hased were placed, and dragged home. These
articles almost universally consisted of some iron and steel, and a
little coffee and sugar, and sometimes a quarter of a pound of
tea--universally termed store-tea, to distinguish it from that made
from the root of the sassafras and the leaf of the cassia or
tepaun-bush.

Cotton was, to some little extent, cultivated near the seaboard in
Georgia and South Carolina, and cleaned of the seeds by a machine
similar to that used at the present day for preparing the sea-island
cotton for market. This was a tedious and troublesome method, and was
incapable of doing the work to any very great extent. Indigo, of a
superior quality to the American, was being produced in British India
and Central America, and the competition was reducing the price to the
cost of production. The same difficulty attended the growing of
tobacco. Virginia and Maryland, with their abundance of labor, were
competing, and cheapening the article to a price which made its
production unprofitable. At this juncture, Whitney invented the
cotton-gin, and the growth of cotton as a marketable crop commenced
upon a more extended scale. In a few years it became general--each
farmer growing more or less, according to his means. Some one man, most
able to do so, erected a gin-house, first in a county, then in each
neighborhood. These either purchased in the seed the cotton of their
neighbors, or ginned it and packed it for a certain amount of toll
taken from the cotton. This packing was done in round bales, and by a
single man, with a heavy iron bar, and was a most laborious and tedious
method; and the packages were in the most inconvenient form for
handling and transportation.

Up to this time the slave-trade had been looked upon most unfavorably
by the people of the South. Among the first sermons I remember to have
heard, was one depicting the horrors of this trade. I was by my
grandmother's side at Bethany, in Greene county, and, though a child, I
remember, as if of yesterday, the description of the manner of
capturing the African in his native wilds--how the mother and father
were murdered, and the boys and the girls borne away, and how England
was abused for the cruel inhumanity of the act. Although unused to the
melting mood, the old lady wiped from her eyes a tear, whether in
sorrow or sympathy for outraged humanity, or in compliment to the
pathos and power of her favorite preacher, I was too young to know or
have