The notes of Touchandgo
and Company, soft cash, are now the exclusive currency of all this
vicinity. This is the land, in which all men flourish; but there are
three classes of men who flourish especially, methodist preachers,
slave-drivers, and paper-money manufacturers; and as one of the latter,
I have just painted the word BANK, on a fine slab of maple, which was
green and growing when I arrived, and have discounted for the settlers,
in my own currency, sundry bills, which are to be paid when the proceeds
of the crop they have just sown shall return from New Orleans; so that
my notes are the representatives of vegetation that is to be, and I am
accordingly a capitalist of the first magnitude. The people here know
very well that I ran away from London; but the most of them have run
away from some place or other; and they have a great respect for me,
because they think I ran away with something worth taking, which few of
them had the luck or the wit to do. This gives them confidence in my
resources, at the same time that, as there is nothing portable in the
settlement except my own notes, they have no fear that I shall run away
with them.
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