South Carolinians
accepting Secession with an enthusiasm (or rather self-exaltation) and
confidence astounding to witness. There would be no collision; the North
could not and dared not push it to the extreme issue; she must endure
the punishment due to her 'fanaticism' in inevitable bankruptcy and
beggary, while the South, the seat of 'a great, free, and prosperous
people, whose renown must spread throughout the civilized world, and
pass down to the remotest ages' (I quote from the ordinance of
Secession), had infinite possibilities before it. Jack Cade's
commonwealth, Panurge's 'world, in which all men shall be debtors and
borrowers,' Gonzalo's imaginary kingdom in the _Tempest_, were not a
whit more extravagant than what was hourly talked of and expected from
this longed-for slaveholding confederacy at this time in Charleston. But
enough of digression on a subject merely incidental to this narrative.

Three days after my conversation with the Colonel, when the city was
jubilant with the passage of the act of Secession, I accompanied him to
the plantation spoken of. It involved a little steamboat journey, sundry
rides in chaise or buggy, and the crossing of more than one of the many
creeks or rivers intersecting the low, sandy, swampy coast. I purposely
abstain from particularizing the locality. It was toward the close of a
mild, humid day when we reached the Colonel's residence.

Suppose an old-fashioned two-story house, one of a very common pattern
in this region, built of wood, and standing on an open foundation of
brick, with a tall, formal chimney projecting at either end, a broad
piazza, and a great flight of wooden steps in front and rear, the latter
looking seaward. Like the house of Chaucer's Reeve, in summer it must
have been all 'yshadowed with greene trees,' the cedar, the cottonwood,
the liveoak, fig, mulberry, and magnolia, growing in the sand or light
soil accruing from vegetable decomposition; and as the evergreens
predominated, its winter aspect was yet pleasant and rural,
notwithstanding a certain air of dilapidation and decay, so common in
Southern dwellings that the inhabitants seem to be unconscious of it.
Adjacent, beyond the short avenue of orange trees by which we had
approached, was a double row of negro huts, with little gardens between
them, forming a rustic lane; farther on, corn and cotton fields. The
geography of the island might be stated as follows: interior woods,
girdled by plantatio