Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/368

 Having crossed the Flint, I entered then upon the primitive forests, the hunting grounds of the Creeks, but from which the insatiable cupidity of the greedy Georgians, backed by the power of the federal government, was already preparing forcibly to expel them — a thing soon after effected — in order to replace the wild, free tenants of the forest by gangs of miserable slaves purchased up and transferred from the wornout fields of Virginia and the Carolinas.

Upon presently reaching the banks of the Alabama, I emerged from these soon-to-be-violated solitudes, and thence to the banks of the Mississippi, traversed a country which the Indians had been already compelled to resign, and which was rapidly filling up with a most miscellaneous population from the more northern slave states; scions of the "first families" of Virginia, with such numbers of slaves as by some hocus pocus they could save from the grasp of their creditors, coming to refound their fortunes in this new country; gangs of slaves sent out under overseers by the wealthier slaveholders of the old states to open new plantations, where their labor might be more productive; Georgia "Crackers," with their pale, tallow-colored visages; with other wretched specimens of white poverty, ignorance, and degradation coming from North Carolina, squatters on these new lands; Yankee traders, and doctors, and lawyers, quacks and pettifoggers, with land speculators, slave traders, gamblers, horse thieves, and all kinds of adventurers, including a reasonable mixture of Baptist and Methodist preachers, — all, except the preachers, and not all of them, with but one idea in their heads, the growing rich suddenly; and with but two words in their mouths, namely, "niggers" and cotton.

It was, indeed, in these new settlements, had one leisure and curiosity for the purpose, that the slaveholding system of the United States might be seen operating unrestrained, and exhibiting its true character and richest development. All the old slave states had been originally planted as free communities on