Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation: 1838-1839

As I walked home I pondered over this compliment of Mr. –'s slaves to me, and did not feel quite sure that the very absence of the fear which haunts the southern women in their intercourse with these people and prevents them from trusting themselves ever with them out of reach of white companionship and supervision was not one of the circumstances which makes my intercourse with them unsafe and undesirable. The idea of apprehending any mischief from them never yet crossed my brain; and in the perfect confidence with which I go amongst them, they must perceive a curious difference between me and my lady neighbours in these parts; all have expressed unbounded astonishment at my doing so.

The spring is fast coming on; and we shall, I suppose, soon leave Georgia. How new and sad a chapter of my life this winter here has been!

Dear E–. I cannot give way to the bitter impatience I feel at my present position, and come back to the north without leaving my babies; and though I suppose their stay will not in any case be much prolonged in these regions of swamp and slavery, I must, for their sakes, remain where they are, and learn this dreary lesson of human suffering to the end. The record, it seems to me, must be utterly wearisome to you, as the instances themselves I suppose in a given time (thanks to that dreadful reconciler to all that is evil—habit) would become to me.

This morning I had a visit from two of the women, Charlotte and Judy, who came to me for help and advice for a complaint, which it really seems to me every other woman on the estate is cursed with, and which is a direct result of the conditions of their existence; the practice of sending women to labour in the fields in the third week after their confinement is a specific for causing this infirmity, and I know no specific for curing it under these circumstances. As soon as these poor things had departed with such comfort as I could give them, and the bandages they especially begged for, three other sable graces introduced themselves, Edie, Louisa, and Diana; the former told me she had had a family of seven children, but had lost them all through 'ill luck,' as she denominated the ignorance and ill treatment which were answerable for the loss of these, as of so many other poor little creatures their fellows. Having dismissed her and Diana with the sugar and rice they came to beg, I detained Louisa, whom I had never seen but in the presence of her old grandmother, whose version of the poor child's escape to, and hiding in the woods, I had a desire to compare with the heroine's own story. She told it very simply, and it was most pathetic. She had not finished her task one day, when she said she felt ill, and unable to do so, and had been severely flogged by Driver Bran, in whose 'gang' she then was. The next day, in spite of this encouragement to labour, she had again been unable to complete her appointed work; and Bran having told her that he'd tie her up and flog her if she did not get it done, she had left the field and run into the swamp. 'Tie you up, Louisa!' said I, 'what is that?' She then described to me that they were fastened up by their wrists to a beam or a branch of a tree, their feet barely touching the ground, so as to allow them no purchase for resistance or evasion of the lash, their clothes turned over their heads, and their backs scored with a leather thong, either by the driver himself, or if he pleases to inflict their punishment by deputy, any of the men he may choose to summon to the office; it might be father, brother, husband, or lover, if the overseer so ordered it. I turned sick, and my blood curdled listening to these details from the slender young slip of a lassie, with her poor piteous face and murmuring pleading voice. 'Oh,' said I, 'Louisa; but the rattlesnakes, the dreadful rattlesnakes in the swamps; were you not afraid of those horrible creatures?' 'Oh, missis,' said the poor child, 'me no tink of dem, me forget all 'bout dem for de fretting.' 'Why did you come home at last?' 'Oh, missis, me starve with hunger, me most dead with hunger before me come back.' 'And were you flogged, Louisa?' said I, with a shudder at what the answer might be. 'No, missis, me go to hospital; me almost dead and sick so long, 'spec Driver Bran him forgot 'bout de flogging.' I am getting perfectly savage over all these doings, E–, and really think I should consider my own throat and those of my children well cut, if some night the people were to take it into their heads to clear off scores in that fashion.

The Calibanish wonderment of all my visitors at the exceedingly coarse and simple furniture and rustic means of comfort of my abode is very droll. I have never inhabited any apartment so perfectly devoid of what we should consider the common decencies of life; but to them my rude chintz-covered sofa and common pine-wood table, with its green baize cloth, seem the adornings of a palace; and often in the evening, when my bairns are asleep, and M– up-stairs keeping watch over them, and I sit writing this daily history for your edification,—the door of the great barn-like room is opened stealthily, and one after another, men and women come trooping silently in, their naked feet falling all but inaudibly on the bare boards as they betake themselves to the hearth, where they squat down on their hams in a circle,—the bright blaze from the huge pine logs, which is the only light of this half of the room, shining on their sooty limbs and faces, and making them look like a ring of ebony idols surrounding my domestic hearth. I have had as many as fourteen at a time squatting silently there for nearly half an hour, watching me writing at the other end of the room. The candles on my table give only light enough for my own occupation, the fire light illuminates the rest of the apartment; and you cannot imagine anything stranger than the effect of all these glassy whites of eyes and grinning white teeth turned towards me, and shining in the flickering light. I very often take no notice of them at all, and they seem perfectly absorbed in contemplating me. My evening dress probably excites their wonder and admiration no less than my rapid and continuous writing, for which they have sometimes expressed compassion, as if they thought it must be more laborious than hoeing; sometimes at the end of my day's journal I look up and say suddenly, 'Well, what do you want?' when each black figure springs up at once, as if moved by machinery, they all answer, 'Me come say ha do (how d'ye do), missis;' and then they troop out as noiselessly as they entered, like a procession of sable dreams, and I go off in search, if possible, of whiter ones.

Two days ago I had a visit of great interest to me from several lads from twelve to sixteen years old, who had come to beg me to give them work. To make you understand this you must know, that wishing very much to cut some walks and drives through the very picturesque patches of woodland not far from the house, I announced, through Jack, my desire to give employment in the wood-cutting line, to as many lads as chose, when their unpaid task was done, to come and do some work for me, for which I engaged to pay them. At the risk of producing a most dangerous process of reflection and calculation in their brains, I have persisted in paying what I considered wages to every slave that has been my servant; and these my labourers must, of course, be free to work or no, as they like, and if they work for me must be paid by me. The proposition met with unmingled approbation from my 'gang;' but I think it might be considered dangerously suggestive of the rightful relation between work and wages; in short, very involuntarily no doubt, but, nevertheless, very effectually I am disseminating ideas among Mr. –'s dependents, the like of which have certainly never before visited their wool-thatched brains.

Friday, March 1.—Last night after writing so much to you I felt weary, and went out into the air to refresh my spirit. The scene just beyond the house was beautiful, the moonlight slept on the broad river which here is almost the sea, and on the masses of foliage of the great southern oaks; the golden stars of German poetry shone in the purple curtains of the night, and the measured rush of the Atlantic unfurling its huge skirts upon the white sands of the beach (the sweetest and most awful lullaby in nature) resounded through the silent air.

I have not felt well, and have been much depressed for some days past. I think I should die if I had to live here. This morning, in order not to die yet, I thought I had better take a ride, and accordingly mounted the horse which I told you was one of the equestrian alternatives offered me here; but no sooner did he feel my weight, which, after all, is mere levity and frivolity to him, than he thought proper to rebel, and find the grasshopper a burthen, and rear and otherwise demonstrate his disgust. I have not ridden for a long time now, but Montreal's opposition very presently aroused the Amazon which is both natural and acquired in me, and I made him comprehend that, though I object to slaves, I expect obedient servants; which views of mine being imparted by a due administration of both spur and whip, attended with a judicious combination of coaxing pats on his great crested neck, and endearing commendations of his beauty, produced the desired effect. Montreal accepted me as inevitable, and carried me very wisely and well up the island to another of the slave settlements on the plantation, called Jones's Creek.

On my way I passed some magnificent evergreen oaks,[5 - The only ilex trees which I have seen comparable in size and beauty with those of the sea-board of Georgia are some to be found in the Roman Campagna, at Passerano, Lunghegna, Castel Fusano, and other of its great princely farms, but especially in the magnificent woody wilderness of Valerano.] and some thickets of exquisite evergreen shrubs, and one or two beautiful sites for a residence, which made me gnash my teeth when I thought of the one we have chosen. To be sure, these charming spots, instead of being conveniently in the middle of the plantation, are at an out of the way end of it, and so hardly eligible for the one quality desired for the overseer's abode, viz. being central.

All the slaves' huts on St. Simon's are far less solid, comfortable, and habitable than those at the rice-island. I do not know whether the labourer's habitation bespeaks the alteration in the present relative importance of the crops, but certainly the cultivators of the once far-famed long staple sea-island cotton of St. Simon's are far more miserably housed than the rice-raisers of the other plantation. These ruinous shielings, that hardly keep out wind or weather, are deplorable homes for young or aged people, and poor shelters for the hardworking men and women who cultivate the fields in which they stand. Riding home I passed some beautiful woodland with charming pink and white blossoming peach and plum-trees, which seemed to belong to some orchard that had been attempted, and afterwards delivered over to wildness. On enquiry I found that no fruit worth eating was ever gathered from them. What a pity it seems! for in this warm delicious winter climate any and every species of fruit might be cultivated with little pains and to great perfection. As I was cantering along the side of one of the cotton fields I suddenly heard some inarticulate vehement cries, and saw what seemed to be a heap of black limbs tumbling and leaping towards me, renewing the screams at intervals as it approached. I stopped my horse, and the black ball bounded almost into the road before me, and suddenly straightening itself up into a haggard hag of a half-naked negress, exclaimed, with panting eager breathlessness, 'Oh missis, missis! you no hear me cry, you no hear me call. Oh missis! me call, me cry, and me run; make me a gown like dat. Do, for massy's sake, only make me a gown like dat.' This modest request for a riding habit in which to hoe the cotton fields served for an introduction to sundry other petitions for rice and sugar and flannel, all which I promised the petitioner, but not the 'gown like dat;' whereupon I rode off, and she flung herself down in the middle of the road to get her wind and rest.

The passion for dress is curiously strong in these people, and seems as though it might be made an instrument in converting them, outwardly at any rate, to something like civilisation; for though their own native taste is decidedly both barbarous and ludicrous, it is astonishing how very soon they mitigate it in imitation of their white models. The fine figures of the mulatto women in Charleston and Savannah are frequently as elegantly and tastefully dressed as those of any of their female superiors; and here on St. Simon's, owing, I suppose, to the influence of the resident lady proprietors of the various plantations, and the propensity to imitation in their black dependents, the people that I see all seem to me much tidier, cleaner, and less fantastically dressed than those on the rice plantation, where no such influences reach them.

On my return from my ride I had a visit from Captain F–, the manager of a neighbouring plantation, with whom I had a long conversation about the present and past condition of the estate, the species of feudal magnificence in which its original owner, Major –, lived, the iron rule of old overseer K– which succeeded to it, and the subsequent sovereignty of his son, Mr. R– K–, the man for whom Mr. – entertains such a cordial esteem, and of whom every account I receive from the negroes seems to me to indicate a merciless sternness of disposition that may be a virtue in a slave-driver, but is hardly a Christian grace. Captain F– was one of our earliest visitors at the rice plantation on our arrival, and I think I told you of his mentioning, in speaking to me of the orange trees which formerly grew all round the dykes there, that he had taken Basil Hall there once in their blossoming season, and that he had said the sight was as well worth crossing the Atlantic for as Niagara. To-day he referred to that again. He has resided for a great many years on a plantation here, and is connected with our neighbour, old Mr. C–, whose daughter, I believe, he married. He interested me extremely by his description of the house Major – had many years ago on a part of the island called St. Clair. As far as I can understand there must have been an indefinite number of 'masters'' residences on this estate in the old Major's time; for what with the one we are building, and the ruined remains of those not quite improved off the face of the earth, and the tradition of those that have ceased to exist, even as ruins, I make out no fewer than seven. How gladly would I exchange all that remain and all that do not, for the smallest tenement in your blessed Yankee mountain village!

Captain F– told me that at St. Clair General Oglethorpe, the good and brave English governor of the State of Georgia in its colonial days, had his residence, and that among the magnificent live oaks which surround the site of the former settlement, there was one especially venerable and picturesque, which in his recollection always went by the name of General Oglethorpe's Oak. If you remember the history of the colony under his benevolent rule, you must recollect how absolutely he and his friend and counsellor, Wesley, opposed the introduction of slavery in the colony. How wrathfully the old soldier's spirit ought to haunt these cotton fields and rice swamps of his old domain, with their population of wretched slaves! I will ride to St. Clair and see his oak; if I should see him, he cannot have much to say to me on the subject that I should not cry amen to.

Saturday, March 2.—I have made a gain, no doubt, in one respect in coming here, dear E–, for, not being afraid of a rearing stallion, I can ride; but, on the other hand, my aquatic diversions are all likely, I fear, to be much curtailed. Well may you, or any other Northern Abolitionist, consider this a heaven-forsaken region,—why? I cannot even get worms to fish with, and was solemnly assured by Jack this morning that the whole 'point,' i.e. neighbourhood of the house, had been searched in vain for these useful and agreeable animals. I must take to some more sportsman-like species of bait; but in my total ignorance of even the kind of fish that inhabit these waters, it is difficult for me to adapt my temptations to their taste.

Yesterday evening I had a visit that made me very sorrowful—if anything connected with these poor people can be called more especially sorrowful than their whole condition; but Mr. –'s declaration that he will receive no more statements of grievances or petitions for redress through me, makes me as desirous now of shunning the vain appeals of these unfortunates as I used to be of receiving and listening to them. The imploring cry, 'Oh missis!' that greets me whichever way I turn, makes me long to stop my ears now; for what can I say or do any more for them? The poor little favours—the rice, the sugar, the flannel—that they beg for with such eagerness, and receive with such exuberant gratitude, I can, it is true, supply, and words and looks of pity and counsel of patience and such instruction in womanly habits of decency and cleanliness, as may enable them to better, in some degree, their own hard lot; but to the entreaty, 'Oh missis, you speak to massa for us! Oh missis, you beg massa for us! Oh missis, you tell massa for we, he sure do as you say!'—I cannot now answer as formerly, and I turn away choking and with eyes full of tears from the poor creatures, not even daring to promise any more the faithful transmission of their prayers.

The women who visited me yesterday evening were all in the family-way, and came to entreat of me to have the sentence (what else can I call it?) modified, which condemns them to resume their labour of hoeing in the fields three weeks after their confinement. They knew, of course, that I cannot interfere with their appointed labour, and therefore their sole entreaty was that I would use my influence with Mr. – to obtain for them a month's respite from labour in the field after child-bearing. Their principal spokeswoman, a woman with a bright sweet face, called Mary, and a very sweet voice, which is by no means an uncommon excellence among them, appealed to my own experience; and while she spoke of my babies, and my carefully tended, delicately nursed, and tenderly watched confinement and convalescence, and implored me to have a kind of labour given to them less exhausting during the month after their confinement, I held the table before me so hard in order not to cry that I think my fingers ought to have left a mark on it. At length I told them that Mr. – had forbidden me to bring him any more complaints from them, for that he thought the ease with which I received and believed their stories only tended to make them discontented, and that, therefore, I feared I could not promise to take their petitions to him; but that he would be coming down to 'the point' soon, and that they had better come then some time when I was with him, and say what they had just been saying to me: and with this, and various small bounties, I was forced, with a heavy heart, to dismiss them, and when they were gone, with many exclamations of, 'Oh yes, missis, you will, you will speak to massa for we; God bless you, missis, we sure you will!' I had my cry out for them, for myself, for us. All these women had had large families, and all of them had lost half their children, and several of them had lost more. How I do ponder upon the strange fate which has brought me here, from so far away, from surroundings so curiously different—how my own people in that blessed England of my birth would marvel if they could suddenly have a vision of me as I sit here, and how sorry some of them would be for me!

I am helped to bear all that is so very painful to me here by my constant enjoyment of the strange wild scenery in the midst of which I live, and which my resumption of my equestrian habits gives me almost daily opportunity of observing. I rode to-day to some new cleared and ploughed ground that was being prepared for the precious cotton crop. I crossed a salt marsh upon a raised causeway that was perfectly alive with land-crabs, whose desperately active endeavours to avoid my horse's hoofs were so ludicrous that I literally laughed alone and aloud at them. The sides of this road across the swamp were covered with a thick and close embroidery of creeping moss or rather lichens of the most vivid green and red: the latter made my horse's path look as if it was edged with an exquisite pattern of coral; it was like a thing in a fairy tale, and delighted me extremely.

I suppose, E–, one secret of my being able to suffer as acutely as I do without being made either ill or absolutely miserable, is the childish excitability of my temperament, and the sort of ecstacy which any beautiful thing gives me. No day, almost no hour, passes without some enjoyment of the sort this coral-bordered road gave me, which not only charms my senses completely at the time, but returns again and again before my memory, delighting my fancy, and stimulating my imagination. I sometimes despise myself for what seems to me an inconceivable rapidity of emotion, that almost makes me doubt whether anyone who feels so many things can really be said to feel anything; but I generally recover from this perplexity, by remembering whither invariably every impression of beauty leads my thoughts, and console myself for my contemptible facility of impression by the reflection that it is, upon the whole, a merciful system of compensation by which my whole nature, tortured as it was last night, can be absorbed this morning, in a perfectly pleasurable contemplation of the capers of crabs and the colour of mosses as if nothing else existed in creation. One thing, however, I think, is equally certain, and that is, that I need never expect much sympathy; and perhaps this special endowment will make me, to some degree, independent of it; but I have no doubt that to follow me through half a day with any species of lively participation in my feelings would be a severe breathless moral calisthenic to most of my friends,—what Shakspeare calls 'sweating labour.' As far as I have hitherto had opportunities of observing, children and maniacs are the only creatures who would be capable of sufficiently rapid transitions of thought and feeling to keep pace with me.

And so I rode through the crabs and the coral. There is one thing, however, I beg to commend to your serious consideration as a trainer of youth, and that is, the expediency of cultivating in all the young minds you educate an equal love of the good, the beautiful, and the absurd (not an easy task, for the latter is apt in its developement to interfere a little with the two others): doing this, you command all the resources of existence. The love of the good and beautiful of course you are prepared to cultivate—that goes without saying, as the French say; the love of the ludicrous will not appear to you as important, and yet you will be wrong to undervalue it. In the first place, I might tell you that it was almost like cherishing the love of one's fellow-creatures—at which no doubt you shake your head reprovingly; but, leaving aside the enormous provision for the exercise of this natural faculty which we offer to each other, why should crabs scuttle from under my horse's feet in such a way as to make me laugh again every time I think of it, if there is not an inherent propriety in laughter, as the only emotion which certain objects challenge—an emotion wholesome for the soul and body of man? After all, why are we contrived to laugh at all, if laughter is not essentially befitting and beneficial? and most people's lives are too lead-coloured to afford to lose one sparkle on them, even the smallest twinkle of light gathered from a flash of nonsense. Hereafter point out for the 'appreciative' study of your pupils all that is absurd in themselves, others, and the universe in general; 'tis an element largely provided, of course, to meet a corresponding and grateful capacity for its enjoyment.

After my crab and coral causeway I came to the most exquisite thickets of evergreen shrubbery you can imagine. If I wanted to paint paradise I would copy this undergrowth, passing through which I went on to the settlement at St. Annie's, traversing another swamp on another raised causeway. The thickets through which I next rode were perfectly draped with the beautiful wild jasmine of these woods. Of all the parasitical plants I ever saw, I do think it is the most exquisite in form and colour, and its perfume is like the most delicate heliotrope.

I stopped for some time before a thicket of glittering evergreens, over which hung, in every direction, streaming garlands of these fragrant golden cups, fit for Oberon's banqueting service. These beautiful shrubberies were resounding with the songs of mocking birds. I sat there on my horse in a sort of dream of enchantment, looking, listening, and inhaling the delicious atmosphere of those flowers; and suddenly my eyes opened, as if I had been asleep, on some bright red bunches of spring leaves on one of the winter-stripped trees, and I as suddenly thought of the cold northern skies and earth, where the winter was still inflexibly tyrannising over you all, and, in spite of the loveliness of all that was present, and the harshness of all that I seemed to see at that moment, no first tokens of the spring's return were ever more welcome to me than those bright leaves that reminded me how soon I should leave this scene of material beauty and moral degradation, where the beauty itself is of an appropriate character to the human existence it surrounds: above all, loveliness, brightness, and fragrance; but below! it gives one a sort of melusina feeling of horror—all swamp and poisonous stagnation, which the heat will presently make alive with venomous reptiles.

I rode on, and the next object that attracted my attention was a very startling and by no means agreeable one—an enormous cypress tree which had been burnt stood charred and blackened, and leaning towards the road so as to threaten a speedy fall across it, and on one of the limbs of this great charcoal giant hung a dead rattlesnake. If I tell you that it looked to me at least six feet long you will say you only wonder I did not say twelve; it was a hideous-looking creature, and some negroes I met soon after told me they had found it in the swamp, and hung it dead on the burning tree. Certainly the two together made a dreadful trophy, and a curious contrast to the lovely bowers of bloom I had just been contemplating with such delight.

This settlement at St. Annie's is the remotest on the whole plantation, and I found there the wretchedest huts, and most miserably squalid, filthy and forlorn creatures I had yet seen here—certainly the condition of the slaves on this estate is infinitely more neglected and deplorable than that on the rice plantation. Perhaps it may be that the extremely unhealthy nature of the rice cultivation makes it absolutely necessary that the physical condition of the labourers should be maintained at its best to enable them to abide it; and yet it seems to me that even the process of soaking the rice can hardly create a more dangerous miasma than the poor creatures must inhale who live in the midst of these sweltering swamps, half sea, half river slime. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the climate on St. Simon's is generally considered peculiarly mild and favourable, and so less protection of clothes and shelter is thought necessary here for the poor residents; perhaps, too, it may be because the cotton crop is now, I believe, hardly as valuable as the rice crop, and the plantation here, which was once the chief source of its owner's wealth, is becoming a secondary one, and so not worth so much care or expense in repairing and constructing negro huts and feeding and clothing the slaves. More pitiable objects than some of those I saw at the St. Annie's settlement to-day I hope never to see: there was an old crone called Hannah, a sister, as well as I could understand what she said, of old house Molly, whose face and figure seamed with wrinkles and bowed and twisted with age and infirmity really hardly retained the semblance of those of a human creature, and as she crawled to me almost half her naked body was exposed through the miserable tatters that she held on with one hand, while the other eagerly clutched my hand, and her poor blear eyes wandered all over me as if she was bewildered by the strange aspect of any human being but those whose sight was familiar to her. One or two forlorn creatures like herself, too old or too infirm to be compelled to work, and the half-starved and more than half-naked children apparently left here under their charge, were the only inmates I found in these wretched hovels.

I came home without stopping to look at anything, for I had no heart any longer for what had so charmed me on my way to this place. Galloping along the road after leaving the marshes, I scared an ox who was feeding leisurely, and to my great dismay saw the foolish beast betake himself with lumbering speed into the 'bush:' the slaves will have to hunt after him, and perhaps will discover more rattlesnakes six or twelve feet long.

After reaching home I went to the house of the overseer to see his wife, a tidy, decent, kind-hearted, little woman, who seems to me to do her duty by the poor people she lives among, as well as her limited intelligence and still more limited freedom allow. The house her husband lives in is the former residence of Major –, which was the great mansion of the estate. It is now in a most ruinous and tottering condition, and they inhabit but a few rooms in it; the others are gradually mouldering to pieces, and the whole edifice will, I should think, hardly stand long enough to be carried away by the river, which in its yearly inroads on the bank on which it stands has already approached within a perilous proximity to the old dilapidated planter's palace. Old Molly, of whom I have often before spoken to you, who lived here in the days of the prosperity and grandeur of 'Hampton,' still clings to the relics of her old master's former magnificence and with a pride worthy of old Caleb of Ravenswood showed me through the dismantled decaying rooms and over the remains of the dairy, displaying a capacious fish-box or well, where, in the good old days, the master's supply was kept in fresh salt water till required for table. Her prideful lamentations over the departure of all this quondam glory were ludicrous and pathetic; but while listening with some amusement to the jumble of grotesque descriptions through which her impression of the immeasurable grandeur and nobility of the house she served was the predominant feature, I could not help contrasting the present state of the estate with that which she described, and wondering why it should have become, as it undoubtedly must have done, so infinitely less productive a property than in the old Major's time.

Before closing this letter, I have a mind to transcribe to you the entries for to-day recorded in a sort of daybook, where I put down very succinctly the number of people who visit me, their petitions and ailments, and also such special particulars concerning them as seem to me worth recording. You will see how miserable the physical condition of many of these poor creatures is; and their physical condition, it is insisted by those who uphold this evil system, is the only part of it which is prosperous, happy, and compares well with that of northern labourers. Judge from the details I now send you; and never forget, while reading them, that the people on this plantation are well off, and consider themselves well off, in comparison with the slaves on some of the neighbouring estates.

Fanny has had six children, all dead but one. She came to beg to have her work in the field lightened.

Nanny has had three children, two of them are dead; she came to implore that the rule of sending them into the field three weeks after their confinement might be altered.

Leah, Caesar's wife, has had six children, three are dead.

Sophy, Lewis' wife, came to beg for some old linen; she is suffering fearfully, has had ten children, five of them are dead. The principal favour she asked was a piece of meat, which I gave her.

Sally, Scipio's wife, has had two miscarriages and three children born, one of whom is dead. She came complaining of incessant pain and weakness in her back. This woman was a mulatto daughter of a slave called Sophy, by a white man of the name of Walker, who visited the plantation.

Charlotte, Renty's wife, had had two miscarriages, and was with child again. She was almost crippled with rheumatism, and showed me a pair of poor swollen knees that made my heart ache. I have promised her a pair of flannel trowsers, which I must forthwith set about making.

Sarah, Stephen's wife,—this woman's case and history were, alike, deplorable, she had had four miscarriages, had brought seven children into the world, five of whom were dead, and was again with child. She complained of dreadful pains in the back, and an internal tumour which swells with the exertion of working in the fields; probably, I think, she is ruptured. She told me she had once been mad and ran into the woods, where she contrived to elude discovery for some time, but was at last tracked and brought back, when she was tied up by the arms and heavy logs fastened to her feet, and was severely flogged. After this she contrived to escape again, and lived for some time skulking in the woods, and she supposes mad, for when she was taken again she was entirely naked. She subsequently recovered from this derangement, and seems now just like all the other poor creatures who come to me for help and pity. I suppose her constant child-bearing and hard labour in the fields at the same time may have produced the temporary insanity.

Sukey, Bush's wife, only came to pay her respects. She had had four miscarriages, had brought eleven children into the world, five of whom are dead.

Molly, Quambo's wife, also only came to see me; hers was the best account I have yet received; she had had nine children, and six of them were still alive.

This is only the entry for to-day, in my diary, of the people's complaints and visits. Can you conceive a more wretched picture than that which it exhibits of the conditions under which these women live? Their cases are in no respect singular, and though they come with pitiful entreaties that I will help them with some alleviation of their pressing physical distresses, it seems to me marvellous with what desperate patience (I write it advisedly, patience of utter despair) they endure their sorrow-laden existence. Even the poor wretch who told that miserable story of insanity and lonely hiding in the swamps and scourging when she was found, and of her renewed madness and flight, did so in a sort of low, plaintive, monotonous murmur of misery, as if such sufferings were all 'in the day's work.'

I ask these questions about their children because I think the number they bear as compared with the number they rear a fair gauge of the effect of the system on their own health and that of their offspring. There was hardly one of these women, as you will see by the details I have noted of their ailments, who might not have been a candidate for a bed in an hospital, and they had come to me after working all day in the fields.

Dearest E–. When I told you in my last letter of the encroachments which the waters of the Altamaha are daily making on the bank at Hampton Point and immediately in front of the imposing-looking old dwelling of the former master, I had no idea how rapid this crumbling process has been of late years; but to-day, standing there with Mrs. G–, whom I had gone to consult about the assistance we might render to some of the poor creatures whose cases I sent you in my last letter, she told me that within the memory of many of the slaves now living on the plantation, a grove of orange trees had spread its fragrance and beauty between the house and the river. Not a vestige remains of them. The earth that bore them was gradually undermined, slipped, and sank down into the devouring flood, and when she saw the astonished incredulity of my look she led me to the ragged and broken bank, and there, immediately below it and just covered by the turbid waters of the in-rushing tide, were the heads of the poor drowned orange trees, swaying like black twigs in the briny flood which had not yet dislodged all of them from their hold upon the soil which had gone down beneath the water wearing its garland of bridal blossom. As I looked at those trees a wild wish rose in my heart that the river and the sea would swallow up and melt in their salt waves the whole of this accursed property of ours. I am afraid the horror of slavery with which I came down to the south, the general theoretic abhorrence of an Englishwoman for it, has gained, through the intensity it has acquired, a morbid character of mere desire to be delivered from my own share in it. I think so much of these wretches that I see, that I can hardly remember any others, and my zeal for the general emancipation of the slave, has almost narrowed itself to this most painful desire that I and mine were freed from the responsibility of our share in this huge misery,—and so I thought:—'Beat, beat, the crumbling banks and sliding shores, wild waves of the Atlantic and the Altamaha! Sweep down and carry hence this evil earth and these homes of tyranny, and roll above the soil of slavery, and wash my soul and the souls of those I love clean from the blood of our kind!' But I have no idea that Mr. – and his brother would cry amen to any such prayer. Sometimes, as I stand and listen to the roll of the great ocean surges on the further side of little St. Simon's Island, a small green screen of tangled wilderness that interposes between this point and the Atlantic, I think how near our West Indian islands and freedom are to these unfortunate people, many of whom are expert and hardy boatmen, as far as the mere mechanical management of a boat goes; but unless Providence were compass and steersman too it avails nothing that they should know how near their freedom might be found, nor have I any right to tell them if they could find it, for the slaves are not mine, they are Mr. –'s.

The mulatto woman, Sally, accosted me again to-day, and begged that she might be put to some other than field labour. Supposing she felt herself unequal to it, I asked her some questions, but the principal reason she urged for her promotion to some less laborious kind of work was, that hoeing in the field was so hard to her on 'account of her colour,' and she therefore petitions to be allowed to learn a trade. I was much puzzled at this reason for her petition, but was presently made to understand that being a mulatto, she considered field labour a degradation; her white bastardy appearing to her a title to consideration in my eyes. The degradation of these people is very complete, for they have accepted the contempt of their masters to that degree that they profess, and really seem to feel it for themselves, and the faintest admixture of white blood in their black veins appears at once, by common consent of their own race, to raise them in the scale of humanity. I had not much sympathy for this petition. The woman's father had been a white man who was employed for some purpose on the estate. In speaking upon this subject to Mrs. G–, she said that, as far as her observation went, the lower class of white men in the south lived with coloured women precisely as they would at the north with women of their own race; the outcry that one hears against amalgamation appears therefore to be something educated and acquired, rather than intuitive. I cannot perceive in observing my children, that they exhibit the slightest repugnance or dislike to these swarthy dependents of theirs, which they surely would do if, as is so often pretended, there is an inherent, irreconcilable repulsion on the part of the white towards the negro race. All the southern children that I have seen seem to have a special fondness for these good-natured childish human beings, whose mental condition is kin in its simplicity and proneness to impulsive emotion to their own, and I can detect in them no trace of the abhorrence and contempt for their dusky skins which all questions of treating them with common justice is so apt to elicit from American men and women.

To-day, for the first time since I left the Rice Island, I went out fishing, but had no manner of luck. Jack rowed me up Jones's Creek, a small stream which separates St. Simon's from the main, on the opposite side from the great waters of the Altamaha. The day was very warm. It is becoming almost too hot to remain here much longer, at least for me, who dread and suffer from heat so much. The whole summer, however, is passed by many members of the Georgia families on their estates by the sea. When the heat is intense, the breeze from the ocean and the salt air, I suppose, prevent it from being intolerable or hurtful. Our neighbour Mr. C– and his family reside entirely, the year round, on their plantations here without apparently suffering in their health from the effects of the climate. I suppose it is the intermediate region between the sea-board and the mountains that becomes so pestilential when once the warm weather sets in. I remember the Belgian minister, M. de –, telling me that the mountain country of Georgia was as beautiful as paradise, and that the climate, as far as his experience went, was perfectly delicious. He was, however, only there on an exploring expedition, and, of course, took the most favourable season of the year for the purpose.

I have had several women with me this afternoon more or less disabled by chronic rheumatism. Certainly, either their labour or the exposure it entails must be very severe, for this climate is the last that ought to engender rheumatism. This evening I had a visit from a bright young woman, calling herself Minda, who came to beg for a little rice or sugar. I enquired from which of the settlements she had come down, and found that she has to walk three miles every day to and from her work. She made no complaint whatever of this, and seemed to think her laborious tramp down to the Point after her day of labour on the field well-rewarded by the pittance of rice and sugar she obtained. Perhaps she consoled herself for the exertion by the reflection which occurred to me while talking to her, that many women who have borne children, and many women with child, go the same distance to and from their task ground—that seems dreadful!

I have let my letter lie from a stress of small interruptions. Yesterday, Sunday 3rd, old Auber, a stooping, halting hag, came to beg for flannel and rice. As usual, of course, I asked various questions concerning her condition, family, &c.; she told me she had never been married, but had had five children, two of whom were dead. She complained of flooding, of intolerable back-ache, and said that with all these ailments, she considered herself quite recovered, having suffered horribly from an abscess in her neck, which was now nearly well. I was surprised to hear of her other complaints, for she seemed to me like quite an old woman; but constant child-bearing, and the life of labour, exposure, and privation which they lead, ages these poor creatures prematurely.

Dear E–, how I do defy you to guess the novel accomplishment I have developed within the last two days; what do you say to my turning butcher's boy, and cutting up the carcase of a sheep for the instruction of our butcher and cook, and benefit of our table? You know, I have often written you word, that we have mutton here—thanks to the short salt grass on which it feeds—that compares with the best south down or pré salé; but such is the barbarous ignorance of the cook, or rather the butcher who furnishes our kitchen supplies, that I defy the most expert anatomist to pronounce on any piece (joints they cannot be called) of mutton brought to our table to what part of the animal sheep it originally belonged. I have often complained bitterly of this, and in vain implored Abraham the cook to send me some dish of mutton to which I might with safety apply the familiar name of leg, shoulder, or haunch. These remonstrances and expostulations have produced no result whatever, however, but an increase of eccentricity in the chunks of sheeps' flesh placed upon the table; the squares, diamonds, cubes, and rhomboids of mutton have been more ludicrously and hopelessly unlike anything we see in a Christian butcher's shop, with every fresh endeavour Abraham has made to find out 'zackly wot de missis do want;' so the day before yesterday, while I was painfully dragging S– through the early intellectual science of the alphabet and first reading lesson, Abraham appeared at the door of the room brandishing a very long thin knife, and with many bows, grins, and apologies for disturbing me, begged that I would go and cut up a sheep for him. My first impulse of course was to decline the very unusual task offered me with mingled horror and amusement. Abraham, however, insisted and besought, extolled the fineness of his sheep, declared his misery at being unable to cut it as I wished, and his readiness to conform for the future to whatever patterns of mutton 'de missis would only please to give him.' Upon reflection I thought I might very well contrive to indicate upon the sheep the size and form of the different joints of civilised mutton, and so for the future save much waste of good meat; and moreover the lesson once taught would not require to be repeated, and I have ever held it expedient to accept every opportunity of learning to do anything, no matter how unusual, which presented itself to be done; and so I followed Abraham to the kitchen, when, with a towel closely pinned over my silk dress, and knife in hand, I stood for a minute or two meditating profoundly before the rather unsightly object which Abraham had pronounced 'de beautifullest sheep de missis eber saw.' The sight and smell of raw meat are especially odious to me, and I have often thought that if I had had to be my own cook, I should inevitably become a vegetarian, probably, indeed, return entirely to my green and salad days. Nathless, I screwed my courage to the sticking point, and slowly and delicately traced out with the point of my long carving-knife two shoulders, two legs, a saddle, and a neck of mutton; not probably in the most thoroughly artistic and butcherly style, but as nearly as my memory and the unassisted light of nature would enable me; and having instructed Abraham in the various boundaries, sizes, shapes and names of the several joints, I returned to S– and her belles-lettres, rather elated upon the whole at the creditable mode in which I flattered myself I had accomplished my unusual task, and the hope of once more seeing roast mutton of my acquaintance. I will confess to you, dear E–, that the neck was not a satisfactory part of the performance, and I have spent some thoughts since in trying to adjust in my own mind its proper shape and proportions.

As an accompaniment to 'de beautifullest mutton de missis ever see,' we have just received from my neighbour Mr. C– the most magnificent supply of fresh vegetables, green peas, salad, &c. He has a garden and a Scotchman's real love for horticulture, and I profit by them in this very agreeable manner.

I have been interrupted by several visits, my dear E–, among other, one from a poor creature called Judy, whose sad story and condition affected me most painfully. She had been married, she said, some years ago to one of the men called Temba, who however now has another wife, having left her because she went mad. While out of her mind she escaped into the jungle, and contrived to secrete herself there for some time, but was finally tracked and caught, and brought back and punished by being made to sit, day after day, for hours in the stocks—a severe punishment for a man, but for a woman perfectly barbarous. She complained of chronic rheumatism, and other terrible ailments, and said she suffered such intolerable pain while labouring in the fields, that she had come to entreat me to have her work lightened. She could hardly crawl, and cried bitterly all the time she spoke to me.

She told me a miserable story of her former experience on the plantation under Mr. K–'s overseership. It seems that Jem Valiant (an extremely difficult subject, a mulatto lad, whose valour is sufficiently accounted for now by the influence of the mutinous white blood) was her firstborn, the son of Mr. K–, who forced her, flogged her severely for having resisted him, and then sent her off, as a further punishment, to Five Pound—a horrible swamp in a remote corner of the estate, to which the slaves are sometimes banished for such offences as are not sufficiently atoned for by the lash. The dismal loneliness of the place to these poor people, who are as dependent as children upon companionship and sympathy, makes this solitary exile a much-dreaded infliction; and this poor creature said, that bad as the flogging was, she would sooner have taken that again than the dreadful lonely days and nights she spent on the penal swamp of Five Pound.

I make no comment on these terrible stories, my dear friend, and tell them to you as nearly as possible in the perfectly plain unvarnished manner in which they are told to me. I do not wish to add to, or perhaps I ought to say take away from, the effect of such narrations by amplifying the simple horror and misery of their bare details.

My dearest E–. I have had an uninterrupted stream of women and children flowing in the whole morning to say, 'Ha de missis!' Among others, a poor woman called Mile, who could hardly stand for pain and swelling in her limbs; she had had fifteen children and two miscarriages, nine of her children had died; for the last three years she had become almost a cripple with chronic rheumatism, yet she is driven every day to work in the field. She held my hands and stroked them in the most appealing way, while she exclaimed, 'Oh my missis! my missis! me neber sleep till day for de pain,' and with the day her labour must again be resumed. I gave her flannel and sal volatile to rub her poor swelled limbs with; rest I could not give her—rest from her labour and her pain—this mother of fifteen children.

Another of my visitors had a still more dismal story to tell; her name was Die; she had had sixteen children, fourteen of whom were dead; she had had four miscarriages, one had been caused by falling down with a very heavy burthen on her head, and one from having her arms strained up to be lashed. I asked her what she meant by having her arms tied up; she said their hands were first tied together, sometimes by the wrists, and sometimes, which was worse, by the thumbs, and they were then drawn up to a tree or post, so as almost to swing them off the ground, and then their clothes rolled round their waist, and a man with a cow-hide stands and stripes them. I give you the woman's words; she did not speak of this as of anything strange, unusual or especially horrid and abominable; and when I said, 'Did they do that to you when you were with child?' she simply replied, 'Yes, missis.' And to all this I listen—I, an English woman, the wife of the man who owns these wretches, and I cannot say, 'That thing shall not be done again; that cruel shame and villany shall never be known here again.' I gave the woman meat and flannel, which were what she came to ask for, and remained choking with indignation and grief long after they had all left me to my most bitter thoughts.

I went out to try and walk off some of the weight of horror and depression which I am beginning to feel daily more and more, surrounded by all this misery and degradation that I can neither help nor hinder. The blessed spring is coming very fast, the air is full of delicious wild wood fragrances, and the wonderful songs of southern birds; the wood paths are as tempting as paths into Paradise, but Jack is in such deadly terror about the snakes, which are now beginning to glide about with a freedom and frequency certainly not pleasing, that he will not follow me off the open road, and twice to-day scared me back from charming wood paths I ventured to explore with his exclamations of terrified warning.