on pleasant afternoons, when the mothers and daughters of these cotton lords take their accustomed airing.  So powerfully has this feeling of exclusiveness prevailed that no son or daughter dares marry out of their circle.  For a long series of years has this custom prevailed, and the consequence is that the families above named are nearly of a common blood; and it needs no physiologist to tell us the invariable effect arising from this transgression of natural laws, on the physical and mental faculties of both sexes.  In such a state of society is it strange that the present generation should have grown up with ideas better suited to the castes of India than to those of republican America?  As a consequence they consider their condition more elevated than that of their neighbors in the adjoining States, and of almost imperial consideration.  But no language can express their bitter contempt for the people of the North, more particularly for those of New England birth.

In perusing the history and progress of any portion of our country, the statistics of population become an interesting study.  Let us glance over a brief table, showing what the increase has been in this district for the past forty years, and its miserable deficiency in physical means of strength and defense.  In 1820 the district contained 32,000 souls, of which there were 4,679 whites and 27,339 slaves, and 141 free blacks.  In 1860 there were 6,714 whites and 32,500 slaves, and 800 free blacks, making a total of 40,014,—­an increase of whites of 2,035, of slaves 5,161, of free blacks 650:—­total increase 7,855 in forty years.  Here we have nearly the largest disproportion of whites to slaves in any part of the South.  Of the 6,714 whites, about 1,000 are probably men over twenty-one years of age, and it is not to be presumed that an equal number are capable of bearing arms.  Is it possible to find anywhere a community more helpless for its own protection or defense?  It is one of the truths of science and philosophy that nature, when forced beyond its own powers and laws, will react, and again restore its own supremacy.  So we here find a magnificent space of country, rich in all natural requisites, and unsurpassed in its capabilities of producing not only the necessaries of life, but its luxuries, having an exclusive right to some of the most valuable staples of the world, which has been for a century and a half the abode of an imperious few, who have, by tyrannical power, wrung from the bones and muscles of generations of poor Africans the means to sustain their luxury, power, and pride.  They have also robbed from the mother earth the fertility of its soil to its utmost extent, leaving much of it completely exhausted.  This state of things has reacted on them; it has made them proud, domineering, ambitious, and revengeful of fancied injuries.  It has hurried them into rebellion against the best government the world ever saw,—­and this has at last brought with it its own punishment and