The Portland daily press., 1867-08-15
Miscellany.
TIRE POOR WHITES AND BLACKS.

TIRE POOR WHITES AND BLACKS.
Gail Hamilton, in "Wool Gathering" writes
as follows: .H
Through Middle and Southern Tenr essee,
and down into Alabama-sweeG, softly flow
ing names, lands rich in promise and posi-
bility, but wretched and squalid. We read of
privation and suffering; but the book that
opens before our eyes tells tale utterly new
and unsupported Can one dream OF life
so miserable and meagre as that which stag
mates here? 1t is not life, but lifelessness.
The station villages show huddle of dirty
white frame houses. small, disorderly, mean.
set apparently with no attempt at regularity.
built with no thought of symmetry or beanty
scarcely, one would say, of comfort or thrift
they might be workshops rather than houses.
Groups OF unkempt, unshOrn, unwashed men
lounge on the stoops; men and village are
dirtywhite together.
But this is the better class of houses. by
Tar the larger number on the road, all except
those in the villages, are huts, cabins, built
perhaps OF logs, sometimes OF the toughest
boards. One shudders 10 think OF human be-
lngs living in such houses, and content ia
i've there. Sometimes house and harm
and shed are all under one roof
the shed in the middle. Oftener no barn
appears. The chimneys are rudely built up
from the ground and at the end of the house,
with stones OF various sizes gathered from the
pastures, sticks and bits of boards piled trans
versely and iaubed with clay. Black and
white live side by side, as it is easy to see. for
the doorways are generally filled with gazers,
looking even more wretched and squalid than
their houses. One door is adusk with swart
faces, at various distances from the ground
and few feet away another howell over
flows with tow-heads. The. whites seem
by ar the most pitiable. They have gray.
earthly look, as if the Lord God had formed
them OF the dust of the ground particularly O,
tennessee Clay, but bad hardly yet breatied
INTO their nostrils the breath OF lie. The dress
OF the women is no dress at all. but ve,v
partial Covering. Bare feet, bare legs lank
skirts, moppy hair, is the costume One would
not mind group or two here and there but n
country peoped by such beings, country dot
ted with such dwellings, leaves a hopelessness
on the soul. To ride hour after hour past these
dreary, despairing habitations, to see swarm
after swarm of these pallid, dull faces-homes
with all that makes home desirable faded ont.
life with all that makes lite loyejv vanished
away-O the sudden sadness OF it! IL seems
as II In some sort ones country had suffered
change. You thought ali was prosperity and
progress, even il sometimes little noisy and
rude. But here are silence, submission and
degradation.
we drive all along the bottom of the basin
in which Chattanooga stands. The houses OF
the freedmen are scattered over the plain
sometimes crammed close together, and some
times straying out into the fields adventurous
and alone. They are comical little shanties.
curiously awry, laboriously patched, boards
projecting beyond the walls at irregular
lengths, broken-backed roofs, not Straight
line anywhere, but every variety of shapeless.
ness. They are such houses as very small
than houses; but they are generally white.
washed, and look far less squalid than the buts
we have seen on our journey nither. They
embody ambition, improvement, personal ei.
tort to better ones condition. You cannot
help being amused at their colnical and inoe-
nous crookedness, yeS there is little twinge
of pathos behind the smile. TIE women em-a oTe
at work, washing, knitting. and pea hans COS ,a,s
siplng, and the children are playing in the
common door-yard-the open pasture 70