Summer 1846
Alexander Mackay (1808–1852), born in Scotland, began his journalism career in Canada; from Canada he traveled in the United States. Subsequently, he returned to Great Britain and worked for the London Morning Chronicle. In 1846, the newspaper sent him to the United States to report on the Oregon question. Mackay, who had a positive attitude about the United States, also reported on American government, commerce, manufacturing, agriculture, slavery, religion, and education. He was in the South from May to the early fall of 1846; his reports on the South were humorous, but unbiased. In fact, his volumes were among the most objective accounts of his time.
In 1847, he was called to the bar and soon left journalism for the law. His journalistic skills were again employed in 1851 when several British chambers of commerce sent him to India to report on cotton cultivation. He died at sea on his return voyage.
Alexander Mackay, The Western World: or, Travels in the United States in 1846–47, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1849), II: 65–66.
As a town, Montgomery is not calculated to leave so pleasing an impression upon the mind of the stranger as either Macon or Columbus. I stayed in it but an hour or two, during which I ascertained that it could offer very excellent accommodations to the traveller. After arriving I took the first steamer for Mobile, and found myself, in a little more than two hours after quitting the detestable stage-coach, steaming at the rate of eleven miles an hour down the winding channel of the Alabama.
Every step that we proceeded on our course to the Gulf served to develop more and more to the eye the inexhaustible resources of this noble State. Both sides of the river abounded with the evident signs of great fertility, and plantations on a scale equal to any in Georgia were passed in rapid succession. The country had not yet lost the picturesque and undulating aspect which it had assumed in western Georgia; whilst the vegetation with which the face of nature was clothed, and which was equally varied with, was if anything, still richer than that immediately to the east of the Chatahouchee. Montgomery is not at the head of steamboat navigation, the river being navigable for about forty miles further up to Wetumpka, where it is interrupted by the falls, and between which and Montgomery the country is so broken and varied as almost to deserve to have applied to it the epithet of rugged.
It was on the Alabama that I first found myself on board one of those high-pressure steamboats, which so often prove fatal to their passengers, and which have so ominous a name to European ears. It was some time ere I could reconcile myself to my position, and for most of the voyage I kept at a respectable distance from the boilers. We had but little cotton on board, although the boats on this river are sometimes very heavily laden with that commodity, on its way to Mobile for exportation, the quantity on board increasing at almost every station at which they call between Montgomery and that city.
As the voyage from Montgomery to the coast consumes at least the greater part of two days, the steamers on the Alabama are, of course, well provided with sleeping accommodations. The saloon, which extended almost from one end of the boat to the other, was lined on either side by a double row of excellent berths, in which the passengers could do anything except sleep. For this the berths were not to blame, the cause of it being the perpetual jarring of the boat, the powerful engines with which it was provided making it vibrate with every stoke, like a harp-string on being touched. There was a crowd of passengers on board, most of whom were, to judge from appearances, highly respectable; but there were a few whose look, conduct, and demeanour, but too plainly told to what class of desperadoes they belonged. They were most respectably dressed, but kept almost constantly together, there being too many people on board to allow of their carrying matters with the high hand with which they conduct their operations on the Mississippi and some of its tributaries. They belong to the class of professional gamblers, who form so large an ingredient in the population of the South; and, taking them altogether, they had the most sinister look about them that I had ever witnessed. It seemed to be generally understood who and what they were; and although a few conversed and played a little with them, they were prudently shunned by the great bulk of the passengers. Their gambling habits are not the only bad feature about them, it being sometimes their delight, and at other times their object, for reasons best known to themselves, to create disturbances amongst the passengers, which, in these fiery latitudes, are so often fatal to those who are implicated. When the voyage is long, and there are but few respectable people on board who can protect themselves by their numbers, a gang of these fellows are not only troublesome, but dangerous as fellow-passengers. Public opinion, however, is now, even in the South, so decidedly against them, that this great drawback to travelling in the South and West is fast diminishing.