on the right and left ought long since to have
been made "rank" in fertility, and grow-
ing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth
of supplies for the Baltimore and Washing-
ton markets. We will find this existing on
the railroad lines of Pennsylvania, New York,
New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts,
and if we remove that impediment to an en-
terprising immigration—the blight of slavery
—the time will soon be at hand when we will
not be ashamed to point to the land on the
two sides of our railway to the National
Capital.
Leaving this railroad, with its slow travel
from want of a double track and its straight-
ening across Gwyn's Falls at its first ap-
proach to that narrow stream—all owing to
the unprogressiveness natural to a land of
slavery—I am next to devote a few remarks
to the counties of Anne Arundel, Charles,
Calvert and St. Mary's, and then cross the
Chesapeake Bay and pay my respects to yon,
Mr. President, and the rest of our Eastern
Shore friends. There is not a more inviting
region on the face of this wide earth than
these counties for farmers and gardeners of
other States who may feel disposed to seek
new fields for their enterprise and labor.
Now, that theory is not like what these
legal gentlemen get up, who come in here
with a parcel of rusty, musty old books.
I do not understand that sort of thing. I
want to take things practically, just as they
are.
With slavery forever removed, thousands
of acres of land must he offered for sale in a
brief period, and the prices it will command
will fully compensate for that loss of slave
labor which is now operating as a temporary
burden upon their shoulders and a transient
blight upon their farms. With their fields of
culture greatly circumscribed by the profita-
ble sales they will be able to make, they can
start on a new career with free labor and
very soon find one hundred acres of land as
productive and profitable as five hundred
once were. The present generation may not
realize all the great advantages that will flow
from a substitution of free for slave labor, but
we are not to pause for that reason in com-
pleting the work which our constituents sent
us here to perform. We are to legislate for
the benefit of generations to come as well as
the people of the present day. We are to
look to the interests of posterity as well as
our own. if, in the feeble efforts I make to
promote the future progress and prosperity of
these counties and their inhabitants, I shall
advertise their lands to any advantage, I
pray them not to censure me for it, because
such is not my design. When I speak of the
kind and so easily improvable lands of this
section of our State, the small wear and tear
of agricultural implements and beasts of bur-
den in cultivating them. their adaptedness to
the growth of all farm and garden products |
that can be raised anywhere else, the harvests
of fish and oysters that can be gathered in
their numerous water courses, and the ready
access to two markets which these water
courses afford, I am scarcely doing justice to
this important and most desirable section of
country. Let me say to their numerous res-
idents who are so bitter against this Admin-
istration for its recognition and treatment of
slavery as the instigation of this unnatural
war, that if these counties had been located
in any one of the Northern. States heretofore
named by me, their long desired railroad
from the Patapsco, at Dugan's Ferry, to a
point on the Potomac River opposite Acquia
Creek, would have been completed twenty
years ago. With such a transporting agency
carried to the doors of the farm houses a lit-
tle remote from their navigable water courses,
they can send to market and dispose of to
advantage many products in small quantities
which at present go to the account of profit
and loss. And you can't rub that out, either.
Banish slavery, and settlers will quickly come
among you who will push such a railroad to
completion.
The Eastern Shore counties, directly op-
posite, have arms of the noble Chesapeake
and its tributaries, stretching out almost to
the gates of a majority of their farms, and
every acre of their lands can be made availa-
ble for the production of articles that find a
ready sale at paying prices in the markets of
Philadelphia and Baltimore, for those are the
markets I am most familiar with.
Their swamps and marshes, if not readily
drainable and convertible into arable land,
annually furnish a growth of bush that can
be cut and used in shading and fertilizing
the surrounding worn out soil; but the far
larger surface of these swamps and marshes
can be made to grow grass in luxuriance and
abundance. There is no waste land in this
region—you know all about that, I reckon,
Mr. President—and every acre of it, like the
more southern portion of the Western Shore,
can be cultivated at a small cost. There is
nothing wanted in the two accessible markets
that cannot be produced with profit on their
territory, and there is no article that they
can produce which will go long without a
profitable purchaser. Let their slaves go,
and free labor be substituted, and there will
come along, in due lime, a class of farmers
which will make their deserts, if any, "flour-
ish and blossom like the rose," and by their
example of ingenuity and industry, stir up
all the old residents to renewed vigor and life,
and thus convert the Eastern Shore into one
of the " garden spots" of the nation.
I have not done you much injury yet, have
I? I know I have said nothing offensive so
far. Judging from what ingenuity and en-
terprise have accomplished in the naturally
sterile and forbidden north-east, I feel that I
am drawing no fancy sketch in thus portray- |
