Sheltered and secure, it
became the place of refuge for families, wealth, and slaves.
Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.
The red-clay sub-soil already had begun to peer above the
loam. The harder the slaves were driven the more careless
and fatal was their farming. Then came the revolution of war
and Emancipation, the bewilderment of Reconstruction,--and
now, what is the Egypt of the Confederacy, and what mean-
ing has it for the nation's weal or woe?
It is a land of rapid contrasts and of curiously mingled hope
and pain. Here sits a pretty blue-eyed quadroon hiding her
bare feet; she was married only last week, and yonder in the
field is her dark young husband, hoeing to support her, at
thirty cents a day without board. Across the way is Gatesby,
brown and tall, lord of two thousand acres shrewdly won and
held. There is a store conducted by his black son, a black-
smith shop, and a ginnery. Five miles below here is a town
owned and controlled by one white New Englander. He owns
almost a Rhode Island county, with thousands of acres and
hundreds of black laborers. Their cabins look better than
most, and the farm, with machinery and fertilizers, is much
more business-like than any in the county, although the man-
ager drives hard bargains in wages.
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