HOW SLAVERY GREW AND IS MAINTAINED IN THE UNITED STATES.
The first attempt at manufacturing any species of cloth in the North
American provinces produced a resolution on the part of the House of
Commons, [1710,] that "the erecting of manufactories in the colonies
had a tendency to lessen their dependence on Great Britain." Soon
afterward complaints were made to Parliament that the colonists were
establishing manufactories for themselves, and the House of Commons
ordered the Board of Trade to report on the subject, which was done at
great length. In 1732, the exportation of hats from province to
province was prohibited, and the number of apprentices to be taken by
hatters was limited. In 1750 the erection of any mill or other engine
for splitting or rolling iron was prohibited; but pig iron was allowed
to be imported into England duty free, that it might there be
manufactured and sent back again. At a later period, Lord Chatham
declared that he would not permit the colonists to make even a hobnail
for themselves--and his views were then and subsequently carried into
effect by the absolute prohibition in 1765 of the export of artisans,
in 1781 of woollen machinery, in 1782 of cotton machinery and
artificers in cotton, in 1785 of iron and steel-making machinery and
workmen in those departments of trade, and in 1799 by the prohibition
of the export of colliers, lest other countries should acquire the art
of mining coal.
The tendency of the system has thus uniformly been--
I. To prevent the application of labour elsewhere than in England to
any pursuit but that of agriculture, and thus to deprive the weaker
portion of society--the women and children--of any employment but in
the field.
II. To compel whole populations to produce the same commodities, and
thus to deprive them of the power to make exchanges among themselves.
III. To compel them, therefore, to export to England all their produce
in its rudest forms, at great cost of transportation.
IV. To deprive them of all power of returning to the land the manure
yielded by its products, and thus to compel them to exhaust their
land.
V. To deprive them of the power of associating together for the
building of towns, the establishment of schools, the making of roads,
or the defence of their rights.
VI. To compel them, with every step in the process of exhausting the
land, to increase their distances from each other and from market.
VII. To compel the waste of all labour that could not be employed in
the field.
VIII. To compel the waste of all the vast variety of things almost
valueless in themselves, but which acquire value as men are enabled to
work in combination with each other.[44]
IX. To prevent increase in the value of land and in the demand for the
labour of man; and,
X. To prevent advance toward civilization and freedom.
That such were the tendencies of the system was seen by the people of
the colonies. "It is well known and understood," said Franklin, in
1771, "that whenever a manufacture is established which employs a
number of hands, it raises the value of lands in the neighbouring
country all around it, partly by the greater demand near at hand for
the produce of the land, and partly from the plenty of money drawn by
the manufactures to that part of the country. It seems, therefore," he
continued, "the interest of all our farmers and owners of lands, to
encourage our young manufactures in preference to foreign ones
imported among us from distant countries." Such was the almost
universal feeling of the country, and to the restriction on the power
to apply labour was due, in a great degree, the Revolution.
The power to compel the colonists to make all their exchanges abroad
gave to the merchants of England, and to the government, the same
power of taxation that we see to have been so freely exercised in
regard to sugar. In a paper published in 1750, in the London General
Advertiser, it was stated that Virginia then exported 50,000 hhds. of
tobacco, producing £550,000, of which the ship-owner, the underwriter,
the commission merchant, and the government took £450,000, leaving to
be divided between the land-owner and labourer only £100,000, or
about eighteen per cent., which is less even than the proportion
stated by _Gee_, in his work of that date. Under such circumstances
the planter could accumulate little capital to aid him in the
improvement of his cultivation.
The Revolution came, and thenceforward there existed no legal
impediments to the establishment of home markets by aid of which the
farmer might be enabled to lessen the cost of transporting his produce
to market, and his manure from market, thus giving to his land some of
those advantages of situation which elsewhere add so largely to its
value. The prohibitory laws had, however, had the effect of preventing
the gradual growth of the mechanic arts, and Virginia had no towns of
any note, while to the same circumstances was due the fact that
England was prepared to put down all attempts at competition with her
in the manufacture of cloth, or of iron. The territory of the former
embraced forty millions of acres, and her widely scattered population
amounted to little more than 600,000. At the North, some descriptions
of manufacture had grown slowly up, and the mechanics were much more
numerous, and towns had gradually grown to be very small cities; the
consequence of which was that the farmer there, backed by the artisan,
always his ally, was more able to protect himself against the trader,
who represented the foreign manufacturer. Everywhere, however, the
growth of manufactures was slow, and everywhere, consequently, the
farmer was seen exhausting his land in growing wheat, tobacco, and
other commodities, to be sent to distant markets, from which no manure
could be returned. With the exhaustion of the land its owners became,
of course, impoverished, and there arose a necessity for the removal
of the people who cultivated it, to new lands, to be in turn
exhausted. In the North, the labourer thus circumstanced, _removed
himself_. In the South, he had _to be removed_. Sometimes the planter
abandoned his land and travelled forth with all his people, but more
frequently he found himself compelled to part with some of his slaves
to others; and thus has the domestic slave trade grown by aid of the
exhaustive process to which the land and its owner have been
subjected.
The reader may obtain some idea of the extent of the exhaustion that
has taken place, by a perusal of the following extracts from an
address to the Agricultural Society of Albemarle County, Virginia, by
one of the best authorities of the State, the Hon. Andrew Stevenson,
late Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Minister to England.
Looking to what is the "real situation" of things, the speaker asks--
"Is there an intelligent and impartial man who can cast his eyes over
the State and not be impressed with the truth, deplorable as it is
afflicting, that the produce of most of our lands is not only small
in proportion to the extent in cultivation, but that the lands
themselves have been gradually sinking and becoming worse, under a
most defective and ruinous system of cultivation?" "The truth is," he
continues, "we must all feel and know that the spirit of agricultural
improvement has been suffered to languish too long in Virginia, and
that it is now reaching a point, in the descending scale, from which,
if it is not revived, and that very speedily, our State must continue
not only third or fourth in population, as she now is, but consent to
take her station among her smaller sisters of the Union."
The cause of this unhappy state of things he regards as being to be
found in "a disregard of scientific knowledge" and "a deep-rooted
attachment to old habits of cultivation," together with the "practice
of hard cropping and injudicious rotation of crops, leading them to
cultivate more land than they can manure, or than they have means of
improving;" and the consequences are found in the fact that in all the
country east of the Blue Ridge, the average product of wheat "does not
come up to seven bushels to the acre," four of which are required to
restore the seed and defray the cost of cultivation, leaving to the
land-owner for his own services and those of a hundred acres of land,
three hundred bushels, worth, at present prices, probably two hundred
and seventy dollars! Even this, however, is not as bad an exhibit as
is produced in reference to another populous district of more than a
hundred miles in length--that between Lynchburg and Richmond--in which
the product is estimated at _not exceeding six bushels to the acre_!
Under such circumstances, we can scarcely be surprised to learn from
the speaker that the people of his great State, where meadows abound
and marl exists in unlimited quantity, import potatoes from the poor
States of the North, and are compelled to be dependent upon them for
hay and butter, the importers of which realize fortunes, while the
farmers around them are everywhere exhausting their land and obtaining
smaller crops in each successive year.
Why is this so? Why should Virginia import potatoes and hay, cheese
and butter? An acre of potatoes may be made to yield four hundred
bushels, and meadows yield hay by tons, and yet her people raise
wheat, of which they obtain six or seven bushels to the acre, and
corn, of which they obtain fifteen or twenty, and with the produce of
these they buy butter and cheese, pork and potatoes, which yield to
the producer five dollars where they get one--and import many of these
things too, from States in which manufacturing populations abound, and
in which all these commodities should, in the natural course of
things, be higher in price than in Virginia, where all, even when
employed, are engaged in the cultivation of the soil. The answer to
these questions is to be found in the fact that the farmers and
planters of the State can make no manure. They raise wheat and corn,
which they send elsewhere to be consumed; and the people among whom it
is consumed put the refuse on their own lands, and thus are enabled to
raise crops that count by tons, which they then exchange with the
producers of the wheat produced on land that yields six bushels to the
acre.
"How many of our people," continues the speaker, "do we see disposing
of their lands at ruinous prices, and relinquishing their birthplaces
and friends, to settle themselves in the West; and many not so much
from choice as from actual inability to support their families and
rear and educate their children out of the produce of their exhausted
lands--once fertile, but rendered barren and unproductive by a
ruinous system of cultivation.
"And how greatly is this distress heightened, in witnessing, as we
often do, the successions and reverses of this struggle between going
and staying, on the part of many emigrants. And how many are there,
who after removing, remain only a few years and then return to seize
again upon a portion of their native land, and die where they were
born. How strangely does it remind us of the poor shipwrecked
mariner, who, touching in the midst of the storm the shore, lays hold
of it, but is borne seaward by the receding wave; but struggling
back, torn and lacerate, he grasps again the rock, with bleeding
hands, and still clings to it, as a last and forlorn hope. Nor is
this to be wondered at. Perhaps it was the home of his childhood--the
habitation of his fathers for past generations--the soil upon which
had been expended the savings and nourishment, the energies and
virtues of a long life--'the sweat of the living, and the ashes of
the dead.'
"Oh! how hard to break such ties as these.
"This is no gloomy picture of the imagination; but a faithful
representation of what most of us know and feel to be true. Who is it
that has not had some acquaintance or neighbour--some friend,
perhaps some relative, forced into this current of emigration, and
obliged from necessity, in the evening, probably, of a long life, to
abandon his State and friends, and the home of his fathers and
childhood, to seek a precarious subsistence in the supposed El
Dorados of the West?"
This is a terrible picture, and yet it is but the index to one still
worse that must follow in its train. Well does the hon. speaker say
that--
"There is another evil attending this continual drain of our
population to the West, next in importance to the actual loss of the
population itself, and that is, its tendency to continue and enlarge
our wretched system of cultivation.
"The moment some persons feel assured that for present gain they can
exhaust the fertility of their lands in the old States, and then
abandon them for those in the West, which, being rich, require
neither the aid of science nor art, the natural tendency is at once
to give over all efforts at improvement themselves, and kill their
land as quickly as possible--then sell it for what it will bring or
abandon it as a waste. And such will be found to be the case with too
many of the emigrants from the lowlands of Virginia."
Another distinguished Virginian, Mr. Ruffin, in urging an effort to
restore the lands that have been exhausted, and to bring into activity
the rich ones that have never been drained, estimates the advantages
to be derived by Lower Virginia alone at $500,000,000. "The strength,
physical, intellectual, and moral, as well as the revenue of the
commonwealth, will," he says,
"Soon derive new and great increase from the growing improvements of
that one and the smallest of the great divisions of her territory,
which was the poorest by natural constitution--still more, the
poorest by long exhausting tillage--its best population gone or going
away, and the remaining portion sinking into apathy and degradation,
and having no hope left except that which was almost universally
entertained of fleeing from the ruined country and renewing the like
work of destruction on the fertile lands of the far West."
If we look farther South, we find the same state of affairs. North
Carolina abounds in rich lands, undrained and uncultivated, and coal
and iron ore abound. Her area is greater than that of Ireland, and yet
her population is but 868,000; and it has increased only 130,000 in
twenty years, and, from 1830 to 1840; the increase was only 16,000. In
South Carolina, men have been everywhere doing precisely what has been
described in reference to Virginia; and yet the State has, says
Governor Seabrook, in his address to the State Agricultural Society,
"millions of uncleared acres of unsurpassed fertility, which seem to
solicit a trial of their powers from the people of the plantation
States." * * "In her borders," he continues, "there is scarcely a
vegetable product essential to the human race that cannot be
furnished." Marl and lime abound, millions of acres of rich
meadow-land remain in a state of nature, and "the seashore parishes,"
he adds, "possess unfailing supplies of salt mud, salt grass, and
shell-lime." So great, nevertheless, was the tendency to the
abandonment of the land, that in the ten years from 1830 to 1840 the
white population increased but 1000 and the black but 12,000, whereas
the natural increase would have given 150,000!
Allowing Virginia, at the close of the Revolution, 600,000 people, she
should now have, at the usual rate of increase, and excluding all
allowance for immigration, 4,000,000, or one to every ten acres; and
no one at all familiar with the vast advantages of the state can doubt
her capability of supporting more than thrice that number.[45]
Nevertheless, the total number in 1850 was but 1,424,000, and the
increase in twenty years had been but 200,000, when it should have
been 1,200,000. If the reader desire to know what has become of all
these people, he may find most of them among the millions now
inhabiting Alabama and Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas;
and if he would know why they are now there to be found, the answer to
the question may be given in the words--"They borrowed from the earth,
and they did not repay, and therefore she expelled them." It has been
said, and truly said, that "the nation which commences by exporting
food will end by exporting men."
When men come together and combine their efforts, they are enabled to
bring into activity all the vast and various powers of the earth; and
the more they come together, the greater is the value of land, the
greater the demand, for labour, the higher its price, and the greater
the freedom of man. When, on the contrary, they separate from each
other, the greater is the tendency to a decline in the value of land,
the less is the value of labour, and the less the freedom of man. Such
being the case, if we desire to ascertain the ultimate cause of the
existence of the domestic slave trade, it would seem to be necessary
only to ascertain the cause of the exhaustion of the land. The reason
usually assigned for this will be found in the following passage,
extracted from one of the English journals of the day;--
"The mode of agriculture usually coincident with the employment of
slave labour is essentially exhaustive, and adapted therefore only to
the virgin-richness of a newly-colonized soil. The slave can plant,
and dig, and hoe: he works rudely and lazily with rude tools: and his
unwilling feet tread the same path of enforced labour day after day.
But slave labour is not adapted to the operations of scientific
agriculture, which restores its richness to a wornout soil; and it is
found to be a fact that the planters of the Northern slave States,
as, _e.g._, Virginia, gradually desert the old seats of civilization,
and advance further and further into the yet untilled country.
Tobacco was the great staple of Virginian produce for many years
after that beautiful province was colonized by Englishmen. It has
exhausted the soil; grain crops have succeeded, and been found hardly
less exhaustive; and emigration of both white and coloured population
to the West and South has taken place to a very large extent, The
result may be told in the words of an American witness:--'That part
of Virginia which lies upon tide waters presents an aspect of
universal decay. Its population diminishes, and it sinks day by day
into a lower depth of exhaustion and poverty. The country between
tide waters and the Blue Ridge is fast passing into the same
condition. Mount Vernon is a desert waste; Monticello is little
better, and the same circumstances which have desolated the lands of
Washington and Jefferson have impoverished every planter in the
State. Hardly any have escaped, save the owners of the rich bottom
lands along James River, the fertility of which it seems difficult
utterly to destroy.'[46] Now a Virginia planter stands in much the
same relation to his plantation as an absentee Irish landlord to his
estate; the care of the land is in each case handed over to a
middleman, who is anxious to screw out of it as large a return of
produce or rent as possible; and pecuniary embarrassment is in both
cases the result. But as long as every pound of cotton grown on the
Mississippi and the Red River finds eager customers in Liverpool, the
price of slaves in those districts cannot fail to keep up. In many
cases the planter of the Northern slave States emigrates to a region
where he can employ his capital of thews and sinews more profitably
than at home. In many others, he turns his plantation into an
establishment for slave breeding, and sells his rising stock for
labour in the cottonfield."--_Prospective Review_ Nov. 1852.
Unhappily, however, for this reasoning precisely the same exhaustion
is visible in the Northern States, as the reader may see by a perusal
of the statements on this subject given by Professor Johnson, in his
"Notes on North America," of which the following is a specimen:--
"Exhaustion has diminished the produce of the land, formerly the
great staple of the country. When the wheat fell off, barley, which
at first yielded fifty or sixty bushels, was raised year after year,
till the land fell away from this, and became full of weeds."--Vol.
i. 259.
Rotation of crops cannot take place at a distance from market The
exhaustive character of the system is well shown in the following
extract:--
"In the State of New York there are some twelve million acres of
improved land, which includes all meadows and enclosed pastures. This
area employs about five hundred thousand labourers, being an average
of twenty-four acres to the hand. At this ratio, the number of acres
of improved land in the United States is one hundred, and twenty
millions. But New York is an old and more densely populated State
than an average in the Union; and probably twenty-five acres per head
is a juster estimate for the whole country. At this rate, the
aggregate is one hundred and twenty-five millions. Of these improved
lands, it is confidently believed that at least four-fifths are now
suffering deterioration in a greater or less degree.
"The fertility of some, particularly in the planting States, is
passing rapidly away; in others, the progress of exhaustion is so
slow as hardly to be observed by the cultivators themselves. To keep
within the truth, the annual income from the soil may be said to be
diminished ten cents an acre on one hundred million acres, or
four-fifths of the whole.
"This loss of income is ten millions of dollars, and equal to sinking
a capital of one hundred and sixty-six million six hundred and
sixty-six thousand dollars a year, paying six per cent. annual
interest. That improved farming lands may justly be regarded as
capital, and a fair investment when paying six per cent. interest,
and perfectly safe, no one will deny. This deterioration is not
unavoidable, for thousands of skilful farmers have taken fields, poor
in point of natural productiveness, and, instead of diminishing their
fertility, have added ten cents an acre to their annual income, over
and above all expenses. If this wise and improving system of rotation
tillage and husbandry were universally adopted, or applied to the one
hundred million acres now being exhausted, it would be equivalent to
creating each year an additional capital of one hundred and sixty-six
millions six hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars, and placing it
in permanent real estate, where it would pay six per cent. annual
interest. For all practical purposes, the difference between the two
systems is three hundred, and thirty-three millions three hundred and
thirty-three thousand dollars a year to the country.
"Eight million acres [in the State of New York] are in the hands of
three hundred thousand persons, who still adhere to the colonial
practice of extracting from the virgin soil all it will yield, so
long as it will pay expenses to crop it, and then leave it in a thin,
poor pasture for a term of years. Some of these impoverished farms,
which seventy-five years ago produced from twenty to thirty bushels
of wheat, on an average, per acre, now yield only from five to eight
bushels. In an exceedingly interesting work entitled 'American
Husbandry,' published in London in 1775, and written by an American,
the following remarks may be found on page 98, vol. i.:--'Wheat, in
many parts of the province, (New York,) yields a larger produce than
is common in England. Upon good lands about Albany, where the climate
is the coldest in the country, they sow two bushels and better upon
an acre, and reap from _twenty_ to _forty_; the latter quantity,
however, is not often had, but from twenty to _thirty_ are common;
and with such bad husbandry as would not yield the like in England,
and much less in Scotland. This is owing to the _richness_ and
_freshness_ of the land.'
"According to the State census of 1845, Albany county now produces
only seven and a half bushels of wheat per acre, although its farmers
are on tide water and near the capital of the State, with a good home
market, and possess every facility for procuring the most valuable
fertilizers. Dutchess county, also on the Hudson River, produces an
average of only five bushels per acre; Columbia, six bushels;
Rensselaer, eight; Westchester, seven; which is higher than the
average of soils that once gave a return larger than the wheat lands
of England even with 'bad husbandry.'
"Fully to renovate the eight million acres of partially exhausted
lands in the State of New York, will cost at least an average of
twelve dollars and a half per acre, or an aggregate of one hundred
millions of dollars. It is not an easy task to replace all the
bone-earth, potash, sulphur, magnesia, and organized nitrogen in
mould consumed in a field which has been unwisely cultivated fifty or
seventy-five years. Phosphorus is not an abundant mineral anywhere,
and his _sub-soil_ is about the only resource of the husbandman after
his surface-soil has lost most of its phosphates. The three hundred
thousand persons that cultivate these eight million acres of
impoverished soils annually produce less by twenty-five dollars each
than they would if the land had not been injured.
"The aggregate of this loss to the State and the world is seven
million five hundred thousand dollars per annum, or more than seven
per cent. interest on what it would cost to renovate the deteriorated
soils. There is no possible escape from this oppressive tax on labour
of seven million five hundred thousand dollars, but to improve the
land, or run off and leave it."--_Patent Office Report_, 1849
It is not slavery that produces exhaustion of the soil, but exhaustion
of the soil that causes slavery to continue. The people of England
rose from slavery to freedom as the land was improved and rendered
productive, and as larger numbers of men were enabled to obtain
subsistence from the same surface; and it was precisely as the land
thus acquired value that they became free. Such, too, has been the
case with every people that has been enabled to return to the land the
manure yielded by its products, because of their having a market at
home. On the contrary, there is no country in the world, in which men
have been deprived, of the power to improve their land, in which
slavery has not been maintained, to be aggravated in intensity as the
land became more and more exhausted, as we see to have been the case
in the West Indies. It is to this perpetual separation from each other
that is due the poverty and weakness of the South. At the close of the
Revolution, the now slave States contained probably 1,600,000 people,
and those States contained about 120,000,000 of acres, giving an
average of about eighty acres to each. In 1850, the population had
grown to 8,500,000, scattered over more than 300,000,000 of acres,
giving about forty acres to each. The consequence of this dispersion
is that the productive power is very small, as is here seen in an
estimate for 1850, taken from a Southern journal of high
reputation:--[47]
Cotton............................. 105,600,000
Tobacco............................ 15,000,000
Rice............................... 3,000,000
Naval stores....................... 2,000,000
Sugar.............................. 12,396,150
Hemp............................... 695,840 138,691,990
-----------
If we now add for food an equal amount, and this
is certainly much in excess of the truth...... 138,691,990
And for all other products..................... 22,616,020
------------
We obtain................................... $300,000,000
as the total production of eight millions and a half of people, or
about $35 per head. The total production of the Union in 1850 cannot
have been short of 2500 millions; and if we deduct from that sum the
above quantity, we shall have remaining 2150 millions as the product
of fourteen millions and a half of Northern people, or more than four
times as much per head. The difference is caused by the fact that at
the North artisans have placed themselves near to the farmer, and
towns and cities have grown up, and exchanges are made more readily,
and the farmer is not to the same extent obliged to exhaust his land,
and dispersion therefore goes on more slowly; and there is, in many of
the States, an extensive demand for those commodities of which the
earth yields largely, such as potatoes, cabbages, turnips, &c. &c.
With each step in the process of coming together at the North, men
tend to become more free; whereas the dispersion of the South produces
everywhere the trade in slaves of which the world complains, and which
would soon cease to exist if the artisan could be brought to take his
place by the side of the producer of food and cotton. Why he cannot do
so may be found in the words of a recent speech of Mr. Cardwell,
member of Parliament from Liverpool, congratulating the people of
England on the fact that free trade had so greatly damaged the cotton
manufacture of this country, that the domestic consumption was
declining from year to year. In this is to be found the secret of the
domestic slave trade of the South, and its weakness, now so manifest.
The artisan has been everywhere the ally of the farmer, and the South
has been unable to form that alliance, the consequences of which are
seen in the fact that it is always exporting men and raw materials,
and exhausting its soil and itself: and the greater the tendency to
exhaustion, the greater is the pro-slavery feeling. That such should
be the case is most natural. The man who exhausts his land attaches to
it but little value, and he abandons it, but he attaches much value to
the slave whom he can carry away with him. The pro-slavery feeling
made its appearance first in the period between 1830 and 1840. Up to
1832, there had existed a great tendency in Maryland, Virginia, and
Kentucky toward freedom, but that disappeared; and the reason why it
did so may be seen in the greatly increased tendency to the
abandonment of the older tobacco and cotton growing States, as here
shown:--
1820. 1830. 1840. 1850.
----- ----- ----- -----
Total population:
Virginia......... 1,065,379 1,211,405 1,239,797 1,424,863
South Carolina..... 502,741 581,185 594,398 668,247
Ratio of increase:
Virginia..................... 13.6 2.3 15.2
South Carolina............... 15.6 2.3 12.4
With the increase in the export of slaves to the South, the negro
population declined in its ratio of increase, whereas it has grown
with the growth of the power of the slave to remain at home, as is
here shown:--
1820. 1830. 1840. 1850.
----- ----- ----- -----
Total black
population: 1,779,885 2,328,642 2,873,703 3,591,000
Ratio of
increase........... 30 30.8 24 25
We see thus that the more the black population can remain at home, the
more rapidly they increase; and the reason why such is the case is,
that at home they are among their own people, by whom they have been
known from infancy, and are of course better fed and clothed, more
tenderly treated, and more lightly worked, with far greater tendency
toward freedom. It would thence appear that if we desire to bring
about the freedom of the negro, we must endeavour to arrest the
domestic slave trade, and enable the slave and his master to remain at
home; and to do this we must look to the causes of the difference in
the extent of the trade in the periods above referred to. Doing this,
we shall find that from 1820 to 1830 there was a decided tendency
toward bringing the artisan to the side of the ploughman; whereas from
1833 to 1840 the tendency was very strong in the opposite direction,
and so continued until 1842, at which time a change took place, and
continued until near the close of the decennial period, when our
present revenue system came fully into operation. The artisan has now
ceased to come to the side of the planter. Throughout the country
cotton and woollen mills and furnaces and foundries have been closed,
and women and children who were engaged in performing the lighter
labour of converting cotton into cloth are now being sold for the
heavier labour of the cotton-field, as is shown by the following
advertisement, now but a few weeks old:--
SALE OF NEGROES.--The negroes belonging to the Saluda Manufacturing
Company were sold yesterday for one-fourth cash, the balance in one
and two years, with interest, and averaged $599. Boys from 16 to 25
brought $900 to $1000.--_Columbia, (S. C.) Banner_, Dec. 31, 1852.
As a necessary consequence of this, the domestic slave trade is now
largely increasing, as is shown by the following extract from a recent
journal:--
"The emigration to the southern portion of Arkansas, Louisiana, and
Texas, during the past fall, has been unusually large, and the tide
which flows daily through our streets indicates that the volume
abates but little, if any. On the opposite bank of the river are
encamped nearly fifty wagons, with probably not less than two hundred
and fifty souls. Each night, for a fortnight, there have been, on an
average, not less than twenty-five wagons encamped there; and
notwithstanding two hand ferry-boats have been constantly plying
between the shores, the hourly accession to the number makes the
diminution scarcely perceptible."--_Little Rock. (Ark.) Gazette_,
Dec. 3, 1852.
Had the member for Liverpool been aware that a decline in the tendency
toward bringing the cotton-mill to the cotton-field was accompanied by
increased exhaustion of the land, increased impoverishment, and
increased inability to bring into action the rich soils of the older
States, and that with each such step there arose an increased
_necessity_ for the expulsion of the people of those States,
accompanied by an increased sacrifice of life resulting from the
domestic slave trade, he would certainly have hesitated before
congratulating Parliament on an occurrence so hostile to the progress
of freedom.
That the export of negroes, with its accompanying violation of the
rights of parents and children, and with its natural tendency toward a
total forgetfulness of the sanctity of the marriage tie, has its
origin in the exhaustion of the land, there can be no doubt--and that
that, in its turn, has its origin in the necessity for a dependence on
distant markets, is quite as free from doubt. The man who must go to a
distance with his products cannot raise potatoes, turnips, or hay. He
must raise the less bulky articles, wheat or cotton and he must take
from his land all the elements of which wheat or cotton is composed,
and then abandon it. In addition to this, he must stake all his
chances of success in his year's cultivation on a single crop; and
what are the effects of this is seen in the following paragraph in
relation to the wheat cultivation of Virginia in the last season:--
"Never did I know in this State such a destruction of the wheat crop;
I have just returned from Albemarle, one of the best counties. The
joint-worm, a new enemy of three year's known existence there, has
injured every crop, and destroyed many in that and other counties
both sides and along the Blue Ridge. I saw many fields that would not
yield more than seed, and not a few from which not one peck per acre
could be calculated upon. I saw more than one field without a head.
The most fortunate calculate upon a half crop only. Corn is backward
on the lower James River, embracing my own farm. I have heard to-day
from my manager that the caterpillar has made its appearance, and
must in the late wheat do serious damage."
That State is not permitted to do any thing but grow wheat and
tobacco, both of which she must export, and the larger the export the
smaller are the returns, under the system of "unlimited competition"
for the sale of raw products, and limited competition for the purchase
of manufactured ones, which it is the object of British policy to
establish. Not only is Virginia limited in the application of her
labour, but she is also greatly limited in the extent of her market,
because of the unequal distribution of the proceeds of the sales of
her products. The pound of tobacco for which the consumer pays 6s.
($1.44,) yields him less than six cents, the whole difference being
absorbed by the people who stand between him and the consumer, and who
contribute nothing toward the production of his commodity.[48]
Now, it is quite clear that if the consumer and he stood face to face
with each other, he would receive all that was paid, and that while
the one bought at lower prices, the other would sell at higher ones,
and both would grow rich. The difficulty with him is that not only is
his land exhausted, but he receives but a very small portion of the
price paid for its products, and thus is he, like the labourer of
Jamaica, exhausted by reason of the heavy taxation to which he is
subjected for the support of foreign merchants and foreign
governments. As a consequence of all this his land has little value,
and he finds himself becoming poorer from year to year, and each year
he has to sell a negro for the payment of the tax on his tobacco and
his wheat to which he is thus subjected, until he has at length to go
himself. If the reader desire to study the working of this system of
taxation, he cannot do better than read the first chapter of "Uncle
Tom's Cabin," containing the negotiation between Haley and Mr. Shelby
for the transfer of Uncle Tom, resulting in the loss of his life in
the wilds of Arkansas.
The more the necessity for exhausting land and for selling negroes,
the cheaper, however, will be wheat and cotton. Uncle Tom might have
remained at home had the powers of the land been maintained and had
Virginia been enabled to avail herself of her vast resources in coal,
iron ore, water-power, &c.; but as she could not do this, he had to go
to Arkansas to raise cotton: and the larger the domestic slave trade,
the greater must be the decline in the price of that great staple of
the South. At no period was that trade so large as in that from 1830
to 1840, and the effects are seen in the following comparative prices
of cotton:--
Crops, 1831 and 1832, average 10-1/2.
1841 and 1842, average 7.
The export of negroes declined between 1842 and 1850, and the
consequence is that cotton has since maintained its price. With the
closing of Southern mills the slave trade, is now again growing
rapidly, and the consequences will be seen in a large decline in the
price of that important product of Southern labour and land.
The reader will now observe that it was in the period from 1830 to
1840 that the tendency to emancipation disappeared--that it was in
that period were passed various laws adverse to the education of
negroes--that it was in that period there was the greatest enlargement
of the domestic slave trade--and the greatest decline in the price of
cotton. Having remarked these things, and having satisfied himself
that they, each and all, have their origin in the fact that the
planter is compelled to depend on foreign markets and therefore to
exhaust his land, he will be enabled to judge of the accuracy of the
view contained in the following sentence :--
"The price of a negro on Red River varies with the price of cotton in
Liverpool, and whatever tends to lower the value of the staple here,
not only confers an inestimable advantage on our own manufacturing
population, but renders slave labour less profitable, and therefore
less permanent in Alabama."--_Prospective Review_, No. xxxii. 512.
It would be fortunate if philanthropy and pecuniary profit could thus
be made to work together, but such unhappily is not the case. When men
are enabled to come nearer to each other and combine their efforts,
and towns arise, land acquires great value and gradually becomes
divided, and with each step in this direction the negro loses his
importance in the eye of his owner. When, however, men are forced to
abandon the land they have exhausted, it becomes consolidated, and the
moveable chattel acquires importance in the eyes of his emigrant
owner. At death, the land cannot, under these circumstances, be
divided, and therefore the negroes must; and hence it is that such
advertisements as the following are a necessary consequence of the
system that looks to cheap wheat, cheap sugar, and cheap cotton.
HIGH PRICE OF NEGROES.--We extract the following from the Lancaster
(S. C.) _Ledger_ of the 5th January last:--
We attended the sale of negroes belonging to the estate of the late
S. Beekman, on the 22d of last month, and were somewhat astonished at
the high price paid for negroes.
Negro men brought from $800 to $1000, the greater number at or near
the latter price. One (a blacksmith) brought $1425.
We learn from the Winsboro _Register_, that on Monday, the 3d inst.,
a large sale of negroes was made by the Commissioner in Equity for
Fairfleld district, principally the property of James Gibson,
deceased. The negroes were only tolerably likely, and averaged about
$620 each. The sales were made on a credit of twelve
months.--_Charleston (S. C.) Courier_.
The more the planter is forced to depend upon tobacco the lower will
be its price abroad, and the more he must exhaust his land. The more
rapid the exhaustion the more must be the tendency to emigrate. The
more the necessity for depending exclusively on wheat, the greater the
necessity for making a market for it by raising slaves for sale: and
in several of the older Southern States the planter now makes nothing
but what results from the increase of "stock."
Of all the exporters of food England is the largest, said a
distinguished English merchant, in a speech delivered some years
since. In some parts of that country it is manufactured into iron, and
in others into cloth, in order that it may travel cheaply, and this is
quite in accordance with the advice of Adam Smith. With a view,
however, to prevent other nations from following in the course so
strongly urged upon them by that great man, labour has been cheapened,
and men and women, boys and girls, have been accustomed to work
together in the same mine, and often in a state of _entire nudity_;
while other, women and children have been compelled to work for
fourteen or sixteen hours a day for six days in the week, and for
small wages, in the mill or workshop--and this has been done in
accordance with the advice of Mr. Huskisson, who, from his place in
Parliament, told his countrymen that in order "to give capital a fair
remuneration, _labour must be kept down_"--that is, the labourer must
be deprived of the power to determine for himself for whom he would
work, or what should be his reward. It was needed, as was then
declared by another of the most eminent statesmen of Britain, "that
the manufactures of all other nations should be strangled in their
infancy," and such has from that day to the present been the object of
British policy. Hence it is that England is now so great an exporter
of food manufactured into cloth and iron. The people of Massachusetts
manufacture their grain into fish, cloth, and various other
commodities, with a view to enable it cheaply to travel to market.
Those of Illinois, unable to convert their corn into coal or iron,
find themselves obliged to manufacture it into pork. The Virginian
would manufacture his corn and his wheat into cloth, or into coal and
iron, if he could; but this he cannot do, although close to the
producer of cotton, and occupying a land abounding in all the raw
materials of which machinery is composed; and having, too, abundant
labour power that runs to waste. Why he cannot do it is that England
follows the advice of Mr. Huskisson, and cheapens labour with a view
to prevent other nations from following the advice of Adam Smith. The
whole energies of the State are therefore given to the raising of
tobacco and corn, both of which must go abroad, and as the latter
cannot travel profitably in its rude state, it requires to be
manufactured, and the only branch of manufacture permitted to the
Virginian is that of negroes, and hence it is that their export is so
large, and that cotton is so cheap.
Widely different would be the course of things could he be permitted
to employ a reasonable portion of his people in the development of the
vast resources of the State--opening mines, erecting furnaces,
smelting iron, making machinery, and building mills. Fewer persons
would then raise corn and more would be employed in consuming it, and
the price at home would then rise to a level with that in the distant
market, and thus would the land acquire value, while the cost of
raising negroes would be increased. Towns would then grow up, and
exchanges would be made on the spot, and thus would the planter be
enabled to manure his land. Labour would become more productive, and
there would be more commodities to be given in exchange for labour;
and the more rapid the increase in the amount of production the
greater would be the tendency toward enabling the labourer to
determine for whom he would work and what should be his reward.
Population would then rapidly increase, and land would become divided,
and the little black cultivator of cabbages and potatoes would be seen
taking the place of the poor white owner of large bodies of exhausted
land, and thus would the negro tend toward freedom as his master
became enriched. Nothing of this kind is, however, likely to take
place so long as the Virginian shall continue of the opinion that the
way to wealth lies in the direction of taking every thing from the
land and returning nothing to it--nor, perhaps, so long as the people
of England shall continue in the determination that there shall be but
one workshop in the world, and carry that determination into effect by
"keeping labour down," in accordance with the advice of Mr. Huskisson.
The tendency to the abandonment of the older States is now probably
greater than it has ever been, because their people have ceased to
build mills or furnaces, and every thing looks to a yet more perfect
exhaustion of the soil. The more they abandon the land the greater is
the anxiety to make loans in England for the purpose of building
roads; and the more numerous the loans the more rapid is the flight,
and the greater the number of negroes brought to market.
A North Carolina paper informs its readers that--
"The trading spirit is fully up. A few days since Mr. D. W. Bullock
sold to Messrs. Wm. Norfleet, Robert Norfleet, and John S. Dancy,
plantation and 18 negroes for $30,000. Mr. R. R. Bridges to Wm. F.
Dancy, 6 acres near town for $600. At a sale in Wilson, we also
understand, negro men with no extra qualifications sold as high as
$1225."--_Tarborough Southerner_.
A South Carolina editor informs his readers that
"At public auction on Thursday, Thomas Ryan & Son sold fifteen likely
negroes for $10,365, or an average of $691. Three boys, aged about
seventeen, brought the following sums, viz. $1065, $1035, $1010, and
two at $1000--making an average of $1022. Capers Heyward sold a gang
of 109 negroes in families. Two or three families averaged from $1000
to $1100 for each individual; and the entire sale averaged $550. C.
G. Whitney sold two likely female house servants--one at $1000, the
other at $1190."--_Charleston Courier_.
Limited, as the people of the old States are more and more becoming,
to the raising of "stock" as the sole source of profit, need we be
surprised to see the pro-slavery feeling gaining ground from day to
day, as is here shown to be the case?
REMOVAL OF FREE PERSONS OF COLOUR FROM VIRGINIA.--A bill has been
reported in the Virginia House of Delegates which provides for the
appointment of overseers, who are to be required to hire out, at
public auction, all free persons of colour, to the highest bidder,
and to pay into the State Treasury the sums accruing from such hire.
The sums are to be devoted in future to sending free persons of
colour beyond the limits of the State. At the expiration of five
years, all free persons of colour remaining in the State are to be
sold into slavery to the highest bidder, at public auction, the
proceeds of such sales to be paid into the public treasury, provided
that said free persons of colour shall be allowed the privilege of
becoming the slaves of any free white person whom they may select, on
the payment by such person of a fair price.
Twenty years since, Virginia was preparing for the emancipation of the
slave. Now, she is preparing for the enslavement of the free. If the
reader would know the cause of this great change, he may find it in
the fact that man has everywhere become less free as land has become
less valuable.
Upon whom, now, must rest the responsibility for such a state of
things as is here exhibited? Upon the planter? He exercises no
volition. He is surrounded by coal and iron ore, but the attempt to
convert them into iron has almost invariably been followed by ruin. He
has vast powers of nature ready to obey his will, yet dare he not
purchase a spindle or a loom to enable him to bring into use his now
waste labour power, for such attempts at bringing the consumer to the
side of the producer have almost invariably ended in the
impoverishment of the projector, and the sale and dispersion of his
labourers. He is compelled to conform his operations to the policy
which looks to having but one workshop for the world; and instead of
civilizing his negroes by bringing them to work in combination, he
must barbarize them by dispersion. A creature of necessity, he cannot
be held responsible; but the responsibility must, and will, rest on
those who produce that necessity.
The less the power of association in the Northern slave States, the
more rapid must be the growth of the domestic slave trade, the greater
must be the decline in the price of wheat, cotton, and sugar, the
greater must be the tendency to the passage of men like Uncle Tom, and
of women and children too, from the light labour of the North to the
severe labour of the South and South-west--but, the greater, as we
are told, must be the prosperity of the people of England. It is
unfortunate for the world that a country exercising so much influence
should have adopted a policy so adverse to the civilization and the
freedom not only of the negro race, but of mankind at large. There
seems, however, little probability of a change. Seeking to make of
herself a great workshop, she necessarily desires that all the rest of
the world should be one great farm, to be cultivated by men, women,
and children, denied all other means of employment. This, of course,
forbids association, which diminishes as land becomes exhausted. The
absence of association forbids the existence of schools or workshops,
books or instruction, and men become barbarized, when, under a
different system, they might and would become civilized. The tendency
to freedom passes away, as we see to have been the case in the last
twenty years--but in place of freedom, and as a compensation for the
horrors of Jamaica and of the domestic slave trade, the great workshop
of the world is supplied with cheap grain, cheap tobacco, cheap sugar,
and cheap cotton.
Were Adam Smith alive, he might, and probably would, take some trouble
to inform his countrymen that a system which looked to the exhaustion
of the land of other countries, and the enslavement of their
population, was "a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of
mankind;" but since his day the doctrines of the "Wealth of Nations"
have been discarded, and its author would find himself now addressing
hearers more unwilling than were even the men for whom he wrote eighty
years since. At that time the imaginary discovery had not been made
that men always commenced on the rich soils, and passed, as population
and wealth increased, to poorer ones; and the Malthusian law of
population was yet unthought of. Now, however, whatever tends to limit
the growth of population is, we are told, to be regarded as a great
good; and as the domestic slave trade accomplishes that object at the
same time that it furnishes cheap cotton, it can scarcely be expected
that there will be any change; and yet, unless a change be somewhere
made, abroad or at home, we must perforce submit to the continuance of
the existing system, which precludes education, almost eschews
matrimony, separates husbands and wives, parents and children, and
sends the women to the labours of the field.