82 ABSENTEEISM IN SOUTHERN STATES. [CHAP. XXV. 



numerous than it was twenty years ago. owing to 

 migrations to Louisiana and Texas, and partly to the 

 unthriftiness of slave-labour. 



We travelled in a carriage with two horses, and could 

 advance but a few miles a day, so execrable and often 

 dangerous was the state of the roads. Occasionally 

 we had to get out and call at a farm-house to ask 

 the proprietor s leave to take down his snake-fence, 

 to avoid a deep mud-hole in the road. Our vehicle 

 was then driven over a stubble field of Indian corn, 

 at the end of which we made our exit, some fifty 

 yards on, by pulling down another part of the fence. 

 In both places the labour of rebuilding the fence, 

 which consists simply of poles loosely placed together, 

 and not nailed, was entailed upon us, and caused 

 no small delay. 



One of the evils, tending greatly to retard the pro 

 gress of the Southern States, is absenteeism, which is 

 scarcely known in the North. The cheapness of 

 land, caused by such rapid emigration to the South and 

 West, and the frequent sales of the estates of insol 

 vents, tempts planters to buy more land than they can 

 manage themselves, which they must therefore give 

 in charge to overseers. Accordingly, much of the 

 property in Alabama belongs to rich Carolinians, and 

 some wealthy slave-owners of Alabama have estates 

 in Mississippi. With a view of checking the increase 

 of these &quot; pluralities,&quot; a tax has recently been imposed 

 on absentees. In Alabama, as in Georgia, I found 

 that the coloured people were more intelligent in the 

 upper country, and I listened with satisfaction to 

 complaints of their setting themselves up, and being 



