New America ... Seventh edition

Preface

Some studies of past times, which have long occupied my pen, led me last summer to the James River and to Plymouth Rock. I went out in search of an old world, and found a new one. East, west, north, and south, I *met with new ideas, new purposes, new methods : in short, with a New America. The men who planted these Free States — doing* the noblest work that England has achieved in history — were spurred into their course by two great passions; a large love of Liberty ; a deep sense of Religion ; and, in our Great Plantation, liberty and religion exercise a power over the forms of social and do mestic life unknown at home. In the heart of solid societies and conservative churches we find the most singular doctrines, the most audacious experiments ; and it is only after seeing what kind of forces are at work within them, that we can adequately admire the strength of these societies and churches.

What I saw of the changes now being wrought in the actual life of Man and Woman on the American soil, under the power of these master passions, is pic tured in these pages. 6 St. James' Terrace, New-Year's Day, 1867. NOTE TO THE NEW EDITION. In this new edition — offered at a lower price to a wider public — the text has been carefully revised, and some faults have been removed : in the hope of making it a little less unworthy of the favour with which it has been received. That favour has been to me a great reward ; for in the two years of its young life this book has already passed, in various languages, through more than forty editions. April, 1869. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. THE WESTERN COUNTRY ... I II. BLEEDING KANSAS .... 9 III. OVERLAND MAIL . . . . 17 IV. THE PRAIRIES ..... 26 V. PRAIRIE INDIANS .... 34 VI.

THE RED MAN . . . .40 VII. INDIAN LIFE ..... 48 VIII. CARRYING THE MAIL .... 56 IX. RED COMMUNITIES .... 64 X. THE INDIAN QUESTION JO XI. CITY OF THE PLAINS .... 77 XII. PRAIRIE JUSTICE .... 85 XIII. SIERRA MADRE . . . . 90 XIV. BITTER CREEK ..... 99 XV. DESCENT OF THE MOUNTAINS . . I07 XVI. THE NEW JERUSALEM . . . 114 XVII. THE MORMON THEATRE . . .121 XVIII. THE TEMPLE ..... 128 XIX. THE TWO SEERS . . . 1 34 XX. FLIGHT FROM BONDAGE . . . 140 XXI. SETTLEMENT IN UTAH . . . I45 XXII. WORK AND FAITH . . . . 151 XXIII. MISSIONARY LABOUR . . . . 155 XXIV. MORMON LIGHT . . . . l6l XXV. SECULAR NOTES . . . 1 66 XXVI. HIGH POLITICS . . . . 171 XXVII. MARRIAGE IN UTAH . . . 1 77 XXVIII. POLYGAMOUS SOCIETY . . . .183 XXIX. THE DOCTRINE OF PLURALITIES . . 188 XXX. THE GREAT SCHISM . . . -195 CONTENTS.

CHAP. PAGE XXXI. SEALING ..... 200 XXXII. WOMAN AT SALT LAKE . . . 2o6 XXXIII. THE REPUBLICAN PLATFORM . . 214 XXXIV. UNCLE SAM'S ESTATE . . . 220 XXXV. THE FOUR RACES .... 225 XXXVI. SEX AND SEX . . . 23 1 XXXVII. LADIES ..... 239 XXXVIII. SQUATTER WOMEN .... 244 XXXIX. FEMININE POLITICS .... 250 XL. HUSBANDS AND WIVES . . . 257 XLI. DOMESTIC LAW .... 262 XLII. MOUNT LEBANON .... 269 XLIII. A SHAKER HOUSE . . . .275 XLIV. SHAKER UNION .... 282 XLV. MOTHER ANN ..... 289 XLVI. RESURRECTION ORDER . . . 297 XLVII. SPIRITUAL CYCLES .... 304 XLVIII. SPfRfTUALISM . . . 311 rt XLIX. FEMALE SEERS .... 322 ' L. EQUAL RIGHTS . . . .328 LI. THE HARMLESS PEOPLE . . . 334 LII. THE REVOLT OF WOMAN . . 341 LIII. ONEIDA CREEK : 349 LIV. HOLINESS ..... 356 LV. A BIBLE FAMILY .... 363 LVI. NEW FOUNDATIONS . . . 371 LVII.

PANTAGAMY ..... 378 LVIII. YOUNG AMERICA .... 384 LIX. MANNERS ..... 390 LX. LIBERTIES . . ... . . 397 LXI. LAW AND JUSTICE .... 403 LXII. POLITICS ..... 408 LXIII. NORTH AND SOUTH .... 4x5 LXIV. COLOUR ..... 422 LXV. RECONSTRUCTION .... 4,0 LXVI. UNION . , . . . .,„

Chapter I. The Western Country

GUESS these Yanks must look alive on this side the River, unless they should happen to enjoy having their eye-teeth drawn — eh, Judge?' The man to whom this appeal is made as judge lifts up his chin from a dish of hominy and corned beef, glances first at myself, then at my fellow-traveller, and after winking an eye to the right and left, says slowly, 'Guess you are right there, Sheriff.' Spoken, as it is, across the table of a tiny hotel in the city of Atchison — the only wonder about which hotel is, how a place so diminutive can hold so much dirt and feed so much vermin — this passage of legal wit may need a few words of explanation. The Yanks now warned by the Sheriff that they must look alive, under penalty of having their eye-teeth drawn, are my friend Charles W. Dilke and myself; two men of undeniable English birth and blood.

English faces are not seen every day in the State of Kansas ; and these Western boys (every man living beyond the Missouri is a Boy, just as every woman is a Lady — in her own right), these Wes tern boys, having dim notions of ethnology and accent, set down every man who crosses the River with a white face // E B and without a bowie-knife, as a Yankee — a traveller from the New England States in quest of gold-dust, reservations, and corner-lots. 'The River' means the Missouri; here flowing between the settled State of that name and the wild unpeopled region, known in maps as Kansas, in poetry and fiction as Bleeding Kansas. To a Western boy, the Mis souri is the Thames, the Rhine, and the Seine ; his stream of commerce, beauty, luxury, and art ; and every man and woman, that is to say, every boy and lady, living in the western uplands, beyond this margin of bluff and forest, talks to you about going down to the River just as a Picar die peasant boasts of going up to Paris, as a Marylebone grocer speaks of running down to Brighton and the Isle of Wight.

The River divides him, as he says, from the East, from the States; and the current jest, everywhere to be heard from Atchison to Salt Lake, runs, that a man who means to cross the Missouri is going on a trip to America. Dressed in his high boots, his slouch hat, his belt, his buffalo-skin, his bowie-knife, and his six-shooter, a Western boy feels for the unarmed, sober, unadventurous men dwelling on the opposite bank of the River, the sort of proud contempt which an Arab beyond Jordan cherishes for the settlers in Galilee, spiced with the fierce hatred which a Spanish hidalgo dwelling east of the Duero, feels for the Portuguese pedlars crawling on the western bank. Now, that question of drawing the eye-teeth is one about which I hold to an extreme opinion. Five or six years ago, when calling on my old friend Landor in his Florentine house, and expressing my joy at finding him so hale and bright (he was then eighty-four), I heard in reply to my congratulations, these noticeable words : ' My dear fellow, say no more about it, I have lost four of my teeth.' When I smiled, the veteran added, ' Do not laugh at me ; I would rather have lost all my intellect than one of my teeth.' On the whole I should hardly go Lander's length, though the threat of having your ' eye-teeth ' drawn for you, willy nilly is certainly one to disturb a saint.

But we have crossed THE WESTERN COUNTRY. 3 our Jordan, and on this side the River we must take our chance. Early yesterday, a sultry August morning, we left St. Louis j a bright and busy city, full of a fierce and tameless life, half Saxon, half Latin ; a city which has been smitten to the heart by panic, such as will sometimes fall upon Cairo and Aleppo in a thne of plague. For a month of burning heat — the heat of a great plain, lying low down in the drain of a great continent three hundred miles from the nearest hills, eight hundred miles from a mountain range — cholera has been sweeping off her countless victims from those quays on which the poor Irish labour, from those slums in which the improvident negroes lodge. No Howard Society sprang up this year to assist the poor as on a former visitation of the pest, when fifteen hundred of the young, rich, able men of the city had put their hearts into the helping work.

Nothing had been done to meet a calamity which is always threatening such a city as St. Louis, built on one of the deepest sewers in the world. With a lack of wisdom hardly to be matched be yond the walls of Gotham, the council had ceased to make daily returns of the dead, the number of which could only be guessed from the march of funerals through the streets, and from the register of interments in the ten or twelve busiest graveyards. The rate of deaths ran high, and it was grossly extended by the arithmetic of fear. Fires were burning in every street ; lime was being forced into every gutter ; no one dared to enter a public conveyance ; horrible tales, the offspring of a Southern brain, were whispered in your ears at table, where you heard that every officer had flowm from the cemeteries, even the felons and murderers who had been promised their pardon on condition of interring the victims of cholera ; that the unburied corpses were heaped together in the Island; that coffins and searcloths had been set on fire by the runaways ; that a thousand nameless horrors had been committed in the dead-houses and in the graveyards.

The death-bells were tolling day and night. We left the city early. Noon saw us at Macon, picking grapes and sucking melons; midnight brought us to St. Joseph (affectionately called St. Joe), on the Missouri River, some dozen miles above Atchison, and of course on the eastern bank. At two o'clock, in the night, we came to the end of our iron-track, when the car in which we rode emptied itself into a field, at no place in particular, but in a patch of waste land overgrown by Stink-weed, and in a situation generally supposed to be occupied by a ferry boat. When we came alongside the last plank of the railway, the night being bleak and chilly, it was sweet to hear the •cry of the hotel-runner (a tout is here called a runner), Any one for Planter's House?' Yes: we were all for Planter's House ; and away we huddled, with our sacks and sticks, our wraps and overcoats, into an omnibus, which stood ready by the plank to swallow us up.

Ugh ! what monster is lying among our feet? Something like a huge black dog was sleeping on the floor; which, the moment we pushed into the doorway, began to snort and kick. It seemed too big for a dog : perhaps it was a bull, that, finding the omnibus open, had crept in from the Missouri chills. Presently, it began to swear ; such oaths as Uncle Toby heard in Flanders ; and on waking into consciousness, the strange beast proved to be the driver, coiled up, con cealed, and snoring in a buffalo's hide. Getting into our seats, with a dozen sleepless wretches like ourselves, we cried, ' All right,' and bade the driver ' Go a-head.' ' Guess you'll wait for the ferry,' said he, with a volley of adjectives and objurgations, such as ladies and clergymen would consider high in flavour. ' When will the ferry-boat come over ?' some one asked. ' Well, I guess about seven o'clock.' It was now two ; the night raw and cold ; the omnibus choked with passengers ; and we were lying out in an open field.

Shaking the hotel-runner from a doze — both he and the driver had again tumbled off into sleep, in the THE WESTERN COUNTRY. 5 cosiest corner of our coach — we learned that the river might be crossed, at that point, even in the night, if we liked to venture upon it in a small rowing-boat. Venture upon it ! Away we trudged, through the stink-weed, lugging our traps, which no one could be got to carry for us to the river side; feeling our feet down the bank, listening to the lap of the stream, and crying for help to the opposite bluffs. The bank was steep and soft, the black loam slipping beneath our shoes, while a dense yellow fog lay heavily on the swift and whirling flood. On the opposite heights we could trace the outlines of a little town ; a few white houses scattered here and there ; below which loomed the dark outline of the river bank.

But where was the rowing-boat? Not on our side of the river; for Bill, the waterman, lodged in his wifeless cabin on the Kansas side ; and a yep, yep — a warwhoop raised by the runner, which ought to have roused the seven sleepers from their trance — came back to us only in echoes from the Kansas bluffs. No boat came over with it ; and after hanging by the waterside for an hour, seeing the fog grow thicker, and fancying the stream grow wider, we turned away from the muddy bank, not wholly displeased at our war-cry having failed to disturb the boatman's rest. Going back to the omnibus, we found the driver snorting in his nook. We shall never forget the volleys of oaths and growls which he fired off during the next four hours ; neither shall we forget the rude and ready kindness with which he thrust upon us one of his blankets and his buffalo hide.

My friend lay down and slept ; sleep comes to you easily in youth; for myself, I walked on the plank; made a second trip to the river ; watched the stars pale out ; railed against the stink-weed ; smoked a cigar. At seven the ferry-boat came steaming over; at eight we are seated at table in the Planter's House, in the midst of these rough aristocrats of Kansas ; a jolly set of dogs, each dog with a bowie-knife in his pocket, a six-shooter in his belt. ' Can you tell me, sir, at what hour the Overland Mail leaves Atchison for Salt Lake?' is the simple inquiry to which the Sheriff answers, as above, with that suggestion about our eye-teeth being hardly safe in Kansas. Not taking the reply so quickly as might be, I look the man steadily in the face, and repeat my question ; this time with extreme deliberation ; on which the company break into a pleasant burst of Satanic laughter.

Then we hear from the judge that the Overland Mail (to travel by which, on our way to Denver and Salt Lake, we have come from St. Louis to Atchison, its starting-point) has ceased to run by the Platte route, and that the officers and stages have been sent down the River to Leavenworth, whence the mail is in future to be sent across the Plains by an easier and shorter line. Mail, mail-agent, stock, mules, waggons, all have been sent down the River to Leavenworth, and we have no choice left us but to take up our traps and follow in their wake. These folks make merry at our expense, with a brutal kind of good-nature ; for a transfer of the Overland Mail from Atchison to Leavenworth is a big blow to their town, such as people who have put their money in it, and who are bound either to stand by it or fall with it, may be forgiven for not seeing in the light of a joke.

Being regarded as companions in their misery, it is expected in the town that we shall consider ourselves generally as victims of a plot, and as having had one at least of our eye-teeth drawn. In a hundred phrases we are told that the mail is leaving the best route through the Prairies for the worst. The Platte route, we hear, is safe and easy; a good road, well stocked and stationed; the military posts on which are strong, the Indians all through which are friendly to white men. In a word, it is the route. The new route is called the Smoky Hill route, from a rolling mist which runs along it for a hundred miles. ' Well, gentlemen,' says the Sheriff, ' you will see it, and THE WESTERN COUNTRY. 7 then you will judge. Perhaps you like having your re maining eye-teeth drawn?' One of these citizens takes from his pocket a gazette of the current date, in which there is news from the Smoky Hill country; showing that Black Kettle, Roman Nose, Spotted Dog, and some other worthies of the red race, are out on the war-path ; telling how this and that lonely ranch has been plundered and fired by the Cheyennes ; and giving lists of white men who have been killed by these savages.

By the same gazette we learn that in the North the state of affairs is rather worse than better. A party of white men, coming down the Missouri, has been attacked by Blackfeet Indians, who exchanged shots with them, and swam after them, but were distanced by the rapidity with which the white men plied their boats. The party thus escaping from the tomahawk report that seven white men, coming in a boat down the same river, have been captured and killed by Crows, an Indian tribe who have recently made a treaty of peace with the government ; but in consequence of some slight, as they allege, have burned their treaty, put on ochre and vermilion, and gone out, like their brethren the Che yennes and Sioux, on the war-path. A tall, swashing fellow, bickering with rifle, bowie-knife, and six-shooter, lounges into the room, and is introduced to us as Captain Walker ; ' the famous Captain Jem Walker, sir; who has crossed the Plains seven-and-twenty times; after whom Walker's Creek is named ' — a creek of which we blush to think that we know nothing, not even the famous name.

Captain Walker is of opinion that we shall be fools if we trust our scalps along the Smoky Hill route. The Platte road is the only safe one. When we object that as the mail no longer runs along that safer path, we can hardly travel by it, he opines that we shall do well to stay a few days in Atchison, during which he will put us up to the ropes, and fix us generally in Prairie politics. If we don't know what is best for ourselves, he has no objection to our being damned, as we certainly shall be after making unpleasant acquaintance with a Cheyenne knife. It is clear that these men of Atchison have but a poor opinion of the Leavenworth route when compared against their own. Hearing that a small steamer is going down the river to Leavenworth in the afternoon, we send for our bills, and have our boxes put on board.

It is now nine in the morning, and as we have nothing to do, our new friends think proper to stay and help us ; a courtesy on their side to which we should offer no objection if it were not for their frequent and sardonic allusions to the fact of our having been taken in. About noon an accident raises us in their good opinion to a height yet higher than that from which we had evidently fallen ; enabling us to quit the town, morally speaking, sword in hand and with flying colours. Sauntering down the street, enjoying our gossip and cigar, we note the word Post-Office on a shop-front, and on going inside we find there is one letter with my name on the cover, written in an unknown hand, on which three cents are due. Paying the money, and breaking the seal, I find the letter is not for me ; on which I fold and restore it to the postmaster, saying it is not mine, and should be kept for the owner, to whom it is perhaps of moment.

Eyeing me in a queer way, the postmaster takes the letter, and gives me back my change of three cents. ' Do you see?' says the Sheriff to his nearest friend; 'damned smart that — read his letter and got his money back ! Hang me if I think they are Yanks after all.' One touch of roguery, it would seem, is enough to make the whole world kin !

Chapter II. Bleeding Kansas

WELL, Sam,' say I to a blithe young negro of thirty-five years, a boy with quick eye and delicate razor hand, as he powders my face and dabs the rosewater on my hair, in the shaving-room of Planter's House, Leavenworth, 'where were you raised?' ' Me riz in Missouri, sar.' 'You were born a slave, then?' * ' Yes, sar, me slave in Weston ; very bad boss : always drunk and kicking poor nigger-boy.' 'And how did you get your freedom, Sam— did you go and fight?' ' No, sar ; me no fight ; tink fighting big sin ; me swim.' ' Swim ! Oh, yes ; you mean you swam across the Mis souri into Kansas, from a slave state into a free state ?' ' Dat true, sar. One bery dark night, me slip away from Weston ; run through the wood along river bank, down stream ; get into de water by dem trees, and push over to de mud bank ' (pointing to the great ridge of slime which festers in front of Leavenworth when the water runs low); 'there wait till morning, looking at the stars ob heaven and de lights in dese houses all about ; and when daylight come, creep out of de rushes and wade ober to the levee.' ' Then you were free ?' Sam answers this question only by a grin. ' Had you any help in your escape from men on this side the river — the slaves had always good friends in Kansas?' ' No, sar ; me got no help to 'scape ; for me neber tell no one, 'cause me neber know afore the moment when me slip away.

The Lord put it in my head. Me Methodist, sar ; most nigger-boy in Missouri, Methodist; me just come home from chapel, sinking of de wonderful ways of de Lord, when some one say, close in my ear, " Rise up, Sam ; run away and be a man." It was de voice of de Lord; I know it well. At first, I not see what to do; me tink it quite wrong to run away and steal myself from boss, — twelve hundred dollars. Den me tink, it must be right to obey de voice of de Lord, for me belong more to de Lord than to boss, and den I slip away into de woods.' 'Of course, you were followed?' ' Yes, sar,' says Sam, putting the last of his fine flourishes upon my face ; ' boss come ober into Leavenworth, where he find me in de street. " Come here, you damned nigger," he say, pulling out his revolver, and catching me by the neck.

He got a boat all ready : den some people come up, " You let dat nigger go alone," say one ; " Put a knife into de damned nigger," say another. Den come a big row; dey fight for me all day; and my side win.' The date of this little history was six short years ago. Missouri, the fertile state beyond the river, the forests of which I have before me as I write, was then a slave state, with a sparse but fiery population of slave-breeders and slave-dealers. Nine years before that time — that is to say, so late as 185 1, when the world was gathering for its jubilee of progress in Hyde Park — all this wide region, lying west ward of the Missouri, from this river bank to the Rocky Mountains, was without a name. A host of wild Indian tribes, Kansas, Cheyennes, Arappahoes, hunted over the great Plains; following the elk, the buffalo, the antelope, to their secret haunts.

Two great lines of travel had been cut through the Prairies; one leading southward to Santa Fe" in New Mexico, the other running westward, by the Platte river, towards Salt Lake and San Francisco ; but the country was still an Indian hunting-ground, in which the white man could not lawfully reside. Half-a-dozen forts had been thrown up by the Government in this Indian country — Fort Bent, Fort Laramie, Fort Leavenworth, Fort Calhoun, Old Fort — but rather with a view to guarding the red man's rights than to helping the white traveller and trader in their need. But while the people of all nations were assembling in Hyde Park, and wondering at the magnificent country which had even then to be represented by an empty space, a swarm of settlers crossed the Missouri on rafts and in canoes, seized upon the bluffs between Fort Calhoun and Fort Leavenworth, threw up camps of log-huts, staked out the finest patches of land, especially those on the banks of creeks and pools, and so laid the foundation of what are now the populous and flourishing towns of Omaha, Nebraska, Atchison, and Leavenworth — cities of the free Territory of Nebraska, of the free State of Kansas.

Then commenced along the whole line of the Missouri river, that fitful, sanguinary strife, which earned for this region the mourning epithet of Bleeding Kansas. It lasted six years, and was a prelude to the civil war. Lawrence and Leavenworth were the results of this battle, of which Sam's little story may be taken as a sample. Every one is aware that in the great feud between the free-soilers and the slaveholders of America, a truce had been made in 1820, which is known in history as the Mis souri Compromise ; by which act it was arranged between the parties that slavery should never be introduced into any western region lying beyond 3 6° 30' of north latitude, ex cepting into such portion of Missouri as happened to stand above that line. For thirty years that truce held good, and even when the war of freedom raged against slavery on other fields, the Missouri Compromise was respected in the west.

As the final conflict neared, the two parties in the struggle showed an equal discontent with that act of truce. The slave-owners in Missouri, having an exceptional advantage in their state of settling with their slaves above the prohibited line, desired to carry their domestic institution straight backward through the country in their rear to. the foot of the Rocky Mountains, even if they should not be able to carry it thence to the Pacific Ocean. All the South went with them in their plans ; though their action was in open conflict with the law. Secret societies sprang up in many states — Blue Lodges, Social Bands, Sons of the South, and many more — all pledged to aid these planters in carrying slavery westward of the Missouri river, in the teeth of their own Compromise, in violation of their own truce.

The slave-holders of Missouri won one victory without a shot ; in quietly, by a local act, which attracted no at tention either in Boston or in New York, extending their own frontier westward, from the line drawn north and south through Kansas City, up to that of the river bank ; adding six large and now populous counties to their state, and con sequently to the area of the slave empire. This act was absolutely illegal ; but no one in the eastern cities noted it until the bills effecting the change had become law, and the district had been peopled with masters and their slaves. The game appeared to be wholly in their hands. From this new slave soil, which lies on the opposite bank, in front of my window, Blue Lodges, Social Bands, and Sons of the South, streamed over into these Delaware reserves, into these Kansas hunting-grounds ; each boss, accompanied by his sons and his negroes, proceeding to help himself to the choicest lots.

From St. Louis to New Orleans their courage was applauded, their success predicted. In Washington the slave-dealing senators, instead of calling these Missourian planters to account, and carrying out the law against them, sustained them in this outrage on the free states. By a course of partisan agitations they procured a fresh com promise, in which it was agreed that the question of slavery should be referred back, generally, to the people of any un organised country claiming to come within the Union either as a Territory or as a State. Such an act was supposed by the planters of Missouri and Kentucky to be an open de claration that Kansas and Nebraska were to be organised as slave territories. But now New England came into the field. The conversion of Nebraska from free soil into slave soil would have carried the line of slavery, in the western country, as high north as Boston !