I wrote this conversation down carefully at the time. The negro may fairly be taken as a sample of the most ignorant plantation hands, in the interior of the poorest cotton-growing districts, and the conversation may therefore have a certain value, as showing the lowest degree of intelligence among the class on whom it is proposed to confer the right of suffrage. * * * * * All the trains on which I had traveled for some days, had contained numbers of Northerners going down to look at the cotton lands. Many went prepared to buy; all went either to buy or lease, if they found the prospects as encouraging as they hoped. To all these, the central belt of Alabama seemed a promising field. Its lands are the richest east of Louisiana and west of the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands; and the country is entirely healthy, which is more than can be said of either of the other regions. A bale to the acre could be made on the first-class lands, and the Alabama bale means a hundred pounds more than that of Louisiana or the west. Nearly all the lands could, with careful culture, be made to average half a bale. Then, within easy railroad connection, is Mobile on the south, while on the north, a twelve hours’ ride carries the debilitated planter to the bracing breezes of the mountains. In September and October these lands were selling at five dollars an acre. In November I imagine that the average was very nearly ten, and it was constantly rising. The papers were full of advertisements of plantations for rent or sale. The great rush was from men of small means at the North, who wanted from four hundred to a thousand acres; but a few were looking for heavier investments. Here are a couple of specimens of the kind of lands offering: “FOR SALE OR RENT.—A plantation on the Alabama River, containing fourteen hundred acres, one thousand of which are cleared, under good fence and in fine order for a crop. It has a three-story brick gin-house, a large brick stable and corn-crib, a new, well-finished dwelling with four rooms on the floor, all covered with tin roofs and built in the most substantial manner; nine double tenement framed negro houses, with piazzas in front; a large kitchen and smoke-house, a good blacksmith-shop, two never-failing wells of excellent water, some seven or eight miles of Osage-orange hedge. No plantation on the Alabama River lies better or is probably more healthy. The quality of land about the average of Alabama River. I think I risk nothing in saying it is the best improved plantation in the State of Alabama.”