Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/367

 

my new acquaintance behind, at Augusta, where, as he said, he had business to attend to, and provided with the letters which he had promised me, I set out for Vicksburg.

Great was my joy at once more getting on the track of the lost ones; yet I could not but be harassed with many distressing doubts and uncertainties as to what, even if I found them, might be the results of my search.

The first part of my journey from Augusta led me through a district worn out and partially abandoned; a fac simile — and from the same causes — of what I had seen so much of in Virginia and the Carolinas. Crossing the Oconee, and presently the Oakmulgee, I reached a new country, of which the earliest settlements did not date back more than twenty years; but which already presented, here and there, specimens of the destructive agricultural system of the south, in gullied fields, especially on the hill sides from which the soil had been completely washed away; over which still stood erect the blackened trunks of the tenants of the original forest, killed by the process of girdling, but which, though dead and blasted, remained yet firmly rooted in the soil, sternly smiling, as it were, over the scene of destruction; the virgin soil, at first so fertile, having been washed into the neighboring hollows, and leaving exposed nothing but a barren surface of red and arid clay. Can there be a more striking symbol than one of these abandoned fields — the dead, giant trunks still towering over it, as if by way of memento of what it once was — of the natural effects of the plundering system upon which the whole organization of the slaveholding states is based; and which extends even to the land itself, rifled of its virgin strength by a shiftless system of ignorant haste to be rich, — and then abandoned to hopeless sterility?