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

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[89]

Mr. S. said, he believed that this was the real objection which the negro had to the Northern hoe.

I noticed the great size of his fields--one was over fifty acres. He said they called that a small field here.

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Guano and niggers.

He had used guano, but did not like it. It was too great a stimulant, unless you put enough on to raise both a wheat and a clover crop; but the farmers here could not afford to do it at the present rate of guano, and the uncertainty of the wheat crop.

He thought niggers should be the happiest beings in the world. He believed his slaves made more money than he did. All he made was a living. They made that, or he made it for them; and then he allowed them that wanted, to keep a pig, to fish after their work was over, and hunt. They sold their fish and game, and poultry and eggs. They had no care of the morrow; all their thinking he did for them.

He admitted that Virginia would have been better off if never a negro had come there.

Nearly all the slaveholders admit that fact. How to get rid of it — that is the mountain they all see, without industry or genius — alas! also, without even the desire to remove it.

But it must be removed, or it will fall--“and great will be the fall of it!”

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The Slaveocracy and the poor.

Sept. 23.--I slept at the house of a petty farmer, a few miles from Petersburg. We talked about slavery. He has no slaves. He is a Virginian by birth. He owns about two hundred acres of land, which he cultivates