The caravans of migrating planters were occasionally described by travelers in the period.  Basil Hall wrote of one which he overtook in South Carolina in 1828:  “It ... did not consist of above thirty persons in all, of whom five-and-twenty at least were slaves.  The women and children were stowed away in wagons, moving slowly up a steep, sandy hill; but the curtains being let down we could see nothing of them except an occasional glance of an eye, or a row of teeth as white as snow.  In the rear of all came a light covered vehicle, with the master and mistress of the party.  Along the roadside, scattered at intervals, we observed the male slaves trudging in front.  At the top of all, against the sky line, two men walked together, apparently hand in hand pacing along very sociably.  There was something, however, in their attitude, which seemed unusual and constrained.  When we came nearer, accordingly, we discovered that this couple were bolted together by a short chain or bar riveted to broad iron clasps secured in like manner round the wrists.  ‘What have you been doing, my boys,’ said our coachman in passing, ‘to entitle you to these ruffles?’ ‘Oh, sir,’ cried one of them quite gaily, ’they are the best things in the world to travel with.’  The other man said nothing.  I stopped the carriage and asked one of the slave drivers why these men were chained, and how they came to take the matter so differently.  The answer explained the mystery.  One of them, it appeared, was married, but his wife belonged to a neighboring planter, not to his master.  When the general move was made the proprieter of the female not choosing to part with her, she was necessarily left behind.  The wretched husband was therefore shackled to a young unmarried man who having no such tie to draw him back might be more safely trusted on the journey."[20]

[Footnote 20:  Basil Hall, Travels in North America (Edinburgh, 1829), III, 128, 129. See also for similar scenes, Adam Hodgson, Letters from North America (London, 1854), I, 113.]

Timothy Flint wrote after observing many of these caravans:  “The slaves generally seem fond of their masters, and as much delighted and interested in their migration as their masters.  It is to me a very pleasing and patriarchal sight."[21] But Edwin L. Godkin, who in his transit of a Mississippi swamp in 1856 saw a company in distress, used the episode as a peg on which to hang an anti-slavery sentiment:  “I fell in with an emigrant party on their way to Texas.  Their mules had sunk in the mud, ... the wagons were already embedded as far as the axles.  The women of the party, lightly clad in cotton, had walked for miles, knee-deep in water, through the brake, exposed to the pitiless pelting of the storm, and were now crouching forlorn and woebegone under the shelter of a tree....  The men were making feeble attempts to light a fire....  ‘Colonel,’ said one of them as I rode past, ‘this is the gate of hell, ain’t it?’ ...  The hardships