Dougherty County, Georgia, says the author, was the birthplace of the famed “Blackbelt,” where the cotton boom led to a boom in slavery in the early nineteenth century.

True

At Albany, in the heart of the Black Belt, we stop. Two hundred miles south of Atlanta, two hundred miles west of the Atlantic, and one hundred miles north of the Great Gulf lies Dougherty County, with ten thousand Negroes and two thousand whites.