The undoing of the old relations between the two races, and the conferring of political privileges upon him who was formerly the inferior, has been the ruin of certain sections of these fertile lowlands. Neither race seems likely to resume operations on anything like the old scale of grandeur. The Sea Island cotton crop, once a source of such wealth, is small now, yet the negroes, with industry, might raise immense crops. In 1870, Beaufort county, with one hundred and fifty thousand acres of improved land, sent to market but a little over seven thousand bales; it has done somewhat better of late. The culture

has met with some disasters; caterpillars and foul weather have interfered. The negroes usually plant a little Sea Island cotton, no matter how small may be their farms. The northern capitalists who have undertaken this difficult, but once very profitable, culture have, as a rule, sunk the better portion of their invested capital; and the native planters have gradually taken to planting a less number of acres yearly. During the three years preceding the war, South Carolina sent to market 54,904 bales of Sea Island cotton; but in the three years ending September 1st, 1873, only 23,307 bales were sent out. The control of prices abroad has also been lost to the Sea Island planter in South Carolina, as, in the days of slavery, he carelessly sold the finer seeds to any one from other countries who wished to buy, and now encounters formidable foreign rivalry in Egypt, the Sandwich Islands, and in South America, as well as in our own Gulf States. If a planter of the days when the royal colony of South Carolina was in the height of its glory, could return now, and wander through the streets of moss-grown Beaufort, he would be amazed, but no more so

CARRYING SHEAVES.

WINNOWING RICE.

than would the planter of 1850 or 1860, if he, too, might return. For it would be found that in a decade and a half, one of the most remarkable revolutions ever recorded in history, has occurred. A wealthy and highly prosperous community has been reduced to beggary; its vassals have become its lords, and dispose of the present, and pledge the future, resources of the State. In ten years the total valuation of the commonwealth has been reduced from nearly five hundred millions to barely one hundred and fifty millions at the present time; the banking capital of Charleston from thirteen to three millions; the insurance capital entirely destroyed. The taxes have been increased from $392,000 in 1860 to $2,000,000 in 1870; slaves valued at $174,000,000 have been freed, and set to learn the arts of self-government and civilization. More than four hundred thousand blacks now inhabit the State, and their number is constantly increasing. Thousands of planters have been so utterly ruined that they can never hope even to attain comfortable circumstances again. There are numberless instances of this pointed out to me at Beaufort.

Opposite an elegant mansion on one of the main streets is a small, unambitious structure, in which the former occupant of the grand mansion is selling goods at retail. He returned after the capture of Beaufort to find himself stripped of everything, and has been living in view of his former splendor ever since. His fields are held by strangers; his house is converted into offices. In a day, as it were, he and thousands of others were reduced to complete dependence, and compelled to live under the government of the ignorant slaves, whose labor they had grown rich upon.

The lowlands of South Carolina are the most interesting portions of the State, in a commercial and picturesque point of view,

are perfectly happy when they succeed in obtaining an acre or two of land, and in erecting a cabin. To own a

and there the political outlook is also most depressing. The masses of the freedmen of both sexes on the Sea Islands and in the seaboard counties are very ignorant, and are vastly inferior, in natural intelligence and ability, to the negro of the upper and middle sections of the same State, or to the type met with throughout Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee and Kentucky. The lowland negro of South Carolina has a barbarous dialect, which no external influences have as yet impressed in the slightest degree; the English words seem to tumble all at once from his mouth, and to get sadly mixed whenever he endeavors to speak. The phraseology is usually so odd, too, that even after the stranger has become a little accustomed to the thick tones of the voice and the awkward enunciation, he cannot readily understand. Certainly, a Virginian negro from the town could not comprehend these low-country people at all, until his ear had become habituated to the apparent mumbling. The children of the planters, brought up on the plantations, and allowed to run in the woods with the little negroes, acquired the same dialect; and to-day many a gentleman's son regrets that it is apparent in his speech. These negroes also have their peculiar religious superstitions and ceremonies. I repeatedly asked planters in Beaufort and Charleston counties if the negroes there had changed much in manners and habits since their slave days, and the invariable answer was "No!" They have learned to understand that the vote gives power; they find work in large bands together on the rice plantations distasteful to them, and they

WLS

A QUEER CAVALIER.

NEGRO FISHERMAN.

mule is the acme of bliss. The men and women still maintain their oldtime servility toward their former masters. When they meet them on the roads the men always touch their hats, and the women, no matter how huge the basket they may happen to be carrying upon their heads, courtesy profoundly. The word "mas'r" is still used, being so intimately associated in the negro's mind with certain in. dividuals, that he has no inclination to drop it. The friendliest exterior relations are maintained between ex-master and exslave, as a rule; and the white conservatives sometimes bitterly regret that they did not come boldly forward, at the outset of reconstruction, and themselves guide the negro votes. There would, at one time, have been a fair chance for such a fusion; but the races soon drifted into separate political currents, and the negro appeared in his present rôle of corrupt and ignorant legislator. At present, the whites cannot get a hearing in the legislature, and are subject to many tyrannies at the hands of negro justices and constables.

There are honorable exceptions to all the general criticisms which may be made upon the character of the lowland negro; but as a mass, the race is really very degraded. It is making gradual progress toward a condition of independence; yet ignorance and irresponsibility are still dense. The marriage relation is almost unknown in many of the lowland counties; men and women live together so long as they can agree, and are called husband and wife. Passing through a rice field one morning, in which there were, perhaps, four hundred black men and women at work, I requested the owner of the plantation, whom I accompanied, to ask four men, who were sitting by a rice stack,

awaiting a barge, some leading questions. calculated to throw light on their morality. Each of the four had had two "wives," as they termed it; one of the elder ones had had four. The causes of separation were various infidelity, abuse, a hasty word, or laziness. The children who were the fruit of these careless unions were kept by either father or mother, as the couple might agree. Jealousy is a terrible passion among these people, and sometimes leads to capital crime. All, without exception, are religious; they find a temporary relief and an excitement in the "meetings," and will go to one, no matter, how distant it may be. Most of the men are armed; they manage to secure a pistol or a gun, and are as fond of hunting as their white employers. The situation of those gentlemen who had been slaveholders and large planters before the war, was dreadful for a year or two after the fall of the Confederacy. The freedmen were difficult to manage, could not be got to work, and were jealous of anything which seemed like an attempt to get them back to their old places. The intervention of soldiery was constantly necessary to keep the peace.

The low-country planter lived in what was really princely style, as a rule. though some few were ignorant, and cherished the belief that there was nothing else in the country so fine as their forests and swamps, most were courteous, unaffected and devoid of pretension. They resided with their families at their countryseats, on the plantations, during the winter months, and in the summer, removed to pleasant mansions along the Ashley River or on Sullivan's Island, near Charleston. The Heywards, the Manigaults, the Lowndes, the Middletons, the Hugers, the Barnwells, the Elliotts, the Rhetts, went annually to Charleston, where there was choice and polished society. To-day, the majority of those who were at all engaged in planting at the outbreak of the war, are pitiably poor; and just at the close of the war, the spectacle of men who had owned two hundred or five hundred slaves, reduced to drivnig a cart, or tending a grocery, was quite common. The enforced poverty of many is even bitterer now than it was then, for they are compelled to see, day by day, the poor State, which has already been so impoverished, plundered anew and embarrassed further by the action of the ignorant and vicious legislators.

Many of the lowland negroes were firmly impressed, when they were first called upon to use the ballot, that they were to gain some property by it, and great numbers of them still have an idea that they have been in some manner defrauded of what they were entitled to. They have also been told by so many legislators of their own race that all the property, once their masters', now properly belonged to them, that they have taken literally to believing it, in many cases, while, in others, they consider the whole thing a muddle entirely beyond their comprehension. This assertion that the negroes ought to take the planters' lands, has been often made by white politicians, who gained control of the negro at the time that the white natives refused to take any part in the elections, in the re-organization of the State. The whole theory of taxation in the commonwealth, as evolved by Nash and others of the few colored men of talent in the legislature, is summed up in these words, from the present Governor's last message: "The taxes fall chiefly where they belong-upon real estate. The owner cannot afford to keep thousands of acres idle and unproductive, merely to gratify his personal vanity, and because he inherited them from his father. Stern necessity, therefore, will compel him to cut up his ancestral possessions into small farms, and sell them to those who can and will make them productive; and thus the masses of the people will become property-holders."

Swart Demos in the legislative chair, with artful rogues around him, remembers only that the tax was not raised from land, but upon the slaves, previous to 1860; and when he thinks of it, very likely his blood is hot, and he willingly applies a slashing tax to the land-owners. he says, "your cotton acres, worth hundreds of dollars, were only taxed four cents an acre, but on four hundred thousand wretches, such as I, you placed a tax of 60 cents per head, and made us work it out,

MULE-BOOTS.

In the old days,"

thus getting nearly half a million of revenue. Now we will make you work out your tax, and we will wrest your lands away from you." And so bitterness is needlessly provoked on both sides, and

there is a veritable war of races. It is not taxation, nor even an increase of taxation, that the people of South Carolina object to; but it is taxation without representation, and unjust, tyrannical, arbitrary, overwhelming taxation, producing revenues which never get any further than the already bursting pockets of. knaves and dupes!

Rice culture has been

South

the prominent Carolinian industry since the time of the Landgrave Thomas Smith, under the

proprietary government. With the determination of the planters to make it the chief object of their care, came the necessity for importing great numbers of slaves, and the sacrifice of many hundreds of lives, in the arduous labors of clearing the ground and preparing the soil. The cypress forests gave place to the fields of waving green, and the rivers were diverted from their channels to flood the vast expanses in which the negroes had set the seeds.

In 1724, four hundred and thirty-nine African slaves were imported to South Carolina, together with a vast amount of other commodities, in exchange for which the citizens gave eighteen thousand barrels of rice and fifty-two thousand barrels of naval stores. Year by year the importations of negroes increased in numbers; year by year the planter became "more eager in the pursuit of large possessions of land," and "strenuously vied with his neighbor," says a chronicler, " for a superiority of fortune." The Carolinians were compelled to keep up fortifications on the borders of the Spanish domains, to prevent the negroes from escaping into foreign territory; but they had few other external cares. Their trade grew constantly with New England, New York and Pennsylvania; and in 1738, when there were fully forty thousand negroes in South Carolina, Spanish policy provoked a formidable insurrection on the part of the blacks. This brought on open hostilities between Spaniards and Carolinians, and the latter made unsuccessful expedition against St. Augustine."

an

An account of this singular expedition will be found in the forthcoming article on Florida.

CALHOUN'S GRAVE-CHARLESTON.

It should be borne in mind that the following statistics, showing how rapidly the exportation of rice increased in quantity, also shows how swiftly the slave population of the province grew. From 1720 to 1729, the export was 44,081 tons; from 1730 to 1740, it was 99,905 tons; and in the single year of 1740, ninety thousand barrels were sent away, the gain upon which was estimated at two hundred and twenty thousand pounds. In 1771, the exports of the State amounted to £756,000 sterling. Shipping crowded the harbors; money was plenty; the planters commanded the best of everything from Great Britain and the West India Islands. There were at that period no taxes whatever upon real or personal estate; but the revenues were raised by duties on "spirituous liquors, sugar, molasses, flour, biscuit, negro slaves, etc.," and amounted to several thousand pounds per annum.

And so, for many generations, the rice culture and the slave system went hand in hand upon the fertile Carolina lowlands. Good authorities have assured me that they believe there were a million acres of rice lands in cultivation in South Carolina at the outbreak of the civil war. At the present time there is hardly one-fourth of that area cultivated, but there is a steady increase. The blows struck by immediate emancipation upon this once gigantic industry were crushing. Under the slave régime, the planters successfully competed with other producers in all the markets of the world. From 1850 to 1860, they exported 705,317,600 pounds of rice, valued at $24,619,009. The total production of rice in the United States in 1850 was 215,313,497 pounds; in