grow kindly; where cattle, sheep, and hogs, may be pastured over thousands of acres, at no rent; where fuel has no value, and at a season of the year when clothing or shelter is hardly necessary to comfort.
It is a remarkable fact that this frightful famine, unprecedented in North America, was scarcely noticed, in the smallest way, by any of those Southern papers which, in the ordinary course of things, ever reach the North. In the Charleston, Savannah, and Mobile papers, received at our commercial reading-rooms, I have not been able to find any mention of it at all—a single, short, second-hand paragraph in a market report excepted. But these journals had columns of reports from our papers, and from their private correspondents, as well as pages of comment, on the distress of the labourers in New York City the preceding winter.
In 1837, the year of repudiation in Mississippi, a New Orleans editor describes the effect of the money-pressure upon the planters, as follows:—
"They are now left without provisions, and the means of living and
using their industry for the present year. In this dilemma, planters,
whose crops have been from 100 to 700 bales, find themselves forced to
sacrifice many of their slaves, in order to get the common necessaries of
life, for the support of themselves and the rest of their negroes. In many
places, heavy planters compel their slaves to fish for the means of subsistence,
rather than sell them at such ruinous rates. There are, at this
moment, thousands of slaves in Mississippi, that know not where the next
morsel is to come from. The master must be ruined, to save the wretches
from being starved."
Absolute starvation is as rare, probably, in slavery, as in
freedom; but I do not believe it is more so. An instance is
just recorded in the New Orleans Delta. Other papers
omit to notice it—as they usually do facts which it may be
feared will do discredit to slavery—and even the Delta, as
will be seen, is anxious that the responsibility of the publication
should be fixed upon the coroner:
