BOOKS.

OLMSTED'S JOITRNEY IN THE TUCK COUNTRY.'

"This is the third volume of a work, the first of which was a narrative of a journey in the Sea-board districts of the older Slave States ; the second' of a rapid tour West of the Alleghenies, and of a winter spent in Texas." In part the narrative treats of the hill country people and mainly of those who are engaged in, or are affected by, the business of the South—the production of cotton—" facts of general observation and conclusion of judgment form a larger portion of this volume than of the others, because they are appropriately deduced from all preceding details." This additional volume is intended to complete the story, but partly told in the preceding two; and to contribute towards the know- ledge of the truth at a period when the agitation growing out of the condition of the South, is graver than it has ever been before. The work, nearly in its present form, was prepared for the _press three years ago. Previously to that preparation, two years were devoted to the careful study of the condition of the people, es- pecially the White people, living under a great variety of circum- stances where slavery is not prohibited. Mr. Olmsted considers that no published record of "observations made with similar ad- vantages, and extended over so large a field," as yet exists. He takes credit to himself for the freedom from prejudice with which he commenced his inquiry. He left a farm in New York to examine farms in Virginia. "The Fillmore compromises had just been accomplished ; a reaction from a state of suspicion and un- wholesome excitement was obvious in the public mind. Looking upon slavery as an unfortunate circumstance, for which the peo- ple of the South were in no wise to blame," regarding its imme- diate abolition as impracticable, hoping to aid in the reaction, and believing that the subject of slavery might be discussed in a rational, philosophical, and conciliatory spirit, Mr. Olmsted ac- cepted at this reactionary crisis, the suggestion of the editor of the New York Times, and undertook to make a personal study of the ordinary condition and habits of the people of the South. The result of his investigation was disappointment. The actual state of the people of the South, citizen and slave alike, he cha- racterizes as one which cannot be too much deplored, the exten- sion and aggravation of the causes of "'which cannot be too firmly and persistently guarded ag•aiust." Mr. Olmsted is no vehement partisan or immediate abolitionist. He pronounces the present subjection of the Negroes of the South to the mastership of the Whites justifiable and necessary ; and he thinks that their eman- cipation is not to be accomplished by this generation. On the other hand, he is inclined to believe that it may be prepared and anticipated. The determination that it shall not be, he regards as more impracticable, fanatical, and dangerous, than argument for immediate abolition. "The present agitation of the country, he adds, results less from the labours of abolitionists than from the conceit, avarice, and folly of wealthy owners of slaves." Without annihilating slave property, Mr. Olmsted favours a pro- gressive and final liberation ; arguing that a negro's capacities can be cultivated and enlarged by exercise ; that as they are cul- tivated and enlarged the value of the negro will be enhanced; and that the slaves may thus be made to pay, year by year, for their own gradual emancipation. "Even ten years," thinks our author, "of careful judicious and economical cultivation of this capacity, with all the negroes of a large plantation, would [not] fail to earn some pecuniary as well as moral reward." Mr. Olmsted has collected numerous facts relating to the slaves and the slave-masters of the South, which may assist us in form- ing a judgment of the merits or demerits of the institution. The facts against the slave appear to be these : he is almost univer- sally a liar and a thief ; unwilling to labour systematically with- out coercion ; improvident ; reckless, and generally immoral. But if these are facts against the slave, they are facts also against slavery. Reduce a white man to compulsory servitude, deprive him of all inducement to exertion surround him with whatever is most calculated to debase and terrify him, exclude mental culti- vation and the hope of improvement, and if you do not find him false, dishonest, and reckless, after a fair trial of your iniquitous system, it can only be owing to the exceptional heroism of your victim. Indeed, the poor Whites whom our author describes seem to be morally and intellectually pretty much on a par with the slave, though we suppose their condition is scarcely so favour- able to the development of stupidity and vice as that of the dark bondman.

The condition of the slave must vary more or less with the varying character of the slave-master. That slaves in general are well fed, clothed, and cared for, is extremely probable. Nor is the "beneficent whip" everywhere in perpetual requisition. That it is often used, at least in some plantations is, however, the conviction of our author. He saw with his own eyes a grown-np girl flogged with a tough, flexible, raw-hide 'whip; shamelessly, brutally flogged ; flogged till "choking sobbing, spasmodic groans only were heard ; " while a young gentleman of fifteen looked on, with no emotion but that of impatience at the delay. It seems, mereover, that "overseers are often obliged" to kill -negroes, who not knowing what's good for them, refuse the lash and resist them. Nigger-shooting and nigger-hunting are not uncommon. Nigger-hunting, too, is one a the trades of the • A Journey in the Back Country. By Frederick Law Olmsted. Author of " A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States," &e. Published by Samson Low, Son, and Co. South. Horses and dogs, are trained to it. The dogs used are bloodhounds, not pure, we believe' but "a cross of the Spanish bloodhound with the common hounds or curs. On the estates in the South the machinery, of public police is dispensed with. There men "try, decide, and execute the sentences in thousands of eases which in other countries, would go into courts." The punishments inflicted are whipping, exposure in the pillory, and branding with a hot iron. Occasionally a negro is burnt alive. One who, in a paroxysm of fury had killed his master, in Georgia, or Alabama, "was roasted at a slow fire, on the spot of the murder, in the presence of many thousand slaves."

Turning to the slave-masters of the South , we are scarcely surprised

to find them pourtrayed in a less poetical light than their admirers might anticipate. For chivalrous combats, we have "scandalous fiendlike street fights." Every White stripling in the South carries a dirk knife in his pocket, and plays with a revolver be- fore he has learned to swim. When be quarrels, he kills his ad- versary with the deadliest ready weapon at hand. No free .press, no free pulpit, no free politics can be permitted in the South. The fourth or lowest class of Whites in the North has a higher standard than the lowest class of the Slave States ; the third class of the North Mr. Olmstead also pronounces superior to its counterpart in the South ; the number of those in the South who correspond in education and refinement of manners to the average of the second or lower-middle class of the North is very much smaller relatively, either to the territory or the whole White population of their re- spective regions. The really old aristocratic families are few.

Associating with these are many new or recuperated families,

in which there is also the best breeding, and in certain few parts or districts of the South, to be defined and numbered without difficulty, there is unquestionably a wealthy and remarkably generous, hospitable, refined, and accomplished first class, cling- ing with some pertinacity, although with too evident an effort, to the traditional manners and customs of an established gentry." A larger number, however' of thoroughly well-bred and even high-bred people is to be found in the free than in the Slave States. Moreover, the proportion of such people to the whole population of Whites is larger in the North than in the South. The majority of wealthy planters are described by Mr. Olmsted as ab- surdly ostentatious in entertainment, and extravagant in the pur- chase of notoriety ; while of real hospitality or generosity they are said to be absolutely destitute.

According to our traveller, the general, social, and political as- pect of the South is far from satisfactory. The boasted tran- quillity of the South is, in his judgment, the tranquillity of hope- lessness on the part of the subject race.

"But," he continues, "in the most favoured regions, this broken spirit

of despair is as carefully preserved by the citizens, and with as confident and unhesitating an application of force, when necessary to teach humility as it is by the army of the Czar, or the omnipresent police of the Kaiser. In Richmond and Charleston, and New Orleans, the citizens are as careless and gay as in Boston or London, and their servants a thousand times as child- like and cordial, to all appearance, in their relations with them as our ser- vants are with us. But go to the bottom of this security and dependence, and you come to police machinery such as you never find in towns under free government : citadels, sentries, passports, grape-shotted cannon, and daily public whippings of the subjects for accidental infractions of police ceremonies. I happened myself to see more direct expression of tyranny in a single day and night at Charleston, than at Naples in a week ; and I found that more than half the inhabitants of this town were subject to arrest, im- prisonment, and barbarous punishment, if found in the streets without a passport, after the evening "gunfire." Similar precautions and similar

i customs may be discovered n every large town in the South."

The character of Southern industry is described by Mr. Olm-

sted as wasteful and unsystematic. Occupants of land in the South are, he says, very inferior to similarly-situated occupants in the North, "in nearly every quality, habit, and attainment which civilized men respect and value." This inferiority is not the result of climate. In part, thinks our author, it is the effect of slavery. Whatever is closely associated with the slave is re- garded as more or less slavish ; and as manual agricultural labour is the chief employment of slaves in the South, the free man has a contempt for manual agricultural labour in the case of others, and for its necessity in himself, a pity quite beyond that of the man, for whom it possesses no such mental association. Just in pro- portion, too as the Whites are engaged in non-agricultural em- ployments, they are found to be generally indolent, careless, un- trustworthy, and unsuccessful. The feeling of degradation at- tached to slave-shared occupations manifests itself "in the fierce hostility of White mechanics to the instruction of slaves in their crafts." There is no counter-incentive to industry to neutralize the influence of this baneful prejudice. "American slavery, as at present advocated," concludes Mr. Olmsted, "American slavery, as it is desired to be perpetuated, nourished, protected, and extended, has an influence far more cruel, more strenuously repressive upon the mass of free citizens than slavery elsewhere ever had.' Our author controverts Mr. Russell's position, that slave labour is essential or important to sustain cotton production• in the United States. The necessary labour of cotton tillage is not, he maintains, too severe for White men in the cotton-growing climate. Even now, according to Mr. De Bow, 100,000 White men, being one-ninth of the whole numerical cotton force of the country, are engaged in the cultivation of cotton. The vagrant White population of South Carolina amounts to 125,000, capable of operating upon 5,000,000 spindles; though, in the present de- based condition of that population Mr. Olmsted questions the

wisdom of investing capital in the establishment of facto- ries,. and thinks that it would be better employed in trans- ferring the raw cotton to a free country, and there mann- facturing it. We supliose however that, but for the pre- judice against labour which exists in Slave States, this non-productive constituent of the White population would

never, as such, have attained its collective existence. To demon- strate the advantages of free labour, Mr. Olmsted refers us to a

district in Western Texas, where the cotton-fields had been more

thoroughly gleaned by the poor German emigrants than any fields he had ever before seen. He mentions one woman, who in the

first year she had ever seen a cotton-field, was said to have picked more cotten in a day than any slave in the county. He states also that he "was informed by a merchant, that the cotton picked by the free labour of the Germans was worth from one to two per cents a pound more than that picked by slaves in the same township, by reason of its greater cleanliness. Thus, on the two grounds of increased quantity and superior quality, the cot- ton production of the free White labourer is considerably more valuable than that of the Black slave."

The question of labour-supply is really the cardinal question for the South. The cultivable domain is enormous ; millions of acres, yet a perfect wilderness, are capable of being reclaimed. To in-

troduce white operatives' in large numbers, from a free soil, into a Slave State is, says Mr. Olmsted, both impracticable and unsafe ; "impracticable, because, except at greatly enhanced wages, they will not endure the necessary discomfort of the life of working

people in a Slave State ; unsafe, because with their intelligence, the antagonism of slavery to their interests could not be concealed from them.

Whence, then, is the labour supply to come ? There is a party in the South, not, however' it would seem, comprising its leading

politicians, which advocates the reopening of the foreign slave- trade. The representation of slaveholders in the National Con- gress partly depends, we understand, on the number of their slaves. Hence we find a Mr. Sprott saying "The foreign slave-

trade is the certain road to power [with the three-fifths rule] for the South, and the only road to power within the Union." But

the African party advocate the reestablishment of the slave-trade, not on political grounds alone, but for sociological and even theo- logical reasons. According to their showing, slavery is a "Bible institution, and the most effectual agent of freedom, Christianity, democracy, civilization, and wealth.' "It is by the existence of slavery, (writes Governor Hammond) exempting so large a portion of our citizens from labour, that we have leisure for intellectual pursuits." The servitude of the Black, it is argued, at once leaves the upper race purer, and preserves the inferior from an otherwise inevitable degradation. In a strictly moral view, slavery can never be anything but a monstrosity, excusable as a necessity, and even justifiable, as the least bad of two bad alternatives, in the preliminary civilization of mankind. Such a temporary necessity, however, can hardly be contemplated without a sorrowful regret, and probably there will always be some moral idealist in the world, whose generous impatience will lead him to surrender his political exaltation as democrat, or prefer, with Wordsworth, to be "a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn," if republican preroga- tive or religious privilege can be purchased only by the lasting abasement and misery of millions of his fellow men. But there is a third reason adduced to sustain the policy of the African party—the pressing necessity for an increased supply of labourers, to meet the increased demand for labour. This neces- sity is well stated in the words of a Virginian, addressing Elihu Burrett, and quoted by Mr. Olmsted. -

"Europe needs it : every steamer brings us intelligence that efforts are made to produce more cotton. Tropical and semi-tropical products—some

of them articles of prime necessity—are constantly increasing in price. Already sugar is so high that its consumption in Europe is becoming a luxury. Cotton is rising daily ; and no sugar or cotton lands are brought into cultivation. Nor can they. There is a want of labour to cultivate these lands. Give us more of the only kind of labour that will enable us to keep up the supply of the raw material, and the free labour of Europe, and the North can find employment„and consequently bread, in its manutacture.

Diminish the supply of cotton, or let it not increase to keep pace with the demand, and you throw thousands out of employment, and bring starvation

upon all manufacturing communities. America needs it. The North needs it, as Western Europe does for clothing, to furnish the raw material for manufacture. The South needs it to bring more land into cultivation."

This, Mr. Olmsted acknowledges, is the plain truth. That there is more work to do than effective workmen to do it, is, he thinks, an undeniable fact. To meet this new and increasing demand, he would not, however, reestablish the African Slave-trade. In his judgment, the necessity of the South really requires "only cheaper labour and cheaper means of exchanging the results of labour." His remedy for the existing pressure is the territorial restriction of slavery. To restrict the region within which Slave labour may be employed, would, he contends, 'ultimately cheek the further emigration of slaves from any particular district. Hence, a better provision of labourers ; and as a consequence the increased productivity of land. Facilities of transport would follow the increased production of each district. " With the cost of exportation, the cost of importation would be lessened." Im- proved agricultural and other industrial methods would be multi- plied. Articles of use comfort and luxury would become more ac- cessible. The cost of labour necessary to obtain a given value of cotton, or of any other production of the soil, would be constantly diminished.

It should be understood that the present facility of acquiring land in the cotton States "necessarily induces that mode of agri- culture which has desolated so large a portion of the seaboard Slave states." It is more remunerative to invest capital in new land, in the cultivation of cotton, than to apply labour to some

other crop on. old and more or less exhausted land. " Our small planters," says the Honourable C. C. Clay, "after taking the cream off their lands . . . . are going West and South, in search of other virgin lands which they will despoil and impoverish in a similar manner." No repetition of the process will satisfy them. Not even "the annexation of Sonora, of the whole of Mexico, Niearagua, Cuba, and the Amazon region !" The first essential, oontinnes our author, to the prosperity of the South, is to secure to its citizens the comforts of civilized life ; and this end will never be attained "till the nomadic and vagabond propensities of its petty patriarchs 'cease' to be stimulated by our Government, as they have been hitherto."

If we rightly comprehend the matter, the reopening of the African market, even if in itself unobjectionable, would at best be only a postponement of the inevitable day of reckoning. Under the present demoralizing system,--that of very early, and to some extent, promiscuous intercourse,—slave fecundity tends to its minimum. To supply a deficiency that need not exist, it is pro- posed to import slaves from Africa. If the measure were permis- sible and indefinitely practicable,—if the supply of foreign labour did not fail,—this continual appropriation of virgin soil would it- self terminate in the exhaustion of the entire cultivable area. Negro importation would then cease, and the settlement of the ques- tion of free versus slave labour could then no longer be post- poned. Why, then, should it not be grappled with at once ? The reopening of the foreign market would introduce into Ame- rica the lowest variety of the black race. The absolutely pure Negro, according to Mr. Olmsted, is an exceedingly rare type in America. There are many slaves with more of Anglo-Saxon than African blood in their veins. There are also, it is probable, included in the slave class "many descendants of Nubians, Moors, Egyptians, and Indians, all interbred with White and true Negro tribes." Thus, the curse of Canaan, which, in our opinion, has nothing whatever to do with the matter, can hardly be supposed to be operative, even by the most credulous bibliolatrist, in all the imagined extent of the patriarchal execrator's supposed in- tention.

Again, the improvability of the slave race in America seems certain. The Black or mixed population can be governed by the application of the same incentives as the White. Their industry is susceptible of increase' if stimulated by rewards. Striking in- stances of honesty are afforded by the slave ; and the pride which he feels in his master's position is a proof that he has in him some elements of a social and loyal nature. We see no reason why the Black should be more incapable of self-development than the White : we cherish the hope of native civilization in Africa ; and the ultimate, if not the immediate, abolition of enforced servitude in America.

" The inexorable logic" of facts must be respected. Slavery is a fact, and must be dealt with as such. Europe, to some extent, shares with America in moral responsibilities of "the peculiar institution ; " and, if it has no right to dictate, may i at least exer- cise the privilege of a sisterly suggestion. To aid n the solution of the problem—what is to become of not only the Black, but the Red and every inferior race ?—is the interest and duty of every civilized community. However long the best intellect of Ame- rica may ponder over the solution of this problem, or whatever be the ultimate answer that it gives, we trust that the reopening of the African slave market will be no part of the policy approved or accepted by the illustrious Trans-Atlantic Republic.