THE PLANTATIONS. 379 



should be added to the Union. On the other hand, 

 the South could not accept such terms. Slavery ex- 

 tension was necessary for their lives. More land they 

 must have or they could not exist. There was waste 

 land in abundance at the South ; but it was dead. 

 Their style of agriculture was precisely that which is 

 pursued in Central Africa. They took a tract from 

 the wilderness and planted it again and again with 

 cotton and tobacco till it gave up the ghost, and would 

 yield no more. They then moved on and took in 

 another piece. Obliged to spend all their cash in 

 buying prime slaves at two hundred pounds a piece, 

 they could not afford to use manure or to rotate their 

 crops ; they could not afford to employ so costly a 

 species of labour on anything less lucrative than sugar, 

 cotton and tobacco. Besides, if slavery were not to be 

 extended they would be surrounded and hemmed in by 

 free states ; the old contract would be annulled. 

 Already the South were in a minority. The free 

 states and slave states might be equal in number ; but 

 they were not equal in population and prosperity. 

 The Northerner who travelled down South was aston- 

 ished to find that the cities of the maps were villages, 

 and the villages clusters of log huts. Fields covered 

 with weeds, and moss-grown ruins showed where farms 

 once flourishing had been. He rode through vast 

 forests and cypress swamps, where hundreds of mean 

 whites lived like Red Indians, hunting and fishing for 

 their daily bread, eating clay to keep themselves alive, 

 prowling round plantations to obtain stolen food from 

 the slaves. He saw plantations in which the labour 

 was conducted with the terrible discipline of the 

 prison and the hulks ; and where as he galloped 

 past the line of hoeing slaves, so close that he 



