Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 6.djvu/417

 FOREST CULTURE IN NEW ENGLAND.

��379

��was adopted, and the tenor of the ad- dress with which they sent it forth to the people. In these there is no reference to the subject of slavery, and it does not appear that it was at any time in the mind of the conven- tion. As it then existed in the state, it was either regarded as too unim- portant for consideration, or sufficiently provided for in the bill of rights, which, as stated by Dr. Belknap, was after- ward differently construed : by some, that it freed all ; by others, only those blacks born after its adoption. As Dr. Belknap was a contemporary of the frame: s of the constitution, and most of its members were living when he wrote, it is evident that no settled convictions on the subject were expressed or en tertained by them in reference to it.

When the constitution had gone into operation, those slaves who re- mained as servants in the families of

��their former masters were taxed to their owners, and this was done until 1 788, when the legislature, in estab- lishing a new proportion of public taxes, expunged " male and female servants " from the list of taxable prop- erty — intentionally omitted them — a fact, says Judge Doe, " which seems to me very significant as showing an intention to treat slavery as a dead institution."

But even this act, if intended to signify that slavery was at an end, did not have its full effect. Their former masters, as we see in the case of Mr. Cooper, were still held for the support of those who were unable to support themselves. This they certainly would not have been, on any fair construction of the law, had it been a settled con- viction that those who were slaves be- fore the adoption of the constitution were then free.

��FOREST CULTURE IN NEW ENGLAND.

��BV F. H. BARTLETT.

��The most noted crop of New Hampshire in the past has been her great men. Let us hope that her granite hills will still rear them through the centuries to come. The only other crop for which she is distin- guished by nature, in common with the rest of New England and the At- lantic coast generally, is that of her easily growing but rapidly disappear- ing forests.

A glance across the country, from the Atlantic ocean to the Rocky mountains, discloses the natural de- sign as to the products of the differ- ent sections, each supplementing the other. In the East, especially in New Hampshire, the agricultural resources are meager, the fertile lands being confined to the meadows along the larger streams and a small percentage of the uplands, while trees grow every where ; their variety nowhere equaled

��in the United States except around the great lakes. Pines grow thickly and quickly on the warm, porous soil of the lower levels, changing into hemlock and hard wood as we ascend from the river bottoms a few hun- dred feet to the stronger soil of the hills, while a dense spruce thicket every where clothes the mountains and the northern part of New England. The prairies of the Mis- sissippi valley are the cornfields, as the colder lands of Minnesota, Dakota, and the great Northwest, are the wheat fields, and the rolling plains west from the Missouri to the heart of the Rocky mountains, are the grand pasture lands of North America. This is the evident design in nature. Trees grow readily over the Atlantic slope, where the air currents, saturated with the moisture of the warm ocean are cooled by the hills and mountains of

�� �