James Redpath, The Roving Editor: or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States.

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[135] would not permit me to indulge in. I suppose this sentence shocks you very much; but judge me not until you have attempted the same dreary journey that I successfully accomplished! Probably you will swear — and not by proxy.

I walked nearly or quite to Manchester, and then, changing my mind, took the branch to Columbus, the capital of South Carolina, I walked from there to Augusta--sixty miles. I kept no notes during this trip; but in a letter written shortly after my arrival in Augusta, I have preserved and recorded the antislavery results of it.

I was ten days on the trip, I find; but whether ten days to Columbus, or ten days from Wilmington to Augusta, I cannot now recall. I walked from Columbus to Augusta in two days: that I remember — for I slept one night in a barn, and the next in a flax house.

Here is the sum total of my gleanings on the way.

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Discontentment.

I have spoken with hundreds of slaves on my journey. Their testimony is uniform. They all pant for liberty, and have great reason to do so. Even a free-soil politician; I think, if he had heard the slaves speak to me, would have hesitated in again advocating the non-extension doctrine of his party, and been inclined to exchange it for the more Christian and more manly doctrine of non-existence!

Wherever I have gone, I have found the bondmen discontented, and the slaveholders secretly dismayed at the signs of the times in the Northern States.

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