Everything In The Hotel Was Black; Not Black To The Eye, For The Eye
Teaches Itself To Discriminate Colors Even When Loaded With Dirt,
But Black To The Touch.
On coming out of a tub of water my foot
took an impress from the carpet exactly as it would have done had I
trod barefooted on a path laid with soot.
I thought that I was
turning negro upward, till I put my wet hand upon the carpet, and
found that the result was the same. And yet the carpet was green to
the eye - a dull, dingy green, but still green. "You shouldn't damp
your feet," a man said to me, to whom I mentioned the catastrophe.
Certainly, Pittsburg is the dirtiest place I ever saw; but it is, as
I said before, very picturesque in its dirt when looked at from
above the blanket.
From Pittsburg I went on by train to Cincinnati, and was soon in the
State of Ohio. I confess that I have never felt any great regard
for Pennsylvania. It has always had, in my estimation, a low
character for commercial honesty, and a certain flavor of
pretentious hypocrisy. This probably has been much owing to the
acerbity and pungency of Sydney Smith's witty denunciations against
the drab-colored State. It is noted for repudiation of its own
debts, and for sharpness in exaction of its own bargains. It has
been always smart in banking. It has given Buchanan as a President
to the country, and Cameron as a Secretary of War to the government!
When the battle of Bull's Run was to be fought, Pennsylvanian
soldiers were the men who, on that day, threw down their arms
because the three months' term for which they had been enlisted was
then expired! Pennsylvania does not, in my mind, stand on a par
with Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Illinois, or Virginia.
We are apt to connect the name of Benjamin Franklin with
Pennsylvania, but Franklin was a Boston man. Nevertheless,
Pennsylvania is rich and prosperous. Indeed it bears all those
marks which Quakers generally leave behind them.
I had some little personal feeling in visiting Cincinnati, because
my mother had lived there for some time, and had there been
concerned in a commercial enterprise, by which no one, I believe,
made any great sum of money. Between thirty and forty years ago she
built a bazaar in Cincinnati, which, I was assured by the present
owner of the house, was at the time of its erection considered to be
the great building of the town. It has been sadly eclipsed now, and
by no means rears its head proudly among the great blocks around it.
It had become a "Physio-medical Institute" when I was there, and was
under the dominion of a quack doctor on one side, and of a college
of rights of women female medical professors on the other. "I
believe, sir, no man or woman ever yet made a dollar in that
building; and as for rent, I don't even expect it." Such was the
account given of the unfortunate bazaar by the present proprietor.
Cincinnati has long been known as a great town - conspicuous among
all towns for the number of hogs which are there killed, salted, and
packed. It is the great hog metropolis of the Western States; but
Cincinnati has not grown with the rapidity of other towns. It has
now 170,000 inhabitants, but then it got an early start. St. Louis,
which is west of it again near the confluence of the Missouri and
Mississippi, has gone ahead of it. Cincinnati stands on the Ohio
River, separated by a ferry from Kentucky, which is a slave State,
Ohio itself is a free-soil State. When the time comes for arranging
the line of division, if such time shall ever come, it will be very
hard to say where Northern feeling ends and where Southern wishes
commence. Newport and Covington, which are in Kentucky, are suburbs
of Cincinnati; and yet in these places slavery is rife. The
domestic servants are mostly slaves, though it is essential that
those so kept should be known as slaves who will not run away. It
is understood that a slave who escapes into Ohio will not be caught
and given up by the intervention of the Ohio police; and from
Covington or Newport any slave with ease can escape into Ohio. But
when that division takes place, no river like the Ohio can form the
boundary between the divided nations. Such rivers are the highways,
round which in this country people have clustered themselves. A
river here is not a natural barrier, but a connecting street. It
would be as well to make a railway a division, or the center line of
a city a national boundary. Kentucky and Ohio States are joined
together by the Ohio River, with Cincinnati on one side and
Louisville on the other; and I do not think that man's act can upset
these ties of nature. But between Kentucky and Tennessee there is
no such bond of union. There a mathematical line has been simply
drawn, a continuation of that line which divides Virginia from North
Carolina, to which two latter States Kentucky and Tennessee belonged
when the thirteen original States first formed themselves into a
Union. But that mathematical line has offered no peculiar
advantages to population. No great towns cluster there, and no
strong social interests would be dissevered should Kentucky throw in
her lot with the North, and Tennessee with the South; but Kentucky
owns a quarter of a million of slaves, and those slaves must either
be emancipated or removed before such a junction can be firmly
settled.
The great business of Cincinnati is hog killing now, as it used to
be in the old days of which I have so often heard. It seems to be
an established fact, that in this portion of the world the porcine
genus are all hogs.
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