Strength
seemed failing me, I caught the friendly branches
of trees, and held on to keep the canoe from
being whirled down the current towards the
Waccamaw. After long and persistent efforts
had exhausted my strength, I was about to seek
for a resting-place in the swamp, when a view
of the broad Peedee opened before me, and with
vigorous strokes of the paddle the canoe slowly
approached the mighty current. A moment
more and it was within its grasp, and went flying
down the turbulent stream at the rate of ten
miles an hour.
A loud halloo greeted me from the swamp,
where a party of negro shingle-makers were at
work. They manned their boat, a long cypress
dug-out, and followed me. Their employer, who
proved to be the gentleman whose abiding-place
I was now rapidly approaching, sat in the stern.
We landed together before the old
plantation house, which had been occupied a few years
before by members of the wealthy and powerful
rice-planting aristocracy of the Peedee, but was
now the temporary home of a northern man,
who was busily employed in guiding the labors
of his four hundred freedmen in the swamps of
North and South Carolina.
The paper canoe had now entered the regions
of the rice-planter. Along the low banks of the
Peedee were diked marshes where, before the
civil war, each estate produced from five
thousand to forty thousand bushels of rice annually,
and the lords of rice were more powerful than
those of cotton, though cotton was king. The
rich lands here produced as high as fifty-five
bushels of rice to the acre, under forced slave
labor; now the free blacks cannot wrest from
nature more than twenty-five or thirty bushels.
Fine old mansions lined the river's banks, but
the families had been so reduced by the ravages
of war, that I saw refined ladies, who had been
educated in the schools of Edinburgh, Scotland,
overseeing the negroes as they worked in the
yards of the rice-mills. The undaunted spirit of
these southern ladies, as they worked in their
homes now so desolate, roused my admiration.
A light, graceful figure, enveloped in an old
shawl, and mounted on an old horse, flitted about
one plantation like a restless spirit.
"That lady's father," said a gentleman to me,
"owned three plantations, worth three millions
of dollars, before the war. There is a rice-mill
on one of the plantations which cost thirty
thousand dollars. She now fights against misfortune,
and will not give up. The Confederate war
would not have lasted six months if it had not
been for our women. They drove thousands of
us young men into the fight; and now, having
lost all, they go bravely to work, even taking the
places of their old servants in their grand old
homes.
