Family in Ballynure and Abbeville

On 7 April 1883 John Hill wrote from Ballyboley to his older brother: Dear Bro. William…I hope you will get better and live to see my son Samuel this summer if all goes well with him. William Hill (1805-1886) emigrated in his teens from Ballynure to Abbeville, South Carolina, and became a respected businessman; his son Robert Emmet Hill (1839-1918) was a longterm judge and Master of Equity. Several letters survive from William to another brother David Hill (c. 1816-1883), a Ballynure farmer, with a couple in the other direction (from John above, and John’s wife Lizzie). I think it is worth revisiting this transatlantic link, so that Abbeville and Ballynure can enjoy each other’s stories [44]. 

The local Press and Banner of 12 December 1883 enthuses:

WE would urgently advise the people of Abbeville to turn out to-night to hear Prof. Hill’s lecture on India. Mr. Hill has lived for some years at Allahabad, and can tell us wonderful things about that wonderful land. It is hoped that the ladies will attend and hear what he has to say about woman’s rights as understood by their sex in India. The lecture is a response to the request of friends: it is to be heard without money and without price; and all who go to the Court House to-night will enjoy a literary treat.

Alec kept in touch with William’s son, though I am not sure if they met during his later (1889) American trip. Robert is and was a common Hill forename in Ballynure and Ballycor, but “Robert Emmet” is a strong hint about William’s politics. Many readers are not comfortable with unapologetic slaveowners who were on the losing side in the Civil War, and made harshly joking remarks on the Crimean War massacres, and were kindly Presbyterian citizens of unimpeachable probity, writing maudlin letters back home about the glorious Antrim countryside and their youthful amours. This is to brother David (24 January 1855):

Altho’ it is upwards of thirty two years since I left "the green hills of my youth" I can still luxuriate in fancy, listening to the “Laverocks” wild warbling measures rise “high poisd in air” or the mellow notes of the Thrush amongst the rich Hawthorn hedges of Parks garden. I can fancy myself young again, strolling over the old green sod, whispering words of artless love to her who was - most beautiful, most lovely: but now alas! how changed. Do you surmise to whom I allude ? – well then, tell me of her. Altho’ the vase is long broken, yet still the fragrance of the once sweet flower remains.

William is quoting from John Gay's Sweet William's Farewell to Black-Ey'd Susan (c. 1719). The poem was very soon set to music. Douglas Jerrold's 1829 play Black-Eyed Susan was staged in Belfast no later than 1833 (with Mr and Mrs Burroughs in the leading roles); the Vindicator offered its Wicklow-based romantic potboiler Black-Eyed Susan in August 1840.  By the 1850s the song was widely adopted in America, e.g. in Davidson’s Universal Melodist (1853). 

The "Hawthorn hedges of Parks garden" may refer to the extensive Ballynure lands of the farming and milling Park / Dobbs family. William emigrated age about 17, without marrying his "sweet flower".

…I still carry on the farm, having hired a man to superintend the business, I give him 35 pounds for the year or $175. He works himself, and I have 3 young negro Fellows with him, I have 2 negro women in the house here, to do the cooking and housework, one of them is not quite 17 years and has 2 very likely children, the oldest nearly 3 years old, my negro Property is worth 6000 Dollars. Isn't this horrid? say you. I dare say that it was from such a feeling that David McMurtry very quaintly enquired, if much of the spirit of true religion or vital godliness was to be met with in the clergy of this country, as if slavery and christianity were inconsistent…I would like you to say to David [45] that I would rejoice to believe that the ministry in Ireland possessed, and expressed, as much of the spirit influence, as the same class do here, and practised the principles of the Gospel as closely.

In 1859 William writes again to David

This letter will introduce to you my son Robert Emmet who leaves here directly to visit the land of his fathers…He will be surprised, astonished – pleased when he gets to Ireland.  His impressions will be greatly changed.  He believes – as indeed most untravelled Americans believe, that Ireland is a poor country – that its people are a coarse, rough, untutored, ignorant, unpolished and semi-civilized race, that nothing elegant or refined belong to the country; but that poverty and want, rags squalor and wretchedness reign triumphant. He has no conception of the state of improvement, and the beauty of your green fields and snug farms, and the contrast between here and there will shake him deeply. His ideas respecting Ireland and the Irish, are of course derived from the appearance and character of the Irish here, of whom it must be said, they are a very poor sample of the Irish at home. It is true that the most of the emigrants from Ireland are of the lowest rank, and consequently have never had opportunity of polish, and when they get here, and find whiskey cheap the[y] indulge to excess, get to fighting and brawling, and disgrace themselves, and reflect discredit on the better class of their countrymen.  We have a good many of the rowdy class of Irish here in this little town and neighborhood – mostly of the Real Irish, or papist stock, and their looks and uncouth appearance often bring to my mind the Pig-men that I had seen, when a boy, in Ballynure Fairs.

And again on 8 September 1865:

The late war has ruined the South and I may say the whole country. The people here are impoverished, not one in ten but is reduced to insolvency.

The negroes are all freed, and confusion reigns predominant. The freedmen and women will not work, and no means to compel them; the consequence is that they steal and pilfer, as they must live by some means. You cannot imagine such a state of things as exist here. A war of extermination either of the white or the black race is, in my opinion inevitable, and the conflict will not be long postponed.

…I do not think I switched a slave of mine in the last four years and I do not claim to be more humane and indulgent than others, I owned fifteen, all of whom are gone to shift for themselves, but one woman and her two children, and I was pleased at their leaving; they had become so idle since their being freed that in place of a benefit they were a heavy expense to me for their board and clothing.

I have lost by the result of the late war not less than thirty thousand dollars, taking into computation the negroes Confederate bonds, money and depreciation of real estate…

…We have a guard of Yankee soldiers in Abbeville to keep us in subjection. Composed of fifty men, the present guard are white men a great many of whom are Irish; their predecessors were negroes whose domineering conduct so exasperated the people that it was thought best by the authorities to remove them in order to prevent a collision with the citizens…

We have no mail facilities now in consequence of the rebellion as our enemies the Yankees call our effort to free ourselves from their accursed yoke. No people ever had more justifiable cause for asserting and struggling for independence than we had; but we failed after a heroic trial in consequence of weakness and the power of the numbers and resources of our opponents. Had it not been for the resources obtained in men from Ireland and Germany the matter would be different this day. Men from those nations, mercenarys, came in thousands and tens of thousands, to crush a people struggling for self government regardless of anything but their filthy pay.

They knew nothing of the nature of the contest, and seemed to care nothing for the right. I do not know a single Irishman resident in this part of the country, but was strong for the cause of the South.

This is not all pleasant, but it seems honest. There is more on 8 March 1872:

Freedom has ruined the negroes in every way, morally and I might say physically – they steal rather than work. The newspaper, as it seems, sent me by your daughter Mary [46] it is true in a fit of spleen I returned to her and in a very short time I afterwards regretted doing so. I am sure that she did not intend it to tantalize (?) my feelings, altho at the time I got it I thought so; it was full of excellent matter of the celebrations by the Orangemen. You know altho she may not have known that I always utterly detested that party, and I am free to confess that I never had any love for their opposite party. My wishes are that all Irishmen of every religious opinion should be united for the common good of my native land; and until such is accomplished you can have no hope for honest and impartial government. However I will remark in passing that I would greatly prefer your government oppressive as it is to that under which we at present groan.  We are governed by an irresponsible body of negroes, they have the ascendancy in the Legislature of the State, and the white people are utterly powerless to check the onerous taxation which they impose. High taxes don't hurt them as they have little or no property to be affected.

Alec visited Abbeville in 1883 (when William was still alive) during his American tour. Edmonia says “He wrote frequently on the questions of the day for the daily newspapers…He was well posted in American geography and politics, and astonished his acquaintances by his intimate knowledge of affairs. It was often said of him that any statement that he made could be trusted. Mr. Hill described his wanderings in a most interesting style for the Indian papers” [ETH].

I do not know how much Alec was paid for his journalism, or what he and Kipling learned from each other about writing. His article on “South Carolina” appeared in two parts in the Pioneer (2 and 5 January 1884). It is unsigned (“From an Occasional Correspondent”) and describes the town and district of “Secessionville” and some unnamed “relatives long settled there” – that is, Abbeville and his cousins from Ballynure. In a plain patient style he informs about the conduct and economics of the cotton industry, phosphate fertilisers obtained from the mines near Charleston, the technology of ploughs, and – at length – the “disastrous” arrangements between planters and their mostly negro tenants. This is reminiscent of land problems in Ireland, with the tenant always bordering on poverty, the landlord (if active at all) feeling pushed towards harshness, and neither motivated to invest for the long term.

And unless he supervise and dictate to his tenants in a manner that would scarcely be tolerated among any other people, his land must gradually go to the bad, since the actual cultivation depends on the judgment of the negroes, a proverbially thoughtless race.

Alec continues on wider post-emancipation politics:

Of all the tyrannies ever endured, that under which the intelligence, respectability, and wealth of South Carolina were subjected for nine years to the ignorance and rascality of the State, while the United States Army looked on and maintained the Radicals in power, must have been about the worst…at the end of their régime there was nothing to show for it all, except miserable roads, broken bridges, and ruined cities with streets unpaved and undrained. Since 1876 taxation has been greatly reduced, and improvement is visible everywhere…The more intelligent and honest among the negroes themselves see that, except that the demagogues among them have lost the spoils of office, the race as a whole is better treated now than under the Radical régime. They are not admitted to social equality with the whites, but all their rights as citizens are respected.

…Owing to the repugnance of the whites to close association with the negroes, the two classes do not attend the same schools…The anomaly which strikes a foreigner is not the division of the races in school, but the place where the line is drawn. In the “coloured” schools of Charleston one sees beautiful, refined-looking, fair-skinned children, often with blue eyes and golden hair, condemned to associate with “black niggers,” because some remote ancestor of theirs, four or five generations back, happened to be coloured. In India we are usually supposed to have a sufficiently acute eye for “colour,” but few people can recognise fractions less than “one anna in the rupee,” and a larger proportion than that [47] would be no bar to admission into society if the person were otherwise unobjectionable.

…As a race they are, of course, far below the whites in intelligence, though there are many exceptions, the most remarkable that I have seen being a “black nigger” girl of about 14 years, without a suspicion of European ancestry, a scholar in one of the Charleston free schools, who could solve quadratic equations and problems involving the binomial theorem in a way that would have astonished the white boys in the High School. 

The Press and Banner published a letter from Alec to Robert in 1886: We are indebted to Mr. R. E. Hill for the privilege of publishing an interesting letter from his cousin Mr. S. A. Hill, in India.

“Mr. Benet’s article on the negro”: W C Benet gave an address to Newberry College, South Carolina, on “The Negro Civilization”, reported in the Press and Banner on 1 July 1885.

“A free and equal member of a federal union of self-governing British States”: these words chime with William Hill’s from fourteen years earlier, and may still be of interest. That is not to say that each man meant the same thing by Home Rule or self-government or Gospel principles, or that today we can untangle what they did mean – though it is hard to stop peering at all these letters for relevance and univocal meaning.

Alec’s writing is cool, its terms and principles commonplace in the 1880s and potentially offensive today; he and William and others are racists in one clear sense. They are, at the least, anti-integrationists who may acknowledge a theoretical equality but “accept and even defend de facto segregation” [48]. Alec would say his racism was unprejudiced: supported by evidence and observation, and not thoughtless. Many modern readers would ask him to reflect on his standards of evidence, and of intelligence and beauty and other desirable things.

He recounts – neutrally, not defensively, and perhaps with Judge Robert E Hill, his cousin, in mind – an Abbeville court case where the jury (eleven white, one coloured) “after a few minutes consultation, found the white man guilty of the charge and the negro not guilty”. All reports agree on his kindness and patience with Indian students; he had no difficulty acknowledging the good work of his Indian assistants, though they were assistants not equals or superiors. He was responsible for recruiting a young native scientist (a true scientist in the usage of the day, not a clerk of whom only clerking and transcription were demanded); the glare of publicity was considerable; then he criticised Ruchi Ram Sahni according to high standards. They may have been more than usually high, and the psychology here may not surprise [49].

Alec – Kipling’s landlord and older travelling companion – spoke his mind firmly and publicly. Similar views were common in 1880s Anglo-India, and it would be unwise to claim more than a minor influence. Still, it is interesting to find a thoughtful Victorian scientist with deep first-hand experience of the natural and unnatural divisions of Irish allegiances, education systems in several countries, Indian castes, Empire bureaucracy and Southern apartheid. Whether his and our views are tolerably consistent across all these worlds is another thought for today.