One fall, while I was staying at Mr. G----’s, he lost many fine fattening hogs with the cholera. These hogs weighed from two to three or four hundred pounds apiece. It had been his habit to butcher every winter from eighty to a hundred fine porkers. This fall the cholera epidemic had been so fatal that there was scarcely a planter in all the neighborhood but lost a great many swine. They would feed at night and seem to be perfectly well, and be dead by morning; or seemingly well in the morning, and dead by night. As this happened in war time, the loss was felt heavily.
We needed leather so badly that the hogs were flayed as soon as dead, and their hides were tanned. The best and heaviest leather was used for making shoes for the slaves, as their work was out of doors as a rule, and heavy brogans could not be bought. But leather from the hides of swine fell to our lot also, for winter shoes; and many other white families were obliged to use it. I remember very plainly when one of Mr. G----’s daughters and I first wore swine-skin shoes. They were made of leather which Mr. G---- himself had had tanned, and, except that the pores were very large and wide apart, it looked like ordinary leather. We had consented with some reluctance to have these shoes made, for, although we were willing to immolate ourselves on the altar of our Southern Confederacy, it had fallen rather severely on us to think that we must wear hog-skin shoes! They were made, however, at a cost of ten dollars a pair, we furnishing the leather from which to make them. But swine-skin leather was very extensible, and our shoes spread out quite flat by the time we had worn them a day or so. This was more than we could endure, so we took them off, and one of the negro house-girls came into possession of two more pair of shoes, while we stepped back into shoes made of homespun.
As no shoe-blacking or polish could be bought during the blockade, each family improvised its own blacking, which was soot and oil of some variety (either cotton-seed, ground peas, or oil of compressed lard) mixed together. The shoes would be well painted with the mixture of soot and oil, with brushes made of the bristles of swine. Then a thin paste made of flour, bolted meal, or starch, was applied all over the blackened shoe with another brush, which paste, when dry, gave the shoe as bright and glossy an appearance as if “shined” by the best of bootblacks. Planters were very careful in killing their hogs to save a good supply of bristles, from which shapely brushes were manufactured.