reputation.  The brotherly innocence of my relation to Zoe was the generally accepted one.  Reverdy assured me of this.  Douglas was a valiant friend to me in this clarification of my nature and my character before the community.  The whole atmosphere of my life was now freer; but it had cost Lamborn his life to make it so.  It seemed best, however, that I should leave town for a while.  I decided to go to Cincinnati and then to Nashville.  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.  But what was all that I saw here of industry and utilization of the resources of the land compared to what I saw growing up as a system around Jacksonville?

Yet the loveliness of the country around Nashville enchanted me.  I was in a mood to be won, to be sure; for I was completely captivated by Dorothy and the delightful hospitality that was accorded me.  Dorothy’s mother treated me with such gentle and thoughtful attention, as if she received me not less upon the basis of my friendship to Reverdy than upon my own appeal to her.  And as for Dorothy—­she was as kind to me as a sister; and yet....

I loved the country and this little city of 6000 people on the hills above the Cumberland valley.  Still, so many negroes.  In this whole state of about 700,000 people, nearly 150,000 were slaves, so Dorothy told me.  It amazed me.  Negro slavery, so far as England was concerned, had never to me been a visible thing.  But here in America, here in Tennessee, and in this city, it struck one at every turn.  It entered into all the daily thinking and plans of every one.  It was omnipresent.  It touched every life.