|
Notes |
Sketched by Special Artist. [The southern scenes accurately illustrate the life and social status of the negro on the Ashley and Cooper rivers, and the Sea Islands, particularly those within the jurisdiction of South Carolina. Their "garden patches" are sources of great profit, and very many cultivators are known to be among the richest of the laboring classes. The old theory, that negroes, without a master and the whip of the overseer, would relapse into barbarism, and become a burden to the whites, has been exploded. They are now acknowledged, even by the most prejudiced of the late "ruling classes" to be in the main industrious and frugal-saving up money against a rainy day. As a free, peasant population, they are infinitely more profitable to the South than they were when accounted "chattels" and in intelligence ranked but one or two removes from the brute creation. To-day they are the chief reliance of the whites in the cotton States; and this fact, not unknown to them, doubtless incites them to appear to the very best advantage among their "political compeers" of the Caucasian race, whose good-will they naturally and ardently seek. These sketches are truthful, and represent, first, early morning on the Ashley river; and second, taking vegetables by land to Charleston.
When the vegetables are taken to the market, or to the wharves at Charleston, they are readily disposed of to speculators. A small percentage only is purchased by the citizens, the rest being shipped in sloops, schooners, and steamers to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. Baltimore is considered the best market, as the "truck" is not there so stale or wilted as when taken to more distant marts. Possibly, one advantage which the present generation of the colored population of the South has over the white, rests in the fact, that the women are quite as strong and as devoted to labor as the men. Thirty or forty years hence, this may not be the case. The young negro girls of that day will doubtless be desirous of imitating their white sisters in all manners and fashions; and when they do, their husbands, brothers, and fathers, like those of the pale-faces of this era, will have all the work for their share of life's "toil and trouble"]. |
