"What effect will secession have on your business?" I asked the Colonel, after a while.
"A favorable one. I shall ship my crop direct to Liverpool and London, instead of selling it to New York middle-men."
"But is not the larger portion of the turpentine crop consumed at the North?"
"Oh, yes. We shall have to deal with the Yankees anyhow, but we shall do as little with them as possible."
"Suppose the Yankees object to your setting up by yourselves, and put your ports under lock and key?"
"They wont do that, and if they do, England will break the blockade."
"We may rap John Bull over the knuckles in that event," I replied.
"Merely, England would not have a ship in six months to carry your cotton. A war with her would ruin the shipping trade of the North. Our marine would seek employment at privateering, and soon sweep every British merchant ship from the ocean. We could afford to give up ten years' trade with you, and to put secession down by force, for the sake of a year's brush with John Bull."
"But, my good friend, where would the British navy be all this while?"
"Asleep. The English haven't a steamer that can catch a Brookhaven schooner. The last war proved that government vessels are no match for privateers."
"Well, well! but the Yankees wont fight."
"Suppose they do. Suppose they shut up your ports, and leave you with your cotton and turpentine unsold? You raise scarcely any thing else--what would you eat?"
"We would turn our cotton fields into corn and wheat. Turpentine-makers, of course, would suffer."
"My friend, I have nearly three hundred mouths to feed. I depend on the sale of my crop to give them food. If our ports are closed, I cannot do it--they will starve, and I be ruined. But sooner than submit to the domination of the cursed Yankees, I will see my negroes starving, and my child a beggar!"
At this point in the conversation we arrived at the negro shanty where the sick child was. Dismounting, the Colonel and I entered.
The cabin was almost a counterpart of the "Mills House," described in the previous chapter, but it had a plank flooring, and was scrupulously neat and clean. The logs were stripped of bark, and whitewashed. A bright, cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and an air of rude comfort pervaded the whole interior. On a low bed in the farther corner of the room lay the sick child. He was a boy of about twelve years, and evidently in the last stages of consumption. By his side, bending over him as if to catch his almost inaudible words, sat a tidy, youthful-looking colored woman, his mother, and the wife of the negro we had met at the "still." Playing on the floor, was a younger child, perhaps five years old, but while the faces of the mother and the sick lad were of the hue of charcoal, _his_ skin by a process well understood at the South, had been bleached to a bright yellow.