The Express.
London, England, 1856-12-10 00:00:00

SHE SOU IHE.AN STATES OF THE AME.
RICAN UNION.
(sr ur 2140LISZ TUATILLIII •

SELMA, ALABAMA, Not. IS.

It 's :oly when one enters Maryland that
A.,itrie a peculiarities first etrike an English-
man tot eibly. I travelled down from Baltimore
toNorfmk, in Virginia, by one of the Chesapeake-bay
steamers, and for the first time lighted on a
gang of elms going south in custody of a
regular tr der. Maryland is one of the great
slaverbreeding States of the Ihi3o, and supplier
yearly a large quota of the bone and sinew
which gather in the h is of Louisiana and
Her contribution on this occasion was
cJenposed wholly of lads and girls from fourteen to
twenty yr am of age, well clad, and apparently well
fad. They sat in a circle all the evening in the middle
of the mein deck, under the dim light of a lamp
swinging from the ceiling, their arms rosod one
another's wellies, tome of the ranger ones sleeping
with their heads on their elders' ki en, the majority
singing matches of methodist hymns. They were
seldom able to get out more than one or two lines of
the word•, bat this never caused any stop in the
music. The leader put in the first thing that came
into his head, and the others followed op the strain.
Thus the line,
We are p.seing away like a long salliker'il day,
would be followed by—

I took my bud'r by do bud,
And Lid him to do promised laud.

Groups of white men surrounded them, diagnosing
their points in connexion with the markets and poli-
tica; std the slave* didn't seem to feel in the least
abashed by their scrutiny, or affected by their own
situation, though it would be hard to imagine a
cloudier future than that of a boy or girl just entering
life in the hands of a negro dealer bound South.
The first time one comes in contact with a degraded
nos one's nerves are always tried more or less. One
sever likes to find oue's self in the companyotooavicts.
The presence of individuals whom Grime or Woken=
has blasted, and on whom society has set the stomp of
excoromunicatioo, or deprived of all the °editing is.
motives to exertion and to enterprise, and of all the
better and nobler blessings of existence, is sever ray
agreeable. I was not reconciled to it Ilea* ewer-
nos of a bystander that the nigger, were
'natures in the world, and it they were piel=tiral
would sing and dance all day long.
From this point white servants or waitns were no
mon to be seen. Nigger@ everywhere, niggers of mil
shades and all varistin,sulky lookiagniggen,ferocious
looking niggers, merry niggers, sad nigger', Diggers
bright with intelligence, nigger. steeped in stu-
pidity, nigger. horribly ugly, niggers barely @ador-
able, but all cowed, submissive, and attentive. Their
humility was the more striking from its contrast with
the independent bearing of the whitey the perfect
equality which seems to reign between all who have
no negro blood in their veins. In Virginia sad North
and South Carolina, I was in what is popularly
nppned to be the aristocratic region of the
American Union. Here, the Southern papers so-
sure us, are to be found the American 't (outlines"
par excellently, as distinguished from the Northern
retainers, the "small-fisted fanners and greasy
meeksaice" of Massachusetts and Connecticut, whom
" free twisty" is scornfully described as is
abundance. lam giving my. impremions, of coarse,
enly of the surface of emuty, and only of that
poet= of its surface with which one comes in contact
in railways and steamboats; but the feet Is that,
at least to the traveller on the wing, the aristocratic
element in the papulatin is nowhere visible. From
Baltimore to Montgomery, in this State, in ao specie@
of conveyance did I meet with more than two par.
secs who, judging from dress, mamma and novena.
dos, would in England be called "gradates." I con-
fine this observation specially to lb. slave region. Itia •
not true of New England. There may be a hundred
and no reasons, every one of them a good on, why ,
my experieon u been peculiarly unfortunate, but
my fellowpassengers from Baltimore southward bore
so manner of resemblance to anything which the '
loosest and wildest radical in the Old World would call
"gentlemanly." They wets dirty, de route maniere.
They were shabbily dressed; they chewed tobiooo
and spat its juice in showers • they talked slang ; the;
seemed n to have washed any pinion of their
person in their lives. In South Carolina, the
sheen home of chivalry, I sat is a esiniego
is which the mad formed by years oldest sodomise
ef saga was three lathes deep on the Boar, in
sempany with men Into whose pressen most English
ladies would be afraid to venture. I sat at breakfast
end dinner side by side with individuals who, what-
ever their other qualities, had certainly no mon
claims to gentility than chimney-sweeps or cab-
drivers; and we were waited on with a deference and
assiduity which our English Johns would do well to
Imitate, by negro'', who certainly, in all the endow-
ments which give men social standing in ea
aristocratic country, save birth sine, seemed to
me to be jut as good company, and a vast deal
more entertaining than those they served. The
aristocracy of race, I think, never armhole/Asir a
more lud:crous aspect. I draw no euwaindmi firm
this in any way derogatory to the gamed shineater
of the people, as compared with these of say ether
wintry. Bat I must say that I debsiwaerantedin
drawing from it the conemsioo, that the "gentility"
argument, on which the Southern press has placed
great strain in its recent defences of slavery,
M a silly &lesion. The suns which have
bees launched by it at Northern vulgarity wear
a curious aspect to any one who has bad the felicity
of passing a short time with the well•to.do elan,
the travelling elan, is short, of those States which
claim the exclusive hamar of ha:boating diagrams.
A ideas, well•dressed,edusated man in a Northers
railway carriage is by no means a rare phenomena,
though there is but ore slaw foe all grades; bat in
the South you may Untidiness& (guiles without
seeing one. So much for the advantage of slavery
as a refiner of manners. I shall doubtless
to told, in reply to. this, that I mast seek for
of Southern gentility in the mansion
theei "
wealthy planters; bet I claim the right to
lode of the effect of an institutioa from the rases
whom we meet on the highways, and not from an
hillaitesimally small number whom we mast seek for
is seclusion, and who owe all their extend advan-
tages to the fact that their wealth enables them to
live apart from slavery, end out of the atmosphere
which it generates. The great planters whoa red.
deuces are scattered here and there over the wilds
of Virginia and the Carolinas may be, and
no doubt are, polished gentlemen; but they
are jest that poetics of the community who
feel least the Manses of the peculiar hauteur:la. To
twit the North foe its vulgarity because these men
happen to exist in the South, is jut as aboard as it
would be for as to taunt Frenchmen with their
poverty because the Marquis of Westminster has
300,0001. a year.
I must gamed your readers, however, from sap-
'agog that beaus polish is not to be met with,
good breeding is altogether asset. Most English
travellers in America have their bile roossd, I imagine,
at the very outset, by the want of all defames Irmo
badly dressed men to well-dressed men, and ever after
look upon everything with jaundiced eyes. There
perhepe so country in the world is which
mere dries elicits less demonstration of respect
•

Every ma has more or lees of what in Engbuid is
called manliness, seems tolerably sure of his own
position and his own rights, and maintains his dig.
city. But to suppose that this begets positive rade-
nem is a mistake. I feel quite satisfied that if all
classes were mixed op in travelling in England so
they are here, travelling, especially for ladies, would
be intolerable. One would see more oa►mness, rude-
ness, and indecorum in one day in an English third-
elms carriage than one ewe here is a week, making
datum due allowanee for the differ's*, in the divers
sonventionalities by which people in the two eonntries
regulate their conduct in public.
It is curious to see how the passion for dm', and
above all for French fashions is it, has penetrated to
every ncok and corner ot the country. lam staying
in an " bo'el " in which all the chairs are wed* of dial:
in which there is an average ot three beds in every
sold, bare. whi,ewa.hed room; in which I am waited
spas by fi;thy negroes ; is which my looking glass is
nailed to the wall, and is only four inches mare.
Two tbirde of the men of the little town board in it.
and before each tutal wash in two .tin billing, and
arrange their hair at a glass in the hall with
go sage Dumb and break, suspended therefrom by a