Africans, for the purpose of cultivating it, was dobled. So laborious is the task of raising, beating, and cleaning this article, that though it had been possible to obtain European servants in numbers sufficient for attacking the thick forests, and clearing grounds for the purpose, thousands and tens of thousands must have perished in the arduous attempt.* The utter

*Mr. J. R. Creecy remarks about Louisiana, that "for many years the annual influx of the lowest order of Irish into New Orleans has been immense, and the numbers who are buried in the "Swamp," subjects of "Yellow Jack" and cholera, are astonishing; and yet their places are instantly filled up, as are the ranks of well-disciplined troops in destructive battle. Eight out of ten who are attacked by those diseases become victims, and perhaps at least one-third of every importation have one or the other, or both of those dreadful diseases. Nine-tenths of

all the poor, diseased emigrants, who find shelter and attention in the hospitals, are foreigners, by far the greatest number of whom are Irish, of the lowest and worst character-reckless, abandoned, drunken, lying, dirty, ignorant wretches, who are more at home in the police-office than any where else; and, as the fun-loving John Duggan would say, "Dthey ar' niver at pace 'dthey ar' in a fight intirely! Thousands of them leave every summer for the upper country, where they do not fare much better than in New Orleans. They are never employed except from necessity. The negroes have decidedly the prefe rence, and readily obtain higher wages. The Irish females are as disorderly and dissipated as the males, and 'tis sickening to see what numbers are every morning taken to the Recorder's .office, for crimes and misdemeanors the preceding night."

A far-seeing politician at the North makes the following remarks in 1860:—

"Without a miracle, I see not but that slaves will yet be called for in New England, and by New England men-slaves having the attributes if not the name of slaves, and possibly to worse condition than we now complain of in reference to the

inaptitude of Europeans for the labor requisite in such a climate and soil, is obvious to every one possessed of the smallest degree of knowledge respecting the country. White servants would have exhausted their strength in clearing a spot of land for digging their own graves; and every rice plantation would have served no other purpose than a burying-ground to its European cultivators. The low-lands of Carolina, which are unquestionably the richest grounds in the country, must have remained a wilderness, had not Africans, whose natural constitutions were fitted to the clime and work, been employed in cultivating this useful article of food and commerce."

The little negro boys, from nine to fifteen, are generally employed in attending to the cows, and waggoning the crops out of the fields. These little scamps can run a horse when they are seven years old. They are the noisiest, sleekest looking, mischievous little fellows, on this earth, when they are put into the rice and corn

South. Why not, if our present government should last another eighty years? For Yankees will not perform the menial work of life. They are above it now. The imported free-servants of Ireland and other countries will soon be infected with Yankee independence, and have the means of living, above servile labor, on their freeholds! Then who will be our servants? Shall we have coolies or Africans to hew our wood and draw our water? And what form of government shall be over them, but that which is adapted to their comparative rudeness and imbecility, and conservative of the general system? The children and grandchildren of our present abolitionists may yet be the first to introduce a harder serfdom than has yet been known, unless, indeed, they should themselves be compelled to sell themselves for bread, and suffer the proper chastisement of their fathers' sins for their rebellion against the government of God."

fields to scare away the crows. Their exuberantly cultivated capacity to run and scream, and shout at the said crows, and other covetous motherly birds, when in full blast, sounds almost like an Indian war-whoop. The little rascals are, however, such 'cute eye-servants, that they make traps, and pick blackberries, and roast potatoes and groundnuts in the rice and corn patches, leaving the birds full swing to eat what they please of the growing grain; until they see mausser or old daddy Mingo, coming into the fields, and then they give a signal to each other that the enemy approaches, and with a roguish laugh, and piercing scream, they scamper among the previously appropriating crows, who have already, perhaps, devoured a lion's share of the rice, corn, and peas. It is of no earthly use to switch them, for their devil-may-care spirits are too abandon, and their nerves too obtuse, to remember an hour afterwards that they have been punished.

There is also an accomplished butcher on every plantation, who attends to the killing of all the hogs, beeves, sheep, calves, and lambs. When a great bullock is killed for the negroes, they make some twenty gallons of soup out of the head, heart, liver, and kidneys, and divide it around.

The negroes receive every week their allowance of food, that is determined in quantity, either by law, or universal experience. It is usually corn, rice, peas, and sweet potatoes; together with molasses, and fresh beef, or bacon.

Every black man on a coast plantation, owns a canoe, that they themselves construct, by burning the inside, and then scraping out, a great oaken log, some ten or

twelve feet long, that they obtain in their masters' forests. They are the most lucky and expert fishermen, and at moonlight or on holidays, will entrap in their nets, the whole family of fish; together with prawn, shrimps, crabs, oysters, terrapins, clams, conch, and turtle. These they either eat themselves, sell to their masters, or the surrounding neighbors, or present to their wives on the different plantations, for the negroes are, as in Africa, all polygamists.

The sentimental Abolitionist weeps over the separation of husbands and wives when they are sold; but if a woman or a man has a half-dozen husbands or wives, which one of the six is to be selected as the orthodox lover? "Yet the cases of violent separation of husband and wife (says Dr. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston), are not so many, as the voluntary and criminal separations by the parties themselves. For conjugal love among the slaves (or any masses of people on earth), is not invariably the poetical thing which amateurs of slaves sometimes picture it; for there are probably no more happy conjugal unions among the slaves, than among the whites, though the negroes always marry for love." At the Spring term this year (1854), of the Court in one New England State, there were eightythree applications for divorce. In Kansas, in 1860, the newspapers tell us, there were one hundred and fifty divorces granted in forty days.

"The forms of law are as inconsiderate of our feelings, as though they were acts of barbarians. A sheriff's sale of house furniture in the dwelling of a white man who has fallen from opulence into insolvency, is like the wheel of torture, that breaks every bone and

joint one by one. The auctioneer, with precious household treasures, keepsakes, memorials of our dear departed friends, in one hand, and a crumpled newspaper for a hammer in the other, seems the most unfeeling man; but he is not so; it is the law, of which he is the exponent, that is so terrible. His wife, his children, are perhaps entirely innocent of the crime, or the want of discretion, that thus put him in the hands of the law."

"Probably in no slave State are there more voluntary separations of husbands and wives among the slaves, than in some of the New England States that could be specified for the same period," says Dr. Adams. "The only difference is, the slave does not go to court for his divorce." "He absents himself from his cabin, or procures another master;" (almost any planter in the South will let his slave choose a master, and sell him, if he is discontented; for nobody wants. a servant there who is unwilling to live with him ;) "or, belonging to the same master with his wife, and being unwilling to live within possible hearing of her, he flees to the North."... "If he has a good degree of address, he can rouse up the deep philanthropy of freemen like a ground-swell of the sea, in overwhelming pity and compassion for him; while the only unhappiness, after all, was, in his particular case, that he could not have laws to countenance and defend him in putting away his wife who had committed no crime, and marrying another."... "The people of those communities whose laws of divorce are of questionable morality, will not of course throw the first stone at the South for that looseness in the domestic relations of slaves which allows so many voluntary separations."