'
This singular kind of coaching terminates at Fredericksburgh,
whence there is a railway to Richmond. The tract of country
through which it takes its course was once productive; but the soil
has been exhausted by the system of employing a great amount of
slave labour in forcing crops, without strengthening the land: and
it is now little better than a sandy desert overgrown with trees.
Dreary and uninteresting as its aspect is, I was glad to the heart
to find anything on which one of the curses of this horrible
institution has fallen; and had greater pleasure in contemplating
the withered ground, than the richest and most thriving cultivation
in the same place could possibly have afforded me.
In this district, as in all others where slavery sits brooding, (I
have frequently heard this admitted, even by those who are its
warmest advocates:) there is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which
is inseparable from the system. The barns and outhouses are
mouldering away; the sheds are patched and half roofless; the log
cabins (built in Virginia with external chimneys made of clay or
wood) are squalid in the last degree.
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