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March-May 1849 isolated position must cutt the inhabitants off from all society & in such circumstances man, I should imagine, must sink either into an animal or idiot, there being little to rouse either their spiritual or intellectual energies March 30 We arrived at St. Louis the fare for the distance in the cabin with excellent fare being 9 Dollars I mention this fact as this travelling to an Englishman seems incred- ibly cheap In the morning I attended the public sale of a negro boy, the singularity of the incident with its gross injustice produced a feeling of Alloverishness; to see brutal men fingering the weeping lad, examining his points like a horse & eventually knocked down as a bargain for 300 Dols it made me feel chilly & I left more & more convinced of the iniquity of a system that trafficks in human beings & produces more depravity than I have ever before either seen or witnessed Passing through some portions of the slave states, the very cursory view we had affords us a convincing proof of the degrading efforts of this system. Although their country is very beautiful & abundantly fertile, a curse seemed to hang over their miserable dwellings dilapidated Public Buildings & the uni- versal profanity of the population all witness to the debasing effect of a system which makes honest labour degrading & induces the feeling that happiness consists in indolence."' St Louis is a large portrayals really angered most Americans, especially those in the West. In Chuzzlewit, Martin and his friend, Mark Tapley, invested in some land along the Ohio River sold by the Eden Land Corporation. The two gullible Englishmen bought a lot and a house for $150.00. up0 n arriving in Eden, they discovered only a "dismal swamp" with a few log houses and a cow-shed. Their house turned out to be a "miserable cabin" and their land "mere forest." Dickens's "Eden" was Cairo, Illinois, which he described in his American Notes as "a dismal swamp . . . teeming, then, with rank vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; . . . a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo." Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (London: Oxford University Press, 1951); Dickens, American Notes, pp. 109-10; T. A. Jackson, Charles Dickens: The Progress of a Radical (New York: International Publishers, 1938), pp. 44-52; Straus, Charles Dickens, p. 187. 21 The chief trading centers for slaves in the 1840s were Baltimore, Washington, Rich- mond, Norfolk, and Charleston along the Atlantic Seaboard and Montgomery, Memphis, and New Orleans in the new western region. But the Reverend W. G. Eliot could write that St. Louis was "fast becoming a slave market, and the supply was increasing with the demand. Often have I seen gangs of negroes handcuffed together, two and two, going through the open street like dumb cattle, on the way to the steamboat for the South. Large fortunes were made by the trade." When Hudson visited the city, there were five slave- 55 |
