Why should he
strive? Every year finds him deeper in debt. How strange that
Georgia, the world-heralded refuge of poor debtors, should
bind her own to sloth and misfortune as ruthlessly as ever
England did! The poor land groans with its birth-pains, and
brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to the acre,
where fifty years ago it yielded eight times as much. Of his
meagre yield the tenant pays from a quarter to a third in rent,
and most of the rest in interest on food and supplies bought
on credit. Twenty years yonder sunken-cheeked, old black
man has labored under that system, and now, turned day-
laborer, is supporting his wife and boarding himself on his
wages of a dollar and a half a week, received only part of the
year.
The Bolton convict farm formerly included the neighboring
plantation. Here it was that the convicts were lodged in the
great log prison still standing. A dismal place it still remains,
with rows of ugly huts filled with surly ignorant tenants.
"What rent do you pay here?" I inquired. "I don't know,
--what is it, Sam?" "All we make," answered Sam. It is a
depressing place,--bare, unshaded, with no charm of past
association, only a memory of forced human toil,--now,
then, and before the war.
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