out the confidence of other travellers, who had chanced to move through the South in a manner at all similar, however, I have had the satisfaction of finding that I am not altogether solitary in my experience. Even this day I met one fresh from the South-west, to whom, after due approach, I gave the article which is the text of these observations, asking to be told how he had found it in New England and in Mississippi. He replied.
"During four winters, I have travelled for a business purpose two
months each winter in Mississippi. I have generally spent the night at
houses with whose inmates I had some previous acquaintance. Where I
had business transactions, especially where debts were due to me, which
could not be paid, I sometimes neglected to offer payment for my night's
lodging, but in no other case, and never in a single instance, so far as I
can now recollect, where I had offered payment, has there been any hesitation
in taking it. A planter might refrain from asking payment of a
traveller, but it is universally expected. In New England, as far as my
limited experience goes, it is not so. I have known New England farmers'
wives take a small gratuity after lodging travellers, but always with apparent
hesitation. I have known New England farmers refuse to do so. I
have had some experience in Iowa; money is there usually (not always)
taken for lodging travellers. The principal difference between the custom
at private houses there and in Alabama and Mississippi being, that in
Iowa the farmer seems to carefully reckon the exact value of the produce
you have consumed, and to charge for it at what has often seemed to me
an absurdly low rate; while in Mississippi, I have usually paid from four
to six times as much as in Iowa, for similar accommodations. I consider
the usual charges of planters to travellers extortionate, and the custom
the reverse of hospitable. I knew of a Kentucky gentleman travelling
from Eutaw to Greensboro' [twenty miles] in his own conveyance. He
was taken sick at the crossing of the Warrior River. It was nine o'clock
at night. He averred to me that he called at every plantation on the
road, and stated that he was a Kentuckian, and sick, but was refused lodging
at each of them."
This the richest county of Alabama, and the road is lined
with valuable plantations!
The following is an extract from a letter dated Columbus, Mississippi, November 24, 1856, published in the London Daily News. It is written by an Englishman travelling for
