure, indifferent to the opinions of others. Without any of the refinement which careful culture and early training confer, it is not to be wondered at that Tom was not 'over-particular' as to the society in which he ventured, or what profession he followed.

He had also been captain of a canal-packet, a drover, a deputy-sheriff, a general collector, and had first married in Kentucky, and settled at Lexington, where he had spent four years. There his wife died, without leaving children, and Tom was afloat upon the world again. Then he had spent two years in Mississippi; returned to Lexington, went to Cincinnati; 'and since then,' he continued, 'I have lived in every county on this side in succession, and have been here four years since I married my present wife; so that you see the seventeen years is now filled up, and you know my whole history.'

'But what were you doing in Mississippi?' I inquired.

For the first time Tom hesitated; and he answered, with an uneasy expression and a furtive glancing about of his keen hazel eye, that he had been an overseer on a plantation.

'The devil!' I exclaimed, rather abruptly.

'It is a fact,' said the plain-spoken Tom, looking seriously into his empty glass, then adding apologetically:

'What should I care about it? I had lived a long time in Kentucky, and been accustomed to slavery as it existed there. Besides, I am a Marylander by birth. I said slavery was right, and I believed it. My wife was dead; I had little means left, and cared for nothing.

'I had become acquainted with Luke Meminger, the principal negro-dealer at Lexington, who boarded at McGowan's Hotel, where I was then stopping, and he introduced me to a Mississippi planter' who was there buying a few hands for his plantation back of Grand Gulf. Talbot (that was the planter's name) seemed to take a fancy to me, and finally proposed to me to go with him to Mississippi and serve as assistant overseer. He offered me a salary of eight hundred dollars a year; said I should have a horse to ride over the plantation, a servant to wait on me, and an easy time of it generally. I accepted the offer, and accompanied him down the river. We took down fifteen niggars whom he had purchased in Kentucky, mostly at Lexington. I was there two years, and left heartily sick of it.'

'Well, that is an episode in your history, Tom,' I said, 'that I could never have imagined. But now you must tell me something about plantation life. I have heard and read a great deal about it, but never had it from the mouth of an old friend on whose word I could rely, and who possessed the advantage of having been an overseer himself.'

'Oh! there is very little to tell,' said Tom. 'I had to set the niggars at work and see that they performed their tasks; that was all.'

'Well, what crops did you cultivate?'

'Cotton.'

'How many hands did you work?'

'About seventy-five. There were some hundred and fifty on the plantation, altogether, big and little.

'What did the women do?'