An Alabama Courtship

By F. J. Stimson

This book is a novel by J. Stimson. It tells the story of young Mr. Higginbotham from the famous Higginbotham and Thomas Lawrence family. It also details his travel to Alabama and his courtship of Miss Jeanie Brucce.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 4064066439538

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PART FIRST.

Table of Contents

1.

IMUST first tell you how I came to be ever a commercial traveller. My father was a Higginbotham—one of the Higginbothams of Salem—but my mother, Marie Lawrence, was a far-off cousin of the wife of old Thomas Lawrence, the great tobacconist of New York. Horatio Higginbotham was both an author and an artist; but he neither wrote nor painted down to the popular taste; and as he was also a gentleman, and had lived like one, he left very little money. Not that he took it with him when he died, but he had spent it on the way. It costs considerable to get through this world, if you travel first-class and pay as you go. And, at least, my father left no debts.

He left my dear mother, however, and his assets were represented by me, an expensive Junior at Harvard. And as none of the family counting-rooms and cotton-mills seemed to open the door for me—so degenerate a scion of a money-making race as to have already an artist behind him—I was glad to enter the wide portal of Cousin Lawrence's tobacco manufactory.

Here, as in most successful trades, you were, all but the very heir-presumptive, put through a regular mill. First, a year or two in the factory, just to get used to the sneezing; and then you took to the road; and after a few years of this had thoroughly taught you the retail trade, you were promoted to be a gentleman and hob-nob with the planters in Cuba, and ride over their landed estates.

I got through the factory well enough; but the road, as you may fancy, was a trial in prospect. When my time came (being then, as you will see, something of a snob) I was careful to choose the wildest circuit, most remote from Boston and from Boston ways. The extreme West—Denver, Kansas City, Omaha—was out of the question; even the South—New Orleans, Charleston, Florida particularly—was unsafe. Indiana was barbarous enough, but went with Ohio and Michigan; and I finally chose what was called the Tennessee Circuit, which included all the country west of the Alleghanies, from the Ohio River to the Gulf States. Louisville belonged to my Cincinnati colleague, but the rest of Kentucky and Tennessee, from the Cumberland and Great Smoky Mountains to the hills of Alabama and the plains of Memphis, were mine.

And by no means uninteresting I found it. I travelled, you must know, in snuff; and the southern mountains, with the headwaters of the western rivers, Cumberland, Alabama, Tennessee, are the country of the snuff-taker in America.

The civilization, the picturesqueness of our country lies always between the mountains and the seaboard. Trace the Appalachian summits from their first uprearing at Tracadiegash or Gaspé, to that last laurel-hill near Tupelo in Mississippi—on the left of you lies history, character, local identity; on the right that great common place, that vast central prairie, lying stolidly spread out between the Rockies and the Blue Ridge, producing food. Heaven keep us from that central plain, one would say, and from the men and moods and motives that it breeds—but that out of it, in the very unidentified middle of it, the Lord upreared a Lincoln.

However, my beat lay so well to the south of it, lurked so far up in the mountain alley-ways and southern river-cañons, that I found much to study and more to see. The railway did little more than take me to the field of labor; the saddle or the wagon or the country stage must do the rest. My first trip was to the east of my dominions; my headquarters were at Knoxville, and from there I rode through some thousand miles of mountain and of cove; and different enough and remote enough it was from all that I had known before and from all that might know me or look askance upon a travelling-merchant selling snuff by sample. But this was but a breather, as it were; and on my second journey I was ordered to replace my predecessor, Jerry Sullivan, at his headquarters in Chattanooga, and take entire charge of that country. Already I had contracted a prejudice for the slow and unconventional modes of travelling; and after I had seen Jerry Sullivan, a genial Irishman, and had formal delivery of his office, and he had gone back with evident delight to his beloved New York, and I had sat there alone a day or two, I thought that I would open out the business westward. And looking at the map it occurred to me that the Tennessee River was the natural avenue to my domains in that direction. Luckily, I made the acquaintance of a young land-prospector, with romantic instincts like my own; and the second evening after this idea came