in the country and in the bosom of indigenous families one finds oneself continually confronted with some survival or recrudescence of English trait or custom. There is a certain colonialism in the attitude assumed by many of these good folks toward all things modern and American that strikes one as odd in people who gave Washington and the Pinckneys to the cause of independence. There is a persistence in customs, a loyalty to beliefs and traditions, a naïveté of self-satisfaction that cannot be called conceit, a clannishness, an attachment to the soil, that are radically English and thoroughly picturesque, but are certainly not American.
These and similar traits the tidewater inhabitants of the two states have in common. And yet they differ to such a degree that even the superficial observer has no difficulty in distinguishing them without having recourse to such external peculiarities as dialect or physical appearance. The Virginian is more democratic than the South Carolinian; he has more bonhomie; he is not nearly so punctilious, or stern, or fiery. A true South Carolinian gentleman would never have sat in the White House with slippers worn down at the heels, as Jefferson did. Many Virginian gentlemen would not have done it, either, but they would have comprehended how it was possible to do it. In some way or other, the Virginian developed from a seventeenth-century into an eighteenth-century English squire. He became more or less an easy-going optimist, fond of good company and good living, never so vulgar as Squire Western, but likely to fall into careless, slipshod habits unless upheld, as was often the case, by the refined women about him. With the South Carolinian it seems to have been different. What with the infusion of sober Huguenot blood, what with the masterful qualities necessitated by his isolated position among great masses of black barbarians, he took himself and life more seriously than the Virginian did, and he does so to this day. He
