MR. VESSEY OF ENGLAND

Being the Incidents and Reminiscences of Travel in a Twelve Weeks' Tour Through the United States and Canada in the Year 1859 by John Henry Vessey- this journal is introduced by Earl Schenck Miers. He alerts the contemporary reader to the fact that Vessey is one of the first sympathetic commentators from abroad after America had been ""jabbed so often by the pens of British visitors""- more moderate and more anxious to find things pleasing as well as so different in many ways from his native land. Vessey's itinerary, some 11,000 miles, took him from New York south through the cotton country, west to St. Louis and Chicago, back to Niagara Falls and then north to Canada, and finally back to Boston and New York. A farmer, he makes many observations on the crops- tobacco, rice and cotton, but also on the many trivia of travel- from barbershops to pavements, and on the people- particularly the Negroes and the issue of slavery, and the Indians. It is therefore arounded report- well observed and gracefully annotated.