Amrie

“ Since I have been in these States, I have been surprised at the stream of emigration which appears to flow from North Carolina to Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Every hour you meet with a caravan of emigrants from that sterile but healthy state. Every night the banks of the Ohio are lighted up with their fires, where they have bivouacked previously to crossing the river; but they are not like the poor German or Irish settlers: they are well prepared, and have nothing to do, apparently, but to sit down upon their land. ”

“ The present volume is intended to be a substantial contribution to the history of Alabama, by giving expansion to the recorded lives of its foremost citizens—men who alike on the field and in the forum, on the bench and in the sphere of commerce, in the lecture room and in the pulpit, on the farm and in the court, in the field of development as well as in the ordinary walks of life, have shared conspicuously in the erection of one of the proudest of the American commonwealths. ”

“ Alabama, where our people, encompassed and blockaded by the Federal forces, were most sadly straitened and distressed. It is of the exigencies of that stormy day, as hydra-headed they rose to view, that I have to write; of the many expedients to which we were reduced on our ever-narrowing territory, daily growing not only smaller, but less and less adequate for the sustenance of ourselves, our soldiers, and the Northern prisoners who were cast upon us by the fortunes of war. ”

“ The descendants of William Ames, the Puritan, who settled in Braintree, are a representative New England family. Their history forms an honorable part of the history of Massachusetts, and fitly illustrates in its outlines the social and material advancement of the people from the poverty and hardships of the early Colonial days to the wealth and culture of the present. In the early days of the Colony they were poor, as were their neighbors of other names, but they honored toil and believed in the dignity of honest labor. Industry was with them coupled with thrift. ”

“ New Orleans, and it comes from Uncle Ambrose—you've often heard me speak of him, and that he was a captain on a tramp steamer that went all over the world picking up cargoes. For three years I've lost track of him, but he hasn't quite forgotten his nephew Maurice it seems. Listen to what he says, after telling me how he's beginning to feel lonely without a relative near, and growing old all the time. Sit down here where we can look out on the bully old river, while I read. ”

“ Have you great love for Massachusetts and her people, Garde?”
“Is not love a passion?” she answered, without raising her eyes from her work.
“Love of one’s country is not an unseemly passion,” said her grandfather.
“Then I have for Massachusetts a seemly regard,” said Mistress Merrill, who had given all her love elsewhere.
“And could you sacrifice somewhat of your personal thoughts, and mayhap desires, for the colony? Could you be a little patriot in the hour of your country’s need, my child?” asked the old man, his look intent upon her face. ”

“ All the Calias lumber yards owned branch yards at Amro and everybody continued to do a flourishing business. The Amroites paid little attention to the platting of the townsite to the north, nor made a single effort to ascertain which survey the railroad would follow, but continued to boast that Amro would get the road. About this time Ernest Nicholson called a meeting in Amro, inviting all the business men to be present and hear a proposition that he had to make, stating he hoped the citizens of the town and himself could get together without friction or ill-feeling. ”

“ The town of Amro, being surrounded by Indian allotments, had few settlers in its immediate vicinity. The Indians, profiting by their experience in Megory county, where they learned that good location meant increase in the value of their lands, had, in selecting allotments, taken nearly all the land just west of Amro, as they had taken practically all of the good land just west of Calias in the eastern part of Tipp county. ”

“ Maryland, under the Baltimores, was the sole colony that not only admitted convicts, but welcomed them. The labor of the branded hand of the malefactor, the education and accomplishments of the social outcast, the acquirements and skill of the intemperate or over-competed tradesman, all were welcome to the Maryland tobacco-planters; and the possibilities of rehabilitation of fortune, health, reputation, or reëstablishment of rectitude, made the custom not unwelcome to the convict or to the redemptioner. ”

“ In 1729 the city of Baltimore was founded as a convenient port for the planters. The settlement and growth of Maryland had enforced two lessons which were never wholly forgotten,—the possibility, under official toleration, of bringing members of different religious sects together in one civil community and government; and the comfort and prosperity attainable in a well-governed colony.
36. Early Settlers in the Carolinas (1542-1665) .
Between Virginia and Spanish Florida a broad belt of territory lay long unoccupied. ”

“ And all this while every mile of latitude of the last importance, as the Alabama groped her way slowly to the southward and eastward in search of the little island at which she was to take in her supplies, and which she might at any moment run past in the darkness altogether! Trying work, indeed, for the patience of men cooped up in their narrow floating prison, and longing to be at work again. ”

“ There remained the magnificent territory north of the Ohio,—an empire in itself, as large as the German Empire, with the Netherlands thrown in,—in which the collective wisdom of the American people, as represented in Congress, might autocratically shape the future; for it was still a wilderness, watched by frontier garrisons, and save for the Indians and the trappers and a few sleepy old French towns on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, there were no signs of human life in all its vast solitude. ”

“ The Records of Auburn have a close and important relation to those of Worcester, Leicester, Sutton and Oxford, towns prominent in the history of the early settlement of central Massachusetts. Especially are these Records supplementary to the Town Records of Worcester, which have been edited and printed in full by the Trustee of the Systematic History Fund, and they may be considered in reality a continuation of the work which was comprehended in a plan formed by him for the practical development of the original historical material of this section. ”

“ I hear the distant thunder hum,
Maryland!
The Old Line’s bugle fife and drum,
Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb—
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she’ll come! she’ll come! ”

“ After midsummer, 1863, the North occupied the States of Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, half of Virginia, of Tennessee, of Louisiana, of Arkansas, of Mississippi, and considerable portions of the Carolinas and Alabamas. That is, she occupied a third, and nearer a half, of the entire slave-holding territory of the South, while the penetration of her raiding parties into the regions occupied by the Southern troops furnished, at times, opportunity to, possibly, a fourth of the young men of that section to escape from bondage had they been moved by the passion of freedom. ”

“ Those old heroes, often trudging weary and footsore over mountain paths or threading their way along the Indian trails winding through the forests, visiting the primitive settlements of Alabama, and dispensing the truths which make men better, are too often neglected in recounting the elements which entered into the formation of a great state. ”

“ Instead of moving to Victor, taking advantage of choice of location and the purchase of a lot at half price, the Amroites began making improvements in their town, putting down cement walks ten feet wide the length of the two business blocks and walks on side streets as well. A school election was called and as a result an eleven-thousand-dollar school house was erected, a modern two-story building, with basement and gymnasium. The building was large enough to hold all the population of Amro if all the men, women and children were of school age, and still have room for many more. ”

“ On this account we do not find such great and powerful landholders here as in England. It is a subject of dispute, whether primogeniture or equal division be preferable; but it is certain that real prosperity is much more diffused through the nation in America, and the land is better cultivated.
Mr. Nathaniel Amory’s country seat lies on a small eminence in a tolerably large park, and affords an extensive prospect of the vicinity of Boston. Mr. Amory collected several good paintings of the Flemish school in his travels, and some handsome mosaic work in Rome, with which his house is decorated. ”

“ We were drawn together in a closer union, a tenderer feeling [108] of humanity linking us all together, both rich and poor; from the princely planter, who could scarce get off his wide domains in a day’s ride, and who could count his slaves by the thousand, down to the humble tenants of the log-cabin on rented or leased land. I have now a letter written by a Southern woman, whose husband and oldest son belonged to an Alabama regiment, which was ordered to Island No. ”

“ Childers was shot at dawn as a traitor to Ireland as well as to Britain, Amery became First Lord of the Admiralty, and I write this memoir. I remember Amery’s amusing comparison when he twitted the cavalry with wishing to retain the arme blanche simply because their Continental antagonists would have it. “If you fight a rhinoceros,” he said, “you don’t want to tie a horn on your nose.” It is an interesting commentary upon this discussion that on one morning during the war there were duels between two separate squadrons of British and German cavalry. ”

“ They have, within that period, successively occupied the southern shore of lake Erie, the banks of the Ohio and Mississippi, portions of Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, and eastern Pennsylvania; then again the plains of Ohio, and now the small remnant of them that remains, are established west of Missouri and Arkansas. They have been involved in numerous bloody wars with other tribes; and for near half a century, resisted with a bold, ferocious spirit, and an indomitable 021 hatred, the progress of the white settlements in Pennsylvania, western Virginia, and especially Kentucky. ”

“ Alabama is the mother of many brave, heroic sons, but second to none is the young hero whose memory we honor to-night. I say young, because to us, over whose head since then the storms of many years have thundered, that earnest, boyish face comes back as the friend of yesterday. ”

“ From thence he proceeded along the north shore of Lake Erie until abreast of the Miami, a confluent of the Ohio River, on the south shore, then turned northward up the Detroit River, twenty-five miles farther, reaching Amherstburg—called Malden by the Americans—250 miles from Fort Erie. ”

“ No cause except slavery can he assigned for this wonderful difference, for the colonists of Maryland were distinguished for education, intelligence, and gentle culture. Lord Baltimore was a statesman and philanthropist, and his colony was a free representative government, which was the first to repudiate the doctrine of taxation without representation, and the first to introduce religious toleration. ”

“ Turning to his family he spoke a command in Cree, and forthwith they began to pitch their bundles in.
Ambrose was accustomed to the thanklessness of the humbler natives. They are like children, who look to the white man for everything, and take what they can get as a matter of course. ”

“ P. A. Hague’s “Blockaded Family” is the best account of life in Alabama during the war. Mrs. Clayton’s “White and Black under the Old Régime” is very good, but brief. “Our Women in the War” is a valuable collection of articles by a number of women. Nearly all the incidents mentioned I have heard related by relatives and friends. “John Holden, Unionist,” by T. C. De Leon, gives a good account of life in the hill country. Mary A. H. Gay’s “Life in Dixie during the War” and Miller’s “History of Alabama” give information based on personal experiences. ”

“ The settlement was called Providence, and was destined to play a remarkable part in the history of Maryland.28
When the civil war in England was fairly on, emigration to Virginia was much improved in material, and for many years was very large. The new-comers came to make homes, not merely to make tobacco, and they no longer consisted of servants, but of the merchants and yeomanry of England. ”

“ In 1684 Massachusetts was deprived of her charter, and within a few years all the New England colonies, with New York and New Jersey, were put under the tyrannical rule of Governor Andros.
5. When James II lost his throne, Andros was deposed, and Massachusetts was given a new charter (1691) .
6. The government of each colony was managed by (1) a governor elected by the people (Rhode Island, Connecticut) or appointed by the king or by the proprietor; (2) by an appointed Council; and (3) by an Assembly or lower house elected by the colonists. ”

“ Lands were of fabulous fertility; population was pouring southward; the advocacy of slavery had been hushed by the prospective productiveness of southern lands, and Alabama was destined to become the center of an expansive region for the production of cotton. ”

“ The stations filled by him with ability so signal, and extending through so many years, attest his usefulness as a valuable citizen of Alabama. As a lawyer of distinction, a soldier as courageous as any son of Alabama, a delegate in molding the fundamental law of the commonwealth, a statesman whose qualities were signally demonstrated in the halls of congress, and in the gubernatorial chair, there is due him the worthiest praise. ”