02 TRAVELS IN THE CONFEDERATION . 



who drudges like a negro and takes butter and cheese 

 to market? or the North Carolina pitch-boiler? or the 

 South Carolinian with his everlasting rice? Above all 

 these stands the Gentleman of Virginia, for he alone 

 has the finest horses, the finest dogs, the most negroes, 

 the most land, speaks the best English, makes the most 

 elegant bow, has the easy grace of a man of the world, 

 and is a baron on his estates, which yield him every- 

 thing and could yield still more ! What country, what 

 nation in Europe can boast of such advantages as those 

 of Virginia? Spain, perhaps, superstitious and slav- 

 ish? or tyrannical Great Britain? or groaning Italy, 

 under yoke and ban ? or the soul-selling Germany ? The 

 remaining barbaric northern nations, with their frigid 

 lands, (as little known as these) were all passed in re- 

 view and reckoned out of the account. In evidence of 

 an inborn higher morality it was brought out that dur- 

 ing the last, seven years' war, when neither civil nor 

 religious laws were adequately effective, no Virginian 

 had been guilty of murder ; * for the shooting done by 

 their army in the high grass or creeping about in the 

 bush on their stomachs so as to surprise and kill British 

 soldiers, alone, unarmed and off their guard, this they 

 do not call murder. The great-mindedness of the Vir- 

 ginians was mentioned, but they did not speak of the 



* The New Englanders, as also the Pensylvania Germans, 

 boast in a somewhat similar way, the former that in a space of 

 21 years, and the latter, that for 17 years, no one among them 

 has been guilty of death-penalty or has suffered it. This is 

 regarded as proof of the better and more careful upbringing 

 of the young which the Presbyterian New Englanders and the 

 German Lutherans give their children on religious principles, 

 and is ascribed also to their custom of putting children earlier 

 to work. But it may well be said of all America that the 



