Transcriber’s Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation, capitalization, and spelling in the
original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical
errors have been corrected.
Download Volume 2 at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72677.
JOURNEYS AND EXPLORATIONS
IN
THE COTTON KINGDOM OF AMERICA.
ADVERTISEMENT.
MR. OLMSTED’S WORKS ON THE SLAVE STATES.
SEABOARD SLAVE STATES. A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States,
with Remarks on their Economy. 1 vol., 12mo. pp. 724. Price, $1.25.
TEXAS JOURNEY. A Journey through Texas: or, a Saddle Trip on the
Southwestern Frontier; with a Statistical Appendix. 1 vol., 12mo.
pp. 516. Price, $1.25.
JOURNEY IN THE BACK COUNTRY. A Journey in the Back Country; with a
complete Index to the three volumes. 1 vol., 12mo. pp. 492. Price,
$1.25.
THE COTTON KINGDOM. A Traveller’s observations on Cotton and
Slavery in the American Slave States. Based upon three former
volumes of Journeys and Investigations by the same author. 2
vols., 12mo. pp. 384 and 408. With a Colored Statistical Map of
the Cotton Kingdom and its Dependencies, mainly derived from the
United States Census. Price, $2.00.
This work was, by request, prepared by its author with especial
reference to English readers, and is simultaneously published in
England and in this country.
[Illustration:
A MAP OF
THE COTTON KINGDOM
AND ITS DEPENDENCIES
IN AMERICA.
_Dominant Cotton Districts._
(_producing two Bales or more to each Slave_) _Blue_
_Subordinate Cotton Districts._
(_producing less than two Bales_) _Yellow_
_Subsidiary Slave Districts._
(_producing no Cotton or less than half a Bale_) _Red_
_Full horizontal lines indicate in which there is a strong Slave
property interest, there being more Slaves than Freemen here resident.
Dotted horizontal lines shew a moderate Slave property interest._
_In all the colored space not covered by horizontal lines, the resident
free population is more than two to one of the Slaves, but is yet
hampered with slavery._
_The data for this map are mainly derived from the United States Census
of 1850._
Fred. Law Olmsted.
D. McLellen Lith. 26 Spruce St. N.Y.
New York—Mason Brothers.]
THE
COTTON KINGDOM:
A TRAVELLER’S OBSERVATIONS ON COTTON AND SLAVERY
IN THE AMERICAN SLAVE STATES.
BASED UPON THREE FORMER VOLUMES OF JOURNEYS AND INVESTIGATIONS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
BY
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED.
_IN TWO VOLUMES._
VOL. 1.
NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY MASON BROTHERS,
5 and 7 MERCER STREET.
LONDON: SAMPSON LOW, SON & CO., 47 LUDGATE HILL.
1861.
Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by
MASON BROTHERS,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States
for the Southern District of New York.
PRINTED BY
C. A. ALVORD,
15 Vandewater-st.
DEDICATION.
TO
JOHN STUART MILL, ESQ.
SIR,
I beg you to accept the dedication of this book as an indication of
the honour in which your services in the cause of moral and political
freedom are held in America, and as a grateful acknowledgment of the
personal obligations to them on the part of
Your obedient servant,
THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. PAGE
INTRODUCTORY.—THE PRESENT CRISIS 1
CHAPTER II.
THE JOURNEY FROM WASHINGTON 28
CHAPTER III.
VIRGINIA.—GLIMPSES BY RAILROAD 38
CHAPTER IV.
THE ECONOMY OF VIRGINIA 108
CHAPTER V.
VIRGINIA AND ITS ECONOMY—CONTINUED 141
CHAPTER VI.
SOUTH CAROLINA AND GEORGIA SURVEYED 224
CHAPTER VII.
THE SOUTH-WEST—ALABAMA AND MISSISSIPPI 272
CHAPTER VIII.
MISSISSIPPI AND LOUISIANA 285
CHAPTER IX.
FROM LOUISIANA THROUGH TEXAS 342
COTTON AND SLAVERY.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.—THE PRESENT CRISIS.
The mountain ranges, the valleys, and the great waters of America, all
trend north and south, not east and west. An arbitrary political line
may divide the north part from the south part, but there is no such
line in nature: there can be none, socially. While water runs downhill,
the currents and counter currents of trade, of love, of consanguinity,
and fellowship, will flow north and south. The unavoidable comminglings
of the people in a land like this, upon the conditions which the
slavery of a portion of the population impose, make it necessary to
peace that we should all live under the same laws and respect the same
flag. No government could long control its own people, no government
could long exist, that would allow its citizens to be subject to
such indignities under a foreign government as those to which the
citizens of the United States heretofore have been required to submit
under their own, for the sake of the tranquillity of the South. Nor
could the South, with its present purposes, live on terms of peace
with any foreign nation, between whose people and its own there was
no division, except such an one as might be maintained by means of
forts, frontier-guards and custom-houses, edicts, passports and spies.
Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are each much better adapted for an
independent government, and under an independent government would be
far more likely to live at peace with England, than the South to remain
peaceably separated from the North of this country.
It is said that the South can never be subjugated. It must be, or we
must. It must be, or not only our American republic is a failure, but
our English justice and our English law and our English freedom are
failures. This Southern repudiation of obligations upon the result of
an election is but a clearer warning than we have had before, that
these cannot be maintained in this land any longer in such intimate
association with slavery as we have hitherto tried to hope that they
might. We now know that we must give them up, or give up trying to
accommodate ourselves to what the South has declared, and demonstrated,
to be the necessities of its state of society. Those necessities would
not be less, but, on the contrary, far more imperative, were the south
an independent people. If the South has reason to declare itself
independent of our long-honoured constitution, and of our common court
of our common laws, on account of a past want of invariable tenderness
on the part of each one of our people towards its necessities, how long
could we calculate to be able to preserve ourselves from occurrences
which would be deemed to abrogate the obligations of a mere treaty of
peace? A treaty of peace with the South as a foreign power, would be a
cowardly armistice, a cruel aggravation and prolongation of war.
Subjugation! I do not choose the word, but take it, and use it in the
only sense in which it can be applicable. This is a Republic, and the
South must come under the yoke of freedom, not to work for us, but to
work with us, on equal terms; as a free people. To work with us, for
the security of a state of society, the ruling purpose and tendency
of which, spite of all its bendings heretofore, to the necessities
of slavery; spite of the incongruous foreign elements which it has
had constantly to absorb and incorporate; spite of a strong element
of excessive backwoods individualism, has, beyond all question, been
favourable to sound and safe progress in knowledge, civilization, and
Christianity. To this yoke the head of the South must now be lifted, or
we must bend our necks to that of slavery, consenting and submitting,
even more than we have been willing to do heretofore, to labour and
fight, and pay for the dire needs of a small portion of our people
living in an exceptional state of society, in which Cowper’s poems
must not be read aloud without the precautions against the listening
of family servants; in which it may be treated as a crime against the
public safety to teach one of the labouring classes to write; in which
the names of Wilberforce and Buxton are execrated; within which the
slave trade is perpetuated, and at the capital of whose rebellion,
black seamen born free, taken prisoners, in merchant ships, not in
arms, are even already sold into slavery with as little hesitation as
even in Barbary. One system or the other is to thrive and extend, and
eventually possess and govern this whole land.
This has been long felt and acted upon at the South; and the purpose
of the more prudent and conservative men, now engaged in the attempt to
establish a new government in the South, was for a long time simply to
obtain an advantage for what was talked of as “reconstruction;” namely,
a process of change in the form and rules of our government that would
disqualify us of the Free States from offering any resistance to
whatever was demanded of our government, for the end in view of the
extension and eternal maintenance of slavery. That men to whom the
terms prudent and conservative can in any way be applied, should not
have foreseen that such a scheme must be unsuccessful, only presents
one more illustration of that, of which the people of England have
had many in their own history, the moral Myopism, to which the habit
of almost constantly looking down and never up at mankind, always
predisposes. That the true people of the United States could have
allowed the mutiny to proceed so far, before rising in their strength
to resist it, is due chiefly to the instructive reliance which every
grumbler really gets to have under our forms of society in the ultimate
common-sense of the great body of the people, and to the incredulity
with which the report has been regarded, that slavery had made such
a vast difference between the character of the South and that of the
country at large. Few were fully convinced that the whole proceedings
of the insurgents meant anything else than a more than usually bold
and scandalous way of playing the game of brag, to which we had been
so long used in our politics, and of which the people of England had a
little experience shortly before the passage of a certain Reform Bill.
The instant effect of the first _shotted_-gun that was fired proves
this. We knew then that we had to subjugate slavery, or be subjugated
by it.
Peace is now not possible until the people of the South are well
convinced that the form of society, to fortify which is the ostensible
purpose of the war into which they have been plunged, is not worthy
fighting for, or until we think the sovereignty of our convictions of
Justice, Freedom, Law and the conditions of Civilization in this land
to be of less worth than the lives and property of our generation.
From the St. Lawrence to the Mexican Gulf, freedom must everywhere
give way to the necessities of slavery, or slavery must be accommodated
to the necessary incidents of freedom.
Where the hopes and sympathies of Englishmen will be, we well know.
* * * * *
“The necessity to labour is incompatible with a high civilization, and
with heroic spirit in those subject to it.”
“The institution of African slavery is a means more effective than any
other yet devised, for relieving a large body of men from the necessity
of labour; consequently, states which possess it must be stronger in
statesmanship and in war, than those which do not; especially must they
be stronger than states in which there is absolutely no privileged
class, but all men are held to be equal before the law.”
“The civilized world is dependent upon the Slave States of America for
a supply of cotton. The demand for this commodity has, during many
years, increased faster than the supply. Sales are made of it, now, to
the amount of two hundred millions of dollars in a year, yet they have
a vast area of soil suitable for its production which has never been
broken. With an enormous income, then, upon a steadily rising market,
they hold a vast idle capital yet to be employed. Such a monopoly under
such circumstances must constitute those who possess it the richest
and most powerful people on the earth. The world must have cotton, and
the world depends on them for it. Whatever they demand, that must be
conceded them; whatever they want, they have but to stretch forth their
hands and take it.”
* * * * *
These fallacies, lodged in certain minds, generated, long ago, grand,
ambitious, and bold schemes of conquest and wealth. The people of the
North stood in the way of these schemes. In the minds of the schemers,
labour had been associated with servility, meekness, cowardice; and
they were persuaded that all men not degraded by labour at the North
“kept aloof from politics,” or held their judgment in entire subjection
to the daily wants of a working population, of no more spirit and no
more patriotism than their own working men—slaves. They believed this
whole people to be really in a state of dependence, and that they
controlled that upon which they depended. So, to a hitherto vague and
inert local partisanship, they brought a purpose of determination to
overcome the North, and, as this could not be safely avowed, there was
the necessity for a conspiracy, and for the cloak of a conspiracy. By
means the most mendacious, the ignorant, proud, jealous, and violent
free population of the cotton States and their dependencies, were
persuaded that less consideration was paid to their political demands
than the importance of their contentment entitled them to expect from
their government, and were at length decoyed into a state of angry
passion, in which they only needed leaders of sufficient audacity to
bring them into open rebellion. Assured that their own power if used
would be supreme, and that they had but to offer sufficient evidence
of a violent and dangerous determination to overawe the sordid North,
and make it submit to a “reconstruction” of the nation in a form more
advantageous to themselves, they were artfully led along in a constant
advance, and constant failure of attempts at intimidation, until at
length they must needs take part in a desperate rebellion, or accept a
position which, after the declarations they had made for the purpose of
intimidation, they could not do without humiliation.
The conspirators themselves have, until recently, been able, either
directly or by impositions upon patriotic, but too confiding and
generous instruments, to control the treasury of the United States, its
post-office, its army and navy, its arsenals, workshops, dockyards and
fortresses, and, by the simple means of perjury, to either turn these
agencies against the government, or at least render them ineffectual
to aid it, and this at a time, when its very existence, if it were
anything but a democratic republican government, and, as we think for
all good purposes, by far the strongest that ever existed, would have
depended on a perfect instant and unquestionable command of them. Yet
I doubt not that the conspirators themselves, trust at this moment, as
they ever have trusted, even less to the supposed helpless condition of
the government than to the supposed advantages of the cotton monopoly
to the Slave States, and to the supposed superiority of a community of
privileged classes over an actual democracy.
* * * * *
“No! you dare not make war upon cotton; no power on earth dares to make
war upon it. Cotton is king; until lately the Bank of England was king;
but she tried to put her screws, as usual, the fall before the last, on
the cotton crop, and was utterly vanquished. The last power has been
conquered: who can doubt, that has looked at recent events, that cotton
is supreme?”
* * * * *
These are the defiant and triumphant words of Governor Hammond, of
South Carolina, addressed to the Senate of the United States, March
4th, 1858. Almost every important man of the South, has at one time or
other, within a few years, been betrayed into the utterance of similar
exultant anticipations; and the South would never have been led into
the great and terrible mistake it has made, had it not been for this
confident conviction in the minds of the men who have been passing for
its statesmen. Whatever moral strength the rebellion has, abroad or
at home, lies chiefly in the fact that this conviction is also held,
more or less distinctly, by multitudes who know perfectly well that the
commonly assigned reasons for it are based on falsehoods.
Recently, a banker, who is and always has been a loyal union man, said,
commenting upon certain experiences of mine narrated in this book: “The
South cannot be poor. Why their last crop alone was worth two hundred
million. They must be rich:” ergo, say the conspirators, adopting the
same careless conclusion, they must be powerful, and the world must
feel their power, and respect them and their institutions.
My own observation of the real condition of the people of our Slave
States, gave me, on the contrary, an impression that the cotton
monopoly in some way did them more harm than good; and, although the
written narration of what I saw was not intended to set this forth,
upon reviewing it for the present publication, I find the impression
has become a conviction. I propose here, therefore, to show how the
main body of the observations of the book arrange themselves in my
mind with reference to this question, and also to inquire how far the
conclusion to which I think they tend is substantiated by the Census
returns of those States.[1]
Coming directly from my farm in New York to Eastern Virginia, I was
satisfied, after a few weeks’ observation, that the most of the people
lived very poorly; that the proportion of men improving their condition
was much less than in any Northern community; and that the natural
resources of the land were strangely unused, or were used with poor
economy. It was “the hiring season,” and I had daily opportunities
of talking with farmers, manufacturers, miners, and labourers, with
whom the value of labour and of wages was then the handiest subject
of conversation. I soon perceived that labour was much more readily
classified and measured with reference to its quality than at the
North. The limit of measure I found to be the ordinary day’s work of
a “prime field-hand,” and a prime field-hand, I found universally
understood to mean, not a man who would split two cords of wood, or
cradle two acres of grain in a day, but a man for whom a “trader”
would give a thousand dollars, or more, to take on South, for sale
to a cotton planter. I do not mean that the alternative of a sale to
a trader was always had in view in determining how a man should be
employed. To be just, this seldom appeared to be the case—but that, in
estimating the market value of his labour, he was viewed, for the time,
from the trader’s point of view, or, as if the question were—What is he
worth for cotton?
I soon ascertained that a much larger number of hands, at much larger
aggregate wages, was commonly reckoned to be required to accomplish
certain results, than would have been the case at the North. Not all
results, but certain results, of a kind in which it happened that I
could most readily make a confident comparison. I have been in the
habit of watching men at work, and of judging of their industry, their
skill, their spirit; in short, of whatever goes to make up their value
to their employers, or to the community, as instruments of production;
and from day to day I saw that, as a landowner, or as a citizen, in a
community largely composed, or dependent upon the productive industry,
of working people of such habits and disposition as I constantly saw
evinced in those of Virginia, I should feel disheartened, and myself
lose courage, spirit, and industry. The close proximity of the better
and cheaper labour—labour seeking a field of labour—which I had left
behind me, added greatly to my interest in the subject, and stimulated
close inquiry. It seemed, indeed, quite incredible that there really
could be such a want of better labour in this region as at first sight
there appeared to be, when a supply was so near at hand. I compared
notes with every Northern man I met who had been living for some time
in Virginia, and some I found able to give me quite exact statements
of personal experience, with which, in the cases they mentioned, it
could not be doubted that labourers costing, all things considered, the
same wages, had taken four times as long to accomplish certain tasks of
rude work in Virginia as at the North, and that in house service, four
servants accomplished less, while they required vastly more looking
after, than one at the North.
I left Virginia, having remained much longer than I at first intended,
in trying to satisfy myself about this matter—quite satisfied as to
the general fact, not at all satisfied with any theories of demand and
supply which had been offered me, or which had occurred to me, in the
way of explanation of it.
My perplexity was increased by certain apparent exceptions to the
general rule; but they were, all things considered, unimportant, and
rather served as affording contrasts, on the ground, to satisfy me of
the correctness of my general conclusion.
I subsequently returned, and spent another month in Virginia, after
visiting the cotton States, and I also spent three months in Kentucky
and other parts of the Slave States where the climate is unsuitable
for the production of cotton, and with the information which I had
in the meantime obtained, I continued to study both the question of
fact, and the question of cause. The following conclusions to which my
mind tended strongly in the first month, though I did not then adopt
them altogether with confidence, were established at length in my
convictions.
1. The cash value of a slave’s labour in Virginia is, practically,
the cash value of the same labour minus the cost of its
transportation, acclimatizing, and breaking in to cotton-culture
in Mississippi.
2. The cost of production, or the development of natural wealth in
Virginia, is regulated by the cost of slave-labour: (that is to
say) the competition of white labour does not materially reduce
it; though it doubtless has some effect, at least in certain
districts, and with reference to certain productions or branches
of industry.
3. Taking infants, aged, invalid, and vicious and knavish slaves
into account, the ordinary and average cost of a certain task of
labour is more than double in Virginia what it is in the Free
States adjoining.
4. The use of land and nearly all other resources of wealth in
Virginia is much less valuable than the use of similar property in
the adjoining Free States, these resources having no real value
until labour is applied to them. (The Census returns of 1850 show
that the sale value of farm lands by the acre in Virginia is less
than one-third the value of farm lands in the adjoining Free State
of Pennsylvania, and less than one-fifth than that of the farm
lands of the neighbouring Free State of New Jersey.)[2]
5. Beyond the bare necessities of existence, poor shelter, poor
clothing, and the crudest diet, the mass of the citizen class of
Virginia earn very little and are very poor—immeasurably poorer
than the mass of the people of the adjoining Free States.
6. So far as this poverty is to be attributed to personal
constitution, character, and choice, it is not the result of
climate.
7. What is true of Virginia is measurably true of all the border
Slave States, though in special cases the resistance of slavery
to a competition of free labour is more easily overcome. In
proportion as this is the case, the cost of production is less,
the value of production greater, the comfort of the people is
greater; they are advancing in wealth as they are in intelligence,
which is the best form or result of wealth.
I went on my way into the so-called cotton States, within which I
travelled over, first and last, at least three thousand miles of
roads, from which not a cotton plant was to be seen, and the people
living by the side of which certainly had not been made rich by cotton
or anything else. And for every mile of road-side upon which I saw
any evidence of cotton production, I am sure that I saw a hundred of
forest or waste land, with only now and then an acre or two of poor
corn half smothered in weeds; for every rich man’s house, I am sure
that I passed a dozen shabby and half-furnished cottages, and at least
a hundred cabins—mere hovels, such as none but a poor farmer would
house his cattle in at the North. And I think that, for every man of
refinement and education with whom I came in contact, there were a
score or two superior only in the virtue of silence, and in the manner
of self-complacency, to the sort of people we should expect to find
paying a large price for a place from which a sight could be got at
a gallows on an execution day at the North, and a much larger number
of what poor men at the North would themselves describe as poor men:
not that they were destitute of certain things which are cheap at the
South,—fuel for instance,—but that they were almost wholly destitute of
things the possession of which, at the North, would indicate that a man
had begun to accumulate capital—more destitute of these, on an average,
than our day-labourers. In short, except in certain limited districts,
mere streaks by the side of rivers, and in a few isolated spots of
especially favoured soil away from these, I found the same state of
things which I had seen in Virginia, but in a more aggravated form.
At least five hundred white men told me something of their own lives
and fortunes, across their own tables, and with the means of measuring
the weight of their words before my eyes; and I know that white men
seldom want an abundance of coarse food in the cotton States: the
proportion of the free white men who live as well in any respect as our
working classes at the North, on an average, is small, and the citizens
of the cotton States, as a whole, are poor. They work little, and that
little, badly; they earn little, they sell little; they buy little, and
they have little—very little—of the common comforts and consolations
of civilized life. Their destitution is not material only; it is
intellectual and it is moral. I know not what virtues they have that
rude men everywhere have not; but those which are commonly attributed
to them, I am sure that they lack: they are not generous or hospitable;
and, to be plain, I must say that their talk is not the talk of even
courageous men elsewhere. They boast and lack self-restraint, yet, when
not excited, are habitually reserved and guarded in expressions of
opinion very much like cowardly men elsewhere.
But, much cotton is produced in the cotton States, and by the labour
of somebody; much cotton is sold and somebody must be paid for it;
there are rich people; there are good markets; there is hospitality,
refinement, virtue, courage, and urbanity at the South. All this is
proverbially true. Who produces the cotton? who is paid for it? where
are, and who are, the rich and gentle people?
I can answer in part at least.
I have been on plantations on the Mississippi, the Red River, and
the Brazos bottoms, whereon I was assured that ten bales of cotton to
each average prime field-hand had been raised. The soil was a perfect
garden mould, well drained and guarded by levees against the floods;
it was admirably tilled; I have seen but few Northern farms so well
tilled: the labourers were, to a large degree, tall, slender, sinewy,
young men, who worked from dawn to dusk, not with spirit, but with
steadiness and constancy. They had good tools; their rations of bacon
and corn were brought to them in the field, and eaten with efficient
despatch between the cotton plants. They had the best sort of gins and
presses, so situated that from them cotton bales could be rolled in
five minutes to steamboats, bound direct to the ports on the gulf. They
were superintended by skilful and vigilant overseers. These plantations
were all large, so large as to yet contain much fresh land, ready to
be worked as soon as the cultivated fields gave out in fertility. If
it was true that ten bales of cotton to the hand had been raised on
them, then their net profit for the year had been, not less than two
hundred and fifty dollars for each hand employed. Even at seven bales
to the hand the profits of cotton planting are enormous. Men who have
plantations producing at this rate, can well afford to buy fresh hands
at fourteen hundred dollars a head. They can even afford to employ such
hands for a year or two in clearing land, ditching, leveeing, fencing,
and other preparatory work, buying, meantime, all the corn and bacon
they need, and getting the best kind of tools and cattle, and paying
fifteen per cent. per annum interest on all the capital required for
this, as many of them do. All this can be well afforded to establish
new plantations favourably situated, on fresh soil, if there is a
reasonable probability that they can after all be made to produce
half a dozen seven-bale crops. And a great many large plantations do
produce seven bales to the hand for years in succession. A great many
more produce seven bales occasionally. A few produce even ten bales
occasionally, though by no means as often as is reported.
Now, it is not at a Roman lottery alone that one may see it, but all
over the world, where a few very large prizes are promised and many
very small ones, and the number of tickets is limited; these are always
speculated on, and men will buy them at third and fourth hand at prices
which, it is useless to demonstrate to them, must be extravagant. They
go to the Jews and pledge the clothes on their back to get another
biacchi to invest; they beggar themselves; they ruin their families;
they risk damnation in their passionate eagerness to have a chance,
when they know perfectly well that the average of chances is not worth
a tithe of what they must pay for it.
The area of land on which cotton may be raised with profit is
practically limitless; it is cheap; even the best land is cheap; but to
the large planter it is much more valuable when held in large parcels,
for obvious reasons, than when in small; consequently the best land can
hardly be obtained in small tracts or without the use of a considerable
capital. But there are millions of acres of land yet untouched, which
if leveed and drained and fenced, and well cultivated, might be made
to produce with good luck seven or more bales to the hand. It would
cost comparatively little to accomplish it—one lucky crop would repay
all the outlay for land and improvements—if it were not for “the
hands.” The supply of hands is limited. It does not increase in the
ratio of the increase of the cotton demand. If cotton should double
in price next year, or become worth its weight in gold, the number of
negroes in the United States would not increase four per cent. unless
the African slave-trade were re-established. Now step into a dealer’s
“jail” in Memphis, Montgomery, Vicksburg, or New Orleans, and you will
bear the Mezzano of the cotton lottery crying his tickets in this way:
“There’s a cotton nigger for you! Genuine! Look at his toes! Look at
his fingers! There’s a pair of legs for you! If you have got the right
sile and the right sort of overseer, buy him, and put your trust in
Providence! He’s just as good for ten bales as I am for a julep at
eleven o’clock.” And this is just as true as that any named horse is
sure to win the Derby. And so the price of good labourers is constantly
gambled up to a point, where, if they produce ten bales to the hand,
the purchaser will be as fortunate as he who draws the high prize of
the lottery; where, if they produce seven bales to the hand, he will
still be in luck; where, if rot, or worm, or floods, or untimely rains
or frosts occur, reducing the crop to one or two bales to the hand, as
is often the case, the purchaser will have drawn a blank.
That, all things considered, the value of the labour of slaves does
not, on an average, by any means justify the price paid for it, is
constantly asserted by the planters, and it is true. At least beyond
question it is true, and I think that I have shown why, that there is
no difficulty in finding purchasers for all the good slaves that can
be got by traders, at prices considerably more than they are worth for
the production of cotton _under ordinary circumstances_. The supply
being limited, those who grow cotton on the most productive soils, and
with the greatest advantages in all other respects, not only can afford
to pay more than others, for all the slaves which can be brought into
market, but they are driven to a ruinous competition among themselves,
and slaves thus get a fictitious value like stocks “in a corner.” The
buyers indeed are often “cornered,” and it is only the rise which
almost annually has occurred in the value of cotton that has hitherto
saved them from general bankruptcy. Nearly all the large planters carry
a heavy load of debt from year to year, till a lucky crop coincident
with a rise in the price of cotton relieves them.
The whole number of slaves engaged in cotton culture at the Census of
1850 was reckoned by De Bow to be 1,800,000,[3] the crops at 2,400,000
bales, which is a bale and a third to each head of slaves. This was
the largest crop between 1846 and 1852. Other things being equal, for
reasons already indicated, the smaller the estate of slaves, the less
is their rate of production per head; and, as a rule, the larger the
slave estate the larger is the production per head. The number of
slaves in cotton plantations held by owners of fifty and upwards is, as
nearly as it can be fixed by the Census returns, 420,000.
If these produce on an average only two and a half bales per head
(man, woman, and child), and double this is not extraordinary on the
large plantations of the South-west,[4] it leaves an average for
the smaller plantations of seven-eighths of a bale per head. These
plantations are mostly in the interior, with long haulage and boatage
to market. To the small planter in the interior, his cotton crop does
not realize, as an average plantation price, more than seven cents a
pound, or thirty dollars the bale.[5] Those who plant cotton in this
small way usually raise a crop of corn, and some little else, not
enough, take the country through, one year with another, to supply
themselves and their slaves with food; certainly not more than enough
to do so, on an average. To this the Southern agricultural periodicals
frequently testify. They generally raise nothing _for sale_, but
cotton. And of cotton their sale, as has been shown, amounted in 1849—a
favourable year—to less than the value of twenty-five dollars for
each slave, young and old, which they had kept through the year.[6]
Deducting those who hold slaves only as domestic servants from the
whole number of slaveholders returned by the Census, more than half
of all the slaveholders, and fully half of all the cotton-sellers,
own each, not more than one family, on an average, of five slaves of
all ages.[7] The ordinary total cash income, then, in time of peace,
of fully half our cotton-planters, cannot be reckoned at more than
one hundred and twenty-five dollars, or, in extraordinary years, like
the last, at, say, one hundred and fifty dollars. From this they must
purchase whatever clothing and other necessaries they require for the
yearly supply of an average of more than ten persons (five whites and
five slaves), as well as obtain tools, mechanics’ work and materials,
and whatever is necessary for carrying on the work of a plantation,
usually of some hundred acres,[8] and must yet save enough to pay the
fees of doctors, clergy, and lawyers, if they have had occasion to
employ them, and their county and state taxes (we will say nothing
of the education of their children, or of accumulations for the war
expenses of the Confederation). My personal experience of the style of
living of the greater number of cotton-planters leads me to think this
not an unfair estimate. It is mainly based upon the official returns
and calculations of the United States Census of 1850, as prepared by
Mr. De Bow, a leading secessionist, and it assumes nothing which is
not conceded in the article on cotton in his Resources of the South. A
majority of those who sell the cotton crop of the United States must
be miserably poor—poorer than the majority of our day-labourers at the
North.
A similar calculation will indicate that the planters who own on an
average two slave families each, can sell scarcely more than three
hundred dollars’ worth of cotton a year, on an average; which also
entirely agrees with my observations. I have seen many a workman’s
lodging at the North, and in England too, where there was double the
amount of luxury that I ever saw in a regular cotton-planter’s house on
plantations of three cabins.
The next class of which the Census furnishes us means of considering
separately, are planters whose slaves occupy, on an average, seven
cabins, lodging five each on an average, including the house servants,
aged invalids, and children. The average income of planters of this
class, I reckon from similar data, to be hardly more than that of a
private of the New York Metropolitan Police Force. It is doubtless
true that cotton is cultivated profitably, that is to say, so as to
produce a fair rate of interest on the capital of the planter, on
many plantations of this class; but this can hardly be the case on an
average, all things considered.
It is not so with many plantations of the next larger class even, but
it would appear to be so with these on an average; that is to say,
where the quarters of a cotton plantation number half a score of cabins
or more, which method of classification I use that travellers may
the more readily recall their observations of the appearance of such
plantations, when I think that their recollections will confirm these
calculations. There are usually other advantages for the cultivation,
cleaning, pressing, shipping, and disposing of cotton, by the aid of
which the owner obtains a fair return for the capital invested, and may
be supposed to live, if he knows how, in a moderately comfortable way.
The whole number of slaveholders of this large class in all the Slave
States is, according to De Bow’s Compendium of the Census, 7,929, among
which are all the great sugar, rice, and tobacco-planters. Less than
seven thousand, certainly, are cotton-planters.
A large majority of these live, when they live on their plantations at
all, in districts, almost the only white population of which consists
of owners and overseers of the same class of plantations with their
own. The nearest other whites will be some sand-hill vagabonds,
generally miles away, between whom and these planters, intercourse is
neither intimate nor friendly.
It is hardly worth while to build much of a bridge for the occasional
use of two families, even if they are rich. It is less worth while
to go to much pains in making six miles of good road for the use of
these families. A school-house will hardly be built for the children
of six rich men who will all live on an average six miles away from
it, while private tutors or governesses can be paid by the earnings
of a single field-hand. If zeal and fluency can be obtained in a
preacher coming occasionally within reach, the interest on the cost of
a tolerable education is not likely to be often paid by all who would
live within half a day’s journey of a house of worship, which can be
built anywhere in the midst of a district of large plantations. It is
not necessary to multiply illustrations like these. In short, then, if
all the wealth produced in a certain district is concentrated in the
hands of a few men living remote from each other, it may possibly bring
to the district comfortable houses, good servants, fine wines, food
and furniture, tutors and governesses, horses and carriages, for these
few men, but it will not bring thither good roads and bridges, it will
not bring thither such means of education and of civilized comfort as
are to be drawn from libraries, churches, museums, gardens, theatres,
and assembly rooms; it will not bring thither local newspapers,
telegraphs, and so on. It will not bring thither that subtle force
and discipline which comes of the myriad relations with and duties
to a well-constituted community which every member of it is daily
exercising, and which is the natural unseen compensation and complement
of its more obvious constraints and inconveniences. There is, in fact,
a vast range of advantages which our civilization has made so common
to us that they are hardly thought of, of which the people of the
South are destitute. They chiefly come from or connect with acts of
co-operation, or exchanges of service; they are therefore possessed
only in communities, and in communities where a large proportion of
the people have profitable employment. They grow, in fact, out of
employments in which the people of the community are associated, or
which they constantly give to and receive from one another, with
profit. The slaves of the South, though often living in communities
upon plantations, fail to give or receive these advantages because the
profits of their labour are not distributed to them; the whites, from
not engaging in profitable employment. The whites are not engaged in
profitable employment, because the want of the advantages of capital
in the application of their labour, independently of the already rich,
renders the prospective result of their labour so small that it is
inoperative in most, as a motive for exerting themselves further than
is necessary to procure the bare means of a rude subsistence; also
because common labour is so poorly rewarded in the case of the slaves
as to assume in their minds, as it must in the minds of the slaves
themselves, a hateful aspect.
In the late act of treason of the usurpers of government in Louisiana,
the commercial demand which induces a man to go to work is considered
to be equivalent to slavery; and the fear that the election of Lincoln,
by its tendency to open a way for the emancipation of the negroes,
may lead on to a necessity for the whites to go to work, is gravely
set forth as a justification for the surrender of the State to the
conspiracy. Thus:—
“Fully convinced as we are that slavery * * * * * leaves to the _black
labourer_ a more considerable sum of comfort, happiness, and liberty
than the inexorable labour required from the free servants of the whole
universe, and that each emancipation of an African, without being of
any benefit to him, would necessarily _condemn to slavery_ one of our
own race, etc.”
To work industriously and steadily, especially under directions from
another man, is, in the Southern tongue, to “work like a nigger;” and,
from childhood, the one thing in their condition which has made life
valuable to the mass of whites has been that the niggers are yet their
inferiors. It is this habit of considering themselves of a privileged
class, and of disdaining something which they think beneath them, that
is deemed to be the chief blessing of slavery. It is termed “high
tone,” “high spirit,” and is supposed to give great military advantages
to those who possess it. It should give advantages of some sort, for
its disadvantages are inexpressibly great.
But if the poor whites were ever so industriously disposed, the
rich planter has a natural distaste to exchange absolute for partial
authority over the instruments by which he achieves his purpose;
and the employment of free and slave labour together, is almost as
difficult as working, under the same yoke, an unbroken horse and a
docile ox. Again, however repugnant it may be to the self-esteem,
and contrary to the habits of the rich man to treat his labourers
with respect, he has to do it when employing white men, from motives
of self-interest which lie below the surface, and he consequently
habitually avoids arranging his affairs in such a way as will make it
necessary for him to offer them employment.
It may be said that on the more profitable cotton plantations, where
little is raised except cotton, supplies for the maintenance of the
slaves, and for carrying on the work of the plantation, are largely
bought, which are raised elsewhere at the South; and that those who
supply the commodities, thus required by the cotton-planter, draw from
his profits which are thus distributed throughout the South, even to
the non-cotton-producing States, the people of which are thus enriched.
As far as all articles are concerned, in the production of which labour
is a comparatively unimportant item of cost,—mules for instance, and in
certain circumstances, within certain limits, swine,—this is true. But
these are of small consequence. It is constantly assumed by nearly all
writers on this subject, that the labour directed to the cultivation of
Indian corn for the necessary sustenance of slaves engaged in cotton
culture, must be just as profitably directed as if it were devoted
to the cultivation of cotton itself. This is not true, although the
Southern agricultural journals, and to a large extent our national
agriculture reports, have for years been assuming it to be so. It is
frequently spoken of, indeed, as a mystery, that the cotton-planters
cannot be induced to raise the food required by their force. The
reason of it is a very simple one; namely, that in the cultivation of
corn their labour must come into competition with the free labour of
the Northern States, as it does not in the production of cotton: and
the corn-raisers of the Northern Slave States, without enjoying any
monopoly of production, like that of the cotton-raisers, have to share
with these, all the manifold inconveniences which result from the
scarcity of good workmen, and the necessary concentration of all the
effective working force of the country, limited as it is, upon the one
purpose of getting cotton.
The interests of the owners of all soil in the Slave States which
is not adapted to cotton culture, and of all capital not engaged in
cotton culture, or in supplying slaves for it, are thus injured by the
demand for cotton, they being, in fact, forced to be co-partners in an
association in which they do not share the profits.
And as to what are commonly called the Cotton States, if we assume that
cotton cultivation is profitable only where the production is equal to
two bales for each slave employed, it will be seen that wherever the
land will not yield as much as this, the owner of it suffers all the
disadvantages of the difficulty of getting good labourers as much as
the owner of the land which produces seven or ten bales to the hand,
although none of the profits of supplying the cotton demand, which
gives this extraordinary price to labour, come to him.
According to the Census,[9] the whole crop of cotton is produced on
5,000,000 acres. It could be produced, at the rate common on good
South-western plantations, on less than half that area. The rest
of the land of the Slave States, which amounts to over 500,000,000
acres, is condemned, so far as the tendencies I have indicated
are not overweighed here and there by some special advantages, to
non-cultivation, except for the hand-to-mouth supply of its people.
And this is true not only of its agricultural but of all other of its
resources.
That for all practical purposes this is not an exaggerated statement
is clearly enough shown by the difference in the market value of
land, which as officially given by De Bow, is, notwithstanding the
extraordinary demand of the world upon the cotton land, between four
and five hundred per cent. higher in the Free than in the Slave States,
the frontier and unsettled districts, Texas, California, and the
territories not being considered.
One of the grand errors, out of which this rebellion has grown, came
from supposing that whatever nourishes wealth and gives power to an
ordinary civilized community, must command as much for a slave-holding
community. The truth has been overlooked that the accumulation of
wealth and the power of a nation are contingent not merely upon
the primary value of the surplus of productions of which it has to
dispose, but very largely also upon the way in which the income from
its surplus is distributed and reinvested. Let a man be absent from
almost any part of the North twenty years, and he is struck, on his
return, by what we call the “improvements” which have been made. Better
buildings, churches, school-houses, mills, railroads, etc. In New York
city alone, for instance, at least two hundred millions of dollars
have been reinvested merely in an improved housing of the people; in
labour-saving machinery, waterworks, gasworks, etc., as much more.
It is not difficult to see where the profits of our manufacturers
and merchants are. Again, go into the country, and there is no end
of substantial proof of twenty years of agricultural prosperity, not
alone in roads, canals, bridges, dwellings, barns and fences, but in
books and furniture, and gardens, and pictures, and in the better
dress and evidently higher education of the people. But where will the
returning traveller see the accumulated cotton profits of twenty years
in Mississippi? Ask the cotton-planter for them, and he will point in
reply, not to dwellings, libraries, churches, school-houses, mills,
railroads, or anything of the kind; he will point to his negroes—to
almost nothing else. Negroes such as stood for five hundred dollars
once, now represent a thousand dollars. We must look then in Virginia
and those Northern Slave States which have the monopoly of supplying
negroes, for the real wealth which the sale of cotton has brought to
the South. But where is the evidence of it? where anything to compare
with the evidence of accumulated profits to be seen in any Free
State? If certain portions of Virginia have been a little improving,
others unquestionably have been deteriorating, growing shabbier, more
comfortless, less convenient. The total increase in wealth of the
population during the last twenty years shows for almost nothing. One
year’s improvements of a Free State exceed it all.
It is obvious that to the community at large, even in Virginia, the
profits of supplying negroes to meet the wants occasioned by the cotton
demand, have not compensated for the bar which the high cost of all
sorts of human service, which the cotton demand has also occasioned,
has placed upon all other means of accumulating wealth; and this
disadvantage of the cotton monopoly is fully experienced by the
negro-breeders themselves, in respect to everything else they have to
produce or obtain.[10]
I say all sorts of human service. What the South will have to pay for
the service of true statesmanship, the world has now to see.
Whither the profits of cotton go, it is not my purpose, here, to
undertake to show. I will barely notice the hypocritical statement
made for the English market as an apology for this mad crime of the
slaveholders, that they are greatly absorbed in contributions made
by the planting States to our national treasury in payment of duties
on importations. The cotton-planters pay duties only on what they
consume of foreign goods. A very large part of all our duties are
collected on a class of goods for which there is almost no demand at
all from the South, either directly or indirectly—woollen and fur
goods, for instance: of the goods required for the South not a few
have been practically free. The whole slave population of the South
consumes almost nothing imported (nor would it, while slave, under
any circumstances). The majority of the white population habitually
makes use of no foreign production except chickory, which, ground
with peas, they call coffee. I have never seen reason to believe that
with absolute free trade the cotton States would take a tenth part of
the value of our present importations. And as far as I can judge from
observation of the comparative use of foreign goods at the South and
at the North, not a tenth part of our duties have been defrayed by the
South in the last twenty years. The most indefensible protective duty
we have is one called for by the South, and which has been maintained
solely to benefit the South. Our protective system had a Southern
origin; its most powerful advocates have been Southerners; and there
has not been a year in the last twenty, in which it could have been
maintained but for Southern votes.