Greensboro, November 25, 1865

Greensboro, November 25, 1865

FINALLY I have found what I began to fear I should not see in this Southern trip, -- evidence that it is possible for at least some persons in this section of the country to know and appreciate order and beauty and taste and neatness and home-like comfort.

Greensboro is the only place of thirty or forty in which
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I have stopped that may challenge comparison with Northern towns on the score of general appearance. It is the shire town of Greene County, has a population of sixteen hundred to two thousand persons, and is often mentioned in the State as the place where Mr. Secretary Seward once taught school. It is situated on the Georgia Railroad, about midway between Atlanta and Augusta, in the heart of a high, rolling, productive country, in which there are many good farms under fair cultivation. It formerly had a cotton factory, which is now used as barracks for the one hundred and fifty soldiers stationed here; a handsome brick college in grounds luxuriant with vines and flowers and evergreens, in which an academy is now kept; and two or three small hotels, which are now all closed. It has half a dozen substantial brick stores, and is doing a moderate trade with the well-peopled surrounding country. Its court-house is the best I have anywhere seen in the State; and two of its half-dozen churches are buildings both tasteful and costly. Its beautiful yards and gardens are not so numerous as in some other towns I have visited, but there is everywhere a noticeable absence of that glaring showiness so common in the South. In general, the little town has a very Northern appearance, -- looking not indeed so much like a New England town as like a quiet county seat of Northern New Jersey or Central New York.

Finally, I have also found what I began to fear I should not see in this Southern trip, -- evidence that it is possible for at least some Southern women to know and appreciate the dignity of domestic life, and to comprehend the subtile mysteries of thrifty and orderly and cleanly housekeeping.

The house of this widow lady, in which I am domiciled for a day or two, is the one house of all in which I have stopped that may challenge comparison with the house of any New England dame under the sun. It is a small cornor-lot
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house, set round with vines and evergreens and china-trees, and having the usual cook-house and servants' quarters in the rear. Every one of its four rooms below and its three chambers above is as neat and tastefully and appropriately furnished as any house I ever saw in Massachusetts. There is a place for everything, and everything is in its place. The room assigned to me is without carpet, but its bare floor is as clean as water and soap and scrubbing-brushes can make it; its furnishing is old and quaint, but every way proper and in order; its bed will bear the most careful inspection, from the snowy counterpane to the solid cotton mattress; and in one corner is an old-fashioned reel, -- evidence of how much well-ordered household economy! I confess that I am charmed and delighted, -- for how much sloth and apathy and filth and shiftlessness and slovenliness has vexed and saddened my New England soul for twelve long weeks!

Nor is the comfort and good order of the household due wholly to the servants, either. There appear to be a couple of them, and they well do their work, but the head of the house is the widow lady herself; and she and the married daughter living with her superintend household affairs to their minutest detail; and I am sure that if the servants were to leave to-morrow, the home would neither fall in pieces nor go into bankruptcy. The table is well supplied, and the manner in which it is served demonstrates what my general experience in the South contradicts, -- the capacity of a negro woman to be a good cook. Need I say, after all this, that the ladies of the house are ladies in the good sense of the word? It is a private boarding-house, at which chance travellers are always at liberty to ask for accommodations, and I expect to pay the usual four dollars per day; but the boarders are apparently at home, and I am treated like the guest of the family. The mistress of the house owned a few slaves, and is not very hopeful regarding free negro labor;
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but in that respect she does not differ from every other native resident of the State, and I am very sure no one can be kinder to this black man working out his great destiny than she was to her slaves.

Does all this matter seem merely personal or unimportant? It is neither. The son and son-in-law of the house were both soldiers, and both suffered long imprisonment at our hands. They are now good citizens, who live by honest work. If any member of the household has any bitterness of feeling because of the war, I have failed to find it, after a good deal of conversation on all branches of the subject. They mourn the loss of property, but they accept that as part of their defeat. They wish the soldiers were out of the way; but peaceable citizens of no town like the presence of the military. They have some prejudices against the Yankees, but they are not offensively apparent, even to one who avows himself a Yankee of the Yankees. It is not a small matter that there is even one town in the whole of this great State that may court measurement by a Northern standard; for herein is the promise of many more such towns to be built up, when the land is purged of the spirit of slavery. It is not a small matter that one traveller has found a pleasant stopping-place; for in that fact is proof enough how little slavery cared either for the comforts or the economies of home, and proof also of the future homes that shall rise here under the new heavens. It is neither merely personal nor unimportant that twelve weeks of travel in three of the late slave States should find but one village and one household that would lose nothing in comparison with fifty villages and some hundreds of households in Massachusetts alone. Give this people Freedom and all her handmaids, and the traveller of a dozen years hence will not need to draw such pictures as I have drawn of Southern shiftlessness and slovenliness.