I wanted to see Dorothy. I felt
that I must make myself clear to her, and face to face.
Having made all arrangements for Zoe and Mrs. Brown to keep the house
while I was gone and having laid out the work for my men, I set forth
for Vandalia, the capital of Illinois, by stage. There I took the
Cumberland Road, passed through Indianapolis, a small place; arrived in
good time at Cincinnati, a city of more than 30,000 people; a busy place
of manufacturers, distillers, and pork packers, since Kentucky, Ohio,
and Indiana shipped their hogs to this market to be converted into hams
and bacon and lard. I saw the town, the residence of the great Nicholas
Longworth, who had grown fabulously rich by making wine. And at the
hotel, this latter part of April being warm, I was treated to the
spectacle of the men in the dining room taking off their coats and
dining in their shirt sleeves amid the not inelegant appointments that
surrounded the table. But I was becoming Americanized now and was not as
sensitive as formerly to deportment of this sort.
The vastness of America came over me as I descended from Cincinnati to
Nashville. Yet there was the southern territory still south of me; and
beyond the Mississippi the unsettled empire of Louisiana. Cincinnati had
something of the activity and the character of other northern cities;
but as I passed through the domain of Kentucky and Tennessee I could not
help but see that here was an agricultural country which owed its
prosperity to slavery.
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