A WALK INTO THE COUNTRY.
The weather holds warm and springlike. We have no need of overcoats,
unless doing guard duty nights. The people here tell us it is an unusually mild
fall, but that we shall get right smart lots of cold and snow before many days.
I took a walk of a few miles into the country yesterday, on a tour of observation.
I noticed what appeared to me a great extent of good land, but very badly
improved. Occasionally I saw a farm where things seemed to be kept up snug and
showed some evidences of thrift, but more of them looked as though the owners
studied to see how shiftless they could be and still manage to live. Buildings
and fences are going to decay; fields of corn are yet unharvested, the cattle
and hogs running through and destroying them. I asked one man why he didn't
harvest his corn. “Oh,” he said, “there is no hurry about that, I have got all
winter to do it in, and the corn is just as well off in the field as anywhere.”
I came to the conclusion that his plan of harvesting was about as fast as he
wanted it to eat. I said to another man I met, “You have good land about here,
sir; easy of cultivation and close to a market. I suppose you make a pile of money?”
“Oh, no,” he said, “you are mistaken; right poor land about yere, one can
hardly make a living on it, but you go over yere a few miles to some creek [the
name of which I have forgotten], and you will find right good land; make as
much again corn on it as you can on this.” I asked, “What do you value this
land at?” “Well,” he replied, “we reckon the land around yere worth about $10
an acre; reckon some of it mought be bought for a little less, but the land
around Annapolis is worth from $25 to $50 an acre.” I made up my mind that a
man with an ordinary degree of enterprise, with our improved implements for
farming and with hired labor, might take this land and make money on it. I am
unable to see any profits from slave labor in Maryland; it is poor help at the best;
besides they have to be clothed and fed several months in a year during which
time they are net earning much, and there is always on a farm employing a dozen
or more field hands, a lot of old men and women and small children who are not
earning anything, but still have to be supported.
SOURCE: David L. Day, My Diary of Rambles with the
25th Mass. Volunteer Infantry, p. 14-5
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