Descriptions added their bright and
vivid coloring to the picturesque beauty of the
scene.
The governor had arrived at Jehossee before
me, and Saturday being pay-day, the faces of the
negroes were wreathed in smiles. Here, in his
quiet island home, I remained until Monday with
this most excellent man and patriot, whose soul
had been tried as by fire during the disturbances
caused by the war.
As we sat together in that room where, in
years gone by, Governor Aiken had entertained
his northern guests, with Englishmen of noble
blood, a room full of reminiscences both
pleasant and painful, - my kind host freely told
me the story of his busy life, which sounded like
a tale of romance. He had tried to stay the wild
storm of secession when the war-cloud hung
gloomily over his state. It broke, and his
unheeded warnings were drowned in the thunders
of the political tempest that swept over the fair
South. Before the war he owned one thousand
slaves. He organized schools to teach his
negroes to read and write. The improvement of
their moral condition was his great study.
The life he had entered upon, though at first
distasteful, had been forced upon him, and he
met his peculiar responsibilities with a true
Christian desire to benefit all within his reach.
When a young man, having returned from the
tour of Europe, his father presented him with
Jehossee Island, an estate of five thousand acres,
around which it required four stout negro
oarsmen to row him in a day. "Here," said the
father to the future governor of South Carolina,
as he presented the domain to his son, - "here
are the means; now go to work and develop
them."
William Aiken applied himself industriously
to the task of improving the talents given him.
His well-directed efforts bore good fruit, as year
after year Jehossee Island, from a half
submerged, sedgy, boggy waste, grew into one of
the finest rice-plantations in the south. The
new lord of the manor ditched the marshes, and
walled in his new rice-fields with dikes, to keep
out the freshets from the upland and the tides
from the ocean, perfecting a complete system of
drainage and irrigation. He built comfortable
quarters for his slaves, and erected a church and
schoolhouse for their use. From the original
two hundred and eighty acres of cultivated rice
land, the new proprietor developed the wild
morass into sixteen hundred acres of rice-fields,
and six hundred acres of vegetable, corn, and
provender producing land.
For several seasons prior to the war, Jehossee
yielded a rice crop which sold for seventy
thousand dollars, and netted annually fifty thousand
dollars income to the owner. At that time
Governor Aiken had eight hundred and seventy
three Slaves on the island, and about one hundred
working as mechanics, &c., in Charleston.
