public service, they were not unlikely upon return to meet such a reception as Henry Laurens described:  “I found nobody there but three of our old domestics—­Stepney, Exeter and big Hagar.  These drew tears from me by their humble and affectionate salutes.  My knees were clasped, my hands kissed, my very feet embraced, and nothing less than a very—­I can’t say fair, but full—­buss of my lips would satisfy the old man weeping and sobbing in my face....  They ... held my hands, hung upon me; I could scarce get from them.  ‘Ah,’ said the old man, ’I never thought to see you again; now I am happy; Ah, I never thought to see you again.’"[14]

[Footnote 13:  Emily J. Putnam, The Lady (New York, 1910), pp. 282-323.]

[Footnote 14:  D.D.  Wallace, Life of Henry Laurens, p. 436.]

Among the clearest views of plantation life extant are those of two Northern tutors who wrote of their Southern sojourns.  One was Philip Fithian who went from Princeton in 1773 to teach the children of Colonel Robert Carter of Nomoni Hall in the “Northern Neck” of Virginia, probably the most aristocratic community of the whole South:  the other was A. de Puy Van Buren who left Battle Creek in the eighteen-fifties to seek health and employment in Mississippi and found them both, and happiness too, amid the freshly settled folk on the banks of the Yazoo River.  Each of these made jottings now and then of the work and play of the negroes, but both of them were mainly impressed by the social regime in which they found themselves among the whites.  Fithian marveled at the evidences of wealth and the stratification of society, but he reckoned that a well recommended Princeton graduate, with no questions asked as to his family, fortune or business, would be rated socially as on an equal footing with the owner of a L10,000 estate, though this might be discounted one-half if he were unfashionably ignorant of dancing, boxing, fencing, fiddling and cards.[15] He was attracted by the buoyancy, the good breeding and the cordiality of those whom he met, and particularly by the sound qualities of Colonel and Mrs. Carter with whom he dwelt; but as a budding Presbyterian preacher he was a little shocked at first by the easy-going conduct of the Episcopalian planters on Sundays.  The time at church, he wrote, falls into three divisions:  first, that before service, which is filled by the giving and receiving of business letters, the reading of advertisements and the discussion of crop prices and the lineage and qualities of favorite horses; second, “in the church at service, prayrs read over in haste, a sermon seldom under and never over twenty minutes, but always made up of sound morality or deep, studied metaphysicks;"[16] third, “after service is over, three quarters of an hour spent in strolling round the church among the crowd, in which time you will be invited by several different gentlemen home with them to dinner.”

[Footnote 15:  Philip V. Fithian, Journal and Letters (Princeton, 1900), p. 287.]