1917 Harper's Magazine

Here are some snippets from a travel article about Charleston, published in Harper's magazine in 1917:

"Without being exactly one pattern, [the houses] were of a general type which I found continually repeated throughout the city. A certain rather narrow breadth of stone or brick or wood abuts into the street, and as wide a space of veranda, colonnaded and rising in two or even three stories, looks...over a more or less ample garden ground."

"Nearly all the gardens are shut in by high brick walls and it is something fine to pass in or out by the gate of such a garden, with a light iron-work grill overhead and small globes on the high shouldered brick piers..."

"The tobacco chewing habit, so well-nigh extinct in the North, is still rife in the South."

"To this moment, I do not know what must be the prevalent feeling concerning slavery. It was intimated only once, from lips that trembled with old memories in owning and affirming the Negroes, "They were slaves, but they were happy.'"

"Their presence is of an almost unbroken gloom......[they have] little or no gradation from absolute black to any lighter coloring...but there may be paler shadings of the mulatto, the quadroon, the octaroon, but I did not notice them, though more than once I took persons for white who would have shown to the trained eye as black."