New Bedford, especially, took me by surprise, in the solid wealth and grandeur there exhibited.

I had formed my notions respecting the social condition of the free states, by what I had seen and known of free, white, non-slaveholding people in the slave states.
Regarding slavery as the basis of wealth, I fancied that no people could become very wealthy without slavery.

A free white man, holding no slaves, in the country, I had known to be the most ignorant and poverty-stricken of men, and the laugh{268} ing stock even of slaves themselves--called generally by them, in derision, _"poor white trash_." Like the non-slaveholders at the south, in holding no slaves, I suppose the northern people like them, also, in poverty and degradation.

Judge, then, of my amazement and joy, when I found--as I did find--the very laboring population of New Bedford living in better houses, more elegantly furnished--surrounded by more comfort and refinement--than a majority of the slaveholders on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

There was my friend, Mr.Johnson, himself a colored man (who at the south would have been regarded as a proper marketable commodity), who lived in a better house--dined at a richer board--was the owner of more books--the reader of more newspapers--was more conversant with the political and social condition of this nation and the world--than nine-tenths of all the slaveholders of Talbot county, Maryland.