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IN RELATION TO THE CONSUMING COUNTRIES.
CONSUMI COUNTR

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teeming preserves of Virginia and Kentucky. Considerations of economy, moreover, which, under a natural system, afford some security for humane treatment by identifying the master's interest with the slave's preservation, when once trading in slaves is practised, become reasons for racking to the utmost the toil of the slave; for, when his place can at once be supplied from foreign preserves, the duration of his life becomes a matter of less moment than its productiveness while it lasts. It is accordingly a maxim of slave management, in slave-importing countries, that the most effective economy is that which takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space of time the utmost amount of exertion it is capable of putting forth. "It is in tropical culture, where annual profits often equal the whole capital of plantations, that negro life is most recklessly sacrificed. It is the agriculture of the West Indies, which has been for centuries prolific of fabulous wealth, which has engulfed millions of the African race. It is in Cuba, at this day, whose revenues are reckoned by millions, and whose planters are princes, that we see, in the servile class, the coarsest fare, the most exhausting and unremitting toil, and even the absolute destruction of a portion of its numbers every year, by the slow torture of overwork and insufficient sleep and rest. In our own country, is it in Maryland and Virginia that slaves fare the worst, or is it in the sugar regions of Louisiana and Texas, where the scale of profits suggests the calculation of using them up in a given number of years as a matter of economy? Is it not notorious, that the States upon the Gulf of Mexico, in which forced labour is most productive to those who own it, are made use of by the northern slave States, not merely as markets in which to dispose of slaves as a matter of profit, but as a Botany Bay, furnished to their hands, to which their slaves are sent by way of punishment?" The slave-trade thus affords the means of extending the institution in its harshest form to countries in which, without this support, it either could not have been permanently maintained at all, or only in a very mitigated form, sustaining the waste of human life in tropical regions from the hardier or healthier populations of barbarous countries and of temperate climes.†

But the benefits of commerce are reciprocal, and if slavery receives a new impulse from the slave-trade in the warm

*Progress of Slavery, pp. 132, 133.

In this adaptation the slaveholders trace the finger of God. The Professor of Agricultural Chemistry in the University of Georgia remarks on the “providential” proportion between the untilled lands of the South, and the "unemployed power of hnman muscles in Africa."—"I trace," he exclaims, "the growing demand for negro muscles, bones, and brains to the good providence of God."

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DIVISION OF LABOUR

regions of the South, it acquires increased stability in more temperate countries through the same cause. We have already seen the tendency of slave-labour to exhaust the soil, and the rapidity with which this process proceeds, reducing to the condition of wilderness districts which fifty years before were yet untouched by the hand of cultivation. Now, this would seem to promise that the reign of slavery, if ruinous, should at least be brief, and we might expect that, when the soil had been robbed of its fertility, the destroyer would retire from the region which he had rendered desolate. And such would be the fate of slavery, were it depending exclusively on the soil for its support; but, when trading in human beings is once introduced, a new source of profit is developed for the system, which renders it in a great degree independent of the resources of the soil. It is this, the profit developed by trading in slaves, and this alone, which has enabled slavery in the older Slave States of North America to survive the consequences of its own ravages. In Maryland and Virginia, perhaps also in the Carolinas and Georgia, free institutions would long since have taken the place of slavery, were it not that just as the crisis of the system had arrived, the domestic slave-trade opened a door of escape from a position which had become untenable. The conjuncture was peculiar, and would doubtless by Southern theologians be called providential. The progress of devastation had reached the point at which slave cultivation could no longer sustain itself. A considerable emigration of planters had actually taken place, and the deserted fields were already receiving a new race of settlers from the regions of freedom.* The long night of slavery seemed to be passing away, and the dawn of a brighter day to

* The progress of this movement is thus described by the Southern Planter :— "Every farm was greatly impoverished-almost every estate was seriously impaired -and some were involved in debt to nearly their value. Most of the proprietors had died, leaving families in reduced circumstauces, and in some cases in great straits. No farm whether of a rich or a poor proprietor had escaped great exhaustion, and no property great dilapidation, unless because the proprietor had at first been too poor to join in the former expensive habits of his wealthier neighbours. There was nothing left to waste, but time and labour; and these continued to be wasted in the now fruitless efforts to cultivate to profit, or to replace the fertility of soil which had been destroyed. Luxury and expense had been greatly lessened. But on that account the universal prostration was even the more apparent. Many mansions were falling into decay. Few received any but trivial and indispensable repairs. No new mansion was erected, and rarely any other farm-building of value. There was still generally prevailing idleness among proprietors; and also an abandonment of hope, which made every one desirous to sell his land and move to the fertile and far West, and a general emigration and dispersion was only prevented by the impossibility of finding purchasers for the lands, even at half the then low estimate of market prices." The consequences are further described by Mr. Olmsted :-"Notwithstanding a constant emigration of the decayed families,

BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW STATES.

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have arrived, when suddenly the auspicious movement was arrested. A vast extension of the territory of the United States, opening new soils to Southern enterprise, exactly coincided with the prohibition of the external slave trade, and both fell in with the crisis in the older States. The result was a sudden and remarkable rise in the price of slaves. The problem of the planters' position was at once solved, and the domestic slavetrade commenced. Slavery had robbed Virginia of the best riches of her soil, but she still had a noble climate-a climate which would fit her admirably for being the breeding place of the South. A division of labour between the old and the new states took place. In the former the soil was extensively exhausted, but the climate was salubrious; in the latter the climate was unfavourable to human life spent in severe toil, but the soil was teeming with riches. The old states therefore undertook the part of breeding and rearing slaves till they attained to physical vigour, and the new that of using up in the development of their virgin resources the physical vigour which had been thus obtained.*

It has been contended that the constant drain of slaves must

and of the more enterprising of the poor, the population steadily augmented. If the apparent wealth of the country was not increasing, the foundation of a greater material prosperity was being laid in the increase of the number of small but intelligent proprietors, and in the constantly growing necessity to abandon tobacco, and substitute grains, or varied crops, as the staple productions of the country. The very circumstance that reduced the old pseudo-wealthy proprietors was favourable to this change, and to the application of intelligence to a more profitable disposal of the remaining elements of wealth in the land. While multitudes abandoned their ancestral, acres in despair, or were driven from them by the recoil of their fathers' inconsiderate expenditures, they were taken possession of by 'new men,' endowed with more hopefulness and energy if not more intelligence than the old."-Seaboard Slave States, pp. 274-276.

*"The citizens of Virgiuia indignantly deny that they breed and rear slaves for the purpose of selling them. Not only do those who interpose this denial do so, in the vast majority of cases, with a consciousness of truth; but, perhaps, in no single instance can it be truly affirmed, that any individual slave is raised for the purpose of being sold. The determination to rear slaves is formed and executed this year, while the act of selling may not take place until twenty years hence. The two things are probably never resolved and consummated as parts of one plan. The fallacy of the denial interposed by the people of Virginia consists in this, that, although no one slave may be raised with a special view to his sale, yet the entire business of raising slaves is carried on with reference to the price of slaves, and solely in consequence of the price of slaves; and this price depends, as they well know, solely upon the domestic slave trade. Of the men who deny for themselves individually the fact of raising slaves for the purpose of selling them, too many make no scruple in insisting upon markets to keep up the price of slaves. The well-known lamentation of a successful candidate for the governorship of Virginia, uttered without rebuke before a Virginia audience, that the closing of the mines of California to slave labour had prevented the price of an able-bodied negro man from rising to five thousand dollars, is only a single example of the freedom and publicity with which the domestic slave trade is advocated in that state."-Progress of Slavery, pp. 147-148.

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THE INTERNAL SLAVE TRADE.

have its effect in diminishing, and ultimately exhausting, the slave population in the states from which it proceeds; and on this ground the domestic slave trade has found advocates amongst persons who profess themselves opposed to slavery in general, as tending to effect its extinction in the older states. But such a view, if sincerely entertained, can only find credit with those who are unacquainted with the laws of population, and it has been amply refuted by the experience of half a century. Far from conducing in the slightest degree to the decline of slavery in the older states, the inter-state traffic has tended directly to establish it, and the slave population of those states has steadily increased under the drain. The single exception to this statement is the State of Delaware, and Delaware is the only one of those states in which the sale or removal of slaves is prohibited by law. The real character of the influence exercised by the internal trade on the breeding states was strikingly shown on the annexation of Texas. That event occurred in 1844. It was followed by a great increase in the demand for slaves for the South, and with what effect on the states which supplied them?-with the effect of a positive increase in their slave population. The slave population of the principal slave-breeding state, Virginia, had declined in the decade previous to the annexation, but at the end of the following decade it was found to have increased. The explanation of this, of course, is perfectly simple. Slaves in the older states being of little value for agricultural purposes, there is no inducement to encourage their increase so long as agriculture is the sole purpose to which they can be turned; but with the increase of the slave trade, their value increases, and they are, therefore, raised in greater numbers. The phenomenon need surprise no one who has attended to the ordinary facts of emigrating countries. The United Kingdom is of all European countries that from which emigration is greatest, and it is also that in which population increases most rapidly. Emigration from Germany is greater than from France, and population in Germany advances more rapidly than in France. Spain and Portugal were once colonizing nations, and since they have ceased to colonize, the rate at which their population increases has declined. A more apposite illustration is that of cattle breeding. It has never been found that the opening of new markets for cattle has any tendency to exhaust the breed in the countries which raise them; and, so long as human beings are subjected to precisely the same influences as cattle, it is idle to expect a different result. In each case the power of multiplication is the same, and where the same inducement is offered, a corresponding result may be expected to follow.

OUTLINE OF THE ECONOMY OF SLAVE SOCIETIES. 77

CHAPTER V.

INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF SLAVE SOCIETIES.

. Ir may be well here to trace briefly the salient features of the system which in the previous chapters it has been attempted to describe. A race superior to another in power and civilization holds that other in bondage, compelling it to work for its profit. The enslaved race, separated broadly from the dominant one in its leading physical and moral attributes, is further distinguished from it by the indelible mark of colour, which prevents the growth of mutual sympathy and transmits to posterity,the brand of its disgrace. Kept in compulsory ignorance and deprived of all motive for intelligent exertion, this people can only furnish its possessors with the crudest form of manual labour. It is thus rendered unfit for every branch of industry which requires, in any but the lowest forms, the exercise of care, intelligence, or skill, and is virtually restricted to the pursuit of agriculture. In agriculture it can only be turned to profitable account under certain special conditions-in raising crops of a peculiar kind and upon soils of more than average fertility; while these by its thriftless methods it tends constantly to exhaust. The labour of the enslaved race is thus in practice confined to the production of a few leading staples; but, through the medium of foreign trade, these few commodities become the means of furnishing its masters with all the. conveniences and comforts of life-the product of intelligence and skill in countries where labour is free. Further, it was seen that the defects of servile labour are best neutralized, and such advantages as it possesses best turned to account, where the scale of the operations is large,-a circumstance, which, by placing a premium on the employment of large capitals, has gradually led to the accumulation of the whole wealth of the country in the hands of a small number of persons. Four million slaves have thus come into the possession of masters less than one-tenth of their number, by whom they are held as chattel property; while the rest of the dominant race, more numerous than slaveholders and their slaves together, squat over the vast area which slave labour is too unskilful to cultivate, where by hunting and fishing, by plunder or by lawless adventure, they eke out a precarious livelihood. Three leading elements are thus presented by the economy of the slave states -a few planters cultivating the richest soils, a multitude of slaves toiling for their profit, the bulk of the white population

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