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The well-to-do planters were angered when their horses and corn were taken for the expedition, but at any show of resistance they were threatened and intimidated. One of Bacon's men told John Mann, "with many fearful oaths, as God damn his blood, sink him and rot him, he would ruin him." It was late in July when Bacon drew up his army of seven hundred horse and six hundred foot.

A sort of feudal question, as is well known, is near obtaining a position in the South; the poor whites there are two or three times as numerous as the planters. The struggle of classes may, therefore, break out as soon as the effected secession shall have banished to the second rank the struggle against the adversaries of slavery.

In the western part of the cotton belt, as in the eastern, the planters directed practically all their capital and labor to the production of cotton, relying on the region north of them for provisions and live stock. The market for the grain, pork and flour of the Ohio Valley was greatly enlarged.

There was rejoicing in Virginia when Charles II. acceded to power; on the part of the planters, because they saw opportunity for political distinction; on the part of the plebeians, as the expression of a loyalty to kingship which centuries had made instinctive in them.

Add to this, that it might be still less, as the circumstances of their masters might become embarrassed, and in this case both an abridgment of their food and an increase of their labour would follow. But the great cause of the decrease of the slaves was in the non-residence of the planters.

The cool barbarity of such a regulation is hardly surpassed by the worst edicts of the Roman Caligula especially when we consider that the plantations of this man were in the neighborhood of the Combahee river, one of the most unhealthy districts in the low country of South Carolina; further, that large numbers of his slaves worked in the rice marshes, or 'swamps' as they are called in that state and that during six months of the year, so fatal to health is the malaria of the swamps in that region that the planters and their families invariably abandon their plantations, regarding it as downright presumption to spend a single day upon them 'between the frosts' of the early spring and the last of November.

The treatment I met with among the planters, during my whole residence in the island, was that of unvarying kindness; many of them were well educated and cultivated a literary taste; had well-furnished libraries, which were not kept for show; and the history and writings of Ramsay, Ferguson, Burns, Beattie, Robertson, Blair, and other distinguished Scottish authors, were as familiar with some of the planters in Grenada "as household words."

In reality it was to afford Dermot an opportunity of disclosing to them as much of the impending peril of invasion as he judged wise. The planters would be the first to suffer in such an event. He wanted to put them on their guard and enlist their help in the detection of a treacherous correspondence between external and internal foes.

When the amiable attorney-general of Charles II. said to the Virginian commissioners, pleading the cause of learning and religion, "Damn your souls! grow tobacco!" he uttered a precept which the mass of the planters seem to have laid to heart.

We hear a great deal of the barbarity with which West Indian planters and hunters in the seventeenth century treated their servants, and we may well believe that many of the latter, finding their situation unendurable, ran away from their plantations or ajoupas to join the crew of a chance corsair hovering in the neighbourhood. The hunters' life, as we have seen, was not one of revelry and ease.