The Piney Woods [pp. 361-369]

THE PINEY WOODS.
sun shines, but to show that the people of the pines are the
same Saxons in industry and good sense as those that owni
plantations and cotton factories. The light in which English
and Northern writers have represented these people is but
another evidence of that fanatic prejudice that falsifies facts to
gratify an unreasonable hate of our institutions. They insist
on coloring African pupilage w.ith the hues of oriental despotism, and they see in our people isolated castes-in the higher
circles of whites, lazy harems of beautiful women and barbaric
lords; and in the lower, ignorant and beastly peasants. It is
a traditional sneer of the fanatic that the sweet South mothlers
slaves and harlots; and our people, for many years, have been
stigmatized as the dirty progeny of a base institution. We
have but little respect for these foppish peripatetics, who write
for the newspapers. It is their business to manufacture marvellous facts and create sensations at home, and they are
not scrupulous as to at whose expense it is done. They dine on
a crust and marrow-bone, and their pay is a penny the line.
An attic, to them, is a palace, and they are terrible reformers,
seeking martyrdom on the side that is most liberal and successful. We regret the morals of this normal tribe of lecturers
and letter-makers were not better, atid that, like Romans, they
would prefer living poor and dying noble to bartering hoinori
for money and notoriety. But why complain? Ghosts of all
Grub street start up in horrid resurrection, and we have no
Pope, with lightning periods, to thunder among their hordes
and drown their barkings. It is a low employment to collect
the faults of neighlboring, States and carry them home to pander to the prejudices of tanatic countrymen, instead of facts to
show them their patriotism has degenerated into a mixture
of enthusiastic vanity and conceit.
Charity alone would compel a philanthropist to such a course.
Flattery deludes a people into the belief that they are the
models for others to gauge their conduct by, and ignorance of
their ignorance makes their civilization retrograde. Poetic
flattery may magnify the Illisus into classic beauty because it
ran by the -walls of Athens, but yet Illisus is as much of a ditch
and little of a mountain brook aiS ever.
There is a certain class of idle people living among the pines.
but it is the inherent evil that exists in every society; and the
cause of their indolence and poverty is more in nature than
individual indiscretion. The better classes, although rough in
appearance and not particularly polished in manners, are industriouts and intelligent.
And those who argue ignorance from the roughness of their
dress, read character superficially, and have probably ventured
beyond the corporation limits for the first time. Roughness in
costume, geniality and simplicity of address, and wildness of
scenery, are just what constitute the picturesqueness of the
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