It is a plausible ground of opposition to slavery, to charge it with

the guilt of the slave trade. It is argued that unless we are willing

to justify the capture of free and innocent men, on their own soil,

and their reduction from freedom to slavery, with all the enormous

injustice and cruelty of the African slave trade, we must acknowledge

that the title of the Southern master to his slave at this day is

unrighteous; that a system which had its origin in wrong cannot become

right by the lapse of time; that, if the title of the piratical slave

catcher on the coast of Africa was unrighteous, he cannot sell to the

purchaser any better title than he has; and that an unsound title

cannot become sound by the passage of time. It need hardly be said

that we abhor the injustice, cruelty, and guilt of the African slave

trade. It is justly condemned by the public law of Christendom--a law

which not Wilberforce, nor the British Parliament, nor British, nor

Yankee Abolitionists, have the honour of originating, but the

slaveholding Commonwealth of Virginia. It is condemned by the law of

God. Moses placed this among the judicial statutes of the Jews: "And

he that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand,

he shall surely be put to death." We fully admit, then, that the title

of the original slave catcher to the captured African was most

unrighteous. But few can be ignorant of the principle, that a title,

originally bad, may be replaced by a good one, by transmission from

hand to hand, and by lapse of time. When the property has been

acquired, by the latest holder, fairly and honestly; when, in the

later transfers, a fair equivalent was paid for it, and the last

possessor is innocent of fraud in intention and in the actual mode of

his acquisition of it, more wrong would be effected by destroying his

title, than by leaving the original wrong unredressed. Common sense

says, that whatever may have been the original title, a new and valid

one has arisen out of the circumstances of the case. If this principle

be denied, half the property of the civilized world will be divorced

from its present owners. All now agree that the pretext which gave

ground for the conquest of William of Normandy was wicked; and however

just it might have been, by the laws of nations, the conquest of the

government of a country ought not to disturb the rights of individuals

in private property. The Norman Conquest resulted in a complete

transfer of almost all the land in England to the hands of new

proprietors; and nearly all the land titles of England, at the present

day, are the legal progeny of that iniquitous robbery, which

transferred the territory of the kingdom from the Saxon to the Norman

barons. If lapse of time, and change of hands, cannot make a bad title

good, then few of the present landlords of England have any right to

their estates. Upon the same principles, the tenants leasing from them

have no right to their leases, and consequently they have no right to

the productions of the farms they hold. If they have no right to those

productions, then they cannot communicate any right to those who

purchase from them; so that no man eating a loaf of English bread, or

wearing a coat of English wool, could be certain that he was not

consuming what was not his own. Thus extravagant and absurd are the

results of such a principle. Let us apply to the abolitionists their

own argument, and we shall unseat the most of them from the snug homes

whence they hurl denunciations at us. It is well known that their

forefathers obtained the most of that territory from the poor Indians,

either by fraud or violence. If lapse of time and subsequent transfers

cannot make a sound title in place of an unsound one, then few of the

people of the North have any right to the lands they hold; and, as

honest men, they are bound to vacate them. To this even as great a man

as Dr. Wayland, the philosopher of abolitionism, has attempted an

answer, by saying that this right, arising from possession, only holds

so long as the true, original owner, or the inheritor of his right,

does not appear; and that, when he appears, the right of possession

perishes at once. But he argues, the original and true claimant to the

ownership of the slave is always present, in the person of the slave

himself; so that the right originating in possession cannot exist for

a moment. Without staying to inquire whether the presence of the

inheritor of the original right necessarily puts an end to this right

of possession--a proposition worse than questionable--I would simply

remark, that, to represent the slave himself as the possessor of the

original right, is a complete begging of the question. It assumes the

very point in dispute, whether the right of the master is sound or

not. And we would add, what would the courts of New England, what

would Dr. Wayland say, should the feeble remnants of the New England

Indians, who are yet lingering in those States, claim all the fair

domains of their tribe? And what would be said in England, if the

people of Saxon descent should rise upon all those noble houses who

boast a Norman origin, and claim their princely estates?

But we carry this just _argumentum ad hominem_ nearer home. If the

Virginian slaveholder derived from the New England or British

slave-trader, no valid title to the African, then the trader had no

valid title to the planter's money. What can be clearer than this? And

if continued possession, with lapse of time, and transmission from

hand to hand, cannot convert an unsound title into a sound one, all

the wealth acquired by the African slave trade, together with all its

increase, is wrongfully held by the heirs of those slave dealers: it

belongs to the heirs of the planters from whom it was unjustly taken.

Now it is well known that the New England States, and especially the

little State of Dr. Wayland, Rhode Island, drew immense sums from the

slave trade; and it was said of the merchants of Liverpool and

Bristol, that the very bricks of their houses were cemented with the

blood of the slave. Who can tell how much of the wealth which now

freights the ships, and drives the looms of these anti-slavery marts,

is the fruit of slave profits? Let the pretended owners disgorge their

spoils, and restore them to the Virginian planters, to indemnify them

for the worthless and fictitious title to the slaves whom they have

been called upon to emancipate; in order that means may be provided to

make their new liberty a real blessing to them. Thus we should have a

scheme for emancipation, or colonization, which would be just in both

its aspects. But will abolitionism assent to this? About as soon as

death will surrender its prey. Let them cease, then, for shame's sake,

to urge this sophism.

If this principle of a right originated by possession can be sound

anywhere, it is sound in its application to our slaves. The title by

which the original slave catchers held them may have been iniquitous.

But these slave catchers were not citizens of the Southern colonies;

these slaves were not brought to our shores by our ships. They were

presented by the inhuman captors, dragged in chains from the filthy

holds of the slave ships; and the alternative before the planter was,

either to purchase them from him who possibly had no right to sell

them, or re-consign them to fetters, disease, and death. The slaves

themselves hailed the conclusion of a sale with joy, and begged the

planters to become their masters, as a means of rescue from their

floating prison. The planters, so far as they were concerned, paid a

fair commercial equivalent for the labour of the slaves; and the right

so acquired passed legally through generations from father to son, or

seller to purchaser. The relation, so iniquitously begun in those

cases where the persons imported were not slaves already in Africa,

has been fairly and justly transferred to subsequent owners, and has

resulted in blessings to the slaves. Its dissolution is more

mischievous to them than to the masters. Must it not be admitted that

the injustice in which the relation originated no longer attaches to

it? The difference between the title of the original slave catcher,

and that of the late Virginian slave owner, is as great as between the

ruffian Norman freebooter, who conquered his fief at Hastings, and his

law-abiding descendant, the Christian gentleman of England.

§ 9. _The Morality of Slavery Vindicated by its Results._

To deny the mischievous effects of emancipation upon the Africans

themselves, requires an amount of impudence which even abolitionists

seldom possess. The experience of Britain has demonstrated, to the

satisfaction of all her practical statesmen, that freedom among the

whites is ruinous to the blacks. They tell us of the vast decline in

the productiveness of their finest colonies, of the lapsing of

fruitful plantations into the bush, of the return of the slaves,

lately an industrious and useful peasantry, to savage life, and of the

imperative necessity for Asiatic labour, to rescue their lands from a

return to the wilderness. A comparison between the slaves of the

South, and the freed negroes of the North, gives the same results.

While the former were cheerful, healthy, progressive, industrious, and

multiplying rapidly in numbers, the latter are declared by their white

neighbours to be a social nuisance, depressed by indolence and

poverty, decimated by hereditary diseases, and tending rapidly to

extinction.

We argue hereupon, that it cannot be a moral duty to bestow upon the

slave that which is nothing but an injury. It cannot be a sin to do to

him that which uniformly and generally is found essential to his

well-being in his present condition. We certainly are not required by

a benevolent God to ruin him in order to do him justice! No sober and

practical mind can hold such an absurdity. Hence we may know, even in

advance of examination, that the ethical premises, the theory of human

rights, which lead to such preposterous conclusions, must be false.

To illustrate this argument, the humane effects of slavery upon the

slave should be more fully exhibited. This we propose to attempt in

another chapter.

CHAPTER VIII.

ECONOMICAL EFFECTS OF SLAVERY.

We are not propagandists of slavery. The highest wish of Virginia with

reference to it was, that now it had been fastened on her against her

remonstrances by others, she should be let alone to manage it as she

judged the best: a right which had been solemnly pledged to her by her

present aggressors. We had no desire to force it on others, or to

predict its universal prevalence, as the best organization of society.

But having claimed that the Word of God and publick justice authorize

it, we admit that it is reasonable we should meet those who assert

economical and social results of it so evil, as to render it in

credible that a wise and benevolent God should sanction such a

mischief. We hope to show that slavery, instead of being wasteful,

impoverishing, and mischievous, is so far useful and benevolent as to

vindicate the divine wisdom in ordaining it, and to show that we were

wisely content with our condition so far as this relation of labour

and capital was concerned.

We would also urge this preliminary remark: that the economical

effects of American slavery have usually been argued from an amazingly

unreasonable point of view. Our enemies persist in discussing it as an

election to be made between a system of labour by christianized,

enlightened, free yeomen of the same race, on one hand; and a system

of labour by African slaves on the other; as though the South had any

such election in its power! It was not a thing for us to decide,

whether we should have these Africans, or civilized, free, white

labour; the former were here; here, not by the choice of our

forefathers, but forced upon us by the unprincipled cupidity of the

slave-trading ancestors of the Abolitionists of Old and New England

who now revile us; forced upon us against the earnest protest of

Virginia. Did Abolitionists ever propose a practical mode of removing

them, and supplying their places, which would not inflict on both

parties more mischief than slavery occasion? They should have showed

us some way to charm the four millions of Africans among us, away to

some happy Utopia, where they might be more comfortable than we made

them; and to repair the shock caused by the abstraction of all this

productive labour. Until they did this, the question was not whether

it would be wisest for a legislator creating a totally new community,

to form it like Scotland or New England; or like Virginia. The true

question was, these Africans being here, and there being no humane or

practicable way to remove them, what shall be done with them? If the

social condition of Virginia exhibited points of inferiority in its

system of labour, to that of its rivals, the true cause of the evil

was to be sought in the _presence_ of the Africans among us, not in

his _enslavement_. We shall indeed assert, and prove, that these

points of inferiority were vastly fewer and smaller than our enemies

represent. But, we emphatically repeat, the source of the evils

apparent in our industrial system was the presence among us of four

millions of heterogeneous pagan, uncivilized, indolent, and immoral

people; and for that gigantic evil, slavery was, in part at least, the

lawful, the potent, the beneficent remedy. Without this, who cannot

see that such an _incubus_ must have oppressed and blighted every

interest of the country? Such an infusion must have tainted the

sources of our prosperity. It would have been a curse sufficient to

paralyze the industry, to corrupt the morals, and to crush the

development of any people on earth, to have such a race spread abroad

among them like the frogs of Egypt. And that the South not only

delivered itself from this fate, but civilized and christianized this

people, making them the most prosperous and comfortable peasantry in

the world, developed a magnificent agriculture, and kept pace with the

progress of its gigantic rival, attests at once the energy of our

people, and the wisdom and righteousness of the expedient by which all

this has been accomplished.

§ 1. _Slavery and Republican Government._

Intelligent men at the South found something to reconcile them to

their condition, in the wholesome influence of their form of labour,

upon their republican institutions. The effect of slavery to make the

temper of the ruling caste more honourable, self-governed, reflective,

courteous, and chivalrous, and to foster in them an intense love of,

and pride in, their free institutions, has been already asserted, and

substantiated by resistless facts. The testimony of these facts is

concurrent with that of all history. But those qualities are just the

ones which fit a people for beneficent self-government. Again: our

system disposed, at one potent touch, of that great difficulty which

has beset all free governments: the difficulty of either entrusting

the full franchises of the ruling caste to, or refusing them to, the

moneyless class. The Word of God tells us that the poor shall always

be with us. Natural differences of capacity, energy, and thrift, will

always cause one part to distance the other part of the society, in

the race of acquisition; and the older and denser any population

becomes, the larger will be the penniless class, and the more complete

their destitution as compared with the moneyed class. Shall they be

refused all participation in the suffrage and powers of government?

Then, by what means shall the constitution make them secure against

the iniquities of class-legislation, which wickedly and selfishly

sacrifices their interests and rights to the ruling class? And yet

more: by what argument can they be rendered content in their political

disfranchisement, when they are of the same race, colour, and class,

with their unauthorized oppressors, save as money makes an artificial

distinction? The perpetual throes and reluctations of the oppressed

class against the oppressors, will agitate and endanger any free

government; as witness the strifes of the conservative and radical

parties in England, and the slumbering eruptions which the ideas of

the democrats of 1848 have kindled under every throne in Western

Europe. But on the other hand, if the full franchises of the ruling

class be conceded to the moneyless citizens, they seize the balance of

power, and virtually hold the reins over the rights, property, and

lives of the moneyed classes. But the qualities which have made them

continue penniless in a liberal government, together with the pressure

of immediate hardship, destitution, ignorance and passion, will ever

render them most unsafe hands to hold this power. The man who has "the

wolf at his door," who knows not where to-morrow's dinner for his wife

and babes is to be obtained, is no safe man to be entrusted with power

over others' property, and submitted to all the arts and fiery

passions of the demagogue. The inevitable result will be, that his

passions will drive him, under the pressure of his destitution, to

some of those forms of agrarianism or legislative plunder, by which

order and economical prosperity are blighted; and society is

compelled, like democratic France and New England, to take refuge from

returning anarchy and barbarism, in the despotism of a single will.

This truth cannot be more justly stated than in the language of Lord

Macaulay, himself once an ardent advocate of British Reform. If the

democratic States of America seemed, for a time, to offer an exception

to these tendencies, it proves nothing; for in those States, the

intense demand for labour, the cheapness of a virgin soil, and the

rapid growth of a new and sparse population, rendered the working of

the law, for a time, imperceptible. But even there, it had begun to

work with a portentous power. Witness the violence and frightful

mutations of their parties, the loathsome prevalence of demagogueism,

and the great party of free-soil, which is but a form of agrarianism

reaching out its plundering hand against the property class across

Mason's and Dixon's lines, instead of the property class at home. So

completely had the danger we have described been verified, even in

these new and prosperous communities, that the moment a serious strain

came upon their institutions, the will of the mob burst over

constitutions and publick ethics like a deluge, and the pretended

republicks rushed into a centralized despotism, with a speed and force

which astounded the world. All the pleas of _universal suffrage_ have

received a damning and final refutation, from the events of this

revolution.

But the solution which Southern institutions gave to this great

_dilemma_ of republicks was happy and potent. The moneyless labouring

class was wholly disfranchised of political powers, and thus disarmed

of its powers of mischief. Yet this was effected without injustice to

them, or cruelty; because they were at the same time made _parts of

the families_ of the ruling class; and ensured an active protection

and competent maintenance, by law, and by motives of affection and

self-interest in the masters; which experience proved to be more

beneficent in practice to the labouring class, than any political

expedient of free countries. The tendency of our African slavery was

to diminish, at the same time, the numbers and destitution of the

class of white moneyless men, so as to render them a harmless element

in the State. It did this by making for them a wider variety of

lucrative industrial pursuits; by making acquisition easier for white

people; by increasing the total of property, that is to say, of values

held as property, vastly, through the addition of the labour of the

Africans, and by diffusing a general plenty and prosperity. We very

well know that anti-slavery men are accustomed to assert the contrary

of all this: but we know also, that they affirm that whereof they

know nothing. The census returns of the anti-slavery government of the

United States itself stubbornly refute them; showing that the number

and average wealth of the property classes at the South were

relatively larger, and that white pauperism and destitution were

relatively vastly smaller, than at the North. But the violent

abolition of slavery here has exploded into thin air every sophism by

which it has been argued that it was adverse to the interests of the

non-slaveholding whites. The latter have been taught by a hard

experience, to know, with a painful completeness of conviction before

which the old anti-slavery arguments appear insolent and mocking

madness, that they are more injured than the slaveholders. They see,

that while the late masters are reduced from country gentlemen to

yeomen landholders, they are reduced from a thrifty, reputable middle

class, to starving competitors for day labour with still more starving

free negroes. The honest abolitionist (if there is such a thing) needs

only to take the bitter testimony of the non-slaveholding whites of

the South, to unlearn forever this part of his theory. Thus did

African slavery among us solve this hard problem; and place before us

a hopeful prospect of a long career of freedom and stability.

The comparative history of the free and slaveholding commonwealths of

the late United States substantiates every word of the above. The

South, as a section, has never, from the foundation of the government,

committed itself to any project of unrighteous class legislation, such

as tariffs, sectional bounties, or agrarian plunderings of the public

domain. The North has been perpetually studying such attempts. The

South has ever been remarked, (and strange to say, often twitted,)

for the stability and consistency of its political parties. The

Northern States have been "all things by turns, and nothing long,"

save that they have been ever steady in their devotion to their plans

of legislative plunder. The South has been a stranger to mobs,

rebellions, and fanaticism. When, for instance, the wicked crotchet of

Know-nothingism was invented, it seized the brains of the North like

an infection. It carried all before it until it came to Virginia, the

first of the Southern States which it essayed to enter, when the old

Commonwealth quietly arose and placed her foot upon its neck, and the

monster expired at once. From the day Virginia cast her vote against

it, it never gained another victory, either North or South. But the

crowning evidence of the superior stability of our freedom was

presented during the recent war. While its stress upon Northern

institutions crushed them at once into a pure despotism, the South

sustained the tremendous ordeal with the combined energy of a monarchy

and the equity of a liberal republick. There was no mob law; no

terrorizing of dissentients, no intimidations at elections, nor

meddling with their purity and freedom, no infringement of rights by

class legislation, no riots nor mobs, save one or two small essays

generated by foreigners, and no general suspension of the _Habeas

Corpus_, until the pressure of the war had virtually converted the

whole country into a camp: and this, even then, was only enacted by

the constitutional authority of the Congress. The liberty of the press

and of religion was untouched during the whole struggle. Let the

contrast be now drawn. Shall the tree be known by its fruits?

We believe, therefore, that we have no cause, in this respect, to

lament the condition which Providence had assigned us, in placing this

African Race among us. We do not envy the political condition of our

detractors, Yankee and British radicals; of the former with their

_colluvies gentium_, the off-scouring of all the ignorance and

discontent of Europe, and their frantic agrarianism, which will turn,

so soon as it has exhausted its expected prey from the homesteads of

Southern planters, to ravage at home; and of the latter, with their

disorganizing theories of human right, subversive of every bulwark of

the time-honored British Constitution, and their increasing mass of

turbulent pauperism.

§ 2. _Slavery and Malthusianism._

Taking mankind as they are, and not as we may desire them to be,

domestic slavery offered the best relation which has yet been found,

between labour and capital. It is not asserted that it would be best

for a _Utopia_, where we might imagine the humblest citizen virtuous,

intelligent, and provident. But there are no such societies on earth.

The business of the legislator, whether human or divine, is with

mankind as they are; and while he adapts his institutions to their

defects, so as to avoid making them impracticable or mischievous, he

should also shape them to elevate and reform as far as possible. The

legislator, therefore, in devising a frame of society, should adapt it

to a state in which the rich are selfish and the poor indolent and

improvident. For, after all that has been boasted of human

improvement, this is usually man's condition. Now, in adjusting social

institutions, it is all-important to secure physical comfort; because

in a state of physical misery and degradation, moral and intellectual

improvement are hopeless; and the business of the legislator is more

especially to take care of the weak: the strong will take care of

themselves. Property is the chief element of political strength; it is

this which gives to individuals power in society; for "money answereth

all things;" it commands for its possessor whatever he needs for his

physical comfort and safety. The great _desideratum_ in all benign

legislation is to sustain the class which has no property, against the

social depression and physical suffering to which they always tend.

That there will always be such a class, at least till the

_millennium_, is certain, for reasons already stated. Now all

civilized communities exhibit a natural law which tends to depress the

physical condition of those who have no property, who are, usually,

the laboring classes. That law is the tendency of population to

increase. The area of a country grows no larger, while the number of

people in it is perpetually increasing, unless that tendency is

already arrested by extreme physical evils. The same acres have,

therefore, more and more mouths to feed, and backs to clothe.

Consequently, each person must receive a smaller and smaller share of

the total proceeds of the earth. The demand perpetually increases in

proportion to the supply; and therefore the price of those productions

rises, as compared with the price of labour. Hence in every

flourishing community, the relative proportion between the price of

land, its rents, and the food and clothing which it produces, on the

one hand, and the price of manual labour on the other, is perpetually,

though slowly, changing. The former rises, the latter sinks.

Improvements in agriculture and the arts, extensive conquests,

emigrations, or some other cause, may for a time arrest, or even

reverse, this process; but such is the general law, and the constant

tendency. The very prosperity and growth of the community work this

result. The owners of land become richer: those who live by labour

become poorer. Physical depression works moral depression, and these

overcrowded and under-fed labourers, becoming more reckless, are

familiarized with a lower standard of comfort, and continue to

increase. This law has wrought in every growing nation on the globe

which is without domestic slavery. It is felt in Great Britain, in

spite of her vast colonies, where she has disgorged her superfluous

mouths and hands, to occupy and feed them on virgin soils: in spite of

her conquests, which have centred in her lap the wealth of continents.

It has begun to work in the Northern States of America,

notwithstanding the development of the arts, and the proximity of the

Great West. Every where it reduces the quantity or quality of food and

raiment which a day's labour will earn, and perpetually tends to

approximate that lowest grade at which the labouring classes can

vegetate, multiply, and toil.

What, now, is the remedy? Not agrarianism: this could only aggravate

the evil by taking away the incentive to effort, in making its rewards

insecure. Not conquest of new territory: the world is now all

occupied; and conquest from our neighbours is unjust. We found the

remedy in the much-abused institution of domestic slavery. It simply

ended this natural, this universal strife between capital and labour,

by making labour the property of capital, and thus investing it with

an unfailing claim upon its fair share in the joint products of the

two. The manner in which slavery effects this is plain. Where labour

is free, competition reduces its price to whatever grade the laws of

trade may fix; for labour is then a mere commodity in the market,

unprotected, and subject to all the laws of demand and supply. The

owner of land or capital pays for the labour he needs, in the shape of

wages, just the price fixed by the relation of supply and demand; and

if that price implies the severest privation for the labourer or his

family, it is no concern of his. Should they perish by the inadequacy

of the remuneration, it is not his loss: he has but to hire others

from the anxious and competing multitude. Moreover, the ties of

compassion and charity are vastly weaker than under our system; for

that suffering labourer and his family are no more to that capitalist,

than any other among the sons of want. But when we make the labour the

property of the same persons to whom the land and capital belong,

self-interest inevitably impels them to share with the labourer

liberally enough to preserve his life and efficiency, because the

labour is also, in the language of Moses, "their money," and if it

suffers, they are the losers. By this arrangement also, a special tie

and bond of sympathy are established between the capitalist and his

labourers. They are members of his family. They not only work, but

live, on his premises. A disregard of their wants and destitution is

ten-fold more glaring, more difficult to perpetrate, and more promptly

avenged by his own conscience and public opinion. The bond of

domestic affection ensures to the labourer a comfortable share of the

fruits of that capital which his labour fecundates. And the law is

enabled to make the employer directly responsible for the welfare of

the employed. Thus, by this simple and potent expedient, slavery

solved the difficulty, and answered the question raised by the gloomy

speculations of Malthus, at whom all anti-slavery philosophers have

only been able to rail, while equally impotent to overthrow his

premises, or to arrest the evils he predicts.

Slavery also presented us with a simple and perfectly efficient

preventive of pauperism. The law, public opinion, and natural

affection, all joined in compelling each master to support his own

sick and superannuated. And the elevation of the free white labourers,

which results from slavery, by placing another labouring class below

them, by assigning to them higher and more remunerative kinds of

labour, and by diffusing a more general prosperity, reduced white

pauperism to the smallest possible amount amongst us. In a Virginian

slaveholding county, the financial burden of white pauperism was

almost inappreciable. Thus, at one touch, our system solved happily,

mercifully, justly, the Gordian knot of pauperism, a subject which has

completely baffled British wisdom.

The attempt may be made to evade these considerations, by saying that

the same law of increase in population will at length operate, in

spite of slavery; and that its depressing effects will reveal

themselves in this form: that the labouring class will become so

numerous, the same alteration between demand and supply of labour will

appear, and the slave's labour will be worth no more than his

maintenance, when he will cease to sell for any thing. At this stage,

it may be urged, self-interest will surely prompt emancipation, and

the whole slave system will fall before the evil which it was expected

to counteract.

To this there are several answers. The argument implies that the

slaves will be, at that stage, relatively very numerous. Then, the

political difficulties of emancipation would be proportionably great.

The political necessity would overrule the economical tendency, and

compel the continuance of the beneficent institution. And while it

subsisted, the tie of domestic affection, and the force of law and

public opinion, would still secure for slaves a better share in the

joint profits of labour and capital, than would be granted to

depressed free labour. This was the case in the Roman Empire, where

the population of Italy and Sicily was for several centuries as dense

as in those modern States where the Malthusian law has worked most

deplorably: and yet slavery did not yield, and emancipation did not

follow.

But the more complete answer is as follows. We will attempt now to

point out an influence which enabled domestic slavery to resist and

repair the evils of over-population, vastly better than any other form

of labour. As population increases, the size of fortunes which are

accumulated increases. Instances of accumulation are more numerous and

far more excessive. Density of population, facility of large

industrial operations, concentration of number of labourers, with

other causes, ensure that rich men will be vastly richer than while

population was sparse; and that there will be many more rich men.

While a few of these will be misers, as a general rule they will seek

to expend their overflowing incomes. But as man's real wants lie

within very narrow limits, and the actual necessaries and comforts of

life are cheap, the larger part of these overgrown incomes must be

spent in superfluities. The money of the many excessively rich men is

profusely spent in expensive jewelry, clothing, equipage, ostentatious

architecture, useless menials, fine arts, and a thousand similar

luxuries. Now the production of all these superfluities absorbs a vast

amount of the national labour, and thus diminishes greatly the

production of those values which satisfy real wants. A multitude of

the labourers are seduced from the production of those more essential

values, by the higher prices which luxury and pride are enabled to pay

for their objects. Now, although the manufacturers of these

superfluities may, individually, secure a better livelihood than those

laborers who produce the necessaries of life, yet the result of the

withdrawal of so many producing hands is, that the total amount of

necessaries produced in the nation is much smaller. There is, then, a

less mass of the necessaries of life to divide among the whole number

of the citizens; and some people must draw a smaller share from the

common stock. Every sensible man knows that these will be the

landless, labouring men. The wealth of the rich will, of course,

enable them to engross a liberal supply for their own wants, however

scant may be that left for the poor. The ability to expend in

superfluities is, therefore, a _misdirection_ of just so much of the

productive labour of the country, from the creation of essential

values, to the producing of that which fills no hungry stomach,

clothes no naked back, and relieves no actual, bodily want. And here,

after all, is the chief cause why the Malthusian law is found a true

and efficient one in civilized communities. For, were the increasing

labour of a growing nation wisely and beneficiently directed to draw

from the soil and from nature all that they can be made to yield,

their fecundity would be found to be practically so unlimited, that

the means of existence would keep pace with the increase of

population, to almost any extent. The operative cause of the growing

depression of the poor is, not that the same acres are compelled to

feed more mouths, and clothe more backs, so much as this: that the

inducements which excessive wealth gives to the production of

superfluities, misdirects so much precious labour, that the

fruitfulness of those acres is not made to increase with the increase

of mouths. This is proved by the simple fact, that in all the old

countries the misery of the lowest classes tends to keep pace with the

luxury of the highest. It is proved emphatically by the industrial

condition of Great Britain. There is no country in which production is

so active; none in which agriculture and the arts are more stimulated

by science and intelligence; and yet there is a growing mass of

destitution, yearly approaching more frightful dimensions, and testing

the endurance of human nature by lower grades of physical discomfort.

The reason is not to be sought in her limited territory or crowded

population; for if the British Islands have not acres enough to grow

their own bread for so many, why is it that so productive a people are

not able to pay for abundance of imported bread? It is to be found in

the existence of their vast incomes, and the excessive luxury

practised by the numerous rich. True, these magnates excuse their vast

expenditures in superfluities by the plea, that one of the motives is

the "encouragement of industry." But they effect, as we have seen, not

an encouragement, but a misdirection of industry. The reason why so

many British poor have a scanty share of physical comforts is, that

there are so many British rich men who, by their lavish expenditure,

tempt and seduce so large a multitude of producing hands from the

creation of actual comforts to the creation of superfluities.

What safe remedy can the legislator propose for this evil? Not a

violent, agrarian leveling of the larger estates. That, as we have

shown, would be wicked and foolish. Nor can it be found in sumptuary

laws. The world has tried them to its heart's content, and found them

impracticable. It is true, that their adoption showed how clear a

perception the ancients had of one truth, which modern political

science pretends to ignore. That truth is, that luxury is a social

evil. We have shown that it is as wasteful of social wealth as it is

of morals. The ancients thought thus, and they were right. Legislators

now-a-days, in exploding their remedy as no remedy, seem to desire to

cheat themselves into the belief that the disease is no disease. But

the ancients were not as stupid as men imagine.

Now, we do not boast that we can offer a perfect remedy. But our

system of labour certainly gave us a partial one of inestimable value.

Where the rich man is a citizen of a hireling State, his accumulated

wealth and profuse income are all spent in superfluities, except the

small portion needed for the comforts of life for his own family. But

when he is a citizen of a slave State, they are first taxed with the

comfortable support of his slaves. The law, public opinion, affection

for them, and self-interest, all compel him to make the first

appropriation out of that profuse income, to feeding and clothing his

slaves, before he proceeds to superfluities. Thus, the proceeds of the

accumulations which dense population and social prosperity cause, are

rescued from a useless and mischievous expenditure in those luxuries,

the purchase of which misdirects public industry, and tempts to a

deficient production of the necessaries of life; and are directed

where benevolence, mercy, and the public good indicate, to the

comfortable maintenance of the labouring people. That this is the

effect of domestic slavery on the incomes of the rich, is proved by

one familiar fact. It is well known at the South how slaveholders

usually murmured when comparing their style of living with that of

capitalists in the hireling States of equal nominal wealth. The

planter who owned fifty thousand dollars worth of fertile lands, and a

hundred slaves, while he lived in far more substantial comfort and

plenty, displayed in Virginia far less ostentation and luxury than the

merchant or manufacturer of the North who owns the same amount of

capital. His house was plainly furnished with the old-fashioned goods

of his fathers; his family rode in a plain carriage, drawn by a pair

of stout nags which, probably, either did a fair share of ploughing

also, or drew a large part of the fuel for the household. He himself

was dressed partly in "jeans," woven under the superintendence of his

wife; and his boys were at school in a log house, with homespun

clothing, and, in summer, bare feet. It was not unusual to hear the

slaveholder, when he considered this contrast, complain of slavery as

a bad institution for the master. But this was its merciful feature,

that it in some measure arrested superfluous luxury, and taxed

superfluous income with the more comfortable support of the labourers.

In a hireling State, these might be left half-starved on the

inadequate compensation which the hard law of supply and demand in the

labour-market would compel them to accept, while the capitalist was

rioting in a mischievous waste of the overgrown profits of his

capital.

The question of the productiveness of slave labour may be anticipated,

so far as to point out the fact, that this benevolent diversion of the

large incomes from luxurious expenditures to the comfortable

maintenance of the slaves, was a diversion from unproductive to

productive consumption. The slaves were a productive class; and the

increased comfort of their living added greatly to their increase, and

their ability to labour. No student of political economy need be told

how powerfully national wealth is promoted by any cause which

substitutes productive consumption for unproductive.

The truth of these views is confirmed by this fact, which is attested

by all experienced slaveholders: that the slaves throughout the South

lived in far more comfort than they did a generation ago. And this is

truest of those Southern communities where population is densest, and

the price and rents of land are highest. As these influences,

elsewhere so depressing to the poor, advanced, the standard of comfort

for our slaves rose rapidly, instead of falling. How can a more

splendid vindication of the benevolence of our system be imagined? Our

slaves generally ate more meat, wore more and better clothing, and

lived in better houses, than their fathers did.

That a palpable view may be given, to those who are not personally

acquainted with our system, of its true working, the reader's

indulgence will be asked for the statement of a few homely details. In

Virginia, all slaves, without exception, had their own private funds,

derived from their poultry, gardens, "patches," or the prosecution of

some mechanic art, in what is termed "their own time." These funds

they expended as they pleased, in Sunday-clothing, or in such

additions to their diet and comfort as they liked. The allowances

which we proceed to state, are strictly those which the master usually

made out of his funds. The allowances fixed by usage in this State

were generally these: for clothing of adults, one complete suit of

stout woolens, two pair pantaloons of cotton or flax, two shirts, two

pair of worsted half-hose, and a hat and a blanket, each year. For

shoes, the old rule was, one pair each winter, of the quality of best

army shoes or boots, to be replaced at harvest with new ones, in the

case of ploughmen and reapers, while the "less able-bodied hands" only

got their old shoes repaired. But in latter years, the prevalent

custom had come to be, to issue shoes to all adults, as often as is

required, to keep them shod throughout the year; while the children

were universally shod during the winter only.

For diet, the slaves shared jointly the garden-stuff, fruits and milk

of the master's plantation and garden. But their essential and

preferred food was a certain daily or weekly allowance of corn meal

and bacon, issued in addition to the above. The common rule in

Virginia, where these were given in the form of rations, was to allow

each adult a half-pound of bacon, and two quarts of meal per day. The

meal of Indian corn, when uninjured by the mustiness of a sea-voyage,

and properly baked at a bright wood-fire, is an excellent and

nutritious food, as is shown by the fact that it fills more than an

equal place with bread of wheat, on the tables of the richest

planters. In many other families, the allowance of meal was unlimited;

and the bacon was not issued in formal rations, the servants living at

a common board. The supply laid in was then usually according to the

following rule: one hundred and fifty pounds of pork per year, for

every soul, white and black. When it is remembered that the sucklings

and the white females used almost none of this supply, a simple

calculation will show that it is equivalent to at least a half-pound

per day for each adult. Such were the customary usages in Virginia.

There were probably as many cases where the above rules were exceeded,

as where the allowances fell below them. In the new States of the

South West, where agriculture is still more profitable, it is said

that the allowances were more liberal than in the old slave States.

It happens that the census returns of the United States for 1860,

published by our enemies themselves, more than confirm this view of

the abundant and comfortable living of our labouring population.

According to those returns the free States had in 1860, not quite

nineteen millions of people, and the slave States twelve and a

quarter millions. Of the cereals used by Americans for human food, the

free States raised five hundred and sixty-one millions bushels; and

the slave States four hundred and ninety-four millions bushels. That

is, while the people of the free States had about _thirty_ bushels

each of these cereals, those of the slave States had _forty-one_

bushels per head. Moreover, the North boasts that breadstuffs are her

great export crops, while cotton and tobacco were ours. Our people,

including our slaves, must therefore have used more than four bushels

each, to their three. In neither country does each person eat either

thirty or forty-one bushels per year; because horses and other live

stock eat a part, which it is impossible accurately to estimate.

Again: of the animals used for human food, (horned cattle, sheep, and

swine,) then free States had about _forty_ millions, or a little more

than _two_ per head to each inhabitant; while the slave States had

forty and a half millions, or about _three and a half_ to each

inhabitant. But as bacon or pork is the flesh most commonly consumed

by Americans, and especially by farm labourers, the proportion of

swine is still more significant. The free States had not quite twelve

millions of swine, and the slave States twenty millions six hundred

thousand. This gives a little more than _six-tenths of one_ swine to

each inhabitant of the North, and _one and seven-tenths_ to each

inhabitant of the South. But this is not all,--for the North

(especially the prairie States) exported vast quantities of the flesh

of swine to the South, while the slave States exported none to the

North. It should in justice be said, that the disparity is not so

enormous as would thus appear, because the swine reared in the South

are usually smaller than those of the North.

§ 3. _Comparative productiveness of Slave Labour._

From the days of Adam Smith, anti-slavery men have been pleased to

consider it as a point perfectly settled, that slave labour is

comparatively unfavourable to production, and thus, to publick wealth.

So settled is this conviction among the enemies, and so often has it

been admitted by the apologists of our system, it will probably be

hard to secure even a hearing, while we review the grounds on which

the common opinion is based. One would think that the fact that those

grounds have usually been urged by men who, like Adam Smith, knew

nothing of slavery themselves, should bespeak for us at least a little

patience and candour.

One of those grounds is, that slavery, by making manual labour the

peculiar lot of a servile class, renders it disreputable. This, they

suppose, together with the exemption from the law of necessity,

fosters indolence in the masters. But, we reply, is manual labour the

peculiar lot of the servile class alone, in slave States? Is not this

the very question to be settled? Yet it is assumed as the premise from

which to settle it. So that the reasoning amounts to no more than this

ridiculous _petitio principii_: "Because the slaves do all the work,

therefore the masters do none of the work." This should be made a

question of fact. And we emphatically deny that Southern masters were

an indolent class, as compared with the moneyed classes elsewhere. In

fact, the general rule is that rich men do not work, the world over.

It was less true, probably, in Virginia, than in any other

commonwealth. The wealthy man of the North, with his grown sons, is

more indolent, and more a fine gentleman, than the wealthy

slaveholder. If it be said that, in free States, a multitude of small

farmers cultivate their lands with their own hands, it is equally true

that a multitude of small planters in the South, who owned one, three

or five slaves, laboured along with them. That the land shall be owned

by the very persons who cultivate it, is an exceptional condition of

things, resulting, to some extent in New England, from a very peculiar

history, origin and condition of society, and not destined to continue

general even there. It is as true of hireling as of slave States, that

the tendency of civilized institutions is, and ever has been, and ever

will be, generally, to collect the lands in larger properties, in the

hands of a richer class than that which actually tills them. Nor is

there one syllable of truth in the idea, that labour was among us more

disreputable, because usually done by slaves. In all countries, there

is foolish pride, and importance is attached, by the silly, to empty

badges of station. But it was less so among slaveholders than among

the rich, or the would-be rich, of other countries. The reason is

obvious. In free States there is just as truly a servile class,

bearing the servile inferiority of social station, as among us. That

class being white, and nominally free, its addiction to manual labour

is the only badge of its social condition. Hence whites of the

superior class have a far stronger motive, in their pride, to shun

labour. But the white master could freely labour among his black

servants, without danger of being mistaken by the transient observer

for one of the class, because his skin distinguished him: just as the

man of unquestioned wealth and fashion can wear a plain coat, which

would be shunned as the plague, by the doubtful aspirant to _ton_. We

repeat: the planters of Virginia were more often seen performing, not

only the labours of superintendence, but actual manual labour, than

any wealthy class in America. They were proverbial for perseverance

and energy. There is a fact which bears a peculiar testimony to this.

While Yankee adventurers and immigrants have intruded themselves into

every other calling among us, like the frogs into the Egyptian houses

and their very chambers and kneading-troughs, those of them who have

attempted to act the tobacco planter have, in almost every case,

failed utterly. They lack the requisite energy for the calling.

Another reason of the anti-slavery man is, that the free labourer,

stimulated by personal interest in his own success, must be more

thrifty, industrious, and economical than the slave, who is stimulated

only by fear. We reply: both the premises are absolutely false. Slaves

were not stimulated only by fear. They felt at least as much affection

as the Red Republican or Chartist hireling. They comprehended their

own interest in their master's prosperity as fully as hired labourers

do. But, in the second place, the labour of free States is not usually

performed by men who have a personal interest in their own success: it

is performed, in the main, by a landless class, who are as very

hirelings as our slaves were slaves; who need just as much the eye of

an overseer, and who must be pricked on in their labour, at least as

often, by the threat, not of the birch, but of the more cruel penalty

of discharge; which they know is their dismissal to starvation or the

work-house. This delusive reasoning proceeds by comparing the yeoman

landholder in fee-simple, tilling his own soil with his own hands,

with the slave tilling the land of his wealthy master. But are the

lands of hireling States prevalently tilled by their yeomen owners? Is

this the system to which free society tends? The Englishman will not

dare to say so, when he looks around him, and sees how rapidly the

small holdings have been swallowed up into larger farms, which are now

worked by capitalists with organized gangs of hirelings; nor the

Scotchman, with the sight of an old tenant peasantry swept away before

the ruthless Bothy-system of his country. And, as we have asserted,

the class of yeomen landholders, labouring personally among their few

slaves, was at least as large, and as permanent in the South, as in

any civilized country.

Here again, the actual experiment of abolition has ridiculously

exploded all these baseless reasonings for the superior zeal of the

white free labourer, and the thriftless eye-service of the slave. All

intelligent men knew before that they were precisely contrary to fact;

for they saw all hireling labour at the North obviously required a

supervision much more constant and stringent, to prevent the hirelings

from bringing the employers to bankruptcy by their worthless

eye-service, than the labour of our own merry and affectionate

servants. If the white hireling labour was aggregated in masses, we

uniformly saw it distributed in gangs, to sturdy "bosses," who stood

with their formidable bludgeons in their hands, from morning to night,

with just fourfold the persistency of any Southern "head-man" or

"overseer," and actually indicted blows on his free white

fellow-citizens, as frequently as our overseers on the servant

children. If the white hireling labour was employed on their little

farms, in small numbers, then the proprietors always informed us, that

they must be present in the field all the time, to shame and encourage

them by their example, or else their "help" would cheat them to their

ruin. But in the South, nothing was more common than to see estates

farmed by the faithful slaves, for widows, orphans, professional men,

or non-resident proprietors, without any other superintendence than an

occasional visit. Now, all this is at an end. The labourers are free

hirelings, who, according to the anti-slavery argument, should be so

superior in enlightened zeal and fidelity. But lo, the Southern people

have found that eye-service has thereby increased ten-fold; and if

there is any lesson which the South has effectually learned in these

two years, it is, that perpetual and jealous supervision is the sole

condition on which a meagre profit can be extracted from this wretched

and grinding system; and that else, the impositions of the hired

labourers inevitably result in speedy bankruptcy. Hard fact has

demonstrated that the truth is precisely opposite to the pretty

postulates of the anti-slavery philosophers, so called.

It was currently asserted that one free white labourer did as much

work as two or three slaves; and Southern gentlemen used often to be

heard assenting to it. But here the reader should be reminded of what

has been already shown; that if this industrial evil existed among us,

that evil was not slavery, but the presence among us of four millions

of recent pagans, characterized by all the listlessness, laziness, and

unthrift of savages. Slavery did not make the intelligent and

industrious worthless; nor does freedom turn the lazy barbarian into a

civilized and diligent citizen. If there ever was any truth in this

comparison of the efficiency of the African labourer with the free

white, it doubtless existed when the former were newly brought into

our country. The estimate then formed became traditionary, and

prevailed after the partial training and civilization of the blacks

had wholly removed its grounds. Several facts prove that no white

agricultural labour was so efficient (especially under our ardent sun)

as the Africans, had become. Of this, the crowning proof is, again,

given us by the unfortunate experiences of actual abolition. Many

Virginian proprietors, having still retained the old, but false

prejudice, that the negro slave was a less efficient labourer than the

white hireling, and being well assured that the labour of the slaves

would be deteriorated by emancipation, procured white labour from the

North. What was the result? An almost universal conviction that the

freed negro, deteriorated as he was, proved still a better labourer

than the white hireling! Consequently, the importation of white labour

is totally relinquished. Another of these facts is, that in Middle

Virginia, where the best free labour in America exists, and was once

almost exclusively used, the slave population was, up to the war,

steadily supplanting it in agriculture; and was more and more

preferred by the most enlightened agriculturists. Another is, that the

great contractors on our public works, many of them Northern men, who

came to us provided with white labour, gradually convinced themselves

that their works could be executed more cheaply, quickly, and quietly,

by slaves. The third fact is, that along the line which separates

Virginia and Pennsylvania, or Kentucky and Ohio, the lands immediately

south of the line were more valuable than those immediately north of

it. This is so well known that Senator Sumner, in his notorious libel

on the South, admits its existence, and endeavours to evade its force

by the following preposterous solution. He says: freedom, by its

proximity, infuses something of its own vigour, virtue, and life, into

the adjoining Southern community; so as to stimulate its prosperity;

whereas, the blighting slave-power contaminates and palsies freedom

along the line of its contact, so as to make it exhibit less than its

usual happy effects. That is, we are invited to believe that the

indirect influence of free labour is so potent that it can go across

Mason's and Dixon's line, or the Ohio River, into the midst of the

very blight and curse of slavery, and act so happily as to raise the

price of slave-tilled lands to eighty dollars per acre; while its

direct influences at home, on a soil uncursed with slavery, cannot

sustain the price of exactly similar land at sixty dollars! And we are

required to believe that while the mere shadow of slavery, falling

across the border, sinks the price of land, otherwise blessed with the

most profitable system, to sixty dollars, the actual incubus of the

horrid monster on a soil unredeemed by the better system, raises it to

eighty dollars! Common sense shows us the true solution. Two farms

divided only by the imaginary line of the surveyor, of course differ

nothing in the natural advantages of soil, climate and productions.

Why, then, did the Virginian farm sell for twenty dollars more per

acre? Because the owner could combine all the economy and efficiency

of a system of slave labour, with the partial advantages of the system

of free labour near him; and thus make his farm more profitable than

his Pennsylvanian neighbour.

But we are told that actual inspection showed the labour of the South

to be wasteful, shiftless, and expensive, as compared with the free

labour of the North. We reply, if it seemed so in any case, it is

because the comparison is unfairly made. On the Northern side, the

specimen is selected near some great city, in some "crack farming

district," where the labour is stimulated by abundant capital,

supplied with costly implements, and directed by the best skill of

that section. On the Southern side, the specimen was taken from some

ill-informed population, or some soil originally thin, and in a

community depressed and depleted by the iniquitous taxation of Yankee

tariffs. But let the best of each be compared; or the _medium_

specimens of each; or the worst of each; and we fearlessly abide the

test. Where slave labour was directed by equal skill and capital, it

is shown to be as efficient as any in America. There was nowhere on

our continent, more beautiful, more economical, or more remunerative

farming, than in our densest slaveholding communities.

A third argument against the economy of slave labour, is thus stated

by Dr. Wayland: "It removes from both parties, the disposition and the

motives to _frugality_. Neither the master learns frugality from the

necessity of labour, nor the slave from the benefits which it

confers," etc.

Now we emphatically and proudly admit that Southern society has not

learned the frugality of New England; which is, among the middle

classes, a mean, inhospitable, grinding penuriousness, sacrificing the

very comfort of children, and the kindly cheer of the domestic board,

to the Yankee _penates_, Mammon and Lucre; and among the upper classes

a union of domestic scantiness and stinginess with external

ostentation and profusion; a frugality which is "_rich in the parlour,

and poor in the kitchen_." The idea of the Southern planter is the

rational and prudent use of wealth to procure the solid comfort of

himself, his children, and his servants at home, coupled with a simple

and unostentatious equipage abroad, and a generous hospitality to rich

and poor. But we fearlessly assert, and will easily prove to every

sensible reader, that slavery was peculiarly favourable to the

economical application of labour, and of domestic supplies and income.

The attempt to carry the freehold tenure of land down to the yeomanry,

subdivides land too much for economical farming. The holdings are too

small, and the means of the proprietors too scanty, to enable them to

use labour-saving machines, or to avail themselves of the vast

advantages of combined labour. How can the present proprietor of a

farm of five or ten acres in France or Belgium, afford a reaper, a

threshing-machine, a three-horse plough, or even any plough at all?

The spade, the wheel-barrow, the donkey, and the flail, must do his

work, at a wasteful cost of time and toil. But the Southern system, by

placing the labour of many at the direction of one more cultivated

mind, and that furnished with more abundant capital, secured the most

liberal and enlightened employment of machines, and the most

convenient "division of labour." Moreover, the administration of the

means of living for the whole plantation, by the master and mistress,

secured a great economy of supplies. The mistress of Southern

households learns far more providence, judgment and method in

administering her stores, than are possessed by free labourers or by

blacks. The world over, those who have property are more provident

than those who have none. For, this providence is the chief reason why

they have property; and the improvidence of the poor is the cause of

their being poor. But even if the slaveholders had no more of these

qualities, all can see that an immense saving is made by having one

housekeeper for ten families, with one kitchen, store-house, and

laundry, instead of ten kitchens, ten store-houses, and ten varying

administrations of stores. A smaller supply of provisions secures a

greater amount of comfort to all, and a great saving of labour is

effected in preparation of food, and housekeeping cares. A system of

slave labour is, therefore, more productive, because it is more

economical.

In all this argument, the anti-slavery men keep out of view a simple

fact which is decisive of the absurdity of their position. They shall

now be made to look it in the face. That fact is, that in free States,

a large portion of all those who, from their moneyless condition,

ought to pursue manual labour, are too lazy to do so voluntarily. But

they must live, and they do it by some expedient which is a virtual

preying on the means of the more industrious, by stealing, by begging,

by some form of swindling, by perambulating the streets with a

barrel-organ and monkey, or by vending toys or superfluities. Their

labour is lost to the community; and their maintenance, together with

their dishonest arts and crimes, is a perpetual drain from the public

wealth. But slavery made the lazy do their part with the industrious,

by the wholesome fear of the birch. Slavery allowed no loafers, no

swindlers, no "b'hoys," no "plug-uglies," no grinders of

hurdy-gurdies, among her labouring class. Who does not see that, even

if the average slave in Virginia did only two-thirds of the day's work

accomplished by the industrious free labourer in New York, yet, if all

the idle classes in that great commonwealth, together with those now

industrious, were compelled to do just the tasks of the average

Virginia slave, there would be, on the whole, a vast and manifold gain

to the public?

Another potent source of the economy of the slave system in its

influences upon publick wealth, is found in a fact which Northern men

not only admit, but assert with a foolish pride. It is the far greater

development of the local traffic of merchants among them. When your

down-East commercial traveller, whose only conception of productive

industry was of some arts of "living by his wits," saw this contrast

between Northern and Southern villages and country neighbourhoods, he

pointed to it with undoubting elation, as proof of the vastly superior

wealth and productive activity of the North. But in fact, he was a

fool; he mistook what was a villainous, eating ulcer upon the public

wealth of the North, and on the true prosperity of the people, for a

spring of profits. In a farming neighbourhood of the hireling States,

he saw at every hamlet and cross-road, pretentious shingle-palaces,

occupied as large stores, where great accumulations of farm produce

were paraded; sacks of meal, barrels of flour, bins of corn, packs of

wool, garners of wheat, tubs of eggs, cans of butter, hogsheads of

bacon, and even kegs of home-made soap, together with no little show

of cheap finery. In the farming districts of the South, he rode along

a quiet, shady road, with the country-seats of the planters reposing

at a distance, in the bosoms of their estates; and found at long

intervals a little country store, where a few groceries, medicines,

and cloths were exposed for sale to sparse customers. Now this narrow

trafficker, whose only heaven was buying and selling, very naturally

jumped to the conclusion, that the South was so much poorer than the

North, as she exhibited less local trade. Whereas in fact, she was

just so much richer. And this unpopular assertion is, still, perfectly

easy to demonstrate. The necessary labour of distributing commodities

from producers to consumers, is a legitimate element of that fair

market value, which they have when they finally reach the hand which

consumes them. But political economists well know, and uniformly

teach, that if any unnecessary middle-men interpose themselves between

first producer and ultimate consumer, whose labour is not truly

promotive of the economical distribution of commodities, then their

industry is misdirected, the wages they draw for it in the shape of

increased price of commodities passed through their hands is

unproductive consumption, and they are a useless, a mischievous drain

upon the common wealth. For instance, if a class of middle-men,

retailers, or forwarding merchants, juggle themselves unnecessarily

into the importing dry-goods trade of the country; if they place

themselves between the manufacturer in England, and the consumer in

rural New York, grasping wages for their intervention, in the shape of

an additional profit which falls ultimately upon the retail purchaser;

while yet they really contribute nothing to the economical

distribution of the dry-goods; every one sees that they are a

nuisance; they grasp something for nothing; and are preying upon the

publick wealth, instead of promoting it like the legitimate merchant.

Honest men will speedily require legislation, to expel them and abate

the nuisance. Apply now this well-known principle to the case in hand.

The simple system of slaveholding distributed that part of the

products of farms, which properly went to the labourers' subsistence,

direct to the consumers, without taxing it unnecessarily with the

profits of the local merchant. The master was himself the retail

merchant; and he distributed his commodities to the proper consumers,

at wholesale prices, without profit. The consumers were his own

servants. He remarked, in the language of the country, that, for this

part of his products, he "had his market at home." Now, is it not

obvious that the consumer, the slave, got more for his labour, and

that the system of hireling labour, by invoking this local

storekeeper, instead of the master, to do this work of distribution to

consumers, which the master did better without him, and without

charge, has brought in a useless middle-man? And his industry being

useless and unproductive, its wages are a dead loss to the publick

wealth. This coarse fellow behind the counter, retailing the meal and

bacon and soap, at extortionate retail prices, to labourers, should

be compelled to labour himself, at some really productive task; and

the labourers should have gotten these supplies, untaxed with his

extortion, on the farms where their own labour produced them, and at

the farmer's prices. Is not this true science, and true common sense?

But this is just the old Virginian system.

The justice of this view may be seen by a familiar case. A given

landholder was, under our beneficent system, a slaveholder. He

employed ten labourers; and for them and their families he reserved

four hundred bushels of grain in his garners, which their labour and

his capital jointly had produced. This grain is worth to him wholesale

prices; and it is distributed by him to his servants, throughout the

year, without charge. It is, in fact, a part of the virtual wages of

their labour; and they get it at the wholesale price. But now,

abolition comes: these ten labourers become freemen and householders.

They now work the same lands, for the same proprietor; and instead of

drawing their wages in the form of a generous subsistence at wholesale

prices, they draw money. Out of that money they and their families

must be maintained. One result is, that the landholder now has a

surplus of four hundred bushels more than before. Of course it goes to

the corn-merchant. And there must these labourers go, with their money

wages, to buy this same corn, at the enhanced retail price. They get

less for their labour. The local merchant, thus unnecessarily invited

in, sucks a greedy profit; a vain show of trading activity is made in

the community; and all the really producing classes are made actually

poorer; while this unproductive consumer, the unnecessary retail

trader, congratulates himself on his mischievous prosperity. It is

most obvious, that when the advocate of the hireling system attempts

to reply to this, by saying that his system has opened a place for an

additional branch of industry, that of enlarged traffic, he is

preposterous. The answer is, that the additional industry is a loss:

it is unproductive. As reasonably might one argue that crime is

promotive of publick prosperity, by opening up a new branch of

remunerative industry,--that of police and jailors, (a well-paid

class!)

But sensible men ever prefer facts to speculations--the language of

experience to that of theoretical assertion. Let us then appeal to the

fact, as revealed by the statistics furnished of us, by the

anti-slavery government of the United States. By the census of 1860,

while the population of the Free States was not quite nineteen

millions, their total of assessed values, real and personal, was

$6,541,000,000: being three hundred and forty-six ($346) dollars to

each soul. The free white population of the South was a little more

than eight and a quarter millions, and our total of assessed values

was $5,465,808,000: being six hundred and sixty ($660) dollars to each

soul; nearly double the wealth of the North. But if the four millions

of Africans in the South be added, our people still have four hundred

and forty-seven ($447) dollars of value for each soul, black and

white.

§ 4. _Effects of Slavery in the South, compared with those of Free

Labour in the North._

The citations just made introduce a topic upon which anti-slavery men

have usually abounded in sweeping assertion; the actual effects of our

system on our industrial concerns. A fair example of these assertions

may be seen in Dr. Wayland, Moral Science, p. 210, (Boston, 1838:) "No

country, not of great fertility, can long sustain a large slave

population. Soils of more than ordinary fertility cannot sustain it

long, after the first richness of the soils has been exhausted. Hence,

slavery in this country is acknowledged to have impoverished many

valuable districts; and hence it is continually migrating from the

older settlements to those new and untilled regions, where the

accumulated manure of centuries of vegetation has formed a soil, whose

productiveness may, for a while, sustain a system at variance with the

laws of nature. Many of our free, and of our slaveholding States, were

peopled about the same time. The slaveholding States had every

advantage, both in soil and climate, over their neighbours; and yet

the accumulation of capital has been greatly in favour of the latter,"

etc.

The points asserted here are, that Northern men have grown rich faster

than Southern men; that slavery has so starved itself out by its

wasteful nature, as to be compelled to migrate from "many valuable

districts," to virgin soils; and that it is slavery which exhausts

those virgin soils. Each of these statements is absolutely false. That

the first and most important of the three is so, we have just shown,

by the overwhelming testimony of fact. Southern citizens have

accumulated capital faster than Northern, in the ratio of six hundred

and sixty to three hundred and forty-six. And the manner in which

these thrice refuted lies are obtruded, may fairly illustrate the

morality with which anti-slavery men have usually conducted their

argument against us That a conceited, pragmatical Yankee parson

should be misled by rancourous prejudice around him, and by the

concessions of foolish Southerners, to publish such statements thirty

years ago, on a subject of which he knew nothing, is not very

surprising. But surely Dr. Wayland, President of Brown University,

Christian Divine, Instructor of youth, and _Teacher of Ethicks_,(_!_)

would hardly have been expected to continue to print the falsehoods in

successive editions of his work, after three successive _census

returns_ had utterly exploded them.

The second statement we contradict by the _census_ as categorically as

the first. It is not true that slavery was compelled to emigrate, by

its own exhaustion, to virgin soils in the South West. For, in fact,

slavery has not emigrated at all. Slaves have emigrated, in large

numbers; [as we presume, Yankees have.] But the institution has not

receded, and, at the beginning of our war, was not receding from its

old ground in Virginia and the Carolinas. The slave population of the

old States has shown a steady increase at each decennial period, and

except where the _penchant_ of the Yankees for stealing them had

rendered them insecure, they occupied substantially all the old

counties, and spread into new ones, as they were settled.

But we shall be asked: can it be possible that the representations so

uniformly made by travellers, of the ragged, impoverished, and forlorn

appearance of many districts of Eastern Virginia and the Carolinas,

and of their poor and slovenly agriculture, are all mistaken? That

there is much exhausted, and still more poor land, in these sections;

that through extensive districts the soil and crops are now very thin,

and the tillage rude, we explicitly admit. But this is by no means

the same as admitting that it is slavery which has impoverished those

regions. In the first place, of the larger part it is utterly false to

say that they have ever been _impoverished_, by any cause; for they

never had any fertility to lose. The statement usually made, as to the

most of these old lands, is monstrously false. It has been usually

represented that the Atlantic slope of Virginia was originally

excessively rich, and has been brought to its present condition by

slavery and tobacco. But in truth, this region, with the exception of

limited spots, was naturally poor and thin; as every sensible person

who has examined it knows. A vast proportion of it would scarcely have

been judged susceptible of settlement at all, but for the attraction

of its healthy climate, and the one or two crops of tobacco which its

thin mould would produce. And it is only the thrifty industry of its

inhabitants, together with the value of their staple, tobacco, which

enabled them to live as plentifully as they did on so poor a soil.

In the next place, the exhaustion is really far less than it appears

to the Englishman or New Englander, and the tillage far more judicious

and thorough. The agriculture of planting regions is, necessarily,

very different from that of farming regions; and especially is the

culture of the grasses to a very large extent precluded by the nature

of the crops, the soil, and the climate. Hence, excellent lands in the

South, especially during fall and winter, often lack that appearance

of verdancy, which to the English eye is the chief measure of

fertility. But to suppose those lands as exhausted as fields equally

bare or brown would be correctly judged in grass regions, would be an

amazing mistake. Nor is the management always indolent where it seems

slovenly. The Southern planter is proverbially disinclined to consult

mere appearances at the cost of substantial advantage. Though the

fencing seem rough, and the farm ill kept in many respects, the

accurate observer will find his cultivation of the valuable staples,

cotton and tobacco, thorough and skillful. There is no neater culture

than that of the tobacco fields of Virginia.

Again: wherever the soil was originally fertile, in the Atlantic

slope, as in the red lands of the Piedmont region, and the alluvial

valleys of the great rivers, there the supposed decline of agriculture

is unknown. All those lands which by nature were really fine, are now

finer. The tillage was better, the yield per acre larger, the culture

more remunerative, at the opening of the war, than at any date since

the virgin forests were cleared away.

But so far as there has been an actual exhaustion of Southern soil,

[and that there has been is admitted,] it can be proved to be due to

other causes than slavery. For an exhaustion precisely similar can be

pointed out in many of the free States. In both regions, it has arisen

from two causes: the proximity of new and cheap lands, to which the

exhausting farmer could easily resort, and the possession of a

valuable staple crop, whose profits powerfully stimulated large

operations. Those free States which lay under the same circumstances,

have undergone the same exhaustion, except in so far as a natural

depth of soil has made the process slower. If any parts of our country

have escaped the "skinning process" after their first settlement, it

has been simply because they were not so fortunate as to possess any

valuable staple, or else were too remote from a market. Western

Vermont, sixty years ago, was resorted to as a fertile wheat growing

district. Long ago it was so exhausted that the culture of wheat was

nearly relinquished, and its inhabitants emigrated to the new lands of

Western New York to raise wheat; while the wheat fields of Vermont are

now sheep-walks, and her farmers buy their flour. But Western New

York, in its turn, has declined, till its average crop per acre is

only one-half the original; and its farmers have sought the fertile

plains of Illinois and Michigan, to subject them in turn to the same

exhaustion. Even Ohio, fertile Ohio, the boast of abolitionists, whose

black loam seemed able to defy human mismanagement, is proved by the

stubborn census tables to have declined one-half, already, in its

yield per acre. And her own children acknowledge, that if the

appearance of the older parts be compared with that of twenty years

ago, the signs of exhaustion are manifest. This vicious system, then,

is not traceable to slave labour, seeing it prevails just as often

where no slave labour exists; but to the cheapness of new lands, and

facility of emigration.

Virginia presents other facts demonstrating the economy and efficiency

of slave labour. The great Valley of Virginia (between the Blue Ridge

and North Mountain Ranges,) is a farming and grazing region, of

fertile soil and prosperous agriculture. In its great extent, some

counties are occupied almost exclusively by free labour, and some have

a large slave population. Now it is perfectly well known to all

intelligent persons here, that precisely in those counties of this

beautiful valley where there are most slaves, is the land highest in

price, the agriculture most profitable and skillful, the farm

buildings most elegant, and the community most prosperous and wealthy.

Virginia east of the Blue Ridge is partly a farming and partly a

planting region, having a mixed agriculture. Its soil is exceedingly

different from that of the great valley, even where as fertile; and

consequently the tillage is unlike. But there too, the neatest, most

thorough and most profitable agriculture, and the highest priced

lands, the finest farm stock, and the most prosperous landholders, are

to be found precisely where the slave labour is most prevalent. And

there is no agriculture in America superior to that of these favoured

regions.

But, in conclusion, even if the industrial pursuits of the South were

in the unfavourable condition which the Yankees love to assert, the

sufficient cause would be found, not in slavery, but in the exactions

and swindlings of their own section, through sectional federal

legislation. Let a sober statement of these exactions be weighed, and

the wonder will be, not that the South should be depleted, but that

she is not bled to death. In the first place, the Federal Government,

at its foundation, adopted the policy of giving a fishing bounty, (to

encourage, as it said, a school of sailors for the national marine,)

which went wholly into the pockets of New Englanders. It is said that

the bounties paid are yearly about one and a half millions. Supposing

that half only of the sum thus taken from the Federal Treasury was

paid in by the South, (which we shall see is less than the truth,)

this bounty, with that part of its increase which has accrued by

simple interest alone, amounts now to one hundred and seventy-one

millions, transferred by this unfair legislation from the South to the

North. Next are to be mentioned the tonnage duties on foreign ships

carrying between American ports, which, as the South had few ships,

constituted a perpetual tax on us for the benefit of the North. Its

amount cannot possibly be estimated with exactness, but it must have

amounted to millions annually. Next came the oppression of a

protective tariff, raising upon imports as high a revenue as sixty or

seventy millions annually, in the last years of the government. As the

South had few manufactures, and the North many, and as these duties,

even where laid for revenue, were discriminating against the cheaper

and better foreign manufactures which the South desired, in every case

where discrimination was possible; it is manifest that the system

constituted a simple robbery of the South of annual millions, for the

benefit of the North. But we lost far more than the actual tariff on

that portion of the national imports which were consumed at the South;

because the restrictive policy, by throwing the balance of trade

against the nations which took our grand staples of tobacco and

cotton, deprived them of the ability to buy so freely, and at so large

prices, as they would have done under a policy of free trade. Thus,

the Southern planter not only paid the Northern manufacturer a profit

on his goods equal to the protective tariff, but in the process of

that robbery, lost several times as much more, in the prices which he

should have received for his cotton or tobacco, had he been permitted

to go with it to a free European market. This method of legislative

plunder was so wasteful, that the Yankee, in stealing one dollar from

us, annihilated several other dollars of our values. Next may be

mentioned the advantage which the North gained in the funding of the

Federal debt incurred at the Revolutionary war. This was so juggled by

the Hamilton party, as to give the avails of it chiefly to the North.

The enjoyment of that fund, with its increase since, has made a

difference of untold millions in favour of the North. Last: the North

twice enjoyed the advantage of having the National Bank situated in

its midst, and wielding for purposes of traffic a large part of the

funds of the Government. This superior command of ready money,

acquired in these various ways, enabled the North to develope

commercial centres, and to fix the great markets in her territory,

thus ensuring to her the countless profits of commissions, freights,

etc., on Southern trade.

Is it wonderful that the industry of a people thus swindled and

plundered should languish? Who does not know the power of abundant

capital, and especially of ready money, in stimulating enterprise and

facilitating industry? Yet, under all this _incubus_ the South has

more than kept pace with its rapacious partner. When, therefore, the

Yankee abolitionist points to any unfavourable contrasts in our

condition, as evidence of the evil of slavery, he adds insult to

falsehood: his own injustice has created the misfortune with which he

taunts us, so far as that misfortune exists at all.

§ 5. _Effects of Slavery on Population, Disease, and Crime._

But our enemies argue that slavery must be an obstacle to national

growth and strength; for this is evinced by the very fact that they

are nearly nineteen millions, and we only twelve and a quarter; when,

at the beginning, the two sections were nearly equal in strength. Let

us, therefore, look into this question. The increase of population is

usually a sure test of the physical well-being of a people. Hardship

and destitution repress population, by obstructing marriages, by

breeding diseases, and by increasing the mortality of infants. If the

population of the South be found to have a rapid natural increase, it

will prove, therefore, the general prosperity of the people; and if

the black race be found to multiply rapidly, it will be an evidence

that their physical condition is happy, or in other words, that the

institution of slavery is a humane one for them. Sufficient access

being denied us to the statistics collected in 1860, our remarks must

be based in part on the returns of 1850, and previous periods. These

returns show that between 1840 and 1850, the whites of the free States

increased thirty-nine and a half _per cent._, (39.42,) and the whites

of the slave States increased thirty-four and a fourth _per cent._,

(34.26.) The climate, the occupations, and the African labour of the

South, repel almost the whole of that teeming immigration from Europe

which has been rushing to our shores; so that making allowance for

this source of population, it will be seen that the natural increase

of Southern whites is as rapid as that of Northern.

In 1860, the whites in the free States had increased to about eighteen

and a half millions; and in the slave States, to about eight and a

quarter millions. The increase for the free States was, therefore,

forty-two (42) _per cent._, and for the slave States thirty-three _per

cent._, (33.) The census showed that in the decade between 1840 and

1850, four-fifths of the foreign immigration, for the reasons

mentioned, went into the free States. If we suppose the same ratio to

have prevailed in the last decade, then the fact that the North has

received four-fifths of the immense rush of Europeans who resorted to

our shores in the last ten years, will abundantly account for this

difference of increase. The South has grown as fast in white

population, as the North would have done, left to itself.

But the increase of the slave population of the South is obscured by

no such disturbing cause. The South having magnanimously concurred,

and even gone before, in suppressing the foreign slave trade, from a

conviction of its immorality, the African race has received no

accession whatever, in our day, from immigration. Between 1840 and

1850, the increase of the slave population solely from the excess of

births over deaths, was twenty-eight and eight-tenths _per cent._,

(28.8,) and between 1850 and 1860, it was twenty-three and

three-tenths (23.3) _per cent._ One cause for the diminished rate of

increase in the latter decade, was doubtless the growing passion of

the Yankees for the abduction of our slaves; which, towards the last,

carried off thousands annually. But either rate of increase is more

rapid than the whites, either North or South, ever attained without

the aid of immigration. The _native increase_ of the free States in

ten years has probably been between eleven and fifteen _per cent._ So

that tried by this well-established test, the physical well-being of

the slaves is higher than of any race in the world. Meantime, the

miserable free blacks of New England, in the midst of the boasted

philanthropy of abolitionism, only increase at the rate of _one and

seven-tenths_ of one _per cent._ in ten years! Such is the stern and

impartial testimony of fact. How calamitous must be that load of

social oppression, of disease and destitution, which thus nearly

annihilates the increase of this fruitful race! Yet this is the

condition to which the benevolent abolitionist would reduce the

prosperous servants of the South.

This seems the suitable place to notice the most insulting and

preposterous of the abolitionists' slanders. It is that expressed by

calling Virginia the "slave-breeding commonwealth." What do these

insolent asses mean? Do they intend to revile Virginia, because she

did not suppress the natural increase of this peaceful and happy class

of her people, by wholesale infanticide? Or because she did not, like

the North, subject them to social evils so cruel and murderous, as to

kill off that increase by the slow torture of vice, oppression, and

destitution? It was the honour of Virginia, that she _was a

man-breeding commonwealth_; that her benignant government made

existence a blessing, both to the black man and the white, and,

consequently, conferred it on many of both. If it has been proved,

which we claim, that servitude was the best condition for the blacks,

and that it promoted their multiplication, then this is a praise and

not a reproach to Virginia. How perverse and absurd is the charge,

that Virginia was actuated by a motive beastly and avaricious, in

bestowing existence on many black men, and making it a blessing to

them; because, forsooth, her wise government of them made them useful

to the State and to themselves! By the same reason, the Christian

parents who rejoice in children as a gift of the Lord, and a blessing

to him "who hath his quiver full of them," are "slave-breeders,"

because they make their children useful, and hope to find them

supports to their old age.

But medical statistics have revealed the fact, that another sure test

of the physical well-being and progress of a people may be found, in

the _per-centage_ of hereditary disease, idiocy, and lunacy among

them. The hardships, destitution, and immoralities of a bad state of

society have a powerful influence to propagate blindness, deafness,

idiocy, scrofula, _cretinism_, and to harass the feebler minds into

derangement; while the blessings of good government, abundant food and

raiment, and social happiness, strengthen and elevate the "human

breed." The returns of the census of 1850 were collected by authority

of Congress, on these points, and they show that of whites, North and

South, about _one person in every thousand_ is either deaf, dumb,

blind, insane, or idiotic. Of free blacks in the North, _one person in

every five hundred and six_ was in one or the other of these sad

conditions! Of the black people of the South, _one person among every

one thousand four hundred and forty-six_, was thus afflicted. So that,

by this test, Southern slaves are three times as prosperous,

contented, happy, and moral as Northern free blacks, and once and a

half times as much so as the whites themselves. The frightful

proportion which these elemental maladies have reached among the

wretched free blacks of abolitiondom, does more to reveal the misery

of their condition there, than volumes of description.

The statistics of crime and pauperism reveal results yet more

astounding for our enemies, and triumphant for us. While the free

States had, in 1850, about thirteen and a half millions, including a

few hundreds of thousands of free blacks, and the South about nine and

a half millions of whites and blacks, there were, in that year

(23,664) twenty-three thousand six hundred and sixty-four criminal

convictions in the North, and (2,921) two thousand nine hundred and

twenty-one in the South. The same year, the North was supporting

(114,704) one hundred and fourteen thousand seven hundred and four

paupers; and the South (20,563) twenty thousand five hundred and

sixty-three. One of the most remarkable things is the great excess of

both crime and pauperism in the New England States, "the land of

steady habits," not only as compared with the South, but as compared

with the remainder of the North, except New York. In Boston and its

adjacent county, in Massachusetts, the persons in jails, houses of

correction or refuge, and alms-houses, bore, among the blacks, the

ratio of _one to every sixteen_: and among the whites, of _one to

every thirty-four_. In Richmond, Virginia, the same unhappy classes

bore, among the blacks, the ratio of _one to every forty-six_, and

among the whites, of _one to every one hundred and twelve_. By this

test, then, the white people of Richmond are three times as happy and

moral as the white people of Boston, and the negroes of Richmond have

proportionably one-third less crime than the white people of Boston,

and are nearly three times as moral as the free blacks of that city.

We have thus examined the testimony of facts, as given to us under the

unwilling authority of the Congress of the United States. They show

that, by all the tests recognized among statesmen, slavery has not

made the South less populous, less rich, less moral, less healthy, or

less abundant in the resources of living than its boastful rival, in

proportion to its opportunities. On this evidence of experience we

rest ourselves.

In dismissing this head of our discussion, we would briefly touch two

points. One is the annual production of the industry of the North and

the South. Without burdening the reader with statistical details, it

is sufficient to sum up the annual results of the three great

branches, of agriculture, mining, and manufactures. The North exceeds

the South in proportion to population, in wheat, hay, dairy products,

and manufactures; while the South greatly exceeds the North in the

great staples of Indian corn and tobacco, and surpasses it almost

immeasurably in rice, cotton, and naval stores. Summing up the varied

productions of each section, we find that the industry of the South

is, on the whole, more productive than that of the North, relatively

to its numbers. And of the great commodities which constitute the

basis of foreign commerce, the South yields more than the North, in

about the ratio of four to one!

The other point is the relative improvement of the soil. According to

the census of 1860, there were _four_ acres of improved land to each

inhabitant of the North, appraised, with their rateable proportion of

stock and implements, at $223. This gives about $56 for each acre and

its stock. In the South, on the other hand, each inhabitant claims

_nine_ acres of improved land, valued, with their stock and

implements, at $322. This allows about $36 for each acre and its

stock. It has been argued that this evinces the slovenly and imperfect

agriculture of the slaveholding States, and the comparative exhaustion

of their soils. It is said, their rude tillage is spread over a far

wider surface, and conducted with inferiour appointments. And this

depreciating result slavery has brought about, they assert, in spite

of superiour natural advantages. We remark that, contrary to the usual

assertion, the natural fertility was superiour in the free States. The

soil of the Middle States had a better natural average than that of

the old Atlantic slave States, and the North-western States had a

vastly larger proportion of fertile lands than the South-western. In

the next place, the agriculture of the South is of such a character

that it requires a wider area; and yet this requirement argues nothing

of its greater imperfection. It may require more space to fly a kite

than to spin a top, and yet it does not follow that the kite-flying is

less skillful sport than the top-spinning. An iron manufactory must

necessarily cover more ground than a chemical laboratory; but no one

argues thence, that the ironmonger is less a master of his trade than

the manufacturer of drugs, of his. Last: the fact that the Southern

planter accounts the labour of his farm as property, and so, as a

part of his invested capital, causes a lower nominal valuation of his

lands, though there be no inferiority of actual production. Grain and

grass lands in the county of Rockingham have always sold higher than

grain and grass lands in the county of Albemarle, which were actually

yielding the same products annually. The former were tilled by free

labour, and the latter by slave; but the Albemarle farming was

confessedly as skillful, as economical, and as profitable, as the

Rockingham. The explanation is the following: The Rockingham farmer,

hiring his free labour, needed no more capital for this purpose than

was sufficient to pay the wages of a few months in advance of the

realization of his crop. The Albemarle farmer expended a large portion

of his farming capital in the purchase of slaves, and afterwards paid

no money in hire. The former, investing twenty thousand dollars in

agriculture, could expend the whole sum in land, except what was

required to stock it and pay wages for a few months. Thus he would

begin by buying three hundred acres of land for eighteen thousand

dollars. But the slaveholding farmer began by expending eight thousand

dollars in the purchase of servants, leaving him but ten thousand to

pay for the three hundred acres of land. For this reason land of the

same actual value must be rated at a smaller nominal price among

slaveholders than among farmers employing free labour. But the true

profits of the farming are not reduced thereby, in the proportion of

eighteen thousand to ten thousand. For the slaveholder no longer has

to tax his crops, (equal in gross amount to those of the Rockingham

farmer,) with the hire of labourers. That tax he pays in the shape of

the annual interest on the eight thousand dollars, which, in the first

instance, he paid for his servants. Hence the facts do not argue that

the land is intrinsically less productive or less profitable; they

only argue a different distribution of capital between the two sources

of production, land and labour. In consequence of that difference, the

land must be represented by less money. This obvious explanation

explodes much that has been taught concerning the comparative

barrenness of Southern farming.

CHAPTER IX.

CONCLUSION.

These facts, then, have been established beyond question: That slavery

was forced upon Virginia against her protests, by the cupidity of New

England, and the tyranny and cupidity of Old England: That the African

race being thus placed in the State without her agency, she adopted

the remedy of domestic slavery, which is proved by the law of God in

the Old and New Testaments to be innocent, and shown by events to be

beneficent to the Africans: That, according to history, the laws of

nations, and the laws of the British Empire inherited by the American

States, slaveholding was lawful throughout the territories of the

United States, save where it was restrained by State sovereignty: That

it was expressly recognized and protected by the Constitution; such

recognition having been an essential condition, without which the

Southern States would never have accepted the Union: That every

department of the government, and all political parties, habitually

recognized the political equality of the slaveholding States, and of

slaveholding citizens: That the Supreme Court, the authorized

expounder of the Constitution, also recognized the equal rights of

slaveholders in all the common territories: And that slavery proved

itself at once, not only lawful, but eminently promotive of the

well-being of the Africans, of the interests of the whole government,

and of the publick wealth. Then the North, having ceased to find its

own interest in the slave trade and slavery, changed its ground, and

began to cast about, merely from a desire of sectional power in the

confederacy, for means to destroy the institution. It is unnecessary

to argue that the whole free-soil controversy, and the war which grew

out of it, were really designed by them to destroy slavery in the

States: for they themselves, in the pride of success, have long ceased

to conceal that fact.

Now, had slavery been intrinsically a moral and social evil, yet its

protection was in the compact between the States; and to the honest

mind, there was but one course for the North to adopt when she

concluded that she could no longer endure her connexion with slavery.

This was, to restore to the South the pledges, the fulfilment of which

had become irksome; and to dissolve the Union peacefully and fairly,

as it had been formed, leaving us in possession of our own country and

rights, to bear our own sin, and pursue our own destiny. It was the

federal compact alone, which gave the North any right to govern the

South. If they repudiated that contract, it was annihilated equally

for both parties. Thenceforward their claim to legislate for the

South, or exercise any power over her, was baseless and iniquitous. No

fair mind will dispute, that even though slavery had been an

indefensible wrong, the South ought not to have permitted herself to

be assailed for it, in an equal Union which she had sovereignly

entered with this institution expressly recognized. But that basis of

argument we utterly repudiate. We will not defend ourselves from such

premises. We claim to have been justified, not only by the

Constitution of the United States, but by God and the right, in our

rights to slaves. Our _status_ in the Federal Union was, so far, as

equal, as honourable, as legal, as free from ethical taint, as that of

any other States with their property in horses, ships, land, and

factories.

We have, in another place, (the Life of Jackson,) stated with

sufficient fulness, the admitted facts and doctrines of the

Constitution, which justified the Southern States in resuming their

independence, when the compact, to which they had partially yielded

it, was destroyed. The indisputable proofs (now fully admitted by

anti-slavery men) might be cited, which showed that their election of

a sectional President, with other aggressions, were intended to

destroy the most acknowledged and vital rights of the States. Had

Virginia assumed her attitude of resistance upon that event, she might

have defended it by that maxim, so obvious to every just mind, that it

is righteous and wise to meet the first clear aggression, even though

its practical mischiefs be unimportant: that "a people should rather

contend for their rights upon their threshold than upon their

hearthstone." But we had stronger justification still. The aggression

intended was practically vast and ruinous in its results. It has been

shown in previous chapters, that the destruction of African slavery

among us was vital to us, because emancipation by such means would be

destructive of the very framework of society, and of our most

fundamental rights and interests. All our statesmen, of all parties,

had taught us, not only that the reserved rights of the States were

the bulwarks of the liberties of the people, but that emancipation by

federal aggression would lead to the destruction of all other rights.

A Clay, as much as a Calhoun, proclaimed that when abolition overthrew

slavery in the South, it also would equally overthrow the

Constitution. Calhoun, and other Southern statesmen, with a sagacity

which every day confirms, had forewarned us, that when once abolition

by federal aggression came, these other sure results would follow:

that the same greedy lust of power which had meddled between masters

and slaves, would assuredly, and for the stronger reason, desire to

use the political weight of the late slaves against their late

masters: that having enforced a violent emancipation, they would

enforce, of course, negro suffrage, negro eligibility to office, and a

full negro equality: that negro equality thus theoretically

established would be practical negro superiority: that the tyrant

section, as it gave to its victims, the white men of the South, more

and more causes of just resentment, would find more and more violent

inducements to bribe the negroes, with additional privileges and

gifts, to assist them in their domination: that this miserable career

must result in one of two things, either a war of races, in which the

whites or the blacks would be, one or the other, exterminated; or

amalgamation. But while we believe that "God made of one blood all

nations of men to dwell under the whole heavens," we know that the

African has become, according to a well-known law of natural history,

by the manifold influences of the ages, a different, fixed _species_

of the race, separated from the white man by traits bodily, mental and

moral, almost as rigid and permanent as those of _genus_. Hence the

offspring of an amalgamation must be a hybrid race, stamped with all

the feebleness of the hybrid, and incapable of the career of

civilization and glory as an independent race. And this apparently is

the destiny which our conquerors have in view. If indeed they can mix

the blood of the heroes of Manassas with this vile stream from the

fens of Africa, then they will never again have occasion to tremble

before the righteous resistance of Virginian freemen; but will have a

race supple and vile enough to fill that position of political

subjection, which they desire to fix on the South.

But although Virginia well knew that the very existence of society was

assailed by these aggressions, so strict was her loyalty to the

Constitution, she refused to make the election of a sectional

President the immediate occasion of resistance, because, outrage as it

was, it was nominally effected by the forms of the Constitution. When

her sisters, more advanced than herself in the spirit of resistance,

resumed their independence, she refused to follow them. When, warned

by thickening events, she assembled her Convention, immediate

embodiment of her own sovereignty, it was not a convention of

secessionists. Only twenty-five, out of the hundreds of members,

advocated that extreme remedy. But she did by this Convention, what

she had already done by her General Assembly: she repeated the

assertion of the great principles on which the government was

founded; that it was built on the free consent of States originally

sovereign, and not on force; that however wrongfully any State might

resume its independence without just cause, the only remedy was

conciliation, and not force; that therefore the coercion of a

sovereign State was unlawful, mischievous, and must be resisted. There

Virginia took her stand--on this foundation right, as essential to the

well-being of assailant as of assailed. It was not for slavery that

she deliberately resolved to draw the sword, cardinal as she knew

circumstances rendered slavery at this time; but for this corner-stone

of all constitutional liberty, North and South. And this, too, was a

principle which she had always held against all assailants, in all

ages of the Republick. She had asserted it firmly against her own

favourite, Andrew Jackson, in the case of South Carolina,

notwithstanding her disapproval of the nullifying doctrine then held

by that State. She only asserted her time-honoured creed now. It was

not until the claim to subjugate sovereign States was practically

applied, that Virginia drew the sword; and then, not for slavery, but

for the Constitution, and the liberties of a continent, which it had

protected.

It is therefore a great and an odious perversion of the truth, to say

that the defensive movement of the South was a war to extend and

perpetuate slavery. African slavery was not the _cause_, but the

_occasion_ of the strife, on either side. On the Northern side it was

merely the pretext, employed by that aggressive section to carry out

ambitious projects of domination. To the South, it was merely the

circumstance of the controversy, that the right assailed was our right

to the labour of our servants. It was not the circumstance for which

we contended, but the principle--the great cause of moral right,

justice, and regulated liberty. It was therefore a gross injustice to

burden our cause, in the minds of the rest of the world, with the

_odium_ which the prejudices of Christendom have attached to the name

of slaveholder. Even those who are unable to overcome those

prejudices, would, if just and magnanimous, approve our attempt to

defend ourselves.

Finally: the means by which this defence has been overpowered were as

iniquitous as the attack. A war was waged, precipitated by treachery,

aggravated by every measure of barbarity condemned by the laws of

nations, by the agency of multitudinous hordes of foreign mercenaries,

and semi-civilized slaves seduced from their owners; against captives,

women, children, and private property; with the attempt to let loose

upon our little community (which they found otherwise unconquerable) a

servile insurrection and all the horrors of domestic assassination--an

attempt disappointed only by the good feeling and good character which

the servants themselves had learned from the humanity of their

masters. The impartial and magnanimous mind which weighs these facts

cannot but feel itself swelling with an unutterable sense of

indignation. The Southern people feel little impulse to give

expression to their sense of the enormous wrongs, in reproaches or

vituperations of those who have thus destroyed them. When resistance

was practicable, they gave a more expressive and seemly utterance to

this sentiment, in the energy of their blows. Let the heroick spirit

in which the soldiers of Virginia and the South struck for their

liberties, and suffered, and died, represent our appreciation of this

injustice. A righteous God, for our sins towards Him, has permitted us

to be overthrown by our enemies and His. It is vain to complain in the

ear of a maddening tempest. Although our people are now oppressed with

present sufferings and a prospective destiny more cruel and disastrous

than has been visited on any civilized people of modern ages, they

suffer silently, disdaining to complain, and only raising to the

chastening heavens, the cry, "How long, O Lord?" Their appeal is to

history, and to Him. They well know, that in due time, they, although

powerless themselves, will be avenged through the same disorganizing

heresies under which they now suffer, and through the anarchy and woes

which they will bring upon the North. Meantime, let the arrogant and

successful wrongdoers flout our defence with disdain: we will meet

them with it again, when it will be heard; in the day of their

calamity, in the pages of impartial history, and in the Day of

Judgment.

EDWARD J. HALE & SON,

(LATE OF FAYETTEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA,)

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DEFENCE OF VIRGINIA, AND OF THE SOUTH. By Rev. Dr. DABNEY, author of

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Transcriber's Notes:

Words surrounded by _ are italicized.

Words surrounded by = are bold.

Apparent printer's errors and inconsistent spellings have been kept,

including inconsistent use of hyphen (e. g. "church-members" and

"church members").

End of Project Gutenberg's A Defence of Virginia, by Robert L. Dabney