The chief design of the author in writing this book has been, to describe what was most interesting, amusing, and instructive to himself, during the first three of fourteen months' travelling in our Slave States; using the later experience to correct the erroneous impressions of the earlier.

He is aware that it has one fault—it is too fault-finding. He is sorry for it, but it cannot now be helped; so at the outset, let the reader understand that he is invited to travel in company with an honest growler.

But growling is sometimes a duty; and the traveller might well be suspected of being a “dead head,” or a sneak, who did not find frequent occasion for its performance, among the notoriously careless, makeshift, impersistent people of the South.

For the rest, the author had, at the outset, of his journey, a determination to see things for himself, as far as possible, and to see them carefully and fairly, but cheerfully and kindly. It was his disposition, also, to search for the causes and extenuating circumstances, past and present, of those phenomena which are commonly reported to the prejudice of the slaveholding community; and especially of those features which are manifestly most to be regretted in the actual condition of the older Slave States.