322 



NEW ENGLAND FARMER, 



APRIL 23, 1«34. 



land has, in the estimation of good judges, been 

 greatly undervalued. New lands, to be bought for 

 a trifle, and which being new, would naturally pro- 

 duce a few large crops, have allured many a youth 

 from advantages which he and his family will have 

 cause to regret for many generations. We have 

 not a soil which will yield copiously without as- 

 siduous cultivation, 'tis true; but we have a soil 

 which as richly repays the labor and expense be- 

 stowed as in any part of the world. 



It is yet to be proved whither the soils in the 

 western States, after a hundred years of cultiva- 

 tion, will be better than ours ; and it is further 

 yet to be proved, whether their sand anil alluvion 

 will as well sustain the manures necessary to re- 

 cover an exhausted soil, as our own granite base. 



Larger crops than are here obtained, wherever 

 the band of the diligent applies the plough and 

 manure with liberality, if attainable are hardly de- 

 sirable. A few spots in which an improved sys- 

 tem- of agriculture has been introduced, have prov- 

 ed the boundless resources which our soil may 

 supply, whenever our people Bball be induced to 

 apply their energies to this branch ofindustry. A 

 hundred bushels of Indian corn, sixty bushels of 

 oats, forty bushels of rye, three tons of hay, three 

 hundred bushels of potatoes, have severally been 



raised on an acre of ■ soil — and when its value 



compared with prices in the western country, is tak- 

 en into the account, it is believed that few culliva 

 tors of the soil will rind a richer reward. If man 

 could live by bread alone, it might perhaps be an 

 object to transport ourselves to the banks of the 

 Ohio, where grain generally bears from one-fourth 

 to a third of the price it does here: but we are 

 now speaking of fanners, living in decent style, 

 who have many things to buy, and ought always 

 to have something to sell, and to such, one bushel 

 of grain raised hen;, will bring him in as much 

 cash, or the necessaries of life, as four raised in 

 the western country. 



When in former years I used to partake of the 

 labor of "bay time," and brooded over the hard- 

 ship of spending till summer in providing food to 

 sustain the cattle over winter, I thought the far- 

 mers of the south were blessed indeed, where the 

 cattle could find their own food Oil green pastures 

 all the year, and fatten at large beneath a milder 

 sky. But upon better information I found, that 

 instead of raising fine cattle without labor; they 

 could scarce raise them at till ; that their beef was 

 pour, and a Georgia cow scarcely yielded more 

 milk than a New England goat ; and that instead 

 of green pastures, all the year, grass hardly grows, 

 and they scarcely know what a green pasture is. 



A medical friend,* who spent a summer in 

 Georgia, observed that all appearance of green 

 grass in fields or pastures, is entirely parched and 

 dry by August ; that the t'^w cattle live on straw 

 and the tops of corn, and by picking a little grass 

 along the banks of streams and in shady pla- 

 ces. So that our southern states, aside from the 

 artificial curse of slavery, can hardly claim advan- 

 tages over New England. 



We enjoy advantages somewhat peculiar in hav- 

 ing fertile lands along the sea^caast, so that we 

 have a ready market, and our green hills greet the 

 eye of the marioer as he sails along our shores. 

 The other maritime counties of this Slate woiihl 

 suffer much on a comparison with Essex. And 

 along our southern coast, Virginia, the Carolinas, 



* Dr. Warren Abbot, deceased. 



and Georgia, present for the most part, for eigh- 

 ty or one hundred miles from the sea, pine bar- 

 rens, sandy plains, and swamps, abounding in 

 noxious insects, anil venemous reptiles. A single 

 swamp lying in Georgia and Florida, is one hun- 

 dred and eighty miles in circumference ! and no 

 degree id' fertility, or an everlasting summer could 

 compensate for the pestiferous exhalations, which 

 during many months of the year load every breeze 

 with pestilence and death. Another medical friend* 

 who spent a summer in Charleston, South Caro- 

 lina, informs me that though the city is extreme- 

 ly unhealthy compared with northern cities, yet 

 the country around it is vastly more so. Very 

 few white people live in, and as few as possible 

 attempt to crossover the level country for sixty or 

 seventy miles back of Charleston in summer. To 

 go beyond the ramparts of the city, especially in 

 tln> night time, is for many mouths almost certain 

 death! Now what degree of fertility added to 

 our soil would compensate fur such an atmos- 

 phere ! 



Casting our eyes to the south west, the country 

 along the lower Mississippi, must ha\e been once 

 an immense bay, or arm of the Gulf of Mexico, 

 but the alluvial deposit, floated annually down this 

 immense river, from the boundless west, has filled 

 up this bay, and made most of it into swamp, and 

 part of it into something like dry land. The im- 

 mensity of waters from three thousand miles, and 

 ten thousand hills, still kept a main channel 

 through this wilderness of writer and mire and 

 drift-wood, and depositing more soil, when the 

 thickened waters first spread from the main chan- 

 nel, than was carried farther back, the banks of 

 the river became much higher than the back coun- 

 try. 



The fertility of this soil, and the advantages 

 for commerce have allured people to settle along 

 this river bank ; and an artificial dam lias been 

 erected for one hundred and seventy miles above 

 New Orleans, to keep the waters in the river du- 

 ring its annual overflow, and to defend the city 

 of New Orleans, and the plantations which lie be- 

 hind this hank from inundation ! Here land more 

 fertile than your granite hills offers its abundance 

 of cotton, sugar, rice and corn, but among those 

 rich plantations the malaria sweeps with the be- 

 i ot destruction, and hundreds of our enterpri- 

 sing young men go annually to gain property, and 

 lake the fearful chance of laying their dust, where 

 ■veil a grave cannot be prepared, but fills with wa- 

 ter before it reci ives its tenant. 



A clergyman of this Slate, f who was seized 

 villi this spirit qf Emigration some years ago, and 

 has indulged it to his heart's content, informs us 

 that the villages on the Arkansas and Red riv- 

 ers, are uninhabitable during summer, and the 

 people' leave them and build camps in the woods, 

 and on higher grounds to escape certain death. 

 He spent one summer in one of these encamp- 

 ments, battling with the inusipiitoes, and resolving 

 lo improve the first moment of escape to a more 

 northern climate. 



Over all this southern region of the United 

 Siatc s, von might search in vain for an assembly 

 like this. An industrious yeomanry is there un- 

 known. There the taskmaster brandishes his lash 

 and the slaves labor beneath a burning sun, curse 

 the race that fatten and luxuriate upon their tod, 



* Alunzo Chapin, M.D. now Missionary at Ihe Sandwjpli 

 Islands. t Air. Flint. 



and whet the appetite of revenge and the scythe 

 of death for a day of future retribution. 



Fathers and mothers of New England ! Could 

 all the gold of Mexico induce you to fix your dom- 

 icil, and leave your children, where their only 

 chance of safety was the prospect of holding a 

 population of two and a half millions, anil their 

 rapidly increasing posterity in a state of perpetual 

 bondage ? with an equal chance that thirty years 

 will turn the scale, deluge the country in blood, 

 and give the white population only the desperate 

 alternatives of death, slavery or exile ? 



Comparing the higher regions of the great val- 

 ley of the Mississippi with our own Slate, wo 

 shall also find its advantages so nearly overbalanc- 

 ed by disadvantages, that a wise man will feel 

 reconciled to the soil and climate of New Eng- 

 land. 



The immense vegetation which annually de- 

 cays in a rich alluvial soil, saturated with water, is 

 sure in a warm or new country, to render the air 

 unhealthy, and produce bilious and other diseases. 

 Hiere, if w T e find a few acres of swamp, too low to 

 he drained into some running stream, we consid- 

 er it a deformity, and are suspicious of its influence 

 upon health ; but in all the boundless regions of 

 the west hitherto explored, swamps'lying so low 

 that the rivers annually overflow into them, and 

 there leave ponds of fresh water, to stagnate and 

 pollute the air, are a general feature of the coun- 

 try. Hire, the waters run off from our hills, 

 plains and meadows, into the rivers; there, over 

 millions of acres, the waters come down the riv- 

 ers, overflow their banks, and run back into the 

 swamps. Much of this land may in process of 

 time be made useful, by cutting canals through 

 the river banks, that the waters may drain oil' when 

 the inundation subsides, but a population of one 

 or two to a square mile, makes slow progress in 

 draining the unnumbered thousands of stagnant 

 pools and " dismal swamps." 



1 should consider myself as criminal were I to 

 traduce the character of a country as the charac- 

 ter of an individual; and I would not state these 

 tacts in such an assembly, but for what appear to 

 me justifiable motives. 



Thousands of our youth have been allured from 

 their paternal homes by accounts of the plenty and 

 fertility of western lands, without duly consider- 

 ing the labors, privations and perils they must en- 

 counter, in cultivating and reaping the fruits of 

 this fertility, in the bosom of a wilderness, on ihe 

 borders of an immense desolate prairie, or in the 

 midst ofa spreading inundation. 



Nor have many of these emigrants considered 

 what they will find painfully true, that they and 

 their generations will have passed oft' the stage, 

 before their new homes possess the advantages of 

 a New England settlement, — comfortable dwel- 

 lings, fruitful orchards, good roads, social villages, 

 schools of science, and temples ol the living God. 



Every mail from the west teems with the Mac- 

 edonian cr\ , come over and help us. Hundreds of 

 youth accustomed to spend their sabbaths in the 

 churches id' the puritans, now find by privation, 

 ihe Milne ol' those privileges which perhaps once 

 they slighted ; and the question w hither this float- 

 ing population, brought together from the four 

 quarters of the world, is ever to settle down into 

 anything like the moral and religious society of 

 New England is yet to be decided. 



An intelligent gentleman with whom I lately 

 conversed, who went from this country in 1817, 



