Suspicion on this point even
hangs around the places in Florida now frequented by Northerners for
the sake of the mild winter temperature. But oven if the sea-coast
were healthy, it is in summer too hot to be attractive, and offers
no relief to persons whose livers and kidneys have got out of order
in the lowlands. These naturally seek the hills for coolness, and
they go to the sulphur springs of Virginia because the sulphur
waters are very powerful and efficacious in their effects on people
afflicted with what the doctors call "hepatic troubles." But then
they never would or could have gone from the Southern seaboard to
places so far off if it had not been for the inestimable negro. The
extent to which he contributed to the rapid pushing out of the
scanty white population of the slave States to the Mississippi has
never, I think, received due attention. He robbed pioneering,
indeed, at the South of most of the hardship with which it is
associated in the Northern mind--I was going to say discomfort as
well as hardship, but this would be going too far.
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