und it they used a rude pestle and mortar, or placed it
in the hollow of one stone and beat it with another. Beef or pork,
generally salted, salt fish, dried apples, bread made of rye or Indian
meal, milk, and a very limited variety of vegetables, constituted the
food throughout the year. When night came on his light was derived
from a few candles of home manufacture. The farmer and his family wore
homespun. If linen was wanted, the flax was sown and weeded, pulled
and retted, then broken and swingled, for all of which processes
nearly a year was required before the flax was ready for the spinners,
bleaching on the grass, and making and wearing. If woolens were
wanted, sheep were sheared and the wool was dyed and spun and woven at
home.

It was almost invariably true of all the settlers that the use and
value of manures was little regarded. The barn was sometimes removed
to get it out of the way of heaps of manure, because the owner would
not go to the expense of removing the accumulations and putting them
upon his fields. Such were the dreary conditions of the farmer's life
in colonial days, living all the time very closely upon the margin of
subsistence. Those conditions continued for some time after the
Republic had been established, and were not measurably ameliorated
until the present century had well advanced, until an improved
intelligence--the dissemination of information, and the work of the
inventor, had begun to take effect.

From the above we see how strikingly similar were the life, methods of
agriculture, and the results obtained from the sturdy New Englander,
who represented the best blood, bone and sinew of the old world, with
its almost prehistoric civilization, to that of the American Negro,
whose intellectual star is just beginning to rise above the horizon.
Over two centuries and a half ago the Negro found his way as a slave
to America, in a little Dutch trading vessel, cheap labor being the
chief motive which prompted such a gigantic scheme. The experiment
flourished and grew, and at about the close of the eighteenth century
six million slaves had been brought to this country. The major part of
all the cotton, corn, cane, potatoes, tobacco, and other agricultural
products, were planted, cultivated, harvested and prepared for, and,
not infrequently, marketed by, the slaves. In fact, they were the
agricultural backbone of the South. Since cotton forms the largest,
and has been the most important agr