till clung to the old ways. He liked to have the
English ship take his tobacco from the river bank of his own plantation,
and to receive from the same vessel such coarse goods as were needed to
clothe his slaves, with the more expensive luxuries for his own
family,--dry goods for his wife and daughter; the pipe of madeira, the
coats and breeches, the hats, boots, and saddles for himself and his
sons. He knew that this year's crop went to pay--if it did pay--for last
year's goods, and that he was always in debt. But the debt was on
running account, and did not matter. The London factor was skillful in
charges for interest and commissions, and the account for this year was
always a lien on next year's crop. He knew, and the planter knew, that
the tobacco could be sold at a higher price in New York or Philadelphia
than the factor got, or seemed to get, for it in London; that the goods
sent out in exchange were charged at a higher price than they could be
bought for in the Northern towns. Nevertheless, the planter liked to see
his own hogsheads rolled on board ship by his own negroes at his own
wharf, and receive in return his own boxes and bales shipped direct from
London at his own order, let it cost what it might. It was a shiftless
and ruinous system; but the average Virginia planter was not over-quick
at figures, nor even at reading and writing. He was proud of being lord
of a thousand or two acres, and one or two hundred negroes, and fancied
that this was to rule over, as Mr. Rives called it, "a mimic
commonwealth, with its foreign and domestic relations, and its regular
administrative hierarchy." He did not comprehend that the isolated life
of a slave plantation was ordinarily only a kind of perpetual barbecue,
with its rough sports and vacuous leisure, where the roasted ox was
largely wasted and not always pleasant to look at. There was a rude
hospitality, where food, provided by unpaid labor, was cheap and
abundant, and where the host was always glad to welcome any guest who
would relieve him of his own tediousness; but there was little luxury
and no refinement where there was almost no culture. Of course there
were a few homes and families of another order, where the women were
refined and the men educated; but these were the exceptions. Society
generally, with its bluff, loud, self-confident but ignorant planters,
its numerous poor whites destitute of lands and of slaves, and its mass
of slaves whose aim in life wa