Yeomanry of Georgia--more properly termed pine-landers. Have you visions
now of well-to-do farmers with comfortable homesteads, decent habits,
industrious, intelligent, cheerful, and thrifty? Such, however, is not the
Yeomanry of Georgia. Labour being here the especial portion of slaves, it
is thenceforth degraded, and considered unworthy of all but slaves. No
white man, therefore, of any class puts hand to work of any kind soever.
This is an exceedingly dignified way of proving their gentility, for the
lazy planters who prefer an idle life of semi-starvation and barbarism to
the degradation of doing anything themselves; but the effect on the poorer
whites of the country is terrible. I speak now of the scattered white
population, who, too poor to possess land or slaves, and having no means
of living in the towns, squat (most appropriately is it so termed) either
on other men's land or government districts--always here swamp or pine
barren--and claim masterdom over the place they invade, till ejected by
the rightful proprietors. These wretched creatures will not, for they are
whites (and labour belongs to blacks and slaves alone here), labour for
their own subsistence. They are hardly protected from the weather by the
rude shelters they frame for themselves in the midst of these dreary
woods. Their food is chiefly supplied by shooting the wild fowl and
venison, and stealing from the cultivated patches of the plantations
nearest at hand. Their clothes hang about them in filthy tatters, and the
combined squalor and fierceness of their appearance is really frightful.

This population is the direct growth of slavery. The planters are loud in
their execrations of these miserable vagabonds; yet they do not see that,
so long as labour is considered the disgraceful portion of slaves, these
free men will hold it nobler to starve or steal than till the earth with
none but the despised blacks for fellow-labourers. The blacks
themselves--such is the infinite power of custom--acquiesce in this
notion, and, as I have told you, consider it the lowest degradation in a