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VII Morals "THE state of morals differs so much in different parts of America ," proclaimed an Englishman. In the South, he wrote, "the people ... all seemed degenerate.... Their general demeanour [was] .. . more rude and familiar [than in other parts of the country], and their conversations more licentious and profane." Most Englishmen and Northerners agreed that antebellum Southerners were far more immoral than Northerners. After visiting both North and South, a foreigner concluded that New Englanders "appear to me in general, a cleaner people in their morals." A Russian visitor declared: "If the inhabitants of the southern states reproach their northern brothers for their coldness and dryness, the latter reproach the southerners, and quite justifiably it seems to me, for their luxury and immorality, which are not at all the same as gaiety and nonchalance." A New Yorker called Southerners "the greatest criminals of the age," these men of the "brave South," who threatened with "bowie knives, and pistols, and bludgeons" the northern preachers who went among them to teach righteousness. "Let us pray for the day when honest [Yankee] wine and oil shall take the place of . .. [southern] barbarous whisky and hog-fat," wrote another Northerner, who exclaimed that any New Yorker would "rather own . .. ten acres on the Hudson [River] than ... five hundred ... on the Mississippi. "I Such critical observations were made throughout the South. A Northerner announced that Virginians "are profane, and exceeding wicked." Another man declared that North Carolinians "live for the 1. Adam Hodgson, Letters from North America . .. 12 vols., London, 1824), 11:248,1:37-38; John Griffith, A Journal of the Life. Travels. and Labours in the Work of the Ministry of John Griffith ILondon, 17791,60; Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier, A Russian Looks at America : The Journey of Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier in r857, ed. Arnold Schrier and Joyce Story IChicago, 19791,223; Abram Pryne quoted in John Hope Franklin, A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North IBaton Rouge, 19761, 247-48; Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey through Texas . .. 11857; reprint, New York, 19691,7,41. III Cracker Culture most part after an indolent and luxurious manner; ... for I have frequently seen them come to the towns, and there remain drinking .. . for eight or ten days successively." In South Carolina a Yankee noticed constant "gambling, ... much drinking and profane language . . .. The picture," he indignantly reported, "was full of disgust. I desire neither to see it again nor to contemplate it more." In Georgia another New Englander was "greatly annoyed in the middle of the night by the swearing & vociferation of a number of young men, who had been drinking.Ido not think I have heard so much swearing, indicating habits of the grossest profaneness, at any public house where I have stopped, within the last 20 years. There is great reason to fear that Georgia is preeminent in this vice." A visitor claimed that the habits of Alabamians had led "to a gratification of their worse passions" and had destroyed "the character of the people." An Englishman, who heard "disgusting" conversations in southern bars, insisted "that any individual possessing the slightest pretensions to the name of gentleman, in any hotel I had visited in England, on indulging in the indecourous language I heard at these places, would ... have met with ejectment, without ceremony. Here, however , a laxity of moral feeling prevails, that stifles all sense of propriety ; and scurrility, obscene language, and filthy jests .. . form the chief attractions of such places." "I do not know how other people feel," wrote an Englishwoman, "but I cannot come amongst these [southern] people without the perception that every standard of right and wrong is lost,-that they are perverted and degraded."2 The wickedness of southern cities and towns rarely escaped the notice of contemporaries. "The aspect of society, as it presents itself to the superficial eye of a stranger, is such as might be expected where public worship is totally disregarded," a visitor wrote of Mobile. "Profaneness, licentiousness, and ferocity, seemed to be characteristic of the place." New Orleans, of course, seemed to many visitors the capital of vice. One man concluded-surely in exaggeration -that there were no more than ten moral women in the city. He insisted that he had met only two of these, and that even they were "privately talked of." But almost all observers reported im2 . Philip Vickers Fithian, Journal eJ Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773r774 : A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion, ed. Hunter Dickinson Farish 11943; reprint, Charlottesville...

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