70 ai,e:xander wii^on: poet-naturaust 



In New England he met some veterans of the 

 battle of Bunker Hill with whom he visited the 

 old battlefield, and one may see in his letter about 

 this visit how truly American he had become. ''I 

 felt," he declared, "as though I could have en- 

 countered a whole battalion myself in the same 

 glorious cause." 



On the Southern trip which followed the tour 

 through New England, Wilson expressed his 

 opinion in his letters as freely as he had done in 

 the other case. In Maryland he was disgusted 

 with the negroes huddled up with "their filthy 

 bundles of rags around them," but Washington 

 he thinks "a noble place for a great metropoHs." 

 Even then, "the taverns and boarding-houses" 

 were crowded with an odd assemblage of charac- 

 ters : "Fat placemen, expectants, contractors, pe- 

 titioners, office-hunters, lumber-dealers, salt-man- 

 ufacturers, and numerous other adventurers." 



Neither Virginia nor Carolina satisfied him al- 

 together. The streets of Norfolk shocked him by 

 their "disgraceful state"; Southampton County 

 by its almost impassable roads. In North Caro- 

 lina he is astonished by the customary morning 

 drinking of toddies; "you scarcely meet a man," 

 he wrote, "whose lips are not parched or chapped 

 or blistered with drinking this poison." Of the 

 taverns he remarked that they were "the most 

 desolate and beggarly imaginable; bare, bleak 

 and dirty walls; one or two old broken chairs 

 and a bench form all the furniture." 



As a matter of fact there were not many tav- 

 erns in the South in those days; the open-house 



