W.E.B. Du Bois

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy,—the rich granary whence potatoes and corn and cotton poured out to the famished and ragged Confederate troops as they battled for a cause lost long before 1861.

And yet with all this there was something sordid, something forced,—a certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for was not all this show and tinsel built upon a groan?

Day after day the songs of the callous, the wail of the motherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched echoed from the Flint to the Chickasawhatchee, until by 1860 there had risen in West Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom…

Then the swamp grows beautiful; a raised road, built by chained Negro convicts, dips down into it, and forms a way walled and almost covered in living green.

In one place the wood is on fire, smouldering in dull red anger; but nobody minds.

How curious a land is this,—how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise!

So the Waters-Loring plantation was stilled by the spell of dishonesty, and stands like some gaunt rebuke to a scarred land.

The Wizard of the North—the Capitalist—had rushed down in the seventies to woo this coy dark soil.

But now and then the crisscross rails or straight palings break into view, and then we know a touch of culture is near.

Here lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury.

This is the Land of the Unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty.