Daily Times
(Leavenworth, KS)
April 23, 1861
The New York Sunday Atlas thus pictures the peculiarities of Southerners:
A general impression prevails that the people of the South are far more extravagant in their dress than we of the North; and the Daily News asserts that a single Southern family consumes more in value in many instances than a whole New England Village. This is all nonsense. The South spends all it earns, but it is not for dress by any means. In Georgia, it costs a man ten times as much for brandy cocktails as it does for clothing, while his expenditure for Bourbon whisky is greater in one year than his hat and boot bills amount to in twenty years. Owing to a warm climate our friends at the South need but little clothing. The most of them keep warm by cursing and swearing. Thick clothes are a nuisance down south, and in all other climates where men have nine months of the year devoted to mosquitoes and the other three to yellow fever. The slave owner would buy lots of clothing if he needed it. But he does not. The thermometer being in the vicinity of eighty the whole time, the slave owner is ever more ready to invest in juleps than he is in overcoats. The South is death on drinks, but is slow on clothing. With a “light heart and a thin pair of breeches,” they care for nothing that looks like warmth and woolen. The light heart can be obtained with a toddy stick, while the thin pair of breeches can be found in two and a half yards of nankeen, at a cost of sixty cents. The News should overhaul its Southern statistics. When it does this, it will discover that those who consume the most rum are not those who consume the most broadcloth.