52 UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. and commerce for example-which are open to free communities, and partly to what is also a consequence of the institution— the unthrifty habits of the upper classes. We arrive therefore at this singular conclusion, that, while large capitals in countries of slave labor enjoy peculiar advantages, and while the aggregate capital needed in them for the conduct of a given amount of industry is greater than in countries where labour is free, capital nevertheless in such countries is exceptionally scarce. From this state of things result two phenomena which may be regarded as typical of industry carried on by slavesthe magnitude of the plantations and the indebtedness of the planters. Wherever negro slavery has prevailed in modern times, these two phenomena will be found to exist. They form the burthen of most of what has been written on our West Indian Islands while under the régime of slavery; and they are not less prominently the characteristic features of the industrial system of the Southern States. "Our wealthier planters," says Mr. Clay, "are buying out their poorer neigh bours, extending their plantations, and adding to their slave force. The wealthy few, who are able to live on smaller profits, and to give their blasted fields some rest, are thus pushing off the many who are merely independent." At the same time these wealthier planters are, it is well known, very generally in debt, the forthcoming crops being for the most part mortgaged to Northern capitalists, who make the needful advances, and who thus become the instruments by which a considerable proportion of the slave labour of the South is maintained. The tendency of things, therefore, in slave countries is to a very unequal distribution of wealth. The large capitalists, having a steady advantage over their smaller competitors, engross, with the progress of time, a larger and larger proportion of the aggregate wealth of the country, and gradually acquire the control of its collective industry. Meantime, amongst the ascendant class a condition of general indebtedness prevails. But we may carry our deductions from the economic character of slavery somewhat further. It has been seen that slave cultivation can only maintain itself where the soil is rich, while it produces a steady deterioration of the soils on which it is employed. This being so, it is evident that in countries almost entirely to slaves, corn, bacon, salt, sugar, molasses, tobacco, clothing, medieine, hoes, and plough-iron. Even if he had the same capital to spare, he would live in far less comfort than the Iowan, because of the want of local shops and efficient systems of public conveyance which cheapen the essentials of comfort for the latter."-Texas, pp. viii.-X. WASTE LANDS IN SLAVE COUNTRIES. 53 of average fertility but a small portion of the whole area will be available for this mode of cultivation, and that this portion is ever becoming smaller, since, as the process of deterioration proceeds, more soils are constantly reaching that condition in which servile labour ceases to be profitable. What, then, is to become of the remainder-that large portion of the country which is either naturally too poor for cultivation by slaves, or which has been made so by its continued employment? It will be thought, perhaps, that this may be worked by free labour, and that by a judicious combination of both forms of industry the whole surface of the country may be brought to the highest point of productiveness. But this is a moral impossibility it is precluded by what, we shall find, is a cardinal feature in the structure of slave societies-their exclusiveness. In free countries industry is the path to independence, to wealth, to social distinction, and is therefore held in honour; in slave countries it is the vocation of the slave, and becomes therefore a badge of degradation. The free labourer, consequently, who respects his calling and desires to be respected, instinctively shuns a country where industry is discredited, where he cannot engage in those pursuits by which wealth and independence are to be gained without placing himself on a level with the lowest of mankind. Free and slave labour are, therefore, incapable of being blended together in the same system. Where slavery exists it excludes all other forms of industrial life. "The traveller," says De Tocqueville, "who floats down the current of the Ohio, may be said to sail between liberty and servitude. Upon the left bank of the stream the population is sparse; from time to time one descries a troop of slaves loitering in the half-desert fields; the primæval forest recurs at every turn; society seems to be asleep, man to be idle, and nature alone offers a scene of activity and of life. From the right bank, on the contrary, a confused hum is heard which proclaims the presence of industry; the fields are covered with abundant harvests; the elegance of the dwellings announces the taste and activity of the labourer; and man appears to be in the enjoyment of that wealth and contentment which is the reward of labour. Upon the left bank of the Ohio labour is confounded with the idea of slavery, upon the right bank it is identified with that of prosperity and improvement; on the one side it is degraded, on the other it is honoured; on the former territory no white labourers can be found, for they would be afraid of assimilating themselves to the negroes; on the latter no one is idle, for the white population extends its activity and its intelligence to every kind of 54 SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES. employment. Thus the men whose task it is to cultivate the rich soil of Kentucky are ignorant and lukewarm; whilst those who are enlightened either do nothing, or pass over into the State of Ohio, where they may work without dishonour."* Agriculture, therefore, when carried on by slaves, being by a sure law restricted to the most fertile portions of the land, and no other form of systematic industry being possible where slavery is established, it happens that there are in all slave countries vast districts, becoming, under the deteriorating effects of slave industry, constantly larger, which are wholly surrendered to nature, and remain for ever as wilderness. This is a characteristic feature in the political economy of the Slave States of the South, and is attended with social consequences of the most important kind. For the tracts thus left, or made, desolate, become in time the resort of a numerous horde of people, who, too poor to keep slaves and too proud to work, prefer a vagrant and precarious life spent in the desert to engaging in occupations which would associate them with the slaves whom they despise. In the Southern States no less than five millions of human beings are now said to exist in this manner in a condition little removed from savage life, eking out a wretched subsistence by hunting, by fishing, by hiring themselves out for occasional jobs, by plunder. Combining the * Democracy in America, vol. ii. pp. 222, 223. "The negroes," says Mr. Olm sted, are a degraded people-degraded not merely by position, but actually immoral, low-lived; without healthy ambition; but little influenced by high moral considerations; and, in regard to labour, not at all affected by regard for duty. This is universally recognized, and debasing fear, not cheering hope, is in general allowed to be their only stimulant to exertion. Now, let the white labourer come here from the North or from Europe-his nature demands a social life-shall he associate with the poor, slavish, degraded, low-lived, despised, unambitious negro, with whom labour and punishment are almost synonymous? or shall he be the friend and companion of the white man, in whose mind labour is habitually associated with no ideas of duty, responsibility, comfort, luxury, cultivation, or elevation and expansion either of mind or estate, as it is where the ordinary labourer is a free man-free to use his labour as a means of obtaining all these and all else that is to be respected, honoured, or envied in the world? Associating with either or both, is it not inevitable that he will be rapidly demoralized-that he will soon learn to hate labour, give as little of it for his hire as he can, become base, cowardly, faithless-' worse than a nigger?' When we reflect how little the great body of our workingmen are consciously much affected by moral considerations in their movements, one is tempted to suspect that the Almighty has endowed the great transatlantic migration with a new instinct, by which it is unconsciously repelled from the demoralizing and debilitating influence of slavery, as migrating birds have sometimes been thought to be from pestilential regions. I know not else how to account for the remarkable indisposition to be sent to Virginia which I have seen manifested by poor Irishmen and Germans, who could have known, I think, no more of the evils of slavery to the whites in the Slave States, than the slaves themselves know of the effect of conscription in France, and who certainly could have been governed by no considerations of self-respect." THE "MEAN WHITES." 55 restlessness and contempt for regular industry peculiar to the savage with the vices of the prolétaire of civilized communities, these people make up a class at once degraded and dangerous, and constantly reinforced as they are by all that is idle, worthless, and lawless among the population of the neighbouring States, form an inexhaustible preserve of ruffianism, ready at hand for all the worst purposes of Southern ambition. The planters complain of these people for their idleness, for corrupting their slaves, for their thievish propensities; but they cannot dispense with them; for, in truth, they perform an indispensable function in the economy of slave societies, of which they are at once the victims and the principal supports. It is from their ranks that those filibustering expeditions are recruited which have been found so effective an instrument in extending the domain of the Slave Power; they furnish the Border Ruffians who in the colonization struggle with the Northern States contend with Freesoilers on the Territories; and it is to their antipathy to the negroes that the planters securely trust for repressing every attempt at servile insurrection. Such are the "mean whites or "white trash" of the Southern States. They comprise several local subdivisions, the "crackers," the "sandhillers," the "clay-eaters," and many more. The class is not peculiar to any one locality, but is the invariable outgrowth of negro slavery wherever it has raised its head in modern times. It may be seen in the new State of Texas* as well as in the old settled districts of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia; in the West India Islands† no less than on the Continent. In the States of the Confederacy it comprises, as I have said, five millions of human beings-about seven-tenths of the whole white population. وو The industry of the Slave States, we have seen, is exclusively agricultural; and the mode of agriculture pursued in them has been represented as partial, perfunctory, and exhaustive. It must, however, be admitted that, to a certain extent, this description is applicable to the industrial condition of all new countries, and will find illustrations in the western regions of the Free States; and it may therefore occur to the reader that the economical conditions which I have described are rather the consequence of the recent settlement of the societies where they prevail than specific results of the system of slavery. But it is easy to show that this view of the case is fallacious, and proceeds from confounding what is essential in slave-industry with an accidental and temporary feature in the industrial * Olmsted's Texas, p. xvii.; note. + Merivale's Colonization and the Colonies, p. 83; note, new ed. 56 FREE INDUSTRY IN NEW COUNTRIES. career of free communities. The settlers in new countries, whether they be slave-holders or free peasants, naturally fix in the first instance on the richest and most conveniently situated soils, and find it more profitable to cultivate these lightly, availing themselves to the utmost of the resources which nature offers, than to force cultivation on inferior soils after the manner of high farming in old countries. So far the cases are similar. But here lies the difference. The labour of free peasants, though of course more productive on rich than on inferior soils, is not necessarily confined to the former; whereas this is the case with the labour of slaves. According, therefore, as free peasants multiply, after the best soils have been appropriated, the second best are taken into cultivation; and as they multiply still more, cultivation becomes still more general, until ultimately all the cultivatable portions of the country are brought within the domain of industry. But as slaves multiply, their masters cannot have recourse to inferior soils: they must find for them new soils: the mass of the country, therefore, remains uncultivated, and the population increases only by dispersion. Again, although the mode of cultivation pursued by free peasants in new lands is generally far from what would be approved of by the scientific farmers of old countries, still it does not exhaust the soil in the same manner as cultivation carried on by slaves. "I hold myself justified," says Mr. Olmsted, "in asserting that the natural elements of wealth in the soil of Texas will have been more exhausted in ten years, and with them the rewards offered by Providence to labour will have been more lessened, than without slavery would have been the case in two hundred." "After two hundred years' occupation of similar soils by a free-labouring community, I have seen no such evidences of waste as in Texas I have after ten years of slavery."* "Waste of soil and injudi cious application of labour are common in the agriculture of the North;. but nowhere is the land with what is attached to it now less promising and suitable for the residence of a refined and civilized people than it was before the operations, which have been attended with the alleged waste, were commenced." The same is not true of Virginia or the Carolinas, or of any other district where slavery has predominated for an historic period. "The land in these cases is positively less capable of sustaining a dense civilized community than if no labour at all had been expended upon it." The superficial and careless mode of agriculture pursued by free peasants in new countries * Olmsted's Texas, p. xiv. + Ibid. p. xviii.; note. |