g a good deal the idea of society which appears
to exist in many people's minds here....

F. A. B.

BUTLER PLACE, Thursday, July 4th, 1839.
DEAREST HARRIET,

It is the 4th of July, the day on which the Declaration of American
Independence was read to the assembled citizens of Philadelphia from the
window of the City State House. The anniversary is celebrated from north
to south and east to west of this vast country: by the many, with firing
of guns, and spouting of speeches, drinking of drams, and eating of
dinners; by the few, with understanding prayer, praise and thankfulness
for the past, and hope, not unalloyed with some misgiving, for the
future.

In the gravel walk, at the back of our house, under a double row of tall
trees that meet overhead, all our servants and the people employed on
the place and their children, are congregated at dinner, to the tune of
thirty-seven apparently well-satisfied souls, and as I went to see them
just now, a farmer who is our tenant across the road, and has tenanted
the place where he lives for the space of twenty years, assured me that
I was a "real American!" He is an Irishman, and I might have returned
his compliment by telling him he was half an Englishman, for a man who
remains twenty years in one place in this country, and upon ground that
he does not own, is a very uncommon personage.

You would scarcely believe how difficult it is to establish a pleasant
footing with persons of this class here. Dependents they do not and
ought not to consider themselves (for they are not such in any sense
whatever); equals, their own perceptions show them they are not in any
sense, but a political one; and they seem to me, in consequence, to be
far less at their ease really in their intercourse with their employers
or landlords than our own people, with their much more positive and
definite sense of difference of condition and habits of life. Indeed, to
establish a real feeling--a _true_ one--of universal equality, warranted
by the fact of its existence, would require a population, not of
American Republicans, such as they are, but of Christian philosophers,
such as do not exist at all anywhere yet, or, if at all, only by twos or
threes scattered among millions....

You ask me how far Butler's Island was from St. Simon's [the rice and
cotton plantations in Georgia]. Fifteen miles of water