there had been a bloody fight with the Choctaws and Chickasaws, and I was told how many Indians had been slaughtered there, and how the present clerk of the Circuit Court was the last survivor of those who had won the battle. The memory of General Jackson is quite idolized here. It was enough for him to give public notice as he passed, that he should have great pleasure in meeting his friends at a given point on a given day, and there was sure to be a muster of several hundred settlers, armed with rifles, and prepared for a fight with 5000 or 7000 Indians."-vol. ii. p. 65.

This cause of General Jackson's popularity is quite new to us. Macon is now a considerable town.

"I often rejoiced, in this excursion, that we had brought no servants with us from England, so strong is the prejudice here against what they term a white body-servant. Besides, it would be unreasonable to expect any one, who is not riding his own hobby, to rough it in the backwoods. In many houses I hesitated to ask for water or towels for fear of giving offense, although the yeoman with whom I lodged for the night allowed me to pay a moderate charge for my accommodation. Nor could I venture to beg any one to rub a thick coat of mud off my boots or trowsers, lest I should be thought to reflect on the members of the family, who had no idea of indulging in such refinements themselves. I could have dispensed cheerfully with milk, butter, and other such luxuries; but I felt much the want of a private bedroom. Very soon, however, I came to regard it as no small privilege to be allowed to have even a bed to myself. On one occasion, when my host had humored my whims so far in regard to privacy, I felt almost ashamed to see, in consequence, a similar sized bed in the same room, occupied by my companion and two others. When I related these inconveniences afterwards to an Episcopal clergyman, he told me that the bishop and some of his clergy, when they travel through these woods in summer, and the lawyers, when on the circuit or canvassing for votes at elections, have, in addition to these privations, to endure the bites of countless musquitoes, fleas, and bugs, so that I had great reason to congratulate myself that it was now so cold. Moreover, there are parties of emigrants in some of these woods, where women delicately brought up, accustomed to be waited on, and with infants at the breast, may now be seen on their way to Texas, camping out, although the ground within their tent is often soaked with heavy rain. If you were here in the hot season,' said another, the exuberant growth of the creepers and briars would render many paths in the woods, through which you now pass freely, impracticable, and venomous snakes would make the forest dangerous.'"-vol. ii. p. 72.

And yet even here science finds more than liberal hospitality; it has its ardent votaries :

"The different stages of civilization to which families have attained, who live here on terms of the strictest equality, is often amusing to a stranger, but must be intolerable to some of those settlers who have been driven by their losses from the more advanced districts of Virginia and South Carolina, having to begin the world again. Sometimes, in the morning, my host would be of the humblest class of 'crackers,' or some low, illiterate German or Irish emigrants, the wife sitting with a pipe in her mouth, doing no work and reading no books. In the evening, I came to a neighbor whose library was well stored with works of French and English authors, and whose first question to me was, Pray tell me, who do you really think is the author of the Vestiges of Creation?' If it is difficult in Europe, in the country far from towns, to select society on a principle of congeniality of taste and feeling, the reader may conceive what must be the control of geographical circumstances here, exaggerated by ultra-democratic notions of equality and the pride of race.

Nevertheless, these regions will probably bear no unfavorable comparison with such part of our colonies, in Canada, the Cape, or Australia, as have been settled for an equally short term of years, and I am bound to say that I passed my time agreeably and profitably in Alabama, for every one, as I have usually found in newly peopled districts, was hospitable and obliging to a stranger. Instead of the ignorant wonder, very commonly expressed in out-of-the-way districts of England, France, or Italy, at travellers who devote money and time to a search for fossil bones and shells, each planter seemed to vie with another in his anxiety to give me information in regard to the precise spots where organic remains had been discovered." Many were curious to learn my opinion as to the kind of animal to which the huge vertebræ, against which their ploughs sometimes strike, may have belonged. The magnitude, indeed, and solidity of these relics of the colossal zeuglodon are such as might well excite the astonishment of the most indifferent. Dr. Buckley informed me that on the estate of Judge Creagh, which I visited, he had assisted in digging out one skeleton, where the vertebral column, almost unbroken, extended to the length of seventy feet, and Dr. Emmons afterwards showed me the greater part of this skeleton in the Museum of Albany, New York. On the same plantation, part of another back-bone, fifty feet long, was dug up, and a third was met with at no great distance. Before I left Alabama, I had obtained evidence of so many localities of similar fossils, chiefly between Macon and Clarkesville, a distance of ten miles, that I concluded they must have belonged to at least forty distinct individuals."-vol. ii. p. 74.

the midst of the Slave States. Throughout Our philosopher is here in the south, in the Union, and here more especially, his object is to inform himself upon this vital question-the state of slavery, the condition and prospects of the slaves, the hope, the possi

bility of an early and a peaceful adjustment of this awful feud of races. There is throughout a quiet dispassionateness, which gives great weight to his opinions. He has manifestly in his heart the true English, Christian abhorrence of slavery; yet neither, on the one hand, does he close his eyes to the fact that the actual slavery of the present time-in many parts of the country at least-has its compensations in the ease, comfort, plenty of food, good lodging, secure provision for old age, as compared with the condition of the laboring classes in most parts of the Old World; nor is he blind to the difficulties and perils, perils appallingly serious to the colored race, which would make rapid or inconsiderate emancipation a curse rather than a blessing. No more, on the other hand, does he disguise or mitigate the inherent evils of the system; the barbarous laws which in Georgia prohibit the education of the negroes; the barbarous jealousy which prevents their employment when free as workmen and mechanics; the more barbarous, it should seem indelible antipathy, which will not allow social intercourse, still less the connection of marriage, with one in whom there can possibly be suspected one drop of black blood. Sir Charles Lyell is disposed to take a favorable view of the capacity of the black, still more of the colored race, for moral and intellectual cultivation. We do not doubt this conclusion up to a certain point, (beyond this, evidence is wanting ;) and below this point it is criminal and unchristian to attempt to keep down this race of God's creatures, of our brethren in Christ. In Virginia the question first presents itself in a practical form; at Richmond, in that province, the rector and proprietors of a handsome new church have set apart a side gallery for people of color. "This resolution had been taken in order that they and their servants might unite in the worship of the same God, as they hoped to enter hereafter together into his everlasting kingdom if they obeyed his laws." (p.275.) In this church there were few negroes; but the galleries of the Methodist and Baptist churches are crowded with them. The mixed races, it is allowed, are more intelligent and more agreeable as domestic servants; whether from physical causes, or intercourse with the whites, is still matter of controversy:

"Several Virginian planters have spoken to me of the negro race as naturally warm-hearted, patient, and cheerful, grateful for benefits, and forgiving of injuries. They are also of a reli

gious temperament, bordering on superstition. Even those who think they ought forever to releads one to the belief that steps ought long ago main in servitude give them a character which to have been taken towards their gradual emancipation. Had some legislative provision been made with this view before the annexation of Texas, a period being fixed after which all the children born in this State should be free, that new territory would have afforded a useful outlet for the black population of Virginia, and whites now filled up by the breeding of negroes. In the would have supplied the vacancies which are absence of such enactments, Texas prolongs the duration of negro slavery in Virginia, aggravating one of its worst consequences, the internal slave-trade, and keeping up the price of negroes at home. They are now selling for 500, 750, and 1000 dollars each, according to their qualifiwhose business it is to collect slaves for the cations. There are always dealers at Richmond, southern market, and, until a gang is ready to start for the south, they are kept here well fed, and as cheerful as possible. In a court of the gaol, where they are lodged, I see them every day amusing themselves by playing at quoits. How much this traffic is abhorred, even by those who held by the dealer, even when he has made a encourage it, is shown by the low social position large fortune. When they conduct gangs of fifty slaves at a time across the mountains to the Ohio river, they usually manacle some of the men, but on reaching the Ohio they have no longer any fear of their attempting an escape, and they then unshackle them. That the condition of slaves in Virginia is steadily improving, all here seem agreed."-vol. i. p. 277.

There is great repugnance to the separation of families; and some persons have been known to make great sacrifices in order to do their duty by their dependants, whom they might profitably have thrown on the world; in other words, sent to market.

At Hopeton, further south, in Georgia, Sir Charles Lyell had an opportunity of examining the actual working of the system as he admits, on a well-regulated estate. There seems to be much mutual attachment between the master and the slave. Of 500 blacks on the property, some are old, superannuated, live at their ease in separate houses, in the society of neighbors and kinsfolk. There is no restraint, rather every encouragement to marriage. The out-door laborers have separate houses, as neat as the greater part of the cottages in Scotland"--no flattering compliment, observes our author, himself a Scot; their hours of labor are from six in the morning, with an interval of an hour, till two or three. In summer they divide their work, and take a cool siesta in the middle of the day. In the evening they make merry, chat, pray, and

sing psalms. There is a hospital. To counterbalance all this there is the overseer and his whip, not a heavy one, and rarely used --but still there is a whip; though the number of stripes is generally limited, its terrors seems to have great effect:

"The most severe punishment required in the last forty years for a body of 500 negroes at Hopeton, was for the theft of one negro from another. In that period there has been no criminal act of the highest grade, for which a delinquent could be committed to the penitentiary in Georgia, and there have been only six cases of assault and battery. As a race, the negroes are mild and forgiving, and by no means so prone to indulge in drinking as the white man or the Indian. There were more serious quarrels and more broken heads among the Irish in a few years, when they came to dig the Brunswick canal, than had been known among the negroes in all the surrounding plantations for half a century. The murder of a husband by a black woman, whom he had beat violently, is the greatest crime remembered in this part of Georgia for a great length of time." -vol. i. p. 258.

The Baptist and Methodist missionaries were for some time the most active in evangelizing the negroes. Since Dr. Elliott has been bishop of Georgia, the Episcopalians have labored with much zeal and success. The negroes have no faith in the efficacy of baptism, except with a complete washing away of sin; the bishop has wisely adopted

the rubric which allows immersion :

"It may be true that the poor negroes cherish a superstitious belief that the washing out of every taint of sin depends mainly on the particular manner of performing the rite, and the principal charm to the black women in the ceremony of total immersion, consists in decking themselves out in white robes like brides and having their shoes trimmed with silver. They well know that the waters of the Altamaha are chilly, and that they and the officiating minister run no small risk of catching cold, but to this penance they most cheerfully submit."--vol. i. p. 363.

Sir Charles Lyell attended at Savannah, first a black Baptist church with a black preacher, and then a black Methodist church with a white preacher. The black preacher delivered an extempore sermon, for the most part in good English, with only a few phrases in "talkee-talkee," to come more home to his audience:

"He got very successfully through one flight about the gloom of the valley of the shadow of death, and, speaking of the probationary state of a pious man left for a while to his own guidance, and when in danger of failing saved by the grace of God, he compared it to an eagle teaching her newly-fledged offspring to fly by carrying it up high into the air, then dropping it, and, if she sees

it falling to the earth, darting with the speed of lightning to save it before it reaches the ground. Whether any eagles really teach their young to decide; but when described in animated and picfly in this manner, I leave the ornithologists to turesque language, yet by no means inflated, the imagery was well calculated to keep the attenHe also inculcated tion of his hearers awake. some good practical maxims of morality, and told them they were to look to a future state of rewards and punishments in which God would deal impartially with the poor and the rich, the black man and the white.' "-vol. ii. p. 3.

In neither of these churches did that odor,

which is said to keep the two races apart, at all offend the sense. At another black Methodist church at Louisville, in Kentucky, built by subscription by the blacks themselves, and well lighted with gas, he heard another dark divine, (we regret to say that Sir Charles compares him with a white Puseyite Episcopalian, not much to the advantage of the latter.) This preacher was a full black, spoke good English, and quoted Scripture well. He laid down, it is true, metaphysical points of doctrine with a confidence which seemed to increase in proportion as the subjects transcended human understanding; but in this we discern the sect Our black Chrysosrather than the color. tom received signs of assent-not the riotous clapping of hands which applauded him of Constantinople, nor the sighs and groans, so well known in other places, like those which are heard above the torrent's brawl on the hillsides in Wales. It was said of a celebrated metropolitan preacher of the last generation, that he had taken lessons of Mr. Kemble; our sable brother (as he would be called at Exeter Hall) was a manifest imitator of an eminent American actor who had been playing in those parts. We must not omit one point more; from his explanation of 'Whose image and superscription is this?' had set his signature to a dollar note. it was clear that he supposed that Cæsar author afterwards attended in Philadelphia a free black Episcopal church, in which the more solemn and quiet Anglican service was performed by a black clergyman with great propriety. While on this point we will add that, according to the account of Dr. Walsh, published many years ago, and confirmed, if we remember right, by later travellers, the black Roman Catholic priests in Brazil conduct the ceremonial of their faith with much greater impressiveness and dignity than those of European descent.

Our

But there is much to be set against these hopeful signs of negro improvement, and the

Our traveller's return is up the vast Mississippi, after an excursion to Grenville, in Missouri, upon the Ohio, and so across the Alleghany Mountains, back to the land of the older cities, to Philadelphia and New York. We must leave our readers to complete this immense circuit, feeling confident that, having once set forth with Sir Charles Lyell, they will not abandon him from weariness, from want of interest, or of gratitude for his varied and valuable communications.

The conclusion at which we arrive, which has never been forced upon us so strongly by any former tour in America as by these manly, sensible, and fearless volumes, is still grow ng astonishment at the resources of this great country. Here is an immense continent, not like old Asia, at times overshadowed into a seeming unity by some one Assyrian, or Babylonian, or Persian, or Mahometan empire, and at the death of the great conqueror, or the expiration at least of his dynasty, breaking up again into conflicting kingdoms, or almost reduced to the primitive anarchy of hostile tribes not like Europe, attaining something like unity, first by the consolidating and annealing power of the Roman Empire, and afterwards in a wider but less rigorous form by the Church; in later times by the balance of power among the great monarchies-a balance only maintained by perpetual wars and by immense military establishments in times of peace: The New World is born as it were one; a federation with much of the vigor of separate independent states, with no necessary, no herediitary, principles of hostility, but rather bound together by the strongest community of interests; one in descent, at least with one race so predominant that the rest either melt away into it, or, if they remain without, are each, even the colored population, so small comparatively in numbers, that they may continue insulated and outlying sections of society, with no great danger to the general harmony; one in language, and that our noble, manly Anglo-Saxon, the language of Shakspeare, Milton, Bacon, and Locke, now spoken over portions of the globe infinitely more extensive than ever was any other tongue; one in religion, for from the multiplicity of sects, as we have observed, must result a certain unity—at least, religious difference, spread equably over all the land, cannot endanger the political unity. The means of communication throughout this immense continent are absolutely unexampled, both from the natural distribution of the lakes, and seas, and rivers, and from the discoveries of mod

| ern science, which are seized, adapted and appropriated with the restless eagerness of a people fettered by no ancient hereditary prejudices, active even to the overworking of their physical constitutions, speculative so as hazard everything-even, in the case of repudiation, that good-faith which is the foundation of credit-for rapid advantage. There are no local attachments, at least in the masses, to check that adventurous passion for bettering their condition, which turns the faces of men westward with a resolute uniformity; (Sir Charles Lyell met one man moving eastward and that one only from a temporary motive of curiosity.) Along the whole range of coast there is steam navigation, from New England to Georgia. West of the Alleghany ridge, besides the noble rivers, also crowded with steamboats, which are so many splen-. did high roads for travel and for commerce, there is a line of railroads and electric telegraphs, branching off and bringing into intimate relation with the rest every considerable city. These railroads are not wild enterprises, destined, like too many of our own, to swallow up irretrievable capital-framed with no sober calculation of the necessities of the land-magnificent, luxurious, and proportionately wasteful; but prudently conceived, and at first, at least, economically managed, only allowing greater speed, comfort, luxury, on such lines as those between New York and Boston. Behind the Alleghanies to the east, nature has achieved that which, on a small scale, magnificent monarchs have attempted in Europe-a system of internal navigation unrivalled in its extent, and of which even American enterprise has far from approached the limits. Instead of running up singly into the central land—as in the old continents the Ganges, the Indus, the Volga, the Nile, the Niger, the Danube, the Rhine, each divided from other great rivers by ridges of impenetrable mountains-the Mississippi receives her countless and immense tributaries, ramifying and intersecting the whole region from the borders of Canada, from the Alleghanies to within a certain distance of the Pacific. She is carrying up the population almost of cities at once to every convenient fork, to every situation which may become an emporium; and then receiving back into her spacious bosom and conveying to the ocean the accumulating produce, the corn, the cotton, even the peltries of the West. Almost in the centre of this empire is a coal-field, or rather two coal-fields, of which we believe the boundaries are not yet ascertained--but in Sir Charles's geological map (in his former vol