The eastern part of Alabama resembles the western part of Georgia, which I have described. In the North, there are rugged lime stone ridges; below these, there is much rich and new land, until lately occupied by the Creek Indians, which is now being rapidly brought into civilization, mainly by emigrants from Carolina and Georgia, who purchase it in small parcels, and labor upon it with their own hands. In the central part of the State, the surface is undulating, and the soil of various character; the best is a dark brown clayey loam called “mulatto land;” there is also a light, gravelly loam, resting on clay, on which I noticed a great deal of cotton that was very small, not more than three feet high, but which was said to produce an extraordinary proportion of wool to the weed. A large amount of land here is, however, a very thin gray soil, over stiff red clay, and is rapidly exhausted under cultivation. Much of this has been worn out and moved away from.

Through all the southern part of the State, for from fifty to one hundred miles from the Gulf shore, the land is sandy, bearing pine, with live-oak and cypress, in the low grounds. The valleys of the rivers only have any agricultural importance; these are broad and very productive and profitable where they are tolerably secure from overflow, but they are very unhealthy, whites being subject to bilious fevers in Summer, and negroes and those who are acclimated, to fatal lung complaints in the Winter. There is a great extent of land of this kind yet to be brought into cultivation by leveeing the river banks. The climate is suitable to the sugar-cane, which is not yet cultivated, except for plantation use.

The valley of the Tennessee in the north is very fertile and better cultivated than any other part of the State. In the west, the soils are calcareous, and of every degree of fertility. On the river borders, there are large tracts of a very dark, unctuous, clayey soil, on which is produced the best “Mobile” cotton. It is called “black land.” “Cane-brake” soil is very similar.

Alabama is a young State, with very little exhausted land. Her ordinary crop of cotton is estimated to be over 500,000 bales, not less than $20,000,000 in value. New land is being constantly brought into cultivation, and the demand for negroes is very great—occasioning a constant importation from Virginia and Maryland. The first house I saw, on re-entering the State, had painted on its front, in large letters: “J. & W. McKee, Slave-Dealers;” and one of the curiosities to every Northerner visiting Montgomery—the capital of the State-is the parade of negroes, dressed up attractively (the smallest boys provided with the thickest heeled shoes and the tallest hats), which is made every day through the principal streets.

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The plantations are not generally large; I should think the greater number of planters owned from ten to twenty slaves only, though plantations on which from fifty to a hundred are employed are not uncommon; and on the rich alluvial soils of the southern part of the State, these are, perhaps, more common than any other. Many of the largest and most productive plantations are extremely unhealthy in Summer, and their owners seldom reside upon them except temporarily. Several of the larger towns in Alabama, remarkable in the midst of wilderness which surrounds them, for the neatness and tasteful character of many of the houses and gardens which they contain, are in a considerable degree made up of the residences of gentlemen who own large plantations in the hotter and less healthful part of the State; many of these have been educated in the older States, and with minds enlarged and liberalized by travel, they form, with their families, a society of high cultivation and of the most attractive social character.

Much the larger proportion of the planters of the State live in log-houses, some of them very neat and comfortable, but frequently rude in construction, un-chinked, with windows unglazed, and wanting in many of the commonest conveniences possessed by the poorest class of Northern farmers of the older States. This is not for want of means; at least, many living in this way will be surrounded by servants living in a cluster of cabins, only less comfortable than their own by being a little less in size.

The territorial Government of Alabama was established in 1816, and in 1818 she was admitted as a State into the Union. In 1820, her population was 126,000; in 1850, it had increased to 772,000; the increase of the previous ten years having been 30 per cent. (that of South Carolina was 5 per cent.; of Georgia, 31; Mississippi, 60; Michigan, 87; Wisconsin, 890.) A large part of Alabama has yet a strikingly frontier character. Even from the State-house in the fine and promising young city of Montgomery, the eye falls in every direction upon a dense forest, boundless as the sea, and producing the some solemn sensation of reverence for infinitude. You find towns on the map, and hear them frequently referred to as important points in the stages of your journey, which you are surprised and amused to find, when you reach them consist, perhaps, of not more than three or four cabins, a tavern or grocery, a blacksmith’s shop and a stable. A stranger once meeting a coach that I was on, asked the driver whether it would be prudent for him to pass through one of these towns that we had just come from; he had heard that there were more than fifty cases of small pox in the town. “Thar ain’t fifty people in the town, nor within ten miles on’t it,” answered the driver.

The best of the country roads are but little better than open passages for strong vehicles through the woods, made by cutting away the trees, being scarcely “worked” at all. There was, nevertheless, when I was in them, a great deal of travel of heavy wagons, loaded either with the household goods of emigrants, or carrying cotton from the plantation to market;— from two to six bales making a load, which would be drawn by as many mules or horses, or [207] pairs of cattle, as there were bales. At night, the roads were lined at frequent intervals with the camp-fires of the teamsters. There were often three or four wagons proceeding in company, driven by negroes, with their owner on horseback.

I once turned off one of these main-roads to visit a plantation, about half a mile from it. I found my way to it with some difficulty, following an obscure track, which ran very circuitously among the trees, up hill and down, and sometimes in the bed of a stream. In returning, a negro was sent to put me upon a shorter path; soon after he left me, I lost it altogether, and wandered about, giving my horse leave to choose his way, for hours, without coming in sight of a fence or clearing or cabin, till at last I came out on the main road again, four miles from the place I had intended to; and this was within a mile of a town of several thousand inhabitants.

The people, too, have a remarkably frontier character; almost every man you meet talks of “when he first came to Alabama.” They generally commence a conversation with a stranger by asking him to “drink” with them. There is a rudeness, and a heartiness, and a truthfulness, and a working-out of characteristic individual purposes, whether disagreeable or gratifying to the tastes of others, a disuse of ordinary conveniences, and an ignorance and neglect of ordinary mannerisms and conventionalities of older communities, in the majority of the people you accidentally fall in with, which indicates that they have lived much in solitude, and have been accustomed to consider very little what other people thought of them. They are inclined to social experiments-“fights,” gambling, camp-meetings, &c.; their knowledge and their curiosity is practical and material, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you overhear a conversation, you will find the subject of it closely connected with cotton, or the advantages offered to emigrants in this or that region.

There is evidently, with all the individual independence, a certain homogeneousness of character, distinguishing the manners and habits of the people and the state of society from any that I had before observed. It was impossible to classify people as one does elsewhere, by their dress, their tastes, their manners, or their expenditures. These were incomprehensibly united in the same man—the self-possessed, generous and commanding gentleman, the coarse and uncivilized boor, and the reckless ruffian; alternately offending taste, affording amusement, and commanding respect. Evidently, here was a new phase and style of civilization, peculiar to Anglo-Saxon development in the Southwest.

Most of these people had been born in the eastern Southern States—Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Some had moved forward from exhausted plantations in those States, to retrieve or better their fortunes on new lands; many, I am told, had been overseers until they had been able to purchase a few negroes for themselves, and on new, cheap, and productive land to plant for themselves. It is their first thought to buy land to the best advantage for [208] growing cotton upon, without regard to neighbors or surroundings, then to make the most cotton possible, whereby to pay the interest of the debts they have incurred, or to increase their force. For the present they will make shift to live without comfort; they roll the logs into cabins, wherever and in such shape as is easiest. Everything is done roughly, and in [a] make-shift way. Comforts they have been accustomed to are dispensed with until they are forgotten, and they have learned to do as well without them. Hoping everything of luck, they are always short-handed for the work they undertake; they must take hold themselves with the negroes. There’s no time to cook two dinners—the same pot boils for white and black; they are forced into companionship until their numbers increase by birth and purchase, so that new quarters for them, and more system and division of labor is necessarily arrived at. But before this, habits are formed that are never to be lost—old habits are lost, never to be regained.

Such men have had no time to loiter away, and they have lost all taste for mild recreations, or for sober, quiet, and contemplative employment of the mind. Their amusements must be exciting, their festivities are exhaustive, as if they were trials of muscular agility and wind and bottom; if they engage in politics, it is as if they were in a battle. Religion, too, is a matter of excitement—of spasms and experiences—of fights with Apollyon and wrestling with Jehovah—of maddening despair, and of ecstatic hope and triumph. Until their heart is engaged for the higher life, they are careless and reckless. They may be scoffers, but they are seldom sceptics. So, too, their whole organization has become strong and tough; their appetites require something coarse and harsh to satisfy them; they like not delicate meats and wheaten bread, or succulent vegetables;—they are satisfied with no repast in which smoked and salted bacon, and hard corn-dodgers and bitter coffee, or fiery whiskey, have not played important parts.

One thing more I must not omit, in speaking of the character and manners of this class. I never met with any unkindness or uncivility from them, or among them. Roughness of manner, and something of surliness, was not uncommon ; but rudeness I never witnessed. They are a vastly higher type of mankind than what we call “rowdies”—a too-numerous class at the North. I believe that they are generally kind masters, and that their slaves seldom are deprived of privileges or comforts of which they are capable of rightly appreciating the value. Their greatest wants are unknown to themselves.

Notwithstanding the youth of the State, there is a constant and extensive emigration from it, as well as immigration to it. The profits of planting are in a considerable degree dependent upon the extent of the force engaged, expenditures not increasing in the ratio of numbers of slave property. Large planters, as their stock increases, are always anxious to enlarge the area of their land, and will often pay a high price for that of any poor neighbor, who, embarrassed by debt, can be tempted to move on to cheaper and more productive new land. The tendency in Alabama, and all the Eastern and Southern [209] States, is the enlargement of plantations. The small farmers are constantly going ahead. Western Texas is their promised land. Of course, the emigration is not wholly confined to this class. The owners of large plantations that have been “worn out,” particularly from the thin-soiled hill districts, often emigrate, carrying with them large bodies of slaves.

There are large and rich deposits of coal and iron within the State, which, lying as they do on navigable streams and in a limestone district, if manufacturing and a dense population should ever create a home demand, would be worked with great cheapness and profit.

The State is remarkably well supplied by rivers, with the means of a sufficiently convenient and cheap means of transportation of cotton to the sea, during the usual season of its shipment. In Summer these streams are navigable by only a very small class of steamboats, and that with difficulty and danger. Freights at this season are often very high, and traveling very slow and expensive. There are but a few railroads within the State, and the great Northern and Southern Mail, regularity in the arrival of which is of more importance to commerce than that of any other in the country, is carried through Alabama in stage-coaches, which subjects it to most vexatious delays—no mail from New-York often reaching Mobile and New-Orleans for three or four days in succession. The Mobile and Cincinnati Railroad, now building, is a very important line, and will doubtless, be of the greatest service to Mobile and the western part of the State.