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"A neighbor of mine, who has been an overseer in Alabama, informs me, that there they ascertain how much labor a slave can perform in a day, in the following manner. When they commence a new cotton field, the overseer takes his watch, and marks how long it takes them to hoe one row, and then lays out the task accordingly.
A comparison of the crews and armaments of the Kearsarge and Alabama will show that they were pretty evenly matched, though the slight numerical superiority of the Union ship was emphasized by the fact that her men were almost wholly American, while those of Semmes, as already stated, were nearly all English.
Since these men left their fatherland, a great Literature and Philosophy have breathed like a tropic upon that land, and the superstitions have been wrought into poetry and thought; but that raw material of legend which in Germany has been woven into finest tissues on the brain-looms of Wieland, Tieck, Schiller, and Goethe, has remained raw material in the great valley that stretches from New York to Upper Alabama.
As a class they were regarded by the dominant party in state and nation as dangerous and untrustworthy and were persecuted in such irritating ways that many became indifferent to the appeals of civil duty. They formed a solid but almost despairing opposition in the black districts of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina.
The task proved even longer than had been anticipated, and it was not until the afternoon of the third day that the mischief had been finally remedied, and the Alabama was pronounced in a condition to resume with safety her destructive career. Meanwhile, a brighter look-out than ever was kept from her mastheads.
Yet again; the United States had a just complaint against us; arising out of the performances of the Alabama, which, built in an English dockyard and manned by an English crew, but owned by the Slaveowners' Confederacy, had got out to sea, and, during a two years' cruise of piracy and devastation, had harassed the Government of the United States.
Despite the numerous reductions, the Underwood law retained much of the protective purpose of preceding enactments. Underwood represented an iron manufacturing section of Alabama, but he showed an uncommon attention to the general interest by favoring large reductions on pig-iron and placing iron ore and steel rails on the free list.
From the general conversation I learned that a fat Jewish-looking man was a cigar manufacturer, and was experimenting in growing Havana tobacco in Florida; that a slender bespectacled young man was from Ohio and a professor in some State institution in Alabama; that a white-mustached, well-dressed man was an old Union soldier who had fought through the Civil War; and that a tall, raw-boned, red-faced man, who seemed bent on leaving nobody in ignorance of the fact that he was from Texas, was a cotton planter.
Never until my visit to Alabama had I fully realized the horrors of suspense, the lives of utter self-abnegation heroically lived by women in country homes all over the South during the dreary years of the war. Every day every hour was fraught with anxiety and dread. Rumor was always busy, but they could not hear definitely: they could not know how their loved ones were faring.
Let us march on ballot boxes until all over Alabama God's children will be able to walk the earth in decency and honor. "For all of us today the battle is in our hands. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways to lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. We must keep going."
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