This week, I originally planned to continue writing about the biography of James Douglas. However, in keeping with the Civil War exhibit, I recently found an interesting letter from 1851 written by a Connecticut traveler who journeyed from the Nutmeg State to Alabama. The letter was written to a woman named Jane, and sent by someone known only as “your friend”, who was originally from Hartford. The mysterious letter gives insight into the views of a Northerner on life in the Southern states in the years prior to the Civil War.
According to the letter’s author, the trip began with a train ride from Hartford to New York City, where the traveler met up with a man known as “Mr. Savage.” After cross-checking with census records, “Mr. Savage” appears to have been Henry Jamin Savage, a Connecticut-native who removed to Wilcox County, Alabama where he worked as a successful businessman. Savage would later serve in the Third Alabama Cavalry and the Fourth Alabama Volunteer Militia during the Civil War. The traveler toured New York City for several days, taking in the sights and seeing a play, before continuing on to Washington, D.C., by way of rail through Philadelphia and Baltimore. When they reached the nation’s capital, the traveler related that Savage took them on a detour to Richmond. According to the traveler, one the pair reached the city:
“…he stopped to buy slaves; I had a very pleasant time there and went all round the city. It don’t look much like I thought it did. It looks as black as the Negroes that live there. More than half of the people are black that live there. There was an auction the day I was there, they sold 300 Negroes. They was put aboard the cars to the South, they looked like a drove of sheep...”In the margins next to this anecdote, the traveler scrawled, “Don’t let anybody see this but you. Burn it up.” Even though the letter’s author treated the slave auction in a somewhat casual manner, this note suggests that at the same time, they were worried about the knowledge of Savage’s purchase of slaves being known in Connecticut. The people purchased at the auction were evidently put on trains and sent to plantations in the Deep South, which is where Savage and the traveler continued on to, as well. From Richmond, the two Connecticut-natives traveled back to the coast, and made their way through the Carolinas to Georgia, and then overland to Wilcox County, Alabama. Once at the Savage home, the traveler related to their friend Jane their observations on life in the rural South:
“I like the people very much, they are all so kind. I can’t help it, but they are so different from the North. I don’t know how to act. They shake hands when they meet and when they part, they can’t talk a bit like me—they laugh to hear me talk and I laugh to hear them. They never say “I guess”, but say “I reckoned so”, and “a heap of folks”, “that mighty good”; all of these words, they are as common as dirt and sound very queer to me. They live on sweet potatoes, cornbread, and chickens all the time. They don’t have any pies and cake, they don’t know how to make them. Their bread is nothing; cornmeal and hot water and a little suet, put it on a board and set it in the ashes to bake. I have plenty of buttermilk, and I am as fat as a pig.”This letter, written ten years before the start of the Civil War, gives a great deal of information about national attitudes in the antebellum United States. One clue as to the writer’s identity may be found in the 1860 US Census—at that time, there was a man from Connecticut named Fred Hickox living in the Savage household. Hickox later went on to serve in the Third Alabama Cavalry alongside his fellow Nutmegger Henry Jamin Savage.
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