SOLON ROBINSON, 1845 485 



planter stands to grow rich at the present price of the 

 staple. 



In the course of the morning, we passed several other 

 branches of this stream of the same character and began 

 to find the country more hilly, the soil of alluvium, and 

 having the same kind of beds of marly loam as noticed 

 in Warren county, and nearly the whole of great fertility 

 and extreme bad cultivation; full of awful gullies, and 

 showing thousands of acres in sight of the road so past 

 the power of a negro to raise cotton upon it, that it is 

 thrown out to the common as utterly worthless. And yet 

 much of this waste land is covered with Bermuda grass, 

 of which I shall speak hereafter — and that in a southern 

 clime affords the finest pasture in the world, and would 

 sustain great numbers of sheep. Cotton — cotton — cotton 

 — till the land is cottoned to death, because cotton is the 

 "great staple," which in the opinion of the cotton planter, 

 only needs to be sustained, and that will sustain all the 

 links of the great chain of commerce — forgetting that 

 the support of that staple, into which it was driven pretty 

 hard a few years ago, was nothing but a "quick sand 

 Bank," and the floods came and the staple drew out, and 

 down went the chain, dragging prosperity and improve- 

 ment with it. And these cogitations bring us to a gang 

 of 160 negroes working the road, "because it is so wet 

 they can't work on the plantation." And what will such 

 a host do? Not half as much good, though perhaps 

 more labor, as one-tenth the number of yankees with a 

 yankee team, plow and scraper would do. 



Some curious features are seen upon this road — upon 

 some of the hills it is worn down in a ditch like a deep 

 cut in a railroad, 20 or 30 feet deep; while the apex is 

 left so sharp that the forward wheels begin to descend 

 before the hind ones have done ascending. 



