Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
There were half a dozen indentations in the bleak and rugged coast, each a little valley guarded by cliffs on both sides, the natural obstacle to neighborliness that made enemies of the clans. Inhabitants of plains are usually friendly. Mountains make feuds. We passed the valley of Hana Ui, inhabited when Grelet came, and full of rich cotton-fields, now a waste with never a soul in it.
We hailed that boat, and it came up beneath the cottonwoods, and I went aboard with the letters from Louisville, and on we went, down the river, past the great woods and the strange little towns, and the cotton-fields and the sugar-canes, and the moss hanging like banners from taller trees than this gum, to New Orleans.
Slaves have thus been attracted from the Middle States and diverted from the less profitable culture of wheat and tobacco to the cotton-fields. Half a century since, the Middle States contained two-thirds of the negroes of the Union; but under the census of 1860 two millions and a half of slaves are now found south of North Carolina, and but a million and a half north of the Cotton States.
The cotton-fields were whitening, and the yellow corn's pendant ears hung heavily from their supporting stocks. Fat cattle in the shade of the great trees switched away the teasing flies as they lazily ruminated. The crows were cawing and stealing from their bursting shells the rich pecan nuts, and the black-birds flew in great flocks over the fields.
We then disembarked, and marched through the canebrake, carrying lighted candles in our hands, till we got into the open cotton-fields at Hill's plantation, where we lay down for a few hours' rest.
But with the increased demand of the last seven years for cotton, and with the enhanced price of the slave, which rises at least one hundred dollars with each advance of a cent per pound on cotton, more permanent improvements have been made, railways have been opened, and at least fifty thousand tons of guano and cotton-seed have been annually applied to the exhausted cotton-fields of the Carolinas and Georgia.
In the distance were the guinea cornfields of brownish hue, the cotton-fields, the long ranges of negro houses like thatched cottages, the penguin hedges, with their beautiful red, blue, and white convolvuluses; the lime, logwood, and breadfruit trees, the avocado-pear, the feathery bamboo, and the jack-fruit tree; and between the mountains and his own sugar-estates, negro settlements and pens.
In prison, when I used to mop my floor and clean down the walls; when I swept the dust from the corners; when I folded up my convict clothes; when I ate the prison food and sang the prison hymns; when I placed myself beside the bench in the workshop to make things that would bring cash to my fellow-prisoners in their need; when I saw a minister of religion or heard the Litany; when I counted up the days, first that I had spent in jail and then the days I had still to spend in jail; when I read the books from the prison library of the land where you had gone, and of the struggle there; when I saw you, in my mind's eye, in the cotton-fields or on the verandah of your house in Virginia I had but one thought, and that was the look in your face at Playmore and Limerick, the sound of your voice as you came singing up the hill just before I first met you, the joyous beauty of your body."
The last war proved that vessels of war are no match for privateers. 'Well, well! but the Yankees won't fight. 'Suppose they do. Suppose they shut up your ports, and leave you with your cotton and turpentine unsold? You raise scarcely anything else what would you eat? 'We would turn our cotton-fields into corn and wheat. Turpentine-makers, of course, would suffer.
The movement was rapid and well executed, and we soon came to some large cotton-fields and could see our gunboats in Deer Creek, occasionally firing a heavy eight-inch gun across the cotton field into the swamp behind. About that time Major Kirby, of the Eighth Missouri, galloped down the road on a horse he had picked up the night before, and met me.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking