Through Others' Eyes: Published Accounts of Antebellum Montgomery, Alabama

234 Pages·2014·5.77 MB·English

by  Jeffrey C. Benton

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.