had bowed and rustled to every breeze, and all around was barren, dreary, and cheerless."[1]
I will quote from graver authority: Fenner's Southern
Medical Reports:—
"The native soil of Middle Georgia is a rich argillaceous loam, resting
on a firm clay foundation. In some of the richer counties, nearly all the
lands have been cut down, and appropriated to tillage; a large maximum of
which have been worn out, leaving a desolate picture for the traveller to
behold. Decaying tenements, red, old hills, stripped of their native growth
and virgin soil, and washed into deep gullies, with here and there patches
of Bermuda grass and stunted pine shrubs, struggling for subsistence on
what was once one of the richest soils in America."
Let us go on to Alabama, which was admitted as a State of
the Union only so long ago as 1818.
In an address before the Chunnenuggee Horticultural Society, by Hon. C. C. Clay, Jr., reported by the author in De Bow's "Review," December, 1815, I find the following passage. I need add not a word to it to show how the political experiment of the Carolinas, and Georgia, is being repeated to the same cursed result in young Alabama. The author, it is fair to say, is devoted to the sustentation of Slavery, and would not, for the world, be suspected of favouring any scheme for arresting this havoc of wealth, further than by chemical science:—
"I can show you, with sorrow, in the older portions of Alabama, and in
my native county of Madison, the sad memorials of the artless and exhausting
culture of cotton. Our small planters, after taking the cream off their
lands, unable to restore them by rest, manures, or otherwise, are going
further west and south, in search of other virgin lands, which they may
and will despoil and impoverish in like manner. Our wealthier planters, with greater means and no more skill, are buying out their poorer neighbours, extending their plantations, and adding to their slave force. The wealthy few,
- ↑ "Georgia Scenes," by the Rev. and Hon. Judge Longstreet, now President of the University of Mississippi. Harper's edition, p. 76.
