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volved the ownership of the laborer and not merely his hire. This cost increased, of course, with the rise of the price of slaves, finally reaching a point where the ownership of slaves by the small farmer was well-nigh impossible. At the time of the invention of the cotton-gin an able-bodied slave could be bought for about $200. The demand for slave labor created by the demand for cotton, however, led to a rapid rise in the price until the average value of a slave in the cotton region by 1840 had reached $500, and by 1860 good field-hands brought from $1,400 to $1,500; occasionally some, especially drivers and carpenters, would bring as much as $2,000 each.*

The Atlanta (Ga.) Daily Intelligencer of January 13, 1860, declared that the average price of negroes in Crawford County of that State was $1,113. The best field-hand, a negro of 21 years, sold there for $1,900. One woman and a one-year-old child brought $2,150, another woman and a child sold for $2,500, while a third woman and her three children sold for $4,525. The following is a table of prices current in Richmond in December of 1853:†

In addition to the purchase-price of the slave, had to be reckoned the risk of loss through his possible death or loss of labor through illness, accidental injury, or escape into free territory. Then there was the cost of medical care in illness, the cost of sustenance

an expense to which the master was always subject whether the slave worked or not-and finally the cost of maintenance during old age and infirmity, since the poorhouses were closed to slaves. Speaking of the comparative cost of free and slave labor, Governor Hammond, of South Carolina, said in 1850:

"I agree that as a general rule it must be admitted that free labor is cheaper than slave labor. And I have no hesitation in saying that if I could cultivate my land on these terms, I would without a word resign my slaves, provided they could be properly disposed of. But the question is whether free or slave labor is cheapest to us in this country, at this time, situated as we are. And it is to be decided at once by the fact that we cannot avail ourselves of any other than slave labor." *

Aside from the costliness of slave labor, there were certain inherent defects in the character of such labor that rendered it inferior in quality. Being forced labor, it was given reluctantly, and such service necessarily is not the best. To be effective, it had to be carefully watched and directed, thus adding to its cost. Moreover, since it was unpaid labor, the slave had no interest in the output, and

Bogart, Economic History, p. 254.

hence there was no incentive to careful and faithful performance of duty. It was, of course, unintelligent labor, and was therefore cheap in quality. The difficulty of teaching the slave anything concerning modern methods of agriculture was very great, and the attempt was rarely made. Under such circumstances, scientific cultivation of the soil with improved implements and according to modern methods was out of the question. The result was that slave labor had to be confined almost exclusively to the raising of cotton, in the production of which skill was not essential, and rotation or diversification was seldom attempted.

Whenever the cotton lands became exhausted for lack of rotation or scientific treatment of the soil, the planter sold his land and moved on to the newer and richer regions of the West- a course found to be more profitable than the resuscitation of worn-out soils by means of unintelligent (slave) labor. The net income from each year's crop was invested in more negroes, for it was the ambition of every planter to own more slaves than his neighbor. Little or nothing was returned to the soil by way of improvement, and comparatively nothing was spent for improved farm machinery, new buildings, or plantation equipment. Under such a system, the wealth of the South consisted mainly in its slaves.

An important economic and social effect of slavery was that it tended to degrade free labor. As time passed,

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especially in the cotton regions where the number of slaves was large, the social odium attached to labor by men in the cotton fields increased until free white labor no longer existed. To work in the cotton fields beside the negro was something no self-respecting white man would do. The result was the development of a class of shiftless and lazy whites that added nothing to the economic wealth of the country. William Gregg, in an address before the South Carolina Institute in 1851, said:

66 From the best estimates that I have been able to make, I put down the white people who ought to work, and who do not, or who are so employed as to be wholly unproductive to the State, at one hundred and twenty-five thousand. Any man who is an observer of things could hardly pass through our country, without being struck with the fact that all the capital, enterprise and intelligence, is employed in directing slave labor; and the consequence is, that a large portion of our poor white people are wholly neglected, and are suffered to while away an existence in a state but one step in advance of the Indian in the forest. It is an evil of vast magnitude and nothing but a change in public sentiment will effect its cure." *

Another effect of slavery was to retard the development of small farms, since it was the practice of the large slaveholder to buy up the small farms wherever possible and to crush out the small cotton-grower. As time passed, the average size of farms increased. In 1850 the average was 273 acres and by 1860 the average had greatly increased, many plantations exceeding 10,000 acres. Speaking of

*Callender, Economic History of the United States, p. 792.

Hammond, Cotton Industry, p. 102.

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this tendency, Hon. C. C. Clay, in an address in 1855, said:

"Our small planters, after taking the cream off their lands, unable to restore them by rest, manures, or otherwise, are going further west and south in search of other virgin lands, which they may despoil and impoverish in like manner. Our wealthier planters with greater means and no more skill are buying out their poorer neighbors, 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."

All over the South there was a constant struggle between the small farmer and the large plantationowner, with his numerous slaves, for the possession of the best lands, the overwhelming advantage, of course, being with the wealthy slave-owner. The new cotton lands of the West were usually cleared and put in a state of cultivation by the small farmers, but in the course of time the planter, after exhausting his lands, came along, bought up the small farms and established the plantation system. Thus the development of a body of small farmers (such as existed in the free States) was greatly hindered. Slavery, as Von Holst remarks, has an inevitable tendency in favor of plantation industry, which suppresses or swallows up small farms.*

As time passed, the number of nonslaveholders increased as the number of slaveholders decreased. It was estimated that at the outbreak of the Civil War the larger part of the slave population was owned by about

* Constitutional History of the United States, vol. i., p. 342.

5 per cent. of the cotton growers. According to DeBow, there were less than 8,000 slaveholders in 1850 who owned more than 50 slaves each. The non-slaveholders were, as a rule,

either poor or possessed of only small means, while the lands they occupied were so sterile that only a meagre subsistence could be gained therefrom.*

Under such circumstances, there was little migration of free laborers. to the South from the Northern States or from Europe. The odium attached to white labor in the cotton fields and the unwillingness of white laborers from the Old World to compete with slave labor, deprived the South almost wholly of the tide of thrifty immigrants from Europe, who preferred to settle in the Northern States; the only exception of note being the German settlers in portions of Texas. Of the persons of foreign birth in the United States in 1850, 1,866,397 were in the free States and only 378,205 were in the slave States. Thus the growth of the population of the South lagged far behind that of the North. Starting with almost equal populations in 1790, the North by 1860 had more than 20,000,000 inhabitants, while the South had 12,000,000.

One of the most deplorable results of slavery was its injurious effect upon the development of manufactur

* See Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, vol. i., p. 18; DeBow, Industrial Resources, vol. ii., p. 106.

Hammond, The Cotton Industry, p. 63.

ing and other industries. Agriculture, and especially the raising of cotton, continued until after the Civil War to be almost the sole industry of the South. Excepting rice, Indian corn (in the upper South), and tobacco, no staples were raised in considerable quantities. Indeed, in the cotton-growing regions, hardly any attempt was made to produce anything beyond the necessary food supplies used on the plantation, so great was the demand for cotton. Though particularly favored with mineral deposits, water-power, and other natural resources for manufacturing, this industry was neglected and the industrial development of the South soon fell far behind that of the North. According to the census of 1850, the industries of commerce, trades and mining employed about 180,334 persons in the slave States, as against 456,863 in the free States. In 1855 the estimated value of cotton manufactures in the slave States was $885,608, as against $9,367,331 in the free States. The total value of all manufactures in the South in 1850 was estimated at $93,362,202, as against $347,748,612 in the North. The number of persons engaged in manufacturing was 151,944 in the slave States and 807,125 in the free States.*

Practically all the cotton produced was sent to the North or to England to be made into cloth, in spite of the well recognized economic law that,

* Von Holst, Constitutional History of the United States, vol. i., p. 344.

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other things being equal, the manufacture of a raw material will always be carried on in the neighborhood where the material is produced. Only the manufacture of coarse cloths, tools and implements used on the farm, and of some fire-arms, was attempted. The greater part of the available capital of the South was utilized in the purchase of slaves and new lands. The amount thus left for the development of manufacturing was wholly inadequate, while capital from the North was not readily obtainable.

The foreign and internal trade of the South was carried on by Northern capital, and of course most of the manufactured articles used in the South (save the ruder farm implements and coarser clothing for the slaves) came from the North or from abroad. A prominent Southern writer said:

"All the world sees or ought to see that in a commercial, mechanical, manufactural, financial and literary point of view, we (the South) are as helpless as babes. It is a fact well known to every intelligent Southerner that we are compelled to go to the North for almost every article of utility and adornment, from matches, shoe pegs and paintings up to cotton mills, steamships and statuary; that we have no foreign trade, no princely merchants, nor respectable artists; that, in comparison with the free states, we contribute nothing to the literature, polite arts and inventions of the age. Nearly all the profits arising from the exchange of commodities, from insurance and shipping offices, and from the one thousand and one industrial pursuits of the country, accrue to the North, and are there invested in those magnificent cities and stupendous works of art which dazzle the eyes of the South, and attest the superiority of free institutions! All our commercial, manufactural, and literary supplies come from there. We want Bibles, brooms, buckets and books and we go to the North; we want shoes, hats, handkerchiefs,

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umbrellas and pocket-knives, and we go to the North; we want toys, primers, school books, fashionable apparel, machinery, medicines, tomb stones, and a thousand other things, and we go to the North for them all."*

Many other frank and thoughtful Southerners were ready to admit the truth of this indictment, and would gladly have welcomed the abolition of slavery if it could be effected without ruining the South. The wealth of thousands of its citizens consisted almost entirely of slaves and lands. To have suddenly abolished slavery would not only have destroyed what was then the chief element of economic power, but would have so upset the labor system as to render the lands almost valueless. The belief in the necessity of slave labor in the pro

duction of cotton, gradually took strong hold upon the people of the South, who came to believe that there was a natural connection between the two which could not be severed without destroying the cotton industry. It is not at all strange, therefore, that they should have clung to slavery and defended it as a necessary part of their economic system, though they readily admitted its shortcomings. Even when abolition was finally forced upon them, many believed that free negro labor would prove a failure. Of course their worst fears were never realized.*

Besides the works already cited, see G. F. Callender, Economic History of the United States, chap. xv.; U. B. Phillips, The Economic Cause of Slave Holding, in Political Science Quarterly, vol. xx., and Documentary History of American Industrial Society, vols. i.-ii.