Powder to Shoot the Yankee Abolitionists”
From: bernhard1848@att.net
“One of our cotton merchants on the bay related to us yesterday a significant fact, which we must report for the especial benefit of our anti-slavery friends (friends with the “r” out), of the North. The slaves on a cotton plantation, whose master (as is the custom of many of our Georgia planters) allows his people to make a crop for themselves each year in order to furnish themselves with holiday funds and pocket money, a few days since sent their crop, consisting of some 38 bags of cotton to our friend, who is their master’s factor, to be sold.
Accompanying the cotton was a letter in which the Negroes all joined, requesting that their cotton be sold for the best price it would bring in the market, and with the additional request that their factor should, if it was necessary, return one-half the amount of proceeds to be appropriated for the purchase of “powder to shoot the Yankee abolitionists.”
(Diary of Ada Amelia Costin, Wilmington, North Carolina, Friday, January 18, 1861. Special Collections, Randall Library, UNC-Wilmington)
