One of the most reliable witnesses to the cultivation of cotton by free labor is a Quaker gentleman in Philadelphia, who conducts a cotton factory supplied entirely with free-grown cotton, the goods being sold to the Quakers, who will not use the product of slave labor of any kind.  This gentleman writes:—­

I learned by correspondence with several intelligent Germans in Texas, that their experiment of raising cotton by their own labor, without the help of slaves, was a complete success.  One planter offered to supply me at once with one hundred and forty bales raised in this way.  The ground taken by thee that cotton can be raised by white men, as well as by colored men, is entirely correct.  A very large portion is every year so raised.  I have had particular information of its being thus raised in Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina.  In some neighborhoods thousands of bales are thus raised within the limits of two or three adjacent counties.

It may be urged that this is upon uplands almost exclusively, and that upon bottom lands it is not possible, on account of their being unhealthy.

Two statements will be made to disprove this latter assertion, and we will then admit it to be true, and prove it to be of no consequence.

The cotton planters, deserting the rolling land, are fast pouring in upon the ‘swamp.’  Indeed, the impression of the sickliness of the South generally has been rapidly losing ground (i.e. among the whites of the South), and that blessing, health, is now sought with as much confidence on the swamp lands of the Yazoo and the Mississippi, as among the hills and plains of Carolina and Virginia.—­De Bow’s Resources of the South and West.

Dr. Barton, of New Orleans, in a paper read before the Academy of Science, says: 

The class of diseases most fatal at the South are mainly those of a preventable nature.  In another place I have shown that the direct temperature of the sun is not near so great in the South during the summer as in the North.  In fact, the climate is much more endurable, all the year round, with our refreshing breezes, and particularly in some of the more elevated parts of it, or within one hundred miles of the coast.

Dr. Barton had forgotten that white men can not perform field labor in the South.

But admit that white men had better work upon uplands,—­the crop is surer, owing to the less liability to frost and overflow; and good cultivation will give an equal crop.  Intelligent Northern men have taken up exhausted plantations upon the uplands of North Carolina, and, by the application of moderate quantities of guano, phosphate of lime, etc., have carried the crop from two hundred up to eight hundred pounds of clean cotton per acre; and for the last three years the writer has been in the habit of selecting the North Carolina guano-grown cotton, in the New York market, where it has been shipped via Wilmington or Norfolk, on account of its good staple, good color, and extra strength.