During the first half of the nineteenth century the United States was a magnet for European travelers curious to see the new republic in action. Two of the most famous of these visitors were Alexis de Tocqueville, whose book Democracy in America recorded his observations during a trip to the United States in 1831-1832, and Charles Dickens, whose 1842 trip resulted in American Notes for General Circulation. Another British traveler, well known in his lifetime but now largely forgotten, was Basil Hall.
Hall mined his naval career of more than twenty years to produce several popular books, including Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island and Extracts from a Journal, Written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822. He retired from the Royal Navy in 1823, and two years later he married Margaret Hunter of Edinburgh. As the daughter of a diplomat, Hunter was already an experienced traveler when she married Hall. In 1827 the Halls, their fifteen-month-old daughter Eliza, and Eliza’s nurse, Mrs. Cownie, set out for North America. Basil Hall’s three-volume book, Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828, was published in 1829. More than a century later, Margaret Hall’s letters to her sister, Jane Hunter Guthrie, were published by British author Una Pope-Hennessy in 1931. In 1932 Pope-Hennessy sold the original letters and her transcriptions to the Library of Congress, where they are available for research in the Margaret Hunter Hall Papers in the Manuscript Division.
Margaret and Basil Hall prove the theory that crabby people make the best observers. “Both Captain and Mrs. Hall disapproved on principle of everything that America presented of equality and fraternity and were completely out of their bearings in a society unmapped by class distinctions,” Pope-Hennessy writes. “They held democracy to be a demoralizing blight from which, however, it was always possible a country might recover.” They held this view in common with British author Frances Trollope (about whom Pope-Hennessy also wrote). Trollope (the mother of novelist Anthony Trollope) overlapped with the Halls during her time in the United States and, like them, wrote about the dismay she felt on getting to know Americans and their political and social practices. In her book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832, Trollope wrote, “Captain Hall, when asked what appeared to him to constitute the greatest difference between England and America, replied, like a gallant sailor, ‘the want of loyalty.’ Were the same question put to me, I should answer, ‘the want of refinement.’”
Unlike Frances Trollope, who left her husband behind in England, the Halls appear to have not only traveled together, but also shared their observations. About Baltimore, for example, Basil writes in Travels in North America: “I was beyond measure relieved by finding that it was not the custom of the place to cram down our throats their institutions, their town, their bay, their liberty, their intelligence, and so forth.” While Margaret writes in a letter to her sister: “No one here has spouted to us of their Institutions and their buildings and their liberty and fifty other things of which the Philadelphians boasted morning, noon, and night. Margaret describes what may have been their usual, shared practice. One evening in Charleston, ducking an invitation to a ball, “we put on our dressing gowns and sat down to write, which many persons perhaps would consider the greatest fatigue of all, but I find it quite a refreshment.”
Margaret and Basil Hall’s journey began when they landed in New York in April 1827. From there they traveled up the Hudson River, into New England, then down to New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. They continued south to Washington, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans; then to St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, and finally back to New York, where they embarked for England in June 1828.
When they weren’t visiting prison and asylum inmates, the Halls went to parties, dinners, and balls. They visited state legislatures and, in Washington, the House of Representatives and Senate, and courts in session. In Washington, also, they mixed with foreign delegations. In the south they visited plantations, where they watched enslaved people at work and toured their cabins. They witnessed slave sales in Washington and Charleston. They met the president, John Quincy Adams, who gave Margaret a locket with a cutting of his hair as a gift for Eliza. They met Joseph Bonaparte, in exile in the United States after the downfall of his brother, Napoleon. On a steamboat on the Raritan River in New Jersey they bumped into Aaron Burr. They met with Secretary of State Henry Clay and toured the State Department where they saw George Washington’s 1775 military commission. Currently the commission, part of the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, where it is housed like Margaret Hall’s letters in the Manuscript Division, is on display in the Library’s exhibition The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution.
While Margaret’s observations parallel Basil’s in some cases, in others they diverge because of the segregation of the sexes in many public and private spaces. At a tea in the home of New York’s governor, DeWitt Clinton, the Halls walked together into a room that they soon realized contained only men. The governor “came forward and giving me his arm hurried me into the adjoining room” where his wife was entertaining the women. After a dinner in Columbia, South Carolina, Margaret wrote that “ladies in America have a vile custom of crowding all together at dinner tables and leave the gentlemen likewise to herd by themselves.” What this meant was that some of what the Halls saw and reported was specific to each one’s sex. In Washington, for example, Margaret reported that “Basil dined yesterday with a large party of the Vice-President and many members of the House of Representatives at [British ambassador] Mr. Vaughan’s, from which I was, of course, excluded.”
There were so many things Margaret Hall did not like about the United States, and she took care to describe each one in detail. After visiting the New York State Assembly she wrote, “The favorite attitude of the principal speaker was his left hand in his breeches pocket whilst with his right he clutched a pencil and sawed the air in a manner that showed him much in want of Hamlet’s advice to the Players. Now and then he shifted his left hand from the favourite pocket back further than it would be quite delicate to particularise.”
Parties in Washington were too crowded, or “squeezy.” “There is no room to walk about for the purpose of seeing people, and if there were there is no one worth seeing. You may say, perhaps, that dancing in a space no bigger than a cheese plate must be poor amusement for anyone out of their teens, but it is not quite so wearisome as standing crushed up to the wall,” she complained. After attending a South Carolina ball to celebrate Washington’s birthday she wrote that women dressed like “girls at the circus or strolling players at the Dundee Theatre . . . such fabrications of silver muslin and tinsel, such feathers and flowers.” She was appalled at the sight of a “pretty girl” at a Washington dinner “feeding herself with very much-melted ice cream with a great steel knife!” Commenting further on the inadequacy of American utensils she described how hard it was to eat South Carolina rice with one of the “great lumbering, long, two-pronged forks” that she found were generally used. As for the men, she was disgusted by their tobacco chewing and frequent spitting.
Margaret Hall didn’t hate everything. She liked the peach pickle she ate in Washington, she enjoyed some of the places she stayed, and she occasionally, grudgingly, admired the landscapes she passed through. Reading between the lines it is apparent that she was treated by people both free and enslaved with hospitality and kindness just about everywhere she and her family went in the United States. Although she was a perceptive observer and an articulate and witty writer, she may not have thought of herself as an author since, unlike her husband and the other travelers, she never wrote a book, and her letters went unpublished for more than a century. Those letters, in Pope-Hennessy’s published edition and the originals in the Manuscript Division, preserve a trove of detailed information about life in the antebellum United States from a cranky, but observant, visitor.
“Pope-Hennessy writes…” Margaret Hunter Hall, The Aristocratic Journey, Being the Outspoken Letters of Mrs. Basil Hall, Written during a Fourteen Months’ Sojourn in America, 1827-1828, ed. Una Pope-Hennessy (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931), 6.
“the want of refinement…” Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1832), 65-66. Pope-Hennessy’s book, Three English Women in America (London: E. Benn, 1929), covers Trollope, Fanny Kemble, and Harriet Martineau.
“One evening…” Basil Hall, Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1829), 2:392. Margaret Hall to Janet Hunter Guthrie, December 21, 1827; February 26, 1828, in Pope-Hennessy, Aristocratic Journey, 157, 210-211.
“these places…” Pope-Hennessy, Aristocratic Journey, 5; David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little Brown, 1971).
“Margaret reported…” Margaret Hall to Janet Hunter Guthrie, September 15, 1827; February 22, 1828; January 4, 1828, in Pope-Hennessy, Aristocratic Journey, 62-63, 209,170.
“she wrote…” Margaret Hunter Hall to Janet Hall Guthrie, September 16, 1827, in Pope-Hennessy, Aristocratic Journey, 64.
“Commenting further…” Margaret Hunter Hall to Janet Hunter Guthrie, January 3, 1828; January 19, 1828; February 22, 1828; January 15, 1828; March 2, 1828, in Pope-Hennessy, Aristocratic Journey, 169, 185, 209, 182, 212.
“peach pickle…” Margaret Hunter Hall to Janet Hunter Guthrie, December 29, 1827, in Pope-Hennessy, Aristocratic Journey, 165.