. Their clothes hang about them in filthy tatters, and the
combined squalor and fierceness of their appearance is really frightful.

This population is the direct growth of slavery. The planters are loud in
their execrations of these miserable vagabonds; yet they do not see that,
so long as labour is considered the disgraceful portion of slaves, these
free men will hold it nobler to starve or steal than till the earth with
none but the despised blacks for fellow-labourers. The blacks
themselves--such is the infinite power of custom--acquiesce in this
notion, and, as I have told you, consider it the lowest degradation in a
white to use any exertion. I wonder, considering the burthens they have
seen me lift, the digging, the planting, the rowing, and the walking I do,
that they do not utterly contemn me, and indeed they seem lost in
amazement at it.

Talking of these pine-landers--gypsies, without any of the romantic
associations that belong to the latter people--led us to the origin of
such a population, slavery; and you may be sure I listened with infinite
interest to the opinions of a man of uncommon shrewdness and sagacity, who
was born in the very bosom of it, and has passed his whole life among
slaves. If any one is competent to judge of its effects, such a man is
the one; and this was his verdict, 'I hate slavery with all my heart; I
consider it an absolute curse wherever it exists. It will keep those
states where it does exist fifty years behind the others in improvement
and prosperity.' Further on in the conversation, he made this most
remarkable observation, 'As for its being an irremediable evil--a thing
not to be helped or got rid of--that's all nonsense; for as soon as people
become convinced that it is their interest to get rid of it, they will
soon find the means to do so, depend upon it.' And undoubtedly this is
true. This is not an age, nor yours a country, where a large mass of
people will long endure what they perceive to be injurious to their
fortunes and advancement. Blind as people often are to their highest and
truest interests, your country folk have generally shown remarkable
acuteness in finding out where their worldly progress suffered let or
hindrance, and have removed it with laudable alacrity. Now, the fact is
not at all as we at the north are sometimes told, that the southern
slaveholders deprecate the evils of slavery quite as much as we do; that
they see all its miseries; that, moreover, t