ere is the Swamp, to the west, where the Chickasawhatchee flows
sullenly southward. The shadow of an old plantation lies at its edge,
forlorn and dark. Then comes the pool; pendent gray moss and brackish
waters appear, and forests filled with wildfowl. In one place the wood
is on fire, smouldering in dull red anger; but nobody minds. Then the
swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built by chained Negro convicts,
dips down into it, and forms a way walled and almost covered in living
green. Spreading trees spring from a prodigal luxuriance of
undergrowth; great dark green shadows fade into the black background,
until all is one mass of tangled semi-tropical foliage, marvellous in
its weird savage splendor. Once we crossed a black silent stream,
where the sad trees and writhing creepers, all glinting fiery yellow
and green, seemed like some vast cathedral,--some green Milan builded
of wildwood. And as I crossed, I seemed to see again that fierce
tragedy of seventy years ago. Osceola, the Indian-Negro chieftain, had
risen in the swamps of Florida, vowing vengeance. His war-cry reached
the red Creeks of Dougherty, and their war-cry rang from the
Chattahoochee to the sea. Men and women and children fled and fell
before them as they swept into Dougherty. In yonder shadows a dark and
hideously painted warrior glided stealthily on,--another and another,
until three hundred had crept into the treacherous swamp. Then the
false slime closing about them called the white men from the east.
Waist-deep, they fought beneath the tall trees, until the war-cry was
hushed and the Indians glided back into the west. Small wonder the
wood is red.

Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank of chained feet
marching from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia was heard in these rich
swamp lands. Day after day the songs of the callous, the wail of the
motherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched echoed from the
Flint to the Chickasawhatchee, until by 1860 there had risen in West
Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew.
A hundred and fifty barons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand
Negroes, held sway over farms with ninety thousand acres tilled land,
valued even in times of cheap soil at three millions of dollars.
Twenty thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearly to England, New and
Old; and men that came there bankrupt made money and grew rich. In a
single decade the cotton output i