[II.8] If it be known that a stranger, who has pretensions to mix with good society, frequents such balls as these, he may rely upon a cold reception from the white ladies.
[II.9] [A plain, unvarnished history of the internal slave trade carried on in this country, would shock and disgust the reader to a degree that would almost render him ashamed to acknowledge himself a member of the same community. In unmanly and degrading barbarity, wanton cruelty, and horrible indifference to every human emotion, facts could be produced worthy of association with whatever is recorded of the slave trade in any other form. One of these internal slave traders has built, in a neighbouring city, a range of private prisons, fronting the main road to Washington, in which he collects his cattle previous to sending off a caravan to the south. The voice of lamentation is seldom stilled within these accursed walls.] —Trans.
[II.10] This Frenchman, a merchant’s clerk from Montpelier, was not satisfied with this: he went to the police, lodged a complaint against the girl, had her arrested by two constables, and whipped again by them in his presence. I regret that I did not take a note of this miscreant’s name, in order that I might give his disgraceful conduct its merited publicity.
[II.11] [Nonsense.] —Trans.
[II.12] [Our author has somehow been confused in his diary here: the mouth of La Fourche is generally called seventy-five miles above New Orleans, Stoddart makes it eighty-one. At any rate it is about half way between Bayou Sara or Point Coupee and the city of New Orleans; and of course the Duke must have passed Donaldsonville, which is at the junction of La Fourche with the Mississippi, in the morning of the day he passed Baton Rouge.] —Trans.
[II.13] In these rivers there is a difference understood between the two kinds of trunks of trees which lie in the stream, and are dangerous to vessels, i. e. snags and sawyers. The first, of which I have spoken already in the Alabama river, are fast at one end in the bottom, and stand up like piles; the others are not fastened, by being moved by the current the upper end of the tree takes a sawing motion, from whence its appellation is derived.
[II.14] Coluber coccineus.
[II.15] [These log turnpikes are better known by the name of “corduroy roads.”] —Trans.
[II.16] [This is, perhaps, the most charitable idea that can be formed of the actions of such reformers, as well as of a “lady” heretofore mentioned, who has unsexed herself, and become so intoxicated with vanity, as enthusiastically to preach up a “reformation” in favour of the promiscuous intercourse of sexes and colours, the downfall of all religion, and the removal of all restraints imposed by virtue and morality!] —Trans.
[II.17] [It is understood that Mr. M‘Clure has long since given up all connexion with the New Harmony bubble.] —Trans.