Four Months in a Sneak-Box: A Boat Voyage of 2600 Miles Down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and Along the Gulf of MexicoBishop, Nathaniel H. (Nathaniel Holmes)
General
Four Months in a Sneak-Box: A Boat Voyage of 2600 Miles Down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and Along the Gulf of Mexico
Bishop, Nathaniel H. (Nathaniel Holmes)
Boats and boating; Mississippi River -- Description and travel; Ohio River -- Description and travel
Nor was this an exceptional case, many such appointments having been
made, as an inevitable result of a peculiar enfranchisement in which
there is no restriction, and where license stands for liberty. While
on my "Voyage of the Paper Canoe," I met in one county in Georgia,
through which flows the beautiful Altamaha, the colored county
treasurer, who lived in a little backwoods' settlement a few miles
from Darien. He could neither read nor write, but his business was
managed and the county funds handled by a white politician of the
"reconstructing" element then in power, which was sapping the life-
blood of the south, and bonding every state within its selfish grasp
by dishonest legislative acts. The poor black man was simply a tool
for the white charlatan, living in a miserable log cabin, and
receiving a very small share of the peculations of his white clerk.
When all the enfranchised are educated, and not until then, will the
great source of evil be removed from our politics which to-day
endangers our future liberty of self-government. We are floating in a
sea of unlimited and unlettered enfranchisement, vainly tugging at the
helm of our ship of state, while master-minds stoop to cater to the
prejudices of hundreds of thousands of voters who cannot read the
names upon the ticket they deposit in the ballot-box--the ballot-box
which is the guardian of the constitutional liberties of a republic.
We left the kind people of Apalachicola, and crossed the bay to St.
George's Sound, with a cargo of delicacies, for Captain Fry had filled
our lockers with various comforts for the inner man, while our friend,
the cattle-owner, whom we had met at Cape San Blas, and who had now
returned to his home, stocked us with delicious oranges from his grove
on the outskirts of the city.
Four miles to the east of Cat Point we saw the humble homes of Peter
Sheepshead and Sam Pompano, two fishermen, whose uniform success in
catching their favorite species of fish had won for them their
euphonious titles. We camped at night near the mouth of Crooked River,
which enters the sound opposite Dog Island, having rowed twenty-four
miles. If we continued along the sound, after passing out of its
eastern end, we would be upon the open sea, and might have difficulty
in doubling the great South Cape; so we took the interior route,
ascending Crooked River through a low pine savanna country, to the
Ocklockony River, which is, in fact, a continuation of Crooked River.
The region about Crooked and Ocklockony rivers is destitute of the
habitation of man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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