Through Others' Eyes: Published Accounts of Antebellum Montgomery, Alabama PDF
Preview Through Others' Eyes: Published Accounts of Antebellum Montgomery, Alabama
Through Others' Eyes Published Accounts of Antebellum Montgomery, Alabama Compiled By Jeffrey C. Benton N S B EW OUTH OOKS Montgomery Also by Jeffrey C. Benton A Sense of Place: Montgomery’s Architectural Heritage, 1821–1951 The Very Worst Road: Travellers’ Accounts of Crossing Alabama’s Old Creek Indian Territory, 1820–1847 They Served Here: Thirty-three Maxwell Men Respectable and Disreputable: Leisure Time in Antebellum Montgomery NewSouth Books 105 S. Court Street Montgomery, AL 36104 Copyright © 2014 by Jeffrey C. Benton. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama. ISBN: 978-1-60306-258-9 eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306259-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2014949888 Visit www.newsouthbooks.com To my daughters, Caroline and Catherine Contents Editor’s Note on the Text Preface Acknowledgments 1 - Prologue 2 - Auguste Levasseur 3 - Karl Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach 4 - Noah Ludlow 5 - James Stuart 6 - Anne Royall 7 - Thomas Hamilton 8 - Sol Smith 9 - George Featherstonhaugh 10 - Harriet Martineau 11 - P. T. Barnum 12 - Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro 13 - George Lewis 14 - Charles Lyell 15 - Alexander Mackay 16 - Francis and Theresa Pulszky 17 - Fredrick Law Olmsted 18 - Robert Everest 19 - James Redpath 20 - Robert Russell 21 - Amelia Murray 22 - John Shaw 23 - Carlton Holmes Rogers 24 - James Stirling 25 - William Kingsford 26 - Charles Mackay 27 - Thomas Low Nichols Epilogue - William Howard Russell Index About the Author Editor’s Note on the Text Each passage in this volume is transcribed exactly from the original source indicated at the beginning of the chapter. Misspellings, spelling variants, as well as grammatical and typographical errors follow the original sources. Punctuation varied from author to author, but all used commas more frequently than standard usage today; usage of colons and semi-colons also varied from contemporary practice. With few exceptions, errors in fact are reprinted without editorial comments. The copies of the originals used in this volume are held by the Library of Congress or by the Special Collections, Ralph Brown Draughon Library, Auburn University. Most of the travel books are available online and at large university libraries. Preface Through Others’ Eyes, like its companion volume, The Very Worst Road: Travellers’ Accounts of Crossing Alabama’s Old Creek Indian Territory, 1820- 1848, grew out of my research on leisure activities in antebellum Montgomery. In the mid-1990s, while I was compiling those accounts, I also began collecting published accounts of antebellum Montgomery itself. It was not, however, until the summer of 2009 that I was inspired to follow through with the project begun more than a decade earlier. Both the scholars and schoolteachers participating in “Slavery in Alabama: Public Amnesia and Historical Memory,” a continuing education course for teachers conducted by the Alabama Humanities Foundation and the Alabama Department of Archives and History, provided the inspiration by reminding me of the power of primary sources. In rereading the collected accounts, I began to compare memories of my own travels (unlike the writers of the published accounts in this book, I did not keep notes). Although my travels have given me perspective and a measure with which to evaluate different places, including Montgomery, my adopted hometown, they have serious limitations. I certainly have a more realistic understanding of the nine states and four foreign countries in which I have lived than I do of all fifty states and the thirty-two countries that I have merely visited. One whirlwind visit, however, stands out: five days in Romania in 1993. I knew little about Romania before being selected from the U.S. Air War College faculty to travel to Bucharest to speak on the role of national armed forces in a liberal democracy, something foreign to the students in the Romanian War College. Unlike our four war colleges, Romania’s not only had senior officers of the Romanian armed services but also parliamentarians, government bureaucrats, and representatives of the media. In addition to formal lecture hall and classroom experiences, I was dined and toured and had several hours to explore the city alone and on foot. A significant part of what was once known as the Paris of the Balkans had been leveled by Nicolae Ceausescu in a mad failed attempt to rebuild the city on a monumental scale; Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin came to mind as I walked. Thanks to our military mission, I was also able to spend one day in Transylvania with a University of Texas professor. We visited a fortified Saxon (German) village that had no electricity, running water, or gas. Most shocking was looking in the home of a Gypsy family who had been slaves until the fall of Ceausescu in 1989, although slavery had been legally ended in Romania in 1918. I vividly remember looking into a room that had no furniture. Its only contents were a pile of rags on one side of the room for the females and another pile on the other side for the males—and in the middle, on the floor, a hunk of raw meat with several dogs licking up the blood. The point of this extended example is this: What do I really know about Romania, even with educated and knowledgeable people helping to interpret what I was seeing and experiencing—and what did most of those traveling through antebellum Montgomery really know about the city, its people, its values, and its manners? In the “Prologue” that follows, I address how these limitations affected the accounts of antebellum visitors to Montgomery.
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