county, to distribute some corn bought by the Commissioner's Court, for the destitute of our county; and could you have witnessed the applicants, and heard their stories, for the last few days, I am satisfied you could draw a picture that would excite the sympathy of the most selfish heart. I am free to confess that I had no idea of the destitution that prevails in this county. Why, sir, what do you think of a widow and her children living, for three days and nights, on boiled weeds, called pepper grass?—yet such, I am credibly informed, has been the case in Chambers County."—From a letter to the editor of the Montgomery (Ala.) Journal, from Hon. Samuel Pearson, Judge of Probate, for Chambers County, Alabama.
"Famine in Upper Georgia.—We have sad news from the north part of Georgia. The Dalton Times says that many people are without corn, or means to procure any. And, besides, there is none for sale. In some neighbourhoods, a bushel could not be obtained for love or money. Poor men are offering to work for a peck of corn a day. If they plead, 'Our children will starve,' they are answered, 'So will mine, if I part with the little I have.' Horses and mules are turned out into the woods, to wait for grass, or starve. The consequence is, that those who have land can only plant what they can with the hoe—they cannot plough. It is seriously argued that, unless assisted soon, many of the poor class of that section will perish.'—California Paper.[1]
No approach to anything like such a state of things as
those extracts portray (which extended over parts of three
agricultural States) ever occurred, I am sure, in any rural
district of the Free States. Even in our most thickly-peopled
manufacturing districts, to which the staple articles
of food are brought from far-distant regions, assistance from
abroad, to sustain the poor, has never been asked; nor do I
believe the poor have ever been reduced, for weeks together,
to a diet of corn. But this famine at the South occurred in
a region where most productive land can be purchased for
from three to seven dollars an acre; where maize and wheat
- ↑ In the obscure country papers of Northern Alabama and Georgia, and Western South Carolina, I have seen many more descriptions, similar to these, of this famine; but I cannot now lay my hand on them. These I have by accident, not having taken pains to collect them for this purpose. In a district of the Slave States, where it is boasted that more than a hundred bushels of maize to the acre has been raised, and where not one out of five hundred of the people is engaged in any other than agricultural industry, I have myself bought maize, which had been raised by free labour, in Ohio, at two dollars a bushel.
