From the foregoing statistics it appears that the slaveholders of
Virginia constituted a small minority of her population, and that the
slaves themselves were so grouped that the pecuniary advantage of
their presence to the state—if any such advantage existed—was
limited to certain well defined portions of her territory. That the
institution of slavery, however, was a positive disadvantage to the
material prosperity of Virginia is proved by the fact that free
states, not half so richly endowed with natural resources, had far
outstripped her in wealth and population, and also that as between the
white and the slave sections of the commonwealth, the former were more
prosperous.
Mr. Bancroft, writing in 1856, affirmed the truth of this position.
"Washington," he says, "was the director of his community of black
people in their labor, mainly for their own subsistence. For the
market, they produced scarcely anything but a 'little wheat'; and
after a season of drought even their own support had to be eked out
from other resources, so that with all his method and good judgment
he, like Madison of a later day, and in accord with common
experience in Virginia, found that where negroes continued on the
same land, and they and all their increase were maintained upon it,
their owner would become more and more embarrassed or
impoverished."[183]