As regards the opinions of the very representative company at the
springs on the subject of slavery, it seemed, as well as I could
get at it, to be that about one per cent, of the white people
regretted the emancipation; but this was composed almost entirely of
old persons, who were unable to accommodate themselves to a new
order of things, and to whom it meant the loss of personal
attendance--perhaps the greatest inconvenience which elderly
persons who have been used to valets and maids can undergo. Many
such persons at the South were really killed by the social changes
produced by the war, as truly as if they had been struck on the
battle-field; the bewildered resignation of the survivors is
sometimes touching to witness, and the calamity was generally
embittered by the wholesale flight of the most trusted household
servants, who it was supposed would have despised freedom even if
offered in a gold box by Phillips, Garrison, and Greeley in person.
Telling one old gentleman who was mourning over the change that the
young men to whom I spoke did not agree with him, but thought it an
excellent thing, he replied "that those fellows never had known what
domestic comfort was"--meaning that their experience did not run
back beyond 1865.
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