Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Mr. Greeley's Letters From Texas and the Lower Mississippi: To Which Are Added His Address to the Farmers of Texas, and His Speech on His Return to New York, June 12, 1871
New orleans, May 17. - On our way down through Mississippi, we made the acquaintance of Mr. H. E. Lawrence, a lifelong and successful sugar-planter, who, on learning my anxiety to Witness Plowing by Steam (not for show, but as a business), invited us to visit the plantation of his brother, where that style of breaking lup the earth is in fashion. Accordingly, a tug-boat was chartered, and some forty or fifty gentlemen, including the Congressman of the lower district, Gen. J. H. Sypher, Collector Casey, Judge Dibble, several Editors, and my traveling companions, Gen. E. A. Merritt, and Charles Storrs, Esq., devoted yesterday to Sugar-planting by Steam.
Magnolia plantation lies some fifty miles below this city, having a front of two miles on the west bank of the river, with the Gulf of Mexico but five miles distant on either hand. Most of the ten-mile strip which here constitutes the County (late parish) of Plaquemine is a reedy marsh, the haunt of alligators, musketoes, &c., which a tempest in the Gulf may submerge at any time; but a fine forest of Live Oak on the rear of this plantation indicates that the surface usually dry is wider at this point than the average. The famous Levees are slight affairs so near the Gulf, where the rise and fall of the mighty stream (here a mile and a half wide) rarely exceeds three feet, and at the utmost is seven. The river-surface is now but two to three feet below that of the Levees, and has recently been two feet higher. Water leaking through the Levee is caught in the substantial ditches that everywhere traverse the plantations, and runs swiftly away till lost under the rank vegetation of the swamps or absorbed by some bayou of the adjacent Gulf. This whole region has of course been formed of the muddy sediment deposited by the Father of Waters wherever the swiftness of its current is arrested. Thus by ten thousand annual over?ows, mainly in April or May, Louisiana has been projected far into the Gulf; and the process of making new land at the expense of salt water is still in progress. Though the tide rises eighteen inches at New Orleans, and is felt at Donaldsonville, seventy miles further up, the force of the current keeps the river here wholly fresh at this season, though it is some what brackish at times when less water is passing out. That the soil is rich, black, and of unfathomable depth, need not be added. Ditching or deep plowing is constantly unearthing immense cypresses which have been imbedded here for thousands of years-some of them still sound and serviceable.
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