scoured, put into shoes and stockings, set at work and sent regularly to the Sunday-schools, where they are taught what none of them have been taught before—­to read and write.  In a short time they became expert at their work; they lose their sullen shyness, and their physiognomy becomes comparatively open and cheerful.  Their families are relieved from the temptations to theft and other shameful courses which accompany the condition of poverty without occupation.”

“They have a good deal of the poke-easy manner of the piny woods about them yet,” said one of our party, a Georgian.  It was true, I perceived that they had not yet acquired all that alacrity and quickness in their work which you see in the work-people of the New England mills.  In one of the upper stories I saw a girl of a clearer complexion than the rest, with two long curls swinging behind each ear, as she stepped about with the air of a duchess.  “That girl is from the north,” said our conductor; “at first we placed an expert operative from the north in each story of the building as an instructor and pattern to the rest.”

I have since learned that some attempts were made at first to induce the poor white people to work side by side with the blacks in these mills.  These utterly failed, and the question then became with the proprietors whether they should employ blacks only or whites only; whether they should give these poor people an occupation which, while it tended to elevate their condition, secured a more expert class of work-people than the negroes could be expected to become, or whether they should rely upon the less intelligent and more negligent services of slaves.  They decided at length upon banishing the labor of blacks from their mills.  At Graniteville, in South Carolina, about ten miles from the Savannah river, a neat little manufacturing village has lately been built up, where the families of the crackers, as they are called, reclaimed from their idle lives in the woods, are settled, and white labor only is employed.  The enterprise is said to be in a most prosperous condition.

Only coarse cloths are made in these mills—­strong, thick fabrics, suitable for negro shirting—­and the demand for this kind of goods, I am told, is greater than the supply.  Every yard made in this manufactory at Augusta, is taken off as soon as it leaves the loom.  I fell in with a northern man in the course of the day, who told me that these mills had driven the northern manufacturer of coarse cottons out of the southern market.

“The buildings are erected here more cheaply,” he continued, “there is far less expense in fuel, and the wages of the workpeople are less.  At first the boys and girls of the cracker families were engaged for little more than their board; their wages are now better, but they are still low.  I am about to go to the north, and I shall do my best to persuade some of my friends, who have been almost ruined by this southern competition, to come to Augusta and set up cotton mills.”