THE CONDITION AND CHARACTER OF THE PRIVILEGED CLASSES OF THE SOUTH.
Since the growth of the cotton demand has doubled the value of slave
labour, and with it the pecuniary inducement to prevent negroes from
taking care of themselves, hypotheses and easy methods for justifying
the everlasting perpetuation of slavery have been multiplied. I have
not often conversed with a planter about the condition of the slaves,
that he did not soon make it evident, that a number of these were on
service in his own mind, naïvely falling back from one to another,
if a few inquiries about matters of fact were addressed him without
obvious argumentative purpose. The beneficence of slavery is commonly
urged by an exposition not only of the diet, and the dwellings, and
the jollity, and the devotional eloquence of the negroes, but also by
demonstrations of the high mental attainments to which individuals
are already found to be arriving. Thus, there is always at hand, some
negro mathematician, who is not merely held to be far in advance of
the native Africans, but who beats most white men in his quickness and
accuracy in calculation, and who is at the same time considered to be
so thoroughly trustworthy, that he is constantly employed by his master
as an accountant and collecting agent; or some negro whose reputation
for ingenuity and skill in the management and repair of engines,
sugar-mills, cotton-presses, or other machinery, is so well established
that his services are more highly valued, throughout a considerable
district, than any white man’s; or some negro who really manages his
owner’s plantation, his agricultural judgment being deferred to, as
superior to that of any overseer or planter in the county. Scarcely
a plantation did I visit on which some such representative black man
was not acknowledged and made a matter of boasting by the owner, who,
calling attention perhaps to the expression of intelligence and mien
of self-confidence which distinguished his premium specimen, would
cheerfully give me a history of the known special circumstances,
practically constituting a special mental feeding, by which the
phenomenon was to be explained. Yet it might happen that the same
planter would presently ask, pointing to the brute-like countenance of
a moping field-hand, what good would freedom be to such a creature? And
this would be one who had been provided from childhood with food, and
shelter, and clothing, with as little consideration of his own therefor
as for the air he breathed; who had not been allowed to determine
for himself with whom he should associate; with what tools and to
what purpose he should labour; who had had no care on account of his
children; who had no need to provide for old age; who had never had
need to count five-and-twenty; the highest demand upon whose faculties
had been to discriminate between cotton and crop-grass, and to strike
one with a hoe without hitting the other; to whose intelligence, though
living in a civilized land, the pen and the press, the mail and the
telegraph, had contributed nothing; who had no schooling as a boy; no
higher duty as a man than to pick a given quantity of cotton between
dawn and dark; and of whom, under this training and these confinements,
it might well be wondered that he was found able to understand and to
speak the language of human intelligence any more than a horse.
Again, one would assure me that he had witnessed in his own time an
obvious advance in the quality of the slaves generally; they were more
active, less stupid, employed a larger and more exact vocabulary, and
were less superstitious, obstinate, and perverse in their habits of
mind than when he was himself a boy; but I had only to presume that,
with this rapid improvement, the negroes would soon be safely allowed
to take some step toward freedom, to be assured with much more apparent
confidence than before, that in the special quality which originally
made the negro a slave, there had been no gain; that indeed it was
constantly becoming more evident that he was naturally too deficient in
forecasting capacity to be able to learn how to take civilized care of
himself.
As a rule, when the beneficence of slavery is argued by Southerners,
an advancing intellectual as well as moral condition of the mass of
negroes is assumed, and the high attainments of individuals are pointed
to as evidence of what is to be expected of the mass, if the system
is not disturbed. Suggest that any modification of the system would
enlarge its beneficence, however, and an exception to the general
rule, as regards the single quality of providence, is at once alleged,
and in such a manner, that one cannot but get the impression that, in
this quality, the negro is believed to be retrograding as surely as he
is advancing in everything else; and this is one method by which the
unconditional perpetuation of the system, as it is, is justified. Such
a justification must of course involve the supposition that in the
tenth generation of an unremitted training, discipline, education, and
custom in abject dependence upon a voluntary provision by others, for
every wish of which the gratification is permitted, _white_ men would
be able, as a rule, to _gain_ in the quality of providence and capacity
for independent self-support.
As to the real state of the case, I find, in my own observation, no
reason for doubting, what must be expected of those interested, that
the general improvement of the slave is usually somewhat overrated,
and his forecasting ability underrated. Measures intended to prevent
a man from following his natural inclinations often have the effect
of stimulating those inclinations; and I believe that the system
which is designed not merely to relieve the negro from having any
care for himself, but, as far as practicable, to forcibly prevent him
from taking care of himself, in many particulars to which he has more
or less instinctive inclination, instead of gradually suppressing
this inclination, to some extent stimulates it, so that the Southern
negro of to-day, however depraved in his desires, and however badly
instructed, is really a man of more cunning, shrewdness, reticence, and
persistence, in what he does undertake for himself, than his father
was. The healthful use of these qualities (which would constitute
providence) is, however, in general, successfully opposed by slavery,
and, as far as the slave is concerned, nothing worse than this can be
said of the system.
Admitting that, in this view, slavery is not beneficent, or is no
longer beneficent, or can be but for a time beneficent to the slave,
the present attitude of the South still finds a mode of justification
with many minds, in the broad assertion that the negro is not of the
nature of mankind, therefore cannot be a subject of inhumanity. This,
of course, sweeps the field, if it does anything: thus (from the
Day-Book)—
“The wide-spread delusion that Southern institutions are an evil,
and their extension dangerous—the notion so prevalent at the North
that there is a real antagonism, or that the system of the South
is hostile to Northern interests; the weakened union sentiment,
and the utter debauchment, the absolute traitorism of a portion
of the Northern people, not only to the Union, but to Democratic
institutions, and to the cause of civilization on this continent;
all these, with the minor and most innumerable mischiefs that this
mighty world-wide imposture has engendered or drags in its midst,
rest upon the dogma, the single assumption, the sole elementary
foundation falsehood, that a negro is a black man.”
This bold ground is not as often taken at the South as by desperate
bidders for Southern confidence among ourselves. I have heard Christian
men, however, when pushed for a justification of the sealing up of the
printed Bible, of the legal disregard of marriage, of giving power to
rascally traders to forcibly separate families, and so on, refer to
it as a hypothesis not at all to be scouted under such circumstances.
Yet, as they did so, there stood behind their chairs, slaves, in
whose veins ran more Anglo-Saxon blood than of any African race’s
blood, and among their other slaves, it is probable there were many
descendants of Nubians, Moors, Egyptians, and Indians, all interbred
with white and true negro tribes, so that it would be doubtful if there
remained one single absolutely pure negro, to which animal alone their
argument would strictly apply. If the right or expediency of denying
the means of preparing themselves for freedom to these beings could
even be held to be coexistent with the evident preponderance in them
of certain qualities of form, colour, etc., the number of those who
are held unjustly or inexpediently in the bonds of a perpetual slavery
is already quite large in the South, and is gradually but surely
increasing—is increasing much more rapidly than are their means of
cultivating habits which are necessary to be cultivated, before the
manliest child of white men is capable of enjoying freedom.
There are but two methods of vindicating the habit of depending on
the labour of slaves for the development of wealth in the land, which
appear to me, on the face of them, entitled to be treated gravely. One
of these, assuming the beings held in slavery to be as yet generally
incompetent to take care of themselves in a civilized manner, and
dangerous to the life as well as to the wealth of the civilized people
who hold them in slavery, argues that it is necessary for their humane
maintenance, and to prevent them from acquiring an increase of the
disposition and strength of mind and will which has always been felt
a source of danger to the well-being of their masters, that all the
present laws for their mental repression should be rigidly maintained.
It is not to be denied, I think, that there is some ground for this
assumption. Inasmuch as it is also argued that the same necessity
requires that these beings, and with them all these laws, should be
carried on to territory now free from them, we are called upon to give
a sober consideration to the argument which is based upon it. This I
shall do in the last chapter. The other method to which I refer assumes
that by having a well-defined class set apart for drudging and servile
labour, the remainder of a community may be preserved free from the
demeaning habits and traits of character which, it is alleged, servile
and menial obligations and the necessity of a constant devotion to
labour are sure to fix upon those who are subject to them. Hence a
peculiar advantage in morals and in manners is believed to belong to
the superior class of a community so divided. I am inclined to think
that there is no method of justifying slavery, which is more warmly
cherished by those interested to maintain it, than this. I am sure
that there is none which planters are more ready to suggest to their
guests.[55]
No sensible man among us shuts his eyes to the ignorance, meanness,
vice, and misery which accompanies our general prosperity; no class
of statesmen, no politicians or demagogues, no writers deny or ignore
it. It is canvassed, published, studied, struggled with, by all
honest men, and this not in our closets alone, but in our churches,
our legislatures, our colleges, our newspapers, our families. We are
constantly urging, constantly using means for discovering it and
setting it forth plainly. We commission able men to make a business of
bringing it to the light, and we publish the statistics which their
labours supply as legislative documents to be circulated at the general
expense, in order that our misfortune may be as well known and as
exactly comprehended as possible.
From much of all this, which so painfully and anxiously concerns us,
we are told that the South is free. We are told that what we bewail is
seen at the South to be the result of a mistaken social system; that
the South escapes that result by slavery. We do not deny, we daily
acknowledge that there are mistakes in our system; we endeavour to
remedy them; and we not unfrequently have to acknowledge that in doing
so, we have made some of our bad things worse. Does slavery relieve
all? And without compensation? We often find, upon a thorough review,
that our expedients, while they have for a time seemed to produce
very valuable results, have in fact corrected one evil by creating or
enhancing another. We have borrowed from Peter to pay Paul. In this
way we find investigation and discussion to be constantly essential
to prevent errors and mistakes from being exaggerated and persevered
in unnecessarily. Thus we—our honestly humane part at least—are ever
calling for facts, ever publishing, proclaiming, discussing the facts
of our evil. It is only those whose selfish interest is thought by
themselves to be served by negligence, who resist investigation
and publication, who avoid discussion. Thus we come to habitually
associate much activity of discussion, much consideration, much
publication with improvement—often no doubt erroneously—still it is
natural and rational that when we find no discussion of facts, no
publication, no consideration, where we find general consideration and
general discussion practically prevented by a forcible resistance to
publication, we cannot but suspect there is something sadly needing
to be made better. And this last we do find to be the case at the
South, and with regard to slavery. Why, if their system has such
tangible evidence of its advantages within the personal knowledge of
any citizen, do they object to its alleged disadvantages being set
forth for consideration, and, if it should happen, discussion? True, we
may be wrong, we may be mistaken in supposing that this, our constant
publication and challenge to discussion is a good thing. Perhaps if
we were better, we should talk less, know less of what evil remained
to be gradually grown out of. It might be found that the constant
consideration of our evil had had a bad effect upon us. But I have
not found that the people of the South are inclined to shut their
eyes, and close their ears, and bar their imaginations to the same
evil. With the misery which prevails among us, Southerners generally
appear to be, indeed, more familiar than the most industrious of our
home philanthropists. Great as it is, it is really over-estimated at
the South—over-estimated in the aggregate at least; for it is perhaps
impossible to over-estimate the sufferings of individuals. South of
Virginia, an intelligent man or woman is rarely met who does not
maintain, with the utmost apparent confidence, that the people who do
the work of the North are, on the whole, harder driven, worse fed, and
more destitute of comfort than are the slaves at the South, taking
an average of both classes; and this I heard assumed by gentlemen,
the yearly cost of maintaining whose own slaves, according to their
statement to me, would not equal the average monthly expenses of an
equal number of the poorest class of labourers I have ever known at
the North. I have heard it assumed by planters, who not only did not
themselves enjoy, but who never imagined or aspired to a tithe of
the comfort to which most journeymen mechanics whom I have known are
habituated. I have heard it assumed by gentlemen, nine-tenths of whose
neighbours for a hundred miles around them lived in a manner which, if
witnessed at the North, would have made them objects of compassion to
the majority of our day-labourers.
A gentleman coming up the Mississippi, just after a recent “Southern
Commercial Convention” at Memphis, says:
“For three days I have been sitting at a table three times a day
opposite four of the fire-eaters. * * * It was evident that they
were sincere: for they declared to one another the belief that
Providence was directing the South to recommence the importation
of Africans, that she might lead the world to civilization and
Christianity through its dependence upon her soil for cotton.
All their conversation was consistent with this. They believed
the South the centre of Christianity and the hope of the world,
while they had not the slightest doubt that the large majority of
the people of the North were much more to be pitied than their
own negroes. Exclusive of merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, and
politicians, they evidently imagined the whole population of the
North to be quite similar to the poor white population of the
South. Yet they had travelled in the North, it appeared. I could
only conclude that their observation of northern working men
had been confined to the Irish operatives of some half-finished
western railroad, living in temporary shanties along the route.”
I have even found that conservative men, who frankly acknowledged the
many bad effects of slavery, and confessed the conviction that the
Northern Slave States were ruined by it; men who expressed admiration
of Cassius Clay’s course, and acknowledged no little sympathy with his
views, and who spoke with more contempt of their own fanatics than of
the Abolitionists themselves; that such men were inclined to apologize
for slavery, and for their own course in acting politically for its
extension and perpetuation, by assuming certain social advantages to
exist where it prevailed. “There is a higher tone in Southern society
than at the North,” they would say, “which is, no doubt, due to the
greater leisure which slavery secures to us. There is less anxiety for
wealth, consequently more honesty. This also leads to the habit of more
generous living and of hospitality, which is so characteristic of the
South.”
I think that there is a type of character resulting in a secondary
way from slavery, of which Mr. Clay is himself a noble example, which
attracts admiration and affection in a rare manner. I shall explain
this secondary action of slavery by-and-by. I have come to the
conclusion that whatever may be the good results of slavery in the
way I shall then describe, this so constantly asserted, so generally
conceded, of inducing a “higher tone” of breeding, and especially of
nourishing the virtue of hospitality, is chimerical.
Some reader may at once be inclined to say that the Southerners whom
he has met are unquestionably better bred people than are common at the
North, and that they state as their experience that they do not find
that hospitality, that honesty, that guilelessness of dealing one with
another among the people of the North, to which they are accustomed
at home. It would remain a question, whether the Southerners whom
the reader has met are of a common or an exceptional class; whether
it is to slavery, or to some other circumstance, they owe their
breeding; whether this other circumstance is dependent on slavery,
or whether it may exist (and, if so, whether, when it does exist, it
produces the same fruit) quite independently of slavery. It cannot be
said that there are no gentlemen and gentlewomen of first water in
free countries. A comparison, then, must be a comparison of numbers.
I shall, by-and-by, offer the reader some assistance in making a
comparison of this kind. And if, as we hear, free-labour society is
still an experiment, and one of the results of that experiment is to
be found in the low condition of portions of our community, and it is
by comparing this result with the condition of the whites of the South
that we must judge of the success of the experiment; it may again be
a question of numbers. As to experience of hospitality, that is not a
question of quantity or of quality merely. I should wish to ask the
reader’s Southern authorities, “Where and with whom has your experience
been, North and South?” And if with a similar class and in similar
circumstances, I should wish to ask further, “What do you mean by
hospitality?”
I think that the error which prevails in the South, with regard to
the general condition of our working people, is much strengthened
by the fact, that a different standard of comfort is used by most
persons at the South from that known at the North, and that used by
Northern writers. People at the South are content and happy with a
condition which few accept at the North unless with great complaint,
or with expressions of resignation such as are the peculiar property
of slaves at the South. If, reader, you had been travelling all day
through a country of the highest agricultural capability, settled more
than twenty years ago, and toward nightfall should be advised by a
considerate stranger to ride five miles further, in order to reach the
residence of Mr. Brown, because Mr. Brown, being a well-to-do man, and
a right good fellow, had built an uncommonly good house, and got it
well furnished, had a score of servants, and being at a distance from
neighbours, was always glad to entertain a respectable stranger—after
hearing this, as you continued your ride somewhat impatiently in the
evening chill, what consolations would your imagination find in the
prospect before you? My New England and New York experience would
not forbid the hope of a private room, where I could, in the first
place, wash off the dust of the road, and make some change of clothing
before being admitted to a family apartment. This family room would
be curtained and carpeted, and glowing softly with the light of sperm
candles or a shaded lamp. When I entered it, I could expect that a
couch or an arm-chair, and a fragrant cup of tea, with refined sugar,
and wholesome bread of wheaten flour, leavened, would be offered me. I
should think it likely that I could then have the snatch of Tannhäuser
or Trovatore, which had been running faintly in my head all day,
fingered clearly out to my entire satisfaction upon a pianoforte. I
should then look with perfect confidence to being able to refer to
Shakespeare, or Longfellow, or Dickens, if anything I had seen or
thought during the day had haply led me to wish to do so. I should
expect, as a matter of course, a clean, sweet bed, where I could sleep
alone and undisturbed, “until possibly in the morning a jug of hot
water should be placed at my door, to aid the removal of a traveller’s
rigid beard. I should expect to draw a curtain from before a window, to
lift the sash without effort, to look into a garden and fill my lungs
with fragrant air; and I should be certain when I came down of a royal
breakfast. A man of these circumstances in this rich country, he will
be asking my opinion of his fruits. A man of his disposition cannot
exist in the country without ladies, and ladies cannot exist in the
country without flowers; and might I not hope for the refinement which
decks even the table with them? and that the breakfast would be a meal
as well as a feed—an institution of mental and moral sustenance as well
as of palatable nourishment to the body? My horse I need hardly look
after, if he be a sound brute;—good stables, litter, oats, hay, and
water, grooming, and discretion in their use, will never be wanting in
such a man’s house in the country.”
In what civilized region, after such advice, would such thoughts be
preposterous, unless in the Slave States? Not but that such men and
such houses, such family and home comforts may be found in the South.
I have found them a dozen of them, delightful homes. But then in a
hundred cases where I received such advice, and heard houses and men
so described, I did not find one of the things imagined above, nor
anything ranging with them. In my last journey of nearly three months
between the Mississippi and the Upper James River, I saw not only
none of those things, received none of those attentions, but I saw
and met nothing of the kind. Nine times out of ten, at least, after
such a promise, I slept in a room with others, in a bed which stank,
supplied with but one sheet, if with any; I washed with utensils common
to the whole household; I found no garden, no flowers, no fruit, no
tea, no cream, no sugar, no bread; (for corn pone—let me assert, in
parenthesis, though possibly, as tastes differ, a very good thing of
its kind for ostriches—is not bread: neither does even flour, salt,
fat, and water, stirred together and warmed, constitute bread;) no
curtains, no lifting windows (three times out of four absolutely no
windows), no couch—if one reclined in the family room it was on the
bare floor—for there were no carpets or mats. For all that, the house
swarmed with vermin. There was no hay, no straw, no oats (but mouldy
corn and leaves of maize), no discretion, no care, no honesty, at the
—— there was no stable, but a log-pen; and besides this, no other
out-house but a smoke-house, a corn-house, and a range of nigger houses.
In nine-tenths of the houses south of Virginia, in which I was
obliged, making all reasonable endeavour to find the best, to spend
the night, there were none of these things. And most of these had
been recommended to me by disinterested persons on the road as being
better than ordinary—houses where they “sot up for travellers and had
things.” From the banks of the Mississippi to the banks of James, I
did not (that I remember) see, except perhaps in one or two towns,
a thermometer, nor a book of Shakespeare, nor a pianoforte or sheet
of music; nor the light of a carcel or other good centre-table or
reading-lamp, nor an engraving or copy of any kind, of a work of art
of the slightest merit. I am not speaking of what are commonly called
“poor whites;” a large majority of all these houses were the residences
of shareholders, a considerable proportion cotton-planters.
Those who watch the enormous export of cotton from the South, and who
are accustomed to reckon up its value, as it goes forward, million on
million, hundred million on hundred million, year after year, say that
it is incomprehensible, if it be not incredible, that the people of
the South are not rich and living in luxury unknown elsewhere. It is
asking too much that such statements as I have made should be received
without any explanation. I have found this to be so, and so far as the
explanation appears in the attendant social phenomena of the country, I
shall endeavour to set it forth, sustaining the accuracy of my report
by the evidence of competent Southern witnesses.
William H. Gregg, Esq., a distinguished citizen of Charleston,
South Carolina, in a report to the directors of the Graniteville
Manufacturing Company of that State, describes at length the condition
of the operatives of the company, whom he states to have been drawn
originally “from the poor of Edgefield, Barnwell and Lexington
districts.” These are cotton-growing districts of South Carolina,
better supplied than usual with the ordinary advantages of civilized
communities. For instance, by reference to the census returns, I find
that they are provided with public schools at the rate of one to
less than thirty square miles, while within the State, inclusive of
its several towns, there is but one public school, on an average, to
every forty square miles. There are churches within these districts,
one to about seventeen square miles; throughout the State, including
Charleston and its other cities, one to every twenty-five square
miles. In Georgia the average is one to thirty-two square miles. With
the condition of the newer cotton States, in these respects, that of
Edgefield, Barnwell, and Lexington, would be found to compare still
more favourably for the poor. In Lexington there is even a theological
seminary. What, nevertheless, there is not generally available to
the people at large, Mr. Gregg indicates by his statement of what
advantages they possess who have come to Graniteville.
“When they were first brought together, the _seventy-nine_ out
of a hundred grown girls who could neither read nor write were
a by-word around the country; that reproach has long since
been removed. We have night, Sunday, and week-day schools.
Singing-masters, music-teachers, writing-masters, and itinerant
lecturers all find patronage in Graniteville where the people can
easily earn all the necessaries of life, and are in the enjoyment
of the usual luxuries of country life.” * * *
“To get a steady supply of workmen, a population must be collected
_which will regard themselves as a community_; and two essential
elements are necessary to the building up, moral growth, and
stability of such a collection of people, namely, a church and a
school-house.” * * *
“I can safely say that it is only necessary to make _comfortable
homes_ in order to procure families, that will afford labourers
of the best kind. A large manufacturing establishment located
anywhere in the State, away from a town and in a healthy
situation, will soon collect around it a population who, however
poor, with proper moral restraints thrown around them, will soon
develope all the elements of good society. Self-respect and
attachment to the place will soon find their way into the minds of
such, while intelligence, morality, and well directed industry,
_will not fail to acquire position_.”
What the poor people of Edgefield, Barnwell, and Lexington districts
needed was, in the first place, to be led “to regard themselves as a
community;” for this purpose the nuclei of “a church and a schoolhouse”
are declared to be essential, to which must be added, such other
stimulants to improvement as “singing and writing schools, itinerant
lecturers,” etc., etc. In short, the power of obtaining, as the result
of their labour, “the necessaries of life,” “the usual luxuries of
country life,” or, in two words, which cover and include church,
school, music and lecture, as well as bread, cleanliness, luxuries and
necessities, “comfortable homes.” It was simply by making possible to
them what before had not been possible, the essential conditions of a
comfortable civilized home, that Mr. Gregg was enabled in a few years
to announce, as he did, that, “from extreme poverty and want, they have
become a thrifty, happy, and contented people.”
The present system of American slavery, notwithstanding the enormous
advantages of wealth which the cotton monopoly is supposed to offer,
prevents the people at large from having “comfortable homes,” in
the sense intended by Mr. Gregg. For nine-tenths of the citizens,
comfortable homes, as the words would be understood by the mass of
citizens of the North and of England, as well as by Mr. Gregg, are,
under present arrangements, out of the question.
Examine almost any rural district of the South, study its history,
and this will be as evident as it was to Mr. Gregg in the case of
those to which his attention was especially called. These, to be sure,
contained, probably, a large proportion of very poor soil. But how is
it in a district of entirely rich soil? Suppose it to be of twenty
square miles, with a population of six hundred, all told, and with an
ordinarily convenient access by river navigation to market. The whole
of the available cotton land in this case will probably be owned by
three or four men, and on these men the demand for cotton will have
had, let us suppose, its full effect. Their tillage land will be
comparatively well cultivated. Their houses will be comfortable, their
furniture and their food luxurious. They will, moreover, not only have
secured the best land on which to apply their labour, but the best
brute force, the best tools, and the best machinery for ginning and
pressing, all superintended by the best class of overseers. The cotton
of each will be shipped at the best season, perhaps all at once, on a
boat, or by trains expressly engaged at the lowest rates of freight.
It will everywhere receive special attention and care, because it
forms together a parcel of great value. The merchants will watch the
markets closely to get the best prices for it, and when sold the cash
returns to each proprietor will be enormously large. As the expenses
of raising and marketing cotton are in inverse ratio to the number
of hands employed, planters nearly always immediately reinvest their
surplus funds in slaves; and as there is a sufficient number of large
capitalists engaged in cotton-growing to make a strong competition for
the limited number of slaves which the breeding States can supply, it
is evident that the price of a slave will always be as high as the
product of his labour, under the best management, on the most valuable
land, and with every economical advantage which money can procure, will
warrant.
But suppose that there are in the district besides these three or four
large planters, their families and their slaves, a certain number of
whites who do not own slaves. The fact of their being non-slaveholders
is evidence that they are as yet without capital, in this case one
of two tendencies must soon be developed. Either being stimulated by
the high price of cotton they will grow industrious, will accumulate
capital and purchase slaves, and owning slaves will require a larger
amount of land upon which to work them than they require for their own
labour alone, thus being led to buy out one of the other planters, or
to move elsewhere themselves before they have acquired an established
improvement of character from their prosperity; or, secondly, they
will not purchase slaves, but either expend currently for their own
comfort, or hoard the results of their labour. If they hoard they will
acquire no increase of comfort or improvement of character on account
of the demand. If they spend all their earnings, these will not be
sufficient, however profitable their cotton culture may be supposed, to
purchase luxuries much superior to those furnished to the slaves of the
planters, because the local demand, being limited to some fifty white
families, in the whole district of twenty square miles, is not enough
to draw luxuries to the neighbourhood, unless they are brought by
special order, and at great expense from the nearest shipping port. Nor
is it possible for such a small number of whites to maintain a church
or a newspaper, nor yet a school, unless it is one established by a
planter, or two or three planters, and really of a private and very
expensive character.
Suppose, again, another district in which either the land is
generally less productive or the market less easy of access than in
the last, or that both is the case. The stimulus of the cotton demand
is, of course, proportionately lessened. In this case, equally with
the last, the richest soils, and those most convenient to the river
or the railroad, if there happens to be much choice in this respect,
will assuredly be possessed by the largest capitalists, that is, the
largest slaveholders, who may nevertheless be men of but moderate
wealth and limited information. If so, their standard of comfort will
yet be low, and their demand will consequently take effect very slowly
in increasing the means of comfort, and rendering facilities for
obtaining instruction more accessible to their neighbours. But suppose,
notwithstanding the disadvantages of the district in its distance from
market, that their sales of cotton, the sole export of the district,
are very profitable, and that the demand for cotton is constantly
increasing. A similar condition with regard to the chief export of a
free labour community would inevitably tend to foster the intelligence
and industry of a large number of people. It has this effect with only
a very limited number of the inhabitants of a plantation district
consisting in large part as they must of slaves. These labourers may
be driven to work harder, and may be furnished with better tools for
the purpose of increasing the value of cotton which is to be exchanged
for the luxuries which the planter is learning to demand for himself,
but it is for himself and for his family alone that these luxuries
will be demanded. The wages—or means of demanding home comfort—of the
workmen are not at all influenced by the cotton demand: the effect,
therefore, in enlarging and cheapening the local supply of the means of
home comfort will be almost inappreciable, while the impulse generated
in the planter’s mind is almost wholly directed toward increasing the
cotton crop through the labour of his slaves alone. His demand upon the
whites of the district is not materially enlarged in any way. The slave
population of the district will be increased in number, and its labour
more energetically directed, and soon the planters will find the soil
they possess growing less productive from their increasing drafts upon
it. There is plenty of rich unoccupied land to be had for a dollar an
acre a few hundred miles to the West, still it is no trifling matter to
move all the stock, human, equine, and bovine, and all the implements
and machinery of a large plantation. Hence, at the same time, perhaps,
with an importation from Virginia of purchased slaves, there will be an
active demand among the slaveholders for all the remaining land in the
district on which cotton can be profitably grown. Then sooner or later,
and with a rapidity proportionate to the effect of the cotton demand,
the white population of the district divides, one part, consisting
of a few slaveholders, obtains possession of all the valuable cotton
land, and monopolizes for a few white families all the advantages of
the cotton demand. A second part removes with its slaves, if it possess
any, from the district, while a third continues to occupy the sand
hills, or sometimes perhaps takes possession of the exhausted land
which has been vacated by the large planters, because they, with all
their superior skill and advantages of capital, could not cultivate it
longer with profit.[56]
The population of the district, then, will consist of the large
landowners and slaveowners, who are now so few in number as to be
unnoticeable either as producers or consumers; of their slaves, who
are producers but not consumers (to any important extent), and of this
forlorn hope of poor whites, who are, in the eyes of the commercial
world, neither producers nor consumers. The contemplation from a
distance of their condition, is a part of the price which is paid
by those who hold slavery to be justifiable on the ground that it
maintains a race of gentlemen. Some occasionally flinch for a moment,
in observing it, and vainly urge that something should be done to
render it less appalling. Touching their ignorance, for instance, said
Governor Seabrooke of South Carolina, addressing the Legislature of
that State, years ago:—
“Education has been provided by the Legislature, but for one
class of the citizens of the State, which is the wealthy class.
For the middle and poorer classes of society it has done nothing,
since no organized system has been adopted for that purpose.
You have appropriated seventy-five thousand dollars annually
to free schools; but, under the present mode of applying it,
that liberality is really the profusion of the prodigal, rather
than the judicious generosity which confers real benefit. The
few who are educated at public expense in those excellent and
truly useful institutions, the Arsenal and Citadel Academies
[military schools], form almost the only exception to the truth
of this remark. Ten years ago, twenty thousand adults, besides
children, were unable to read or write, in South Carolina. Has
our free-school system dispelled any of this ignorance? Are there
not any reasonable fears to be entertained that the number has
increased since that period?”
Since then, Governor Adams, in another message to the South Carolina
Legislature, vainly urging the appointment of a superintendent of
popular education, said:—
“Make, at least, this effort, and if it results in nothing—if, in
consequence of insurmountable difficulties in our condition, no
improvement can be made on the present system, and the poor of the
land are hopelessly doomed to ignorance, poverty, and crime—you
will, at least, feel conscious of having done your duty, and the
public anxiety on the subject will be quieted.”
It is not unnatural that there should be some anxiety with at least
that portion of the public not accustomed to look at public affairs in
the large way of South Carolina legislators, when the travelling agent
of a religious tract society can read from his diary in a church in
Charleston, such a record as this:—
“Visited sixty families, numbering two hundred and twenty-one
souls over ten years of age; only twenty-three could read, and
seventeen write. Forty-one families destitute of the Bible.
Average of their going to church, once in seven years. Several,
between thirty and forty-five years old, had heard but one or
two sermons in their lives. Some grown-up youths had never heard
a sermon or prayer, until my visit, and did not know of such a
being as the Saviour; and boys and girls, from ten to fifteen
years old, did not know who made them. All of one family rushed
away when I knelt to pray, to a neighbour’s, begging them to tell
what I meant by it. Other families fell on their faces, instead of
kneeling.”[57]
The following is written by a gentleman, “whose name,” says the editor
of De Bow’s “Review,” “has long been illustrious for the services he
has rendered to the South.”
“All of you must be aware of the condition of the class of people
I allude to. What progress have they made in the last hundred
years, and what is to be their future condition, unless some mode
of employment be devised to improve it? A noble race of people!
reduced to a condition but little above the wild Indian of the
forest, or the European gipsy, without education, and, in many
instances, unable to procure the food necessary to develop the
natural man. They seem to be the only class of people in our State
who are not disposed to emigrate to other countries, while our
wealthy and intelligent citizens are leaving us by scores, taking
with them the treasures which have been accumulated by mercantile
thrift, as well as by the growth of cotton and the consequent
exhaustion of the soil.”
Says Governor Hammond, also of South Carolina, in an address before the
South Carolina Institute:—
“According to the best calculations which, in the absence of
statistic facts, can be made, it is believed that, of the 300,000
_white_ inhabitants of South Carolina, there are not less than
50,000, whose industry, such as it is, and compensated as it is,
is not, in the present condition of things, and does not promise,
hereafter, to be, adequate to procure them, honestly, such a
support as every white person in this country is and feels himself
entitled to.
“Some cannot be said to work at all. They obtain a precarious
subsistence by occasional jobs, by hunting, by fishing, sometimes
by plundering fields or folds, and, too often, by what is, in
its effects, far worse—trading with slaves, and seducing them to
plunder for their benefit.”
In another part of the same address, Governor Hammond says, that “$18
or, at the most $19, will cover the whole necessary annual cost of a
full supply of wholesome and palatable food, purchased in the market;”
meaning, generally, in South Carolina. From a comparison of these two
extracts, it will be evident that $19 per annum is high wages for the
labour of one-sixth of all the white population of South Carolina—and
that one-sixth exclusive of the classes not obliged to labour for their
living.
South Carolina affords the fairest example of the tendency of the
Southern policy, because it is the oldest cotton State, and because
slavery has been longest and most strongly and completely established
there. But the same laws are seen in operation leading to the same
sure results everywhere. Some carefully compiled statistics of the
seaboard district of Georgia will be found in Appendix (D), showing the
comparative condition of the people in the rich sea-island counties,
and those in their rear, the latter consisting in large proportion of
poor or worn-out lands. I recapitulate here the more exact of these
statistics:—
_Population._—A large majority of the whole white population resides
within the barren counties, of which the slave population is less than
one-fourteenth that of the aggregate slave population of the whole.
_Wealth._—The personal estate of the whites of these upper counties is,
on an average, less than one-sixth that of the others.
_Education._—As the wealthy are independent of public schools, the
means of education are scarcely more available for those who are not
rich in one than the other, the school-houses being, on an average,
ten and a half miles apart in the less populous, thirteen and
three-quarters miles apart in the more populous.
_Religion._—It is widely otherwise as to churches. In the planting
counties, there is a house of worship for every twenty-nine white
families; in the poor white counties, one for every one hundred and
sixty-two white families. Notwithstanding the fact, that to accommodate
all, the latter should be six times as large, their average value is
less than one-tenth that of the others; the one being eight hundred and
ninety-eight dollars, the other eighty-nine dollars.
_Commerce._—So wholly do the planters, in whose hands is the wealth,
depend on their factors for direct supplies from without, the capital
invested in trade, in the coast counties, is but thirty-seven and a
half cents to each inhabitant, and in the upper counties it is but one
dollar and fifty cents. From the remarks on temperance it would seem
that the most of this capital must be held in the form of whiskey.
One “store” in Liberty county, which I myself entered, contained, so
far as I could see, nothing but casks, demijohns, decanters, a box of
coffee, a case of tobacco, and some powder and lead; and I believe that
nine-tenths of the stock in trade referred to in these statistics is of
this character. It was mentioned to me by a gentleman who had examined
this district with a commercial purpose, that, off the plantations,
there was no money in the country—almost literally, no money. The
dealings even of the merchants or tradesmen seemed to be entirely by
barter. He believed there were many full-grown men who had never seen
so much as a dollar in money in their lives.
The following is a graphic sketch by a native Georgian of the present
appearance of what was once the most productive cotton land of the
State:—
“The classic hut occupied a lovely spot, overshadowed by majestic
hickories, towering poplars, and strong-armed oaks. The little
plain on which it stood was terminated, at the distance of about
fifty feet from the door, by the brow of a hill, which descended
rather abruptly to a noble spring, that gushed joyously forth
from among the roots of a stately beech, at its foot. The stream
from this fountain scarcely burst into view, before it hid itself
in the dark shade of a field of cane, which overspread the dale
through which it flowed, and marked its windings, until it turned
from sight, among vine-covered hills, at a distance far beyond
that to which the eye could have traced it, without the help of
its evergreen belt. A remark of the captain’s, as we viewed this
lovely country, will give the reader my apology for the minuteness
of the foregoing description: ‘These lands,’ said he, ‘will
never wear out. Where they lie level, they will be just as good,
fifty years hence, as they are now.’ Forty-two years afterwards,
I visited the spot on which he stood when he made the remark.
The sun poured his whole strength upon the bald hill which once
supported the sequestered school-house; many a deep-washed gully
met at a sickly bog, where had gushed the limpid fountain; a dying
willow rose from the soil which had nourished the venerable beech;
flocks wandered among the dwarf pines, and cropped a scanty meal
from the vale where the rich cane had bowed and rustled to every
breeze, and all around was barren, dreary, and cheerless.”[58]
I will quote from graver authority: Fenner’s Southern Medical Reports:—
“The native soil of Middle Georgia is a rich argillaceous loam,
resting on a firm clay foundation. In some of the richer counties,
nearly all the lands have been cut down, and appropriated to
tillage; a large maximum of which have been worn out, leaving a
desolate picture for the traveller to behold. Decaying tenements,
red, old hills, stripped of their native growth and virgin soil,
and washed into deep gullies, with here and there patches of
Bermuda grass and stunted pine shrubs, struggling for subsistence
on what was once one of the richest soils in America.”
Let us go on to Alabama, which was admitted as a State of the Union
only so long ago as 1818.
In an address before the Chunnenuggee Horticultural Society, by Hon. C.
C. Clay, Jr., reported by the author in De Bow’s “Review,” December,
1815, I find the following passage. I need add not a word to it to show
how the political experiment of the Carolinas, and Georgia, is being
repeated to the same cursed result in young Alabama. The author, it is
fair to say, is devoted to the sustentation of Slavery, and would not,
for the world, be suspected of favouring any scheme for arresting this
havoc of wealth, further than by chemical science:—
“I can show you, with sorrow, in the older portions of Alabama,
and in my native county of Madison, the sad memorials of the
artless and exhausting culture of cotton. Our small planters,
after taking the cream off their lands, unable to restore them by
rest, manures, or otherwise, are going further west and south, in
search of other virgin lands, which they may and will despoil and
impoverish in like manner. _Our wealthier planters, with greater
means and no more skill, are buying out their poorer neighbours,
extending their plantations, and adding to their slave force. The
wealthy few, who are able to live on smaller profits, and to give
their blasted fields some rest, are thus pushing off the many, who
are merely independent_.
“Of the twenty millions of dollars annually realized from the
sales of the cotton crop of Alabama, nearly all not expended in
supporting the producers is reinvested in land and negroes. Thus
the white population has decreased, and the slave increased,
almost _pari passu_ in several counties of our State. In 1825,
Madison county cast about 3,000 votes; now she cannot cast
exceeding 2,300. _In traversing that county one will discover
numerous farm-houses, once the abode of industrious and
intelligent freemen, now occupied by slaves, or tenantless,
deserted, and dilapidated; he will observe fields, once
fertile, now unfenced, abandoned, and covered with those evil
harbingers—fox-tail and broom-sedge; he will see the moss growing
on the mouldering walls of once thrifty villages: and will find
‘one only master grasps the whole domain’ that once furnished
happy homes for a dozen white families. Indeed, a country in
its infancy, where, fifty years ago, scarce a forest tree had
been felled by the axe of the pioneer is already exhibiting the
painful signs of senility and decay apparent in Virginia and the
Carolinas; the freshness of its agricultural glory is gone; the
vigour of its youth is extinct, and the spirit of desolation seems
brooding over it._”
What inducement has capital in railroads or shops or books or tools to
move into districts like this, or which are to become like this? Why,
rather, I shall be asked, does it not withdraw more completely? Why do
not all, who are able, remove from a region so desolate? Why was not
its impoverishment more complete, more simultaneous? How is it that any
slaveholders yet remain? The “venerable Edmund Ruffin,” president of
the Virginia State Agricultural Society, shall answer:[59]
“The causes are not all in action at once, and in equal progress.
The labours of exhausting culture, also, are necessarily suspended
as each of the cultivators’ fields is successively worn out.
And when tillage so ceases, and any space is thus left at rest,
nature immediately goes to work to recruit and replace as much as
possible of the wasted fertility, until another destroyer, after
many years, shall return, again to waste, and in much shorter time
than before, the smaller stock of fertility so renewed. Thus the
whole territory, so scourged, is not destroyed at one operation.
But though these changes and partial recoveries are continually,
to some extent counteracting the labours for destruction, still
the latter work is in general progress. It may require (as it did
in my native region) more than two hundred years, from the first
settlement, to reach the lowest degradation. But that final result
is not the less certainly to be produced by the continued action
of the causes.”
As to the extent to which the process is carried, Mr. Gregg says:[60]
“I think it would be within bounds to assume that the planting
capital withdrawn within that period [the last twenty-five years]
would, judiciously applied, have drained every acre of swamp land
in South Carolina, besides resuscitating the old, worn-out land,
and doubling the crops—thus more than quadrupling the productive
power of the agriculture of the State.”
It would be consoling to hope that this planters’ capital in the new
region to which it is driven were used to better results. Does the
average condition of the people of western Louisiana and Texas, as I
have exhibited it to the reader in a former chapter, justify such a
hope? When we consider the form in which this capital exists, and the
change in the mode of its investment which is accomplished when it is
transferred from South Carolina, we perceive why it does not.
If we are told that the value of one hundred thousand dollars has been
recently transferred from Massachusetts to a certain young township of
Illinois, we reasonably infer that the people of this township will be
considerably benefited thereby. We think what an excellent saw mill
and grist mill, what an assortment of wares, what a good inn, what a
good school, what fine breeding stock, what excellent seeds and fruit
trees, what superior machinery and implements, they will be able to
obtain there now; and we know that some of these or other sources of
profit, convenience, and comfort to a neighbourhood, are almost certain
to exist in all capital so transferred. In the capital transferred
from South Carolina, there is no such virtue—none of consequence. In a
hundred thousand dollars of it there will not be found a single mill,
nor a waggon load of “store goods;” it will hardly introduce to the
neighbourhood whither it goes a single improvement, convenience, or
comfort. At least ninety thousand dollars of it will consist in slaves,
and if their owners go with them it is hard to see in what respect
their real home comfort is greater.
We must admit, it is true, that they are generally better satisfied,
else this transfer would not be so unremitting as it is. The motive
is the same at the North as at the South, the prospect of a better
interest from the capital, and if this did not exist it would not
be transferred. Let us suppose that, at starting, the ends of the
capitalist are obtained equally in both cases, that a sale of produce
is made, bringing in cash twenty thousand dollars; suppose that five
thousand dollars of this is used in each case for the home comfort of
the owners, and that as much immediate comfort is attainable with it
in the one case as in the other. What, then, is done with the fifteen
thousand dollars? At the South, it goes to pay for a farther transfer
of slaves purchased in the East, a trifle also for new tools. At the
North, nearly all of it will go to improvement of machinery of some
kind, machinery of transfer or trade, if not of manufacture, to the
improvement of the productive value of whatever the original capital
had been invested in, much of it to the remuneration of talent, which
is thus enabled to be employed for the benefit of many people other
than these capitalists—for the home comfort of many people. If five
thousand dollars purchased no more comfort in the one case than the
other, at starting, in a few years it will purchase double as much. For
the fifteen thousand dollars which has gone East in the one case to pay
for more labour, will, in the other, have procured good roads and cheap
transportation of comforts, or shops and machinery, and thus the cheap
manufacture of comforts on the spot where they are demanded. But they
who sell the reinforcement of slaves, and to whom comes the fifteen
thousand dollars, do they have no increase of home comfort? Taking
into consideration the gradual destruction of all the elements of home
comfort which the rearing and holding of those slaves has occasioned in
the district from which they are sold, it may be doubtful if, in the
end, they do. Whither, then, does this capital go? The money comes to
the country from those who buy cotton, and somebody must have a benefit
of it. Who? Every one at the South says, when you ask this, it is the
Northern merchant, who, in the end, gets it into his own hands, and it
is only him and his whom it benefits. Mr. Gregg apparently believes
this. He says, after the sentence last quoted from him, describing the
transfer of capital to the West from South Carolina:—
“But this is not all. Let us look for a moment at the course of
things among our mercantile classes. We shall not have to go
much further back than twenty-five years to count up twenty-five
millions of capital accumulated in Charleston, and which has left
us with its enterprising owners, who have principally located in
northern cities. This sum would build factories enough to spin
and weave every pound of cotton made in the State, besides making
railroads to intersect every portion of the up-country, giving
business facilities to the remotest points.”
How comes this capital, the return made by the world for the cotton
of the South, to be so largely in the hands of Northern men? The
true answer is, that what these get is simply their fair commercial
remuneration for the trouble of transporting cotton, transporting
money, transporting the total amount of home comfort, little as it is,
which the South gets for its cotton, from one part of the country to
the other (chiefly cotton to the coast, and goods returned instead of
money from the coast to the plantations), and for the enormous risks
and advances of capital which are required in dealing with the South.
Is this service over paid? If so, why do not the planters transfer
capital and energy to it from the plantations? It is not so. Dispersed
and costly labour makes the cost of trade or transfer enormous (as it
does the cost of cotton producing). It is only when this wealth is
transferred to the Free States or to Europe that it gives great results
to human comfort and becomes of great value. The South, as a whole,
has at present no advantage from cotton, even planters but little. The
chief result of the demand for it, as far as they are concerned, is to
give a fictitious value to slaves.
Throughout the South-west I found men, who either told me themselves,
or of whom it was said by others, that they settled where I found them,
ten or fifteen years ago, with scarcely any property beyond half a
dozen negroes, who were then indeed heavily in debt, but who were now
quite rich men, having from twenty to fifty negroes. Nor is this at
all surprising, when it is considered that cotton costs nothing but
labour, the value of the land, however rich, being too inconsiderable
to be taken into account, and that the price of cotton has doubled in
ten years. But in what else beside negroes were these rich men better
off than when they called themselves poor? Their real comfort, unless
in the sense of security against extreme want, or immunity from the
necessity of personal labour to sustain life, could scarcely have been
increased in the least. There was, at any rate, the same bacon and
corn, the same slough of a waggon channel through the forest, the same
bare walls in their dwellings, the same absence of taste and art and
literature, the same distance from schools and churches and educated
advisers, and—on account of the distance of tolerable mechanics, and
the difficulty of moving without destruction, through such a rough
country, anything elaborate or finely finished—the same make-shift
furniture. There were, to be sure, ploughs and hoes, and gins and
presses, and there were scores of very “likely negroes.” Whoever sold
such of these negroes as had been bought must have been the richer, it
will be said. But let us see.
The following picture of the condition of Virginia, the great breeding
ground of slaves, is drawn by the last governor of that State, Henry
A. Wise. It was addressed to a Virginia audience, who testified to its
truthfulness.
“You have had no commerce, no mining, no manufactures.
“You have relied alone on the single power of agriculture—and such
agriculture! Your sedge-patches outshine the sun. Your inattention
to your only source of wealth has scared the very bosom of mother
earth. Instead of having to feed cattle on a thousand hills, you
have had to chase the stump-tailed steer through the sedge-patches
to procure a tough beef-steak.
“The present condition of things has existed too long in Virginia.
The landlord has skinned the tenant, and the tenant has skinned
the land, until all have grown poor together. I have heard a
story—I will not locate it here or there—about the condition of
the prosperity of our agriculture. I was told by a gentleman in
Washington, not long ago, that he was travelling in a county
not a hundred miles from this place, and overtook one of our
citizens on horseback, with, perhaps, a bag of hay for a saddle,
without stirrups, and the leading line for a bridle, and he said:
‘Stranger, whose house is that?’ ‘It is mine,’ was the reply. They
came to another. ‘Whose house is that?’ ‘Mine, too, stranger.’ To
a third: ‘And whose house is that?’ ‘That’s mine, too, stranger;
but don’t suppose that I’m so darned poor as to own all the land
about here.’”
But more to the purpose is the following statement of “the venerable
Edmund Ruffin,” President of the Virginia Agricultural Society.
“A gang of slaves on a farm will increase to four times their
original number in thirty or forty years. If a farmer is only
able to feed and maintain his slaves, their increase in value may
double the whole of his capital originally invested in farming
before he closes the term of an ordinary life. But few farms are
able to support this increasing expense, and also furnish the
necessary supplies to the family of the owner; whence very many
owners of large estates, in lands and negroes, are throughout
their lives too poor to enjoy the comforts of life, or to incur
the expenses necessary to improve their unprofitable farming. A
man so situated may be said to be a slave to his own slaves. If
the owner is industrious and frugal, he may be able to support
the increasing numbers of his slaves, and to bequeath them
undiminished to his children. But the income of few persons
increases as fast as their slaves, and, if not, the consequence
must be that some of them will be sold, that the others may be
supported, and the sale of more is perhaps afterwards compelled
to pay debts incurred in striving to put off that dreaded
alternative. The slave at first almost starves his master, and at
last is eaten by him—at least, he is exchanged for his value in
food.”
A large proportion of the negroes sold to these South-western planters,
then, had probably been bought by traders at forced sales in the older
States, sales forced by merchants who had supplied the previous owners
of the negroes, and who had given them credit, not on account of the
productive value of their property as then situated, but in view of its
cash value for sale, that is, of the value which it would realize when
applied to cotton on the new soils of the South-west.
The planters of the South-west are then, in fact, supplying the deficit
of Eastern production, taking their pay almost entirely in negroes. The
free West fills the deficit of the free Eastern cereal production, but
takes its pay in the manufactured goods, the fish, the oil, the butter,
and the importations of the free East.
Virginia planters owning twenty to forty slaves, and nominally worth
as many thousand dollars, often seem to live generously; but according
to Northern standards, I do not think that the comforts and advantages
for a rationally happy life, which they possess, compare with those of
the average of Northern farmers of half that wealth. When they do, they
must be either supplying slaves for the new cotton fields or living on
credit—credit based on an anticipation of supplying that market.
Of course it cannot be maintained that no one, while living at the
South, is actually richer from the effects of the cotton demand. There
are a great many very wealthy men at the South, and of planters, as
well as land dealers, negro dealers, and general merchants, but, except
in or near those towns which are, practically, colonies of free labour,
having constant direct communication and intimate relationship with
free countries, the wealth of these more fortunate people secures to
them but a small proportion of the advantages which belong to the same
nominal wealth anywhere in the Free States, while their number is so
small that they must be held of no account at all in estimating the
condition of the people, when it is compared with the number of those
who are exceedingly destitute, and at whose expense, quite as much as
at the expense of their slaves, the wealth of the richer class has been
accumulated.
This cannot be rightly deemed extravagant or unjust language. I should
not use it if I did not feel satisfied that it was warranted, not
only by my own personal observations, but by the testimony of persons
whose regard for the pride of the South, whose sympathy with wealthy
planters, and whose disposition not to underrate the good results of
slavery, if not more sincere than mine, is more certain not to be
doubted. I quote, for instance, a single passage from the observations
of Mr. Russell, an English gentleman, who, travelling with a special
view of studying the agricultural condition and prospects of the
country, was, nevertheless, so much limited in time that he was obliged
to trust in a great degree to the observations of planters for his
facts.