Ocean to the Mississippi, in the same parallel

Letter XF.

Natchez, State of Mississippi, 8th May, 1820.

THERE is much in the plain friendly manners of many of the planters in this neighbourhood, with which I have been greatly pleased; and if slavery were banished from their domestic and agricultural economy, I should envy their retired, unostentatious, and independent mode of existence.

The men are generally hospitable and well informed, as respects the common concerns of life, and the women modest and obliging, although cold in their manners. Many persons, with incomes of £1000 to £2000 per annum, live somewhat in the style of our second and third-rate farmers; the white joiners and artificers, whom they may be employing, eating with them, and forming part of the family. If you take them by surprise, they make you welcome, but offer no apology for their common fare. They generally, however, offer you a bed; and if you remain till the next day, assiduously furnish a most plentiful table. I visited an old couple who had settled nine children

in their neighbourhood, (is a term which here often comprises a large district,) giving each of them about 1000 acres of land and a stock of Negroes, and retaining for themselves only just sufficient for their wants, and to supply a little occupation. In the higher ranks of the plain planters, you find a state of society which, I think, must strongly resemble that of our second-rate country gentlemen or yeomanry seventy or eighty years since; the females being brought up strictly, with little knowledge, and great attention to personal neatness and propriety, and the men filling alternately the situation of soldiers, justices, and planters. There are, however, some families in the neighbourhood of Natchez, who live much in the style of the higher classes in England, possessing polished manners, and respectable literary acquirements. Their houses are spacious and handsome, and their grounds are laid out like a forest park. In the society of some of these families I passed a few days very agreeably; and while listening to some of our own favourite melodies on the harp and piano-forte, I could have fancied myself on the banks of the Lune or the Mersey, rather than on those of the Mississippi.

The younger branches of many of these families have been educated, the young men at the

colleges in the northern and eastern States, and the young ladies at boarding-schools in Philadelphia; and some of them have formed matrimonial connections with northern families. The tastes and feelings, as well as the accomplishments and literature, of the north, are thus gradually introduced into these southern regions; and one happy consequence is a degree of repugnance to the slave-system on the part of some of the younger members of the community, and a growing desire to mitigate its severities on the part of others. Indeed, it is impossible that, assimilated as many of them must be in mental habits and moral feelings to the society in which they were educated, and in which slavery is an object of abhorrence, they should become reconciled at once to the violation of the natural rights of an unoffending class of their fellow-creatures, or capable of witnessing, without horror, the dreadful scenes occasionally exhibited here. The other day, I passed a plantation, whose owner a few months before had shot one of his slaves; and I conversed with a young planter, I think not 22 years old, whose general manners bespoke mildness, rather than the contrary, who had also shot a slave within a year. The offence, in both cases, was stated to be running away, and no notice whatever was taken of either of the murders. A friend of