The rude condition of a country is always imparted to the character of its people, and out of this peculiarity spring the rough sports and love of coarse jokes and coarse humor. No people ever more fully verified this truth than the Georgians, and to-day, even among her best educated, the love of fun is a prevailing trait. Her traditions are full of the practical jokes and the practical jokers of fifty years ago. The names of Dooly, Clayton, Prince, Bacon, and Longstreet will be remembered in the traditions of fun as long as the descendants of their compatriots continue to inhabit the land. The cock-fight, the quarter-race, and the gander-pulling are traditions now, and so is the fun they gave rise to; and I had almost said, so is the honesty of those who were participants in these rude sports. Were they not more innocent outlets to the excessive energies of a mercurial and fun-loving people than the faro-table and shooting-gallery of to-day? Every people must have their amusements and sports, and these, unrestrained, will partake of the character of the people and the state of society. Sometimes the narrow prejudices of bigoted folly will inveigh against these, and insist upon their restraint by law; and these laws, in many of the States, remain upon the statute-book a rebuking evidence of the shameless folly of fanatical ignorance. Of these, the most conspicuous are the blue-laws of Connecticut, and the more absurd and criminal laws of Massachusetts against amusements not only necessary, but healthful and innocent. Even in the present advanced state of knowledge and civilization, do we occasionally hear ranted from the pulpit denunciations of dancing, as a sinful and God-offending amusement. Such men should not be permitted to teach or preach—it is to attenuate folly and fanaticism, to circumscribe the happiness of youth, and belie the Bible.
The emigrants to Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia were all persons of like character, combining a mixture of English, Irish, and Scotch blood. They were enterprising, daring, and remarkable for great good sense. Rude from the want of education and association with a more polished people, they were nevertheless high-principled and full of that chivalrous spirit which prompts a natural courtesy, courts danger, and scorns the little and mean—open-handed in their generosity, and eminently candid and honest in all their intercourse and dealings with their fellow-men. These elements, collected from various sections, combined to form new communities in the wild and untamed regions. In their conflicts with the savages were shown a daring fearlessness and a high order of military talent in very many of the prominent leaders of the different settlements. They had no chronicler to note and record their exploits, and they exist now only in the traditions of the country.
The names of Shelby and Kenton, of Kentucky; of Davidson and Jackson, of Tennessee; of Clarke, Mathews, and Adams, of Georgia; Dale, of Alabama, and Claiborne, of Mississippi, live in the memory of the people of their States, together with those of Tipton, Sevier, Logan, and Boone, and will be in the future history of these States, with their deeds recorded as those whose enterprise, energy, and fearlessness won from the wilderness and the savage their fertile and delightful lands, to be a home and a country for their posterity.
The children of such spirits intermarrying, could but produce men of talent and enterprise, and women of beauty, intelligence, and virtue. In the veins of these ran only streams of blue blood—such as filled the veins of the leaders of the Crusades—such as warmed the hearts of the O'Neals and O'Connors, of Wallace and Bruce, and animated the bosoms of the old feudal barons of England, who extorted the great charter of human liberty from King John. There was no mixture of the pale Saxon to taint or dilute the noble current of the Anglo-Norman blood which flowed through and fired the hearts of these descendants of the nobility and gentry of Britain. They were the cavaliers in chivalry and daring, and despised, as their descendants despised, the Roundheads and their descendants, with their cold, dissembling natures, hypocritical in religion as faithless in friendship, without one generous emotion or ennobling sentiment.
It is not remarkable that conflict should ensue between races so dissimilar in a struggle to control the Government: true to the instincts of race, each contended for that which best suited their genius and wants; and not at all remarkable that all the generous gallantry in such a conflict should be found with the Celt, and all the cruel rapacity and meanness with the Saxon. Their triumph, through the force of numbers, was incomplete, until their enemies were tortured by every cruelty of oppression, and the fabric of the Government dashed to atoms. This triumph can only be temporary. The innate love of free institutions, universal in the heart of the Celtic Southerner, will yet unite all the races to retrieve the lost. This done, victory is certain.
The descendants of these pioneers have gone out to people the extended domain reaching around the Gulf, and are growing into strength, without abatement of the spirit of their ancestors. Very soon time and their energies will repair the disasters of the recent conflict; and reinvigorated, the shackles of the Puritan shall restrain no longer, when a fierce democracy shall restore the Constitution, and with it the liberty bequeathed by their ancestors.
With this race, fanaticism in religion has never known a place. Rational and natural, they have ever worshipped with the heart and the attributes of their faith. Truth, sincerity, love, and mercy have ever marked their characters. Too honest to be superstitious, and too sincere to be hypocrites, the concentrated love of freedom unites the race, and the hatred of tyranny will stimulate the blood which shall retrieve it from the dominion of the baser blood now triumphant and rioting in the ruin they have wrought.
In the beginning of the settlements, and as soon as fears of the inroads from the savages had subsided, attention was given to the selection of separate and extended homes over the country, to the opening of farms, and their cultivation. The first consideration was food and raiment. All of this was to be the production of the farm and home industry: grain enough was to be grown to serve the wants of the family for bread, and to feed the stock; for this was to furnish the meat, milk, and butter. Cotton enough to serve the wants of families, together with the wool from the flock, and some flax, were of prime consideration. All of this was prepared and manufactured into fabrics for clothing and bedding at home. The seed from the cotton was picked by hand; for, as yet, Whitney had not given them the cotton-gin. This work was imposed most generally upon the children of families, white and black, as a task at night, and which had to be completed before going to bed; an ounce was the usual task, which was weighed and spread before the fire; for it was most easily separated from the seed when warm and dry. Usually some petty rewards stimulated the work. In every family it was observed and commented upon, that these rewards excited the diligence of the white children, but were without a corresponding effect upon the black; and any one who has ever controlled the negro knows that his labor is only in proportion to the coercion used to enforce it. His capacity, physically, is equal to the white; but this cannot be bought, or he persuaded to exert it of himself, and is given only through punishment, or the fear of it. The removal of restraint is to him a license to laziness; and the hope of reward, or the cravings of nature, will only induce him to labor sufficiently to supply these for immediate and limited relief.
Stock of every kind except horses was left to find a support in the forest, and at that time, when their range was unlimited, they found it in abundance. Increasing wants stimulated the cultivation of a market crop to supply them, and indigo and tobacco were first resorted to. Tobacco was the principal staple, and the method of its transportation was extraordinary. As at the present day in Kentucky, it was pressed into very large hogsheads. Upon these were pinned large wooden felloes, forming the circle of a wheel around the hogshead at either end, and in the centre of each head a large pin was inserted. Upon these pins were attached shafts or thills, as to a cart, and to these teams, and thus the hogshead was rolled along rough roads and through streams for sometimes ninety miles to Augusta, for a market. When sold, the shafts were reserved, and upon these was then erected a sort of box, into which the few articles purchased were placed, and dragged home. These articles almost universally consisted of some iron and steel, and a little coffee and sugar, and sometimes a quarter of a pound of tea—universally termed store-tea, to distinguish it from that made from the root of the sassafras and the leaf of the cassia or tepaun-bush.
Cotton was, to some little extent,