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JOURNAL
OF A
RESIDENCE IN AMERICA.
JOURNAL
OF A
RESIDENCE IN AMERICA.
BY
FRANCES ANNE BUTLER
(MISS FANNY KEMBLE).
IN ONE VOLUME.
PARIS,
PUBLISHED BY A. and W. GALIGNANI and Co,
RUE VIVIENNE, No 18.
1835.
PREFACE.
A preface appears to me necessary to this book, in order that theexpectation with which the English reader might open it should not bedisappointed.
Some curiosity has of late been excited in England with regard toAmerica: its political existence is a momentous experiment, upon whichmany eyes are fixed, in anxious watching of the result; and suchaccounts as have been published of the customs and manners of itssocieties, and the natural wonders and beauties of its scenery, havebeen received and read with considerable interest in Europe. This beingthe case, I should be loth to present these volumes to the Englishpublic without disclaiming both the intention and the capability ofadding the slightest detail of any interest to those which othertravellers have already furnished upon these subjects.
This book is, what it professes to be, my personal journal, and not ahistory or a description of men and manners in the United States.
Engaged in an arduous profession, and travelling from city to city inits exercise, my leisure and my opportunities would have been alikeinadequate to such a task. The portion of America which I have visitedhas been a very small one, and, I imagine, by no means that from whichthe most interesting details are to be drawn. I have been neither to thesouth nor to the west; consequently have had no opportunity of seeingtwo large portions of the population of this country,—the enterprisingexplorers of the late wildernesses on the shores of theMississippi,—and the black race of the slave slates,—both classes ofmen presenting peculiarities of infinite interest to the traveller: theone, a source of[Pg vi] energy and growing strength, the other, of disease anddecay, in this vast political body.
My sphere of observati