Travel books were extremely popular in the nineteenth century. At least forty mention Montgomery, which, because of its location just off the Federal Road and near the head of navigation on the Alabama River, made it a natural transit point between the Seaboard States and the Gulf cities of Mobile and New Orleans.
Travel books, however, have their limitations, especially those by writers who only experienced cursory visits. Their comments tend to be mere sketches; they may capture a vague likeness of the place, but they rarely are portraits that capture the soul of the place. Consequently, the primitive state of roads, hotels, food, and the inhabitants themselves filled many inches of type. Some of those who wrote about antebellum Montgomery were famous, others were obscure; the length of the biographical comments that precedes each account indicates the authors’ relative prominence. Of the twenty-seven writers included in this book, only Harriet Martineau and Fredrick Law Olmsted spent more than a few days in Montgomery and present content that exhibits depth of understanding. The entertainers Noah Ludlow, Sol Smith, and P. T. Barnum may have had extended visits or visited several times, but their accounts tend to be focused on themselves and to be rather frivolous. William Howard Russell managed to observe and analyze in a short time, but then he was a seasoned reporter for The Times of London and had access to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Jefferson Davis. Others, such as Auguste Levasseur, an aide to the Marquis de Lafayette, and Francis Pulszky, who served Louis Kossuth in a similar capacity, were on semi-official visits and would, therefore, have been insulated to a degree from an ordinary experience. James Redpath, operating at the other extreme, traveled incognito so as to be able to interview thousands of slaves.
American chattel slavery was of great interest to the Europeans and to a somewhat lesser degree to the Northerners. As the century wore on, fewer Europeans would have remembered slavery in Europe; between 1787 and 1808, French and British slavery had been abolished, first domestically, then in their empires, and finally the legal slave trade itself. Slavery began to die out in the Northern States after the American Revolution—it was deemed incompatible with revolutionary ideals—and was essentially nonexistent in the Northern states as far as Northerners were concerned. So slavery had become, in the Southern phrase, the “peculiar institution.”
Travelers to Montgomery saw slavery variously; many reveal their astonishment with the complexity of the system that they had previously understood so simplistically. Today, scholarship tends to discount or at least question what both Southern whites and blacks said about slavery at the time. Scholars think that many whites were delusional, or saw what they wanted to see, thought what they wanted to think, or knowingly warped reality. Scholars think that the slaves themselves, for obvious reasons, told whites what the slaves assumed or knew the whites wanted to hear. Furthermore, what travelers reported is more likely to have been hearsay conveyed by Southern whites or the travelers’ own observations tempered by interpretations offered by Southern whites. Nevertheless, travelers’ accounts do reveal a system that was diverse and complicated.
Views on Alabamians also varied: ignorant, crude, ill-mannered, superficially genteel, and materialistic at one extreme to seductive in their affability at the other, with ready familiarity and disarming hospitality. Because travelers were most often confined with Alabamians when in a stagecoach or on a steamboat, I have included accounts of both stage and river travel to and from Mobile. However, Alexander Mackay, writing in the 1840s, warns his readers of the danger of basing opinions on the “floating population” of the steamboats, stagecoaches, railways, and taverns. With a few exceptions, I have not included travel to the east of Montgomery. That is covered in this book’s companion volume, The Very Worst Road.
There are two accounts that I would like to have included, but have not because they were only published well after the antebellum period. Although Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which some think is the best analysis of the American nation, was published in 1835, his Journey to America, the compilation of notebooks that he kept during his 1831–32 trip, was not published until the twentieth century. In the latter, de Tocqueville recounts his two-day conversation with a young Montgomery lawyer in January 1832. The lawyer revealed the city’s and Old Southwest’s lawlessness, violence, and political and judicial corruption. The other account is a personal letter from John James Audubon to John Bachman of Mobile that has been published in Selected Journals and Other Writings, 1997. In his February 1837 letter, Audubon gives an account of witnessing Creek Indians being rounded up to be moved to Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Mary Boykin Chesnut’s comments are so well known, they need not be reprinted in this book.
Although this book is nominally about travelers’ views of antebellum Montgomery, I have not only included travel to and from Montgomery, as explained in the previous paragraph, but I have also included accounts of excursions into Montgomery’s hinterland. These, too, provide significant information about the people, the land itself, and the planters’ cotton market economy, although the subsistence economy of yeoman farmers or plain people is entirely missing.
The study of natural history had been a fashionable pastime for gentlemen, and even some ladies, during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, it had become more of a specialized interest; in fact, the word “scientist” came into use in the 1830s. These travelers’ accounts reveal a continuation of the fashionable pastime and the general knowledge of natural history of people of education, as well as specialized knowledge of scientists. The emphasis is on geology and flora. Fauna is lacking—although several alligators, a horny toad, and birds are mentioned.
Contrary to the values of the formally educated Europeans, Americans in general and Alabamians in particular are seen as driven by materialism, to the neglect of spiritual and intellectual values. After all, it was Alabama Fever, the prospect of getting rich quickly with cotton, that attracted Americans from the relatively more civilized Seaboard States to the Old Southwest. Perhaps the travelers should not have been so harsh, and not all of them were. At the end of the antebellum period, Montgomery was just over forty years old, although some remarked that those forty years were but little marked by progress.
A comparison of the time lapse between when the visits were made and when many of the books were published reveals that most of these books were like today’s media. There was little time before publication to read, mark, study, and inwardly digest—to observe, question, and analyze. Although they did not conform to a 24-hour news cycle, many of these travelers were similar to today’s “talking heads” and instant experts. That said, these accounts offer a captivating insight into the antebellum Montgomery that no scholarly work with its studied objectivity and scholarly disinterest can offer. Just because these accounts are so personal, just because their authors are real flesh and blood people with such prejudices—who could top Mrs. Royall—we can vicariously travel with them to antebellum Montgomery.