University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XIX
BUSINESS ASPECTS OF SLAVERY

AN expert accountant has well defined the property of a
master in his slave as an annuity extending throughout
the slave's working life and amounting to the annual surplus
which the labor of the slave produced over and above the
cost of his maintenance.[1] Before any profit accrued to the master
in any year, however, various deductions had to be subtracted
from this surplus. These included interest on the slave's cost, regardless
of whether he had been reared by his owner or had been
bought for a price; amortization of the capital investment; insurance
against the slave's premature death or disability and against
his escape from service; insurance also for his support when incapacitated
whether by illness, accident or old age; taxes; and wages
of superintendence. None of these charges would any sound
method of accounting permit the master to escape.

The maintenance of the slave at the full rate required for the
preservation of lusty physique was essential. The master could
not reduce it below that standard without impairing his property
as well as lessening its immediate return; and as a rule he could
shift none of the charge to other shoulders, for the public would
grant his workmen no dole from its charity funds. On the
other hand, he was often induced to raise the scale above the
minimum standard in order to increase the zeal and efficiency
of his corps. In any case, medical attendance and the like was
necessarily included in the cost of maintenance.
The capital investment in a slave reared by his master would
include charges for the insurance of the child's mother at the
time of his birth and for her deficit of routine work before and

afterward; the food, clothing, nurse's care and incidentals furnished
in childhood; the surplus of supplies over earnings in the
period of youth while the slave was not fully earning his own
keep and his overhead charges; compound interest on all of these
until the slave reached adolescence or early manhood; and a
proportion of similar charges on behalf of other children in his
original group who had died in youth. In his teens the slave's
earnings would gradually increase until they covered all his
current charges, including the cost of supervision; and shortly
before the age of twenty he would perhaps begin to yield a
net return to the owner.

A slave's highest rate of earning would be reached of course
when his physical maturity and his training became complete,
and would normally continue until his bodily powers began to
flag. This period would extend in the case of male field hands
from perhaps twenty-five to possibly fifty years of age, and in
the case of artizans from say thirty to fifty-five years. The
maximum valuation of the slave as property, however, would
come earlier, at the point when the investment in his production
was first complete and when his maximum earnings were about
to begin; and his value would thereafter decline, first slowly and
then more swiftly with every passing year, in anticipation of the
decline and final cessation of his earning power. Thus the ratio
between the capital value of a slave and his annual net earnings,
far from remaining constant, would steadily recede from the
beginning to the end of his working life. At the age of twenty
it might well be as ten to one; at the age of fifty it would
probably not exceed four to one; at sixty-five it might be less than
a parity.

In the buying and selling of nearly all non-human commodities
the cost of production, or of reproduction, bears a definite
relation to the market price, in that it fixes a limit below which
owners will not continue to produce and sell. In the case o£
slaves, however, the cost of rearing had no practical bearing
tipon the market price, for the reason that the owners could
not, or at least did not, increase or diminish the production at

will.[2] It has been said by various anti-slavery spokesmen that
many slaveowners systematically bred slaves for the market.
They have adduced no shred of supporting evidence however;
and although the present writer has long been alert for such data
he has found but a single concrete item in the premises. This one
came, curiously enough, from colonial Massachusetts, where John
Josslyn recorded in 1636: "Mr. Maverick's negro woman came
to my chamber window and in her own country language and
tune sang very loud and shril. Going out to her, she used a great
deal of respect towards me, and willingly would have expressed
her grief in English. But I apprehended it by her countenance
and deportment, whereupon I repaired to my host to learn of him
the cause, for that I understood before that she had been a queen
in her own countrey, and observed a very humble and dutiful garb
used towards her by another negro who was her maid. Mr.
Maverick was desirous to have a breed of negroes, and therefore
seeing she would not yield to perswasions to company with a negro
young man he had in his house, he commanded him, will'd she
nill'd she to go to bed to her—which was no sooner done than she
kickt him out again. This she took in high disdain beyond her
slavery, and this was the cause of her grief."[3]

As for the ante-bellum South, the available plantation instructions,
journals and correspondence contain no hint of such a practice.
Jesse Burton Harrison, a Virginian in touch with planters'
conversation and himself hostile to slavery,[4] went so far as to
write, "It may be that there is a small section of Virginia (perhaps
we could indicate it) where the theory of population is studied
with reference to the yearly income from the sale of slaves,"
but he went no further; and this, be it noted, is not clearly to
hint anything further than that the owners of multiplying slaves
reckoned their own gains from the unstimulated increase. If
pressure were commonly applied James H. Hammond would not
merely have inserted the characteristic provision in his schedule

of rewards: "For every infant thirteen months old and in
sound health that has been properly attended to, the mother shall
receive a muslin or calico frock."[5] A planter here and there
may have exerted a control of matings in the interest of industrial
and commercial eugenics, but it is extremely doubtful that
any appreciable number of masters attempted any direct hastening
of slave increase. The whole tone of the community was
hostile to such a practice. Masters were in fact glad enough
to leave the slaves to their own inclinations in all regards so
long as the day's work was not obstructed and good order was
undisturbed. They had of course everywhere and at all times
an interest in the multiplication of their slaves as well as the
increase of their industrial aptitudes. Thus William Lee wrote
in 1778 concerning his plantation in Virginia: "I wish particular
attention may be paid to rearing young negroes, and
taking care of those grown up, that the number may be increased
as much as possible; also putting several of the most promising
and ingenious lads apprentices to different trades, such as carpenters,
coopers, wheelwrights, sawyers, shipwrights, bricklayers,
plasterers, shoemakers and blacksmiths; some women should
also be taught to weave."[6]

But even if masters had stimulated breeding on occasion,
that would have created but a partial and one-sided relationship
between cost of production and market price. To make the connection
complete it would have been requisite for them to check
slave breeding when prices were low; and even the abolitionists,
it seems, made no assertion to that effect. No, the market
might decline indefinitely without putting an appreciable check
upon the birth rate; and the master had virtually no choice but
to rear every child in his possession. The cost of production,
therefore, could not serve as a nether limit for slave prices
at any time.

An upper limit to the price range was normally fixed the
reckoning of a slave's prospective earnings above the cost of

his maintenance. The slave may here be likened to a mine
operated by a corporation leasing the property. The slave's
claim to his maintenance represents the prior claim of the landowner
to his rent; the master's claim to the annual surplus represents
the equity of the stockholders in the corporation. But the
ore will some day be exhausted and the dividends cease. Purchasers
of the stock should accordingly consider amortization and
pay only such price as will be covered by the discounted value
of the prospective dividends during the life of the mine. The
price of the output fluctuates, however, and the rate of any
year's earnings can only be conjectured. Precise reckoning is
therefore impracticable, and the stock will rise and fall in the
market in response to the play of conjectures as to the present
value of the total future earnings applicable to dividends. So
also a planter entering the slave market might have reckoned
in advance the prospect of working life which a slave of given
age would have, and the average earnings above maintenance
which might be expected from his labor. By discounting each
of those annual returns at the prevailing rate of interest to
determine their present values, and adding up the resulting sums,
he would ascertain the price which his business prospects would
justify him in paying. Having bought a slave at such a price,
an equally thoroughgoing caution would have led him to take
out a life, health and accident insurance policy on the slave;
but even then he must personally have borne the risk of the
slave's running away. In practice the lives of a few slaves
engaged in steamboat operation and other hazardous pursuits
were insured,[7] but the total number of policies taken on their
lives, except as regards marine insurance in the coasting slave
trade, was very small. The planters as a rule carried their
own risks, and they generally dispensed with actuarial reckonings
in determining their bids for slaves. About 1850 a rule
of thumb was current that a prime hand was worth a hundred
dollars for every cent in the current price of a pound of cotton.
In general, however, the prospective purchaser merely "reckoned"
in the Southern sense of conjecturing, at what price he
could employ an added slave with probable advantage, and made
his bid accordingly.

A slave's market price was affected by sex age. physique,
mental quality, industrial training, temper, defects and vices,
so far as each of these could be ascertained. The laws of most
of the states presumed a seller's warrant of health at the time
of sale, unless expressly withheld, and in Louisiana this warrant
extended to mental and moral soundness. The period in
which the buyer might apply for redress, however, was limited
to a few months, and the verdicts of juries were uncertain. On
the whole, therefore, if the buyer were unacquainted with the
slave's previous career and with his attitude toward the transfer
of possession, he necessarily incurred considerable risk in making
each purchase. But in general the taking of reasonable
precautions would cause the loss through unsuspected vices
in one case to be offset by gains through unexpected virtues in
another.

The scale and the trend of slave prices are essential features
of the régime which most economists have ignored and for which
the rest have had too little data. For colonial times the quotations
are scant. An historian of the French West Indies, however,
has ascertained from the archives that whereas the prices
ranged perhaps as low as 200 francs for imported Africans there
at the middle of the seventeenth century, they rose to 450
francs by the year 1700 and continued in a strong and steady
advance thereafter, except in war times, until the very eve of
the French Revolution. Typical prices for prime field hands in
San Domingo were 650 francs in 1716, 800 in 1728, 1,160 in

1750, 1,400 in 1755, 1,180 in 1764, 1,600 in 1769, 1,860 in 1772,
1,740 in 1777, and 2,200 francs in 1785.[8]

In the British West Indies it is apparent from occasional
documents that the trend was similar. A memorial from Barbados
in 1689, for example, recited that in earlier years the
planters had been supplied with Africans at £7 sterling per
head, of which forty shillings covered the Guinea cost and £5
paid the freightage; but now since the establishment of the Royal
African company, "we buy negroes at the price of an engrossed
commodity, the common rate of a good negro on shipboard being
twenty pound. And we are forced to scramble for them in so
shameful a manner that one of the great burdens of our lives
is the going to buy negroes. But we must have them; we cannot
be without them."[9] The overthrow of the monopoly, however,
brought no relief. In 1766 the price of new negroes in the West
Indies ranged at about £26;[10] and in 1788–1790 from £41 to £49.
At this time the value of a prime field hand, reared in the islands,
was reported to be twice as great as that of an imported
African.[11]

In Virginia the rise was proportionate. In 1671 a planter
wrote of his purchase of a negro for £26. 10S and said he
supposed the price was the highest ever paid in those parts; but
a few years afterward a lot of four men brought £30 a head,
two women the same rate, and two more women £25 apiece;
and before the end of the seventeenth century men were being
appraised at £40.[12] An official report from the colony in 1708
noted a great increase of the slave supply in recent years, but
observed that the prices had nevertheless risen.[13] In 1754 George

Washington paid £52 for a man and nearly as much for a woman
in 1764 he bought a lot at £57 a head; in 1768 he bought two
mulattoes at £50 and £61.15s respectively, a negro for £66.10S,
another at public vendue for £72, and a girl for £49.10S Finally
in 1772 he bought five males, one of whom cost £50, another
£65, a third £75, and the remaining two £90 each;[14] and in the
same year he was offered £80 for a slave named Will Shagg whom
his overseer described as an incorrigible runaway.[15]

Scattered items which might be cited from still other colonies
make the evidence conclusive that there was a general and substantially
continuous rise throughout colonial times. The advances
which occurred in the principal British West India islands
and in Virginia, indeed, were a consequence of advances elsewhere,
for by the middle of the eighteenth century all of these
colonies were already passing the zenith of their prosperity,
whereas South Carolina, Georgia, San Domingo and Brazil, as
well as minor new British tropical settlements, were in course
of rapid plantation expansion. Prices in the several communities
tended of course to be equalized partly by a slender intercolonial
slave trade but mainly by the Guineamen's practice of
carrying their wares to the highest of the many competing
markets.

The war for American independence, bringing hard times,
depressed all property values, those of slaves included. But the
return pf peace brought prompt inflation in response to exaggerated
anticipations of prosperity to follow. Wade Hampton,
for example, wrote to his brother from Jacksonborough in the
South Carolina lowlands, January 30, 1782: "All attempts to
purchase negroes have been fruitless, owing to the flattering
state of our affairs in this quarter."[16] The sequel was sharply
disappointing. The indigo industry was virtually dead, and rice
prices, like those of tobacco, did not maintain their expected
levels. The financial experience was described in 1786 by Henry

Pendleton, a judge on the South Carolina bench, in words which
doubtless would have been similarly justified in various other
states: "No sooner had we recovered and restored the country
to peace and order than a rage for running into debt became
epidemical. . . . A happy speculation was almost every
man's object and pursuit. . . . What a load of debt was in
a short time contracted in the purchase of British superfluities,
and of lands and slaves for which no price was too high if credit
for the purchase was to be obtained! . . . How small a
pittance of the produce of the years 1783, '4, '5, altho' amounting
to upwards of 400,000l sterling a year on an average, hath been
applied toward lessening old burdens! . . . What then was
the consequence? The merchants were driven to the exportation
of gold and silver, which so rapidly followed; . . . a
diminution of the value of the capital as well as the annual'produce
of estates in consequence of the fallen price; . . . the
recovery of new debts as well as old in effect suspended, while
the numerous bankruptcies which have happened in Europe
amongst the merchants trading to America, the reproach of which
is cast upon us, have proclaimed to all the trading nations to
guard against our laws and policy, and even against our moral
principles."[17]

The depression continued with increasing severity into the
following decades, when it appears that many of the planters
in the Charleston district were saved from ruin only by the wages
happily drawn from the Santee Canal Company in payment for
the work of their slaves in the canal construction gangs.[18] The
conditions and prospects in Virginia at the same time are suggested
by a remark of George Washington in 1794 on slave investments:
"I shall be happily mistaken if they are not found to
be a very troublesome species of property ere many years have
passed over our heads."[19]

Prices in this period were so commonly stated in currency
of uncertain depreciation that a definite schedule by years may
not safely be made. It is clear, however, that the range in 1783
was little lower than it had been on the eve of the war, while
in 1795 it was hardly more than half as high. For the first
time in American history, in a period of peace, there was a
heavy and disquieting fall in slave prices. This was an earnest
of conditions in the nineteenth century when advances and
declines alternated. From about 1795 onward the stability of
the currency and the increasing abundance of authentic data
permit the fluctuations of prices to be measured and their causes
and effects to be studied with some assurance.

The materials extant comprise occasional travellers' notes,
fairly numerous newspaper items, and quite voluminous manuscript
collections of appraisals and bills of sale, all of which
require cautious discrimination in their analysis.[20] The appraisals
fall mainly into two groups: the valuation of estates in probate,
and those for the purpose of public compensation to the
owners of slaves legally condemned for capital crimes. The
former were oftentimes purely perfunctory, and they are generally
serviceable only as aids in ascertaining the ratios of value
between slaves of the diverse ages and sexes. The appraisals
of criminals, however, since they prescribed actual payments on
the basis of the market value each slave would have had if his
crime had not been committed, may be assumed under such
laws as Virginia maintained in the premises to be fairly accurate.
A file of more than a thousand such appraisals, with vouchers
of payment attached, which is preserved among the Virginia
archives in the State Library at Richmond, is particularly copious
in regard to prices as well as in regard to crimes and punishments.

The bills of sale recording actual market transactions remain

as the chief and central source of information upon prices. Some
thousands of these, originating in the city of Charleston, are
preserved in a single file among the state archives of South
Carolina at Columbia; other thousands are scattered through
the myriad miscellaneous notarial records in the court house at
New Orleans; many smaller accumulations are to be found in
county court houses far and wide, particularly in the cotton
belt; and considerable numbers are in private possession, along
with plantation journals and letters which sometimes contain
similar data.

Now these documents more often than otherwise record the
sale of slaves in groups. One of the considerations involved was
that a gang already organized would save its purchaser time and
trouble in establishing a new plantation as a going concern, and
therefore would probably bring a higher gross price than if its
members were sold singly. Another motive was that of keeping
slave families together, which served doubly in comporting with
scruples of conscience and inducing to the greater contentment
of slaves in their new employ. The documents of the time demonstrate
repeatedly the appreciation of equanimity as affecting
value. But group sales give slight information upon individual
prices; and even the bills of individual sale yield much
less than a statistician could wish. The sex is always presumable
from the slave's name, the color is usually stated or implied,
and occasionally deleterious proclivities are specified, as of a
confirmed drunkard or a persistent runaway; but specifications
of age, strength and talents are very often, one and all, omitted.
The problem is how may these bare quotations of price be utilized.
To strike an average of all prices in any year at any
place would be fruitless, since an even distribution of slave
grades cannot be assumed when quotations are not in great
volume: the prices of young children are rarely ascertainable
from the bills, since they were hardly ever sold separately; the
prices of women likewise are too seldom segregated from those
of their children to permit anything to be established beyond a
ratio to some ascertained standard; and the prices of artizans
varied too greatly with their skill to permit definite schedules

of them. The only market grade, in fact, for which basic price
tabulations can be made with any confidence is that of young
male prime field hands, for these alone may usually be discriminated
even when ages and qualities are not specified. The
method here is to select in the group of bills for any time and
place such maximum quotations for males as occur with any
notable degree of frequency. Artizans, foremen and the like
are thereby generally excluded by the infrequency of their sales,
while the middle-aged, the old and the defective are eliminated
by leaving aside the quotations of lower range. The more scattering
bills in which ages and crafts are given will then serve,
when supplemented from probate appraisals, to establish valuation
ratios between these able-bodied unskilled young men and
the several other classes of slaves. Thus, artizans often brought
twice as much as field hands of similar ages, prime women generally
brought three-fourths or four-fifths as much as prime
men; boys and girls entering their teens, and men and women
entering their fifties, brought about half of prime prices for
their sexes; and infants were generally appraised at about a
tenth or an eighth of prime. The average price for slaves of
all ages and both sexes, furthermore, was generally about one-half
of the price for male prime field hands. The fluctuation
of prime prices, therefore, measures the rise and fall of slave
values in general.

The accompanying chart will show the fluctuations of the
average prices of prime field hands (unskilled young men) in
Virginia, at Charleston, in middle Georgia, and at New Orleans,
as well as the contemporary range of average prices for cotton
of middling grade in the chief American market, that of New
York. The range for prime slaves, it will be seen, rose from
about $300 and $400 a head in the upper and lower South respectively
in 1795 to a range of from $400 to $600 in, 1803, in
consequence of the initial impulse of cotton and sugar production
and of the contemporary prohibition of the African slave
trade by the several states. At those levels prices remained
virtually fixed, in most markets, for nearly a decade as an effect
of South Carolina's reopening of her ports and of the hampering

Prices of Slaves and of Cotton.

Approximate prices of prime field hands (unskilled, able-bodied young slave men) in hundreds of dollars per head: in Virginia—- -—,
at Charleston - - - -, in Middle Georgia—-—, at New Orleans——. Average prices of upland cotton at New York in cents per pound

of export commerce by the Napoleonic war. The latter
factor prevented even the congressional stoppage of the foreign
slave trade in 1808 from exerting any strong effect upon slave
prices for the time being except in the sugar district. The next
general movement was in fact a downward one of about $100
a head caused by the War of 1812. At the return of peace the
prices leaped with parallel perpendicularity in all the markets
from $400–$500 in 1814 to twice that range in 1818, only to be
upset by the world-wide panic of the following year and to
descend to levels of $400 to $600 in 1823. Then came a new
rise in the cotton and sugar districts responding to a heightened
price of their staples, but for once not evoking a sympathetic
movement in the other markets. A small decline then ensuing
gave place to a soaring movement at New Orleans, in response
to the great stimulus which the protective tariff of 1828 gave to
sugar production. The other markets began in the early thirties
to make up for the tardiness of their rise; and as a feature of
the general inflation of property values then prevalent everywhere,
slave prices rose to an apex in 1837 of $1,300 in the purchasing
markets and $1,100 in Virginia. The general panic of 1837
began promptly to send them down; and though they advanced in
1839 as a consequence of a speculative bolstering of the cotton
market that year, they fell all the faster upon the collapse of that
project, finding new levels of rest only at a range of $500–$7OO. A
final advance then set in at the middle of the forties which continued
until the highest levels on record were attained on the
eve of secession and war.

There are thus in the slave price diagram for the nineteenth
century a plateau, with a local peak rising from its level in the
sugar district, and three solid peaks—all of them separated by
intervening valleys, and all corresponding more or less to the
elevations and depressions in the cotton range. The plateau,
1803–1812, was prevented from producing a peak in the eastern
markets by the South Carolina repeal of the slave trade prohibition
and by the European imbroglio. The first common peak,
1818, and its ensuing trough came promptly upon the establishment
of the characteristic règime of the ante-bellum period,

in which the African reservoir could no longer be drawn upon
to mitigate labor shortages and restrain the speculative enhancement
of slave prices. The trough of the 'twenties was deeper
and broader in the upper and eastern South than elsewhere
partly because the panic of 1819 had brought a specially severe
financial collapse there from the wrecking of mushroom canal
projects and the like.[21] It is remarkable that so wide a spread
of rates in the several districts prevailed for so long a period as
here appears. The statistics may of course be somewhat at fault,
but there is reason for confidence that their margin of error is not
great enough to vitiate them.

The next peak, 1837–1839, was in most respects like the preceding
one, and the drop was quite as sudden and even more
severe. The distresses of the time in the district where they
were the most intense were described in a diary of 1840 by a
North Carolinian, who had journeyed southwestward in the hope
of collecting payment for certain debts, but whose personal chagrin
was promptly eclipsed by the spectacle of general disaster.
"Speculation," said he, "has been making poor men rich and
rich men princes." But now "a revulsion has taken place. Mississippi
is ruined. Her rich men are poor, and her poor men
beggars. . . . We have seen hard times in North Carolina,
hard times in the east, hard times everywhere; but Mississippi
exceeds them all. . . . Lands . . . that once commanded
from thirty to fifty dollars per acre may now be bought
for three or five dollars, and that with considerable improvements,
while many have been sold at sheriff's sales at fifty cents
that were considered worth ten to twenty dollars. The people,
too, are running their negroes to Texas and to Alabama, and
leaving their real estate and perishable property to be sold, or
rather sacrificed. . . . So great is the panic and so dreadful
the distress that there are a great many farms prepared to receive
crops, and some of them actually planted, and yet deserted, not
a human being to be found upon them. I had prepared myself

to see hard times here, but unlike most cases, the actual condition
of affairs is much worse than the report."[22]

The fall of Mississippi slaves continued, accompanying that
of cotton and even anticipating it in the later phase of the
movement, until extreme depths were reached in the middle forties,
though at New Orleans and in the Georgia uplands the
decline was arrested in 1842 at a level of about $700. The
sugar planters began prospering from the better prices established
for their staple by the tariff of that year, and were able
to pay more than panic prices for slaves; but as has been noted
in an earlier chapter, suspicion of fraud in the cases of slaves
offered from Mississippi militated against their purchase. A
sugar planter would be willing to pay considerably more for a
neighbor's negro than for one who had come down the river
and who might shortly be seized on a creditor's attachment.

At the middle of the forties, with a rising cotton market, there
began a strong and sustained advance, persisting throughout the
fifties and carrying slave prices to unexampled heights. By 1856
the phenomenon was receiving comment in the newspapers far
and wide. In the early months of that year the Republican of
St. Louis reported field hand sales in Pike County, Missouri, at
from $1,215 to $1,642; the Herald of Lake Providence, Louisiana
recorded the auction of General L. C Polk's slaves at which
"negro men ranged from $1,500 to $1,635, women and girls from
$1,250 to $1,550, children in proportion—all cash" and concluded:
"Such a sale, we venture to say, has never been equaled
in the state of Louisiana." In Virginia, likewise, the Richmond
Despatch in January told of the sale of an estate in Halifax
County at which "among other enormous prices, one man brought
$1,410 and another $1,425, and both were sold again privately
the same day at advances of $50. They were ordinary field
hands, not considered no. I. in any respect." In April the Lynchburg
Virginian reported the sale of men in the auction of a large
estate at from $1,120 to $2,110, with most of the prices ranging
midway between; and in August the Richmond Despatch noted

that instead of the customary summer dullness in the demand for
slaves, it was unprecedentedly vigorous, with men's prices ranging
from $1,200 to $1,500.[23]

The Southern Banner of Athens, Georgia, said as early as
January, 1855: "Everybody except the owners of slaves must
feel and know that the price of slave labor and slave property
at the South is at present too high when compared with the
prices of everything else. There must ere long be a change;
and . . . we advise parties interested to 'stand from
under!'"[24] But the market belied the apprehensions. A neighboring
journal noted at the beginning of 1858, that in the face
of the current panic, slave prices as indicated in newspapers from
all quarters of the South held up astonishingly. "This argues
a confidence on the part of the planters that there is a good
time coming. Well," the editor concluded with a hint of his
own persistent doubts, "we trust they may not be deceived in
their calculations."[25]

The market continued deaf to the Cassandra school. When
in March, 1859, Pierce Butler's half of the slaves from the plantations
which his quondam wife made notorious were auctioned
to defray his debts, bidders who gathered from near and far
offered prices which yielded an average rate of $708 per head for
the 429 slaves of all ages.[26] And in January and February the
still greater auction at Albany, Georgia, of the estate of Joseph
Bond, lately deceased, yielded $2,850 for one of the men, about
$1,900 as an average for such prime field hands as were sold
separately, and a price of $958.64 as a general average for the
497 slaves of all ages and conditions.[27] Sales at similar prices

were at about the same time reported from various other quarters.[28]

Editorial warnings were now more vociferous than before. The
Federal Union of Milledgeville said for example: "There is a
perfect fever raging in Georgia now on the subject of buying
negroes. . . . Men are borrowing money at exorbitant rates
of interest to buy negroes at exorbitant prices. The speculation
will not sustain the speculators, and in a short time we shall see
many negroes and much land offered under the sheriff's hammer,
with few buyers for cash; and then this kind of property
will descend to its real value. The old rule of pricing a negro
by the price of cotton by the pound—that is to say, if cotton is
worth twelve cents a negro man is worth $1,200.00, if at fifteen
cents then $1,500.00—does not seem to be regarded. Negroes
are 25 per cent. higher now with cotton at ten and one half cents
than they were two or three years ago when it was worth fifteen
and sixteen cents. Men are demented upon the subject. A
reverse will surely come."[29]

The fever was likewise raging in the western South,[30] and it
persisted until the end of 1860. Indeed the peak of this price
movement was evidently cut off by the intervention of war. How
great an altitude it might have reached, and what shape its downward
slope would have taken had peace continued, it is idle
to conjecture. But that a crash must have come is beyond
a reasonable doubt.

The Charleston Mercury[31] attributed the advance of slave
prices in the fifties mainly to the demand of the railroads for labor.
This was borne out in some degree by the transactions of the
railroad companies whose headquarters were in that city. The
president of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad Company,
endorsing the arguments which had been advanced by a writer in

DeBow's Review,[32] recommended in his first annual report, 1855,
an extensive purchase of slaves for the company's construction
gangs, reckoning that at the price of $1,000, with interest at 7
per cent. and life insurance at 2 1/2 per cent. the annual charge
would be little more than half the current cost in wages at $180.
The yearly cost of maintenance and superintendence, reckoned
at $20 for clothing, $15 for corn, molasses and tobacco, $1 for
physician's fees, $10 for overseer's wages, and $15 for tools and
repairs, he said, would be the same whether the slaves were hired
or bought.[33] How largely the company adopted its president's
plan is not known. For the older and stronger South Carolina
Railroad Company, however, whose lines extended from Charleston
to Augusta, Columbia and Camden, detailed records in the
premises are available. This company was created in 1843 by
the merging of two earlier corporations, one of which already
possessed eleven slaves. In February, 1845, the new company
bought three more slaves, two of which cost $400 apiece and the
third $686. At the end of the next year the superintendent
reported: "After hands for many years in the company's service
have acquired the knowledge and skill necessary to make
them valuable, the company are either compelled to submit to
higher rates of wages imposed or to pass others at a lower rate
of compensation through the same apprenticeship, with all the
hazard of a strike, in their turn, by the owners."[34] The directors,
after studying the problem thus presented, launched upon a
somewhat extensive slave-purchasing programme, buying one in
1848 and seven in 1849 at uniform prices of $900; one in 1851
at $800; thirty-seven in 1852, all but two of which were procured
in a single purchase from J. C. Sproull and Company, at
prices from $512.50 to $1,004.50, but mostly ranging near $900;
and twenty-eight more at various times between 1853 and 1859,
at prices rising to $1,500. Finally, when two or three years
of war had put all property, of however precarious a nature,
at a premium over Confederate currency, the company bought
another slave in August, 1863, for $2,050, and thirty-two more
in 1864 at prices ranging from $2,450 to $6,005.[35] All of these
slaves were males. No ages or trades are specified in the available
records, and no statement of the advantages actually experienced
in owning rather than hiring slaves.

The Brandon Bank, at Brandon, Mississippi, which was virtually
identical with the Mississippi and Alabama Railroad Company,
bought prior to 1839, $159,000 worth of slaves for railroad
employment, but it presumably lost them shortly after that year
when the bank and the railroad together went bankrupt.[36] The
state of Georgia had bought about 190 slaves in and before 1830
for employment in river and road improvements, but it sold them
in 1834,[37] and when in the late 'forties and the 'fifties it built and
operated the Western and Atlantic Railroad it made no repetition
of the earlier experiment. In the 'fifties, indeed, the South
Carolina Railroad Company was almost unique in its policy of
buying slaves for railroad purposes.

The most cogent reason against such a policy was not that the
owned slaves increased the current charges, but that their purchase
involved the diversion of capital in a way which none but
abnormal circumstances could justify. In the year 1846 when
the superintendent of the South Carolina company made his
recommendation, slave prices were abnormally low and cotton
prices were leaping in such wise as to make probable a strong
advance in the labor market. By 1855, however, the price of
slaves had nearly doubled, and by 1860 it was clearly inordinate.
The special occasion for a company to divert its funds or increase
its capital obligations had accordingly vanished, and sound
policy would have suggested the sale of slaves on hand rather
than the purchase of more. The state of Louisiana, indeed, sold
in 1860[38] the force of nearly a hundred slave men which it had

used on river improvements long enough for many of its members
to have grown old in the service.[39]

Manufacturing companies here and there bought slaves to man
their works, but in so doing added seriously to the risks of their
business. A news item of 1849 reported that an outbreak of
cholera at the Hillman Iron Works near Clarksville, Tenn., had
brought the death of four or five slaves and the removal of the
remainder from the vicinity until the epidemic should have
passed.[40] A more normal episode of mere financial failure was
that which wrecked the Nesbitt Manufacturing Company whose
plant was located on Broad River in South Carolina. To complete
its works and begin operations this company procured a
loan of some $92,000 in 1837 from the Bank of the State of
South Carolina on the security of the land and buildings and a
hundred slaves owned by the company. After several years of
operation during which the purchase of additional slaves raised
the number to 194, twenty-seven of whom were mechanics, the
company admitted its insolvency. When the mortgage was foreclosed
in 1845 the bank bought in virtually the whole property
to save its investment, and operated the works for several years
until a new company, with a manager imported from Sweden,
was floated to take the concern off its hands.[41]

Most of the cotton mills depended wholly upon white labor,
though a few made experiments with slave staffs. One of these
was in operation in Maury County, Tennessee, in 1827,[42] and
another near Pensacola, Florida, twenty years afterward. Except
for their foremen, each of these was run by slave operatives
exclusively; and in the latter case, at least, all the slaves were
owned by the company. These comprised in 1847 some forty
boys and girls, who were all fed, and apparently well fed, at the

company's table.[43] The career of these enterprises is not ascertainable.
A better known case is that of the Saluda Factory,
near Columbia, South Carolina. When J. Graves came from
New England in 1848 to assume the management of this mill
he found several negroes among the operatives, all of whom
were on hire. His first impulse was to replace all the negroes
with whites; but before this was accomplished the newcomer was
quite converted by their "activity and promptness," and he recommended
that the number of black operatives be increased instead
of diminished. "They are easily trained to habits of industry
and patient endurance," he said, "and by the concentration
of all their faculties . . . their imitative faculties become
cultivated to a very high degree, their muscles become trained
and obedient to the will, so that whatever they see done they are
quick in learning to do."[44] The company was impelled by Graves'
enthusiasm to resort to slave labor exclusively, partly on hire
from their owners and partly by purchase. At the height of this
regime, in 1851, the slave operatives numbered 158.[45] But
whether from the incapacity of the negroes as mill hands or
from the accumulation of debt through the purchase of slaves,
the company was forced into liquidation at the lose of the
following year.[46]

Corporations had reason at all times, in fact, to prefer free
laborers over slaves even on hire, for in so doing they escaped
liabilities for injuries by fellow servants. When a firm of contractors,
for example, advertised in 1833 for five hundred laborers
at $15 per month to work on the Muscle Shoals canal in
northern Alabama, it deemed it necessary to say that in cases
of accidents to slaves it would assume financial responsibility
"for any injury or damage that may hereafter happen in the
process of blasting rock or of the caving of banks."[47] Free

laborers, on the other hand, carried their own risks. Except
when some planter would take a contract for grading in his
locality, to be done under his own supervision in the spare time of
his gang, slaves were generally called for in canal and railroad
work only when the supply of free labor was inadequate.

Slaveowners, on the other hand, were equally reluctant to
hire their slaves to such corporations or contractors except in
times of special depression, for construction camps from their
lack of sanitation, discipline, domesticity and stability were at the
opposite pole from plantations as places of slave residence. High
wages were no adequate compensation for the liability to contagious
and other diseases, demoralization, and the checking
of the birth rate by the separation of husbands and wives. The
higher the valuation of slave property, the greater would be the
strength of these considerations.

Slaves were a somewhat precarious property under all circumstances.
Losses were incurred not only through disease[48] and
flight but also through sudden death in manifold ways, and
though theft. A few items will furnish illustration. An early
Charleston newspaper printed the following: "On the ninth
instant Mr. Edward North at Pon Pon sent a sensible negro fellow
to Moon's Ferry for a jug of rum, which is about two miles
from his house; and he drank to that excess in the path that he
died within six or seven hours."[49] From the Eutaws in the same
state a correspondent wrote in 1798 of a gin-house disaster: "I
yesterday went over to Mr. Henry Middleton's plantation to view
the dreadful effects of a flash of lightning which the day before
fell on his machine house in which were about twenty negro
men, fourteen of which were killed immediately."[50] In 1828 the
following appeared in a newspaper at New Orleans: "Yesterday
towards one o'clock P. M., as one of the ferry boats was crossing
the river with sixteen slaves on board belonging to General
Wade Hampton, with their baggage, a few rods distant from the

shore these negroes, being frightened by the motion of the boat,
all threw themselves on the same side, which caused the boat to
fill; and notwithstanding the prompt assistance afforded, four
or five of these unfortunates perished."[51] In 1839 William
Lowndes Yancey, who was then a planter in South Carolina, lost
his whole gang through the poisoning of a spring on his place
and was thereby bankrupted.[52] About 1858 certain bandits in
western Louisiana abducted two slaves from the home of the
Widow Bernard on Bayou Vermilion. After the lapse of several
months they were discovered in the possession of one Apcher,
who was tried for the theft but acquitted. The slaves when
restored to their mistress were put in the kitchen, bound together
by their hands. But while the family was at dinner the two ran
from the house and drowned themselves in the bayou. The narrator
of the episode attributed the impulse for suicide to the
taste for vagabondage and the hatred for work which the negroes
had acquired from the bandit.[53]

The governor of South Carolina reported the convictions of
five white men for the crime of slave stealing in the one year
1809;[54] and in the penitentiary lists of the several states the
designation of slave stealers was fairly frequent, in spite of the
fact that the death penalty was generally prescribed for the
crime. One method of their operation was described in a Georgia
newspaper item of 1828 which related that two wagoners upon
meeting a slave upon the road persuaded him to lend a hand in
shifting their load. When the negro entered the wagon they
overpowered him and drove on. When they camped for the
night they bound him to the wheel; but while they slept he cut
his thongs and returned to his master.[55] The greatest activities
in this line, however, were doubtless those of the Murrell gang
of desperadoes operating throughout the southwest in the early

thirties with a shrewd scheme for victimizing both whites and
blacks. They would conspire with a slave, promising him his
freedom or some other reward if he would run off with them
and suffer himself to be sold to some unwary purchaser and
then escape to join them again.[56] Sometimes they repeated this
process over and over again with the same slave until a threat
of exposure from him led to his being silenced by murder.
In the same period a smaller gang with John Washburn as its
leading spirit and with Natchez as informal headquarters, was
busy at burglary, highway and flatboat robbery, pocket picking
and slave stealing.[57] In 1846 a prisoner under arrest at Cheraw,
South Carolina, professed to reveal a new conspiracy for slave
stealing with ramifications from Virginia to Texas; but the details
appear not to have been published.[58]

Certain hostile critics of slavery asserted that in one district
or another masters made reckonings favorable to such
driving of slaves at their work as would bring premature death.
Thus Fanny Kemble wrote in 1838, when on the Georgia coast:
"In Louisiana . . . the humane calculation was not only
made but openly and unhesitatingly avowed that the planters
found it upon the whole their most profitable plan to work off
(kill with labour) their whole number of slaves about once in
seven years, and renew the whole stock."[59] The English traveler
Featherstonhaugh likewise wrote of Louisiana in 1844, when he
had come as close to it as East Tennessee, that "the duration of

life for a sugar mill hand does not exceed seven years."[60] William
Goodell supported a similar assertion of his own in 1853 by a
series of citations. The first of these was to Theodore Weld as
authority, that "Professor Wright" had been told at New York
by Dr. Deming of Ashland, Ohio, a story that Mr. Dickinson of
Pittsburg had been told by Southern planters and slave dealers
on an Ohio River steamboat. The tale thus vouched for contained
the assertion that sugar planters found that by the excessive
driving of slaves day and night in the grinding season they
could so increase their output that "they could afford to sacrifice
one set of hands in seven years," and "that this horrible system
was now practised to a considerable extent." The second citation
was likewise to Weld for a statement by Mr. Samuel Blackwell
of Jersey City, whose testimonial lay in the fact of his membership
in the Presbyterian church, that while on a tour in Louisiana
"the planters generally declared to him that they were obliged
so to overwork their slaves during the sugar-making season
(from eight to ten weeks) as to use them up in seven or eight
years." The third was to the Rev. Mr. Reed of London who
after a tour in Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky in 1834 published
the following: "I was told, confidentially, from excellent
authority, that recently at a meeting of planters in South Carolina
the question was seriously discussed whether the slave is more
profitable to the owner if well fed, well clothed and worked lightly,
or if made the most of at once and exhausted in. some eight years.
The decision was in favor of the last alternative."[61] An anonymous
writer in 1857 repeated this last item without indication of
its date or authority but with a shortening of the period of
exhaustion to "some four or five years."[62]

These assertions, which have been accepted by some historians
as valid, prompt a series of reflections. In the first place, anyone

who has had experience with negro labor may reasonably be
skeptical when told that healthy, well fed negroes, whether slave
or free, can by any routine insistence of the employer be driven
beyond the point at which fatigue begins to be injurious. In
the second place, plantation work as a rule had the limitation
of daylight hours; in plowing, mules which could not be hurried
set the pace; in hoeing, haste would imperil the plants by
enhancing the proportion of misdirected strokes; and in the
harvest of tobacco, rice and cotton much perseverance but little
strain was involved. The sugar harvest alone called for heavy
exertion and for night work in the mill. But common report in
that regard emphasized the sturdy sleekness as well as the joviality
of the negroes in the grinding season;[63] and even if exhaustion
had been characteristic instead, the brevity of the period
would have prevented any serious debilitating effect before the
coming of the more leisurely schedule after harvest. In fact
many neighboring Creole and Acadian farmers, fishermen and
the like were customarily enlisted on wages as plantation recruits
in the months of stress.[64] The sugar district furthermore was
the one plantation area within easy reach of a considerable city
whence a seasonal supply of extra hands might be had to save
the regular forces from injury. The fact that a planter, as reported
by Sir Charles Lyell, failed to get a hundred recruits one
year in the midst of the grinding season[65] does not weaken this
consideration. It may well have been that his neighbors had
forestalled him in the wage-labor market, or that the remaining
Germans and Irish in the city refused to take the places of their
fellows who were on strike. It is well established that sugar
planters had systematic recourse to immigrant labor for ditching
and other severe work.[66] It is incredible that they ignored the
same recourse if at any time the requirements of their crop threatened
injury to their property in slaves. The recommendation of
the old Roman, Varro, that freemen be employed in harvesting to
save the slaves[67] would apply with no more effect, in case of
need, to the pressing of oil and wine than to the grinding of
sugar-cane. Two months' wages to a Creole, a "Cajun" or an
Irishman would be cheap as the price of a slave's continued vigor
even when slave prices were low. On the whole, however, the
stress of the grinding was not usually as great as has been fancied
Some of the regular hands in fact were occasionally spared from
the harvest at its height and set to plow and plant for the next
year's crop.[68]

The further question arises: how could a master who set himself
to work a slave to death in seven years make sure on the
one hand that the demise would not be precipitated within a few
months instead, and on the other that the consequence would not
be merely the slave's incapacitation instead of his death? In the
one case a serious loss would be incurred at once; in the other
the stoppage of the slave's maintenance, which would be the only
conceivable source of gain in the premises, would not have been
effected, but the planter would merely have an invalid on his
hands instead of a worker. Still further, the slaves had recourses
of their own, even aside from appeals for legal redress,
They might shoot or stab the oppressor, burn his house, or run
away, or resort to any of a dozen other forms of sabotage. These
possibilities the masters knew as well as the slaves. Mere passive
resistance, however, in cases where even that was needed, would
generally prove effective enough.

Finally, if all the foregoing arguments be dismissed as fallacious,
there still remains the factor of slave prices as a deterrent
in certain periods. If when slaves were cheap and their produce
dear it might be feasible and profitable to exhaust the one to
increase the other, the opportunity would surely vanish when the
price relations were reversed. The trend of the markets was
very strong in that direction. Thus at the beginning of the nineteenth
century a prime field hand in the upland cotton belt had

the value of about 1,500 pounds of middling cotton; by 1810 this
value had risen to 4,500 pounds; by 1820 to 5,500; by 1830 to
6,000; by 1840 to 8,300; from 1843 to 1853 it was currently about
10,000; and in 1860 it reached about 16,000 pounds. Comparison
of slave values as measured in the several other staples would
show quite similar trends, though these great appreciations were
accompanied by no remotely proportionate increase of the slaves'
industrial capacities. The figures tell their own tale of the mounting
preposterousness of any calculated exhaustion of the human
chattels.

The tradition in anti-slavery circles was however too strong
to die. Various travelers touring the South, keen for corroborative
evidence but finding none, still nursed the belief that a further
search would bring reward. It was like the rainbow's end, always
beyond the horizon. Thus the two Englishmen, Marshall Hall
and William H. Russell, after scrutinizing many Southern localities
and finding no slave exhaustion, asserted that it prevailed
either in a district or in a type of establishment which they had
not examined. Hall, who traveled far in the Southern states
and then merely touched at Havana on his way home, wrote: "In
the United States the life of the slave has been cherished and his
offspring promoted. In Cuba the lives of the slaves have been
'used up' by excessive labour, and increase in number disregarded.
It is said, indeed, that the slave-life did not extend beyond eight
or ten years."[69] Russell recorded his surprise at finding that the
Louisiana planters made no reckoning whatever of the cost of
their slaves' labor, that Irish gangs nevertheless did the ditching,
and that the slave children of from nine to eleven years were
at play, "exempted from that cruel fate which befalls poor children
of their age in the mining and manufacturing districts of
England"; and then upon glimpsing the homesteads of some
Creole small proprietors, he wrote: "It is among these men
that, at times, slavery assumes its harshest aspect, and that slaves
are exposed to the severest labor."[70] Johann Schoepf on the

other hand while travelling many years before on the Atlantic
seaboard had written: "They who have the largest droves [of
slaves] keep them the worst, let them run naked mostly or in
rags, and accustom them as much as possible to hunger, but exact
of them steady work."[71] That no concrete observations
were adduced in any of these premises is evidence enough, under
the circumstances, that the charges were empty.

The capital value of the slaves was an increasingly powerful
insurance of their lives and their, health. In four days of June,
1836, Thomas Glover of Lowndes County, Alabama, incurred a
debt of $35 which he duly paid, for three visits with mileage
and prescriptions by Dr. Salley to his "wench Rina";[72] and in
the winter of 1858 Nathan Truitt of Troup County, Georgia, had
medical attendance rendered to a slave child of his to the amount
of $130.50.[73] These are mere chance items in the multitude
which constantly recur in probate records. Business prudence
required expenditure with almost a lavish hand when endangered
property was to be saved. The same consideration applied when
famines occurred, as in Alabama in 1828[74] and 1855.[75] Poverty-stricken
freemen might perish, but slaveowners could use
the slaves themselves as security for credits to buy food at
famine prices to feed them.[76] As Olmsted said, comparing
famine effects in the South and in Ireland, "the slaves suffered
no physical want—the peasant starved."[77] The higher the price
of slaves, the more stringent the pressure upon the masters to
safeguard them from disease, injury and risk of every sort.

Although this phase of the advancing valuation gave no occasion
for regret, other phases brought a spread of dismay and apprehension.
In an essay of 1859 Edmund Ruffin analyzed the
effects in Virginia. In the last fifteen years, he said, the value

of slaves had been doubled, solely because of the demand from
the lower South. The Virginians affected fell into three classes.
The first were those who had slaves to be sold, whether through
pressure of debt or in the legal division of estates or in the rare
event of liquidating a surplus of labor. These would receive
advantage from high prices. The second were those who wishing
neither to buy nor sell slaves desired merely to keep their estates
intact These were, of course, unaffected by the fluctuations.
The third were the great number of enterprising planters
and farmers who desired to increase the scale of their industrial
operations and who would buy slaves if conditions were propitious
but were debarred therefrom by the immoderate prices.
When these men stood aside in the bidding the manual force and
the earning power of the commonwealth were depleted. The
smaller volume of labor then remaining must be more thinly applied
land values must needs decline; and the shrewdest employers
must join the southward movement. The draining of
the slaves, he continued, would bring compensation in an inflow
of white settlers only when the removal of slave labor had become
virtually complete and had brought in consequence the
most extreme prostration of land prices and of the incomes of
the still remaining remnant of the original population. The exporting
of labor, at whatever price it might be sold, he likened
to a farmer's conversion of his plow teams into cash instead of
using them in his work. According to these views, he concluded,
"the highest prices yet obtained from the foreign purchasers of
our slaves have never left a profit to the state or produced pecuniary
benefit to general interests. And even if prices should
continue to increase, as there is good reason to expect and to
dread, until they reach $2000 or more for the best laborers, or
$1200 for the general average of ages and sexes, these prices,
though necessarily operating to remove every slave from Virginia,
will still cause loss to agricultural and general interests in
every particular sale, and finally render the state a desert and a
ruin."[78]

At Charleston a similar plaint was voiced by L. W. Spratt.
In early years when the African trade was open and slaves were
cheap, said he, in the Carolina lowlands "enterprise found a
profitable field, and necessarily therefore the fortunes of the
country bloomed and brightened. But when the fertilizing
stream of labor was cut off, when the opening West had no further
supply to meet its requisitions, it made demands upon the
accumulations of the seaboard. The limited amount became a
prize to be contended for. Land in the interior offered itself at
less than one dollar an acre. Land on the seaboard had been
raised to fifty dollars per acre, and labor, forced to elect between
them, took the cheaper. The heirs who came to an estate, or the
men of capital who retired from business, sought a location in
the West. Lands on the seaboard were forced to seek for purchasers;
purchasers came to the seaboard to seek for slaves.
Their prices were elevated to their value not upon the seaboard
where lands were capital but in the interior where the interest
upon the cost of labor was the only charge upon production.
Labor therefore ceased to be profitable in the one place as it became
profitable in the other. Estates which were wealth to
their original proprietors became a charge to the descendants
who endeavored to maintain them. Neglect soon came to the relief
of unprofitable care; decay followed neglect. Mansions became
tenantless and roofless. Trees spring in their deserted
halls and wave their branches through dismantled windows.
Drains filled up; the swamps returned. Parish churches in imposing
styles of architecture and once attended by a goodly company
in costly equipages, are now abandoned. Lands which had
ready sale at fifty dollars per acre now sell for less than five dollars;
and over all these structures of wealth, with their offices of
art, and over these scenes of festivity and devotion, there now
hangs the pall of an unalterable gloom."[79] In a later essay the
same writer dealt with developments in the 'fifties in more sober
phrases which are corroborated by the census returns. Within
the decade, he said, as many as ten thousand slaves had been

drawn from Charleston by the attractive prices of the west, and
the towns of the interior had suffered losses in the same way.
The slaves had been taken in large numbers from all manufacturing
employments, and were now being sold by thousands each
year from the rice fields. "They are as yet retained by cotton
and the culture incident to cotton; but as almost every negro offered
in our markets is bid for by the West, the drain is likely to
continue." In the towns alone was the loss offset in any degree
by an inflow of immigration.[80]

A similar trend as to slaves but with a sharply contrasting effect
upon prosperity was described by Gratz Brown as prevailing
in Missouri. The slave population, said he, is in process of
rapid decline except in a dozen central counties along the Missouri
River. "Hemp is the only staple here left that will pay
for investment in negroes," and that can hardly hold them
against the call of the cotton belt. Already the planters of the
upland counties are beginning to send their slaves to southerly
markets in response to the prices there offered. In most parts
of Missouri, he continued, slavery could not be said to exist as
a system. It accordingly served, not as an appreciable industrial
agency, but only as a deterrent hampering, the progress of immigration.
Brown therefore advocated the complete extirpation
of the institution as a means of giving great impetus to the
state's prosperity.[81]

These accounts are colored by the pro-slavery views of Ruffin
and Spratt and the opposite predilections of Brown. It is
clear nevertheless that the net industrial effects of the exportation
of slaves were strikingly diverse in the several regions. In
Missouri, and in Delaware also, where plantations had never
been dominant and where negroes were few, the loss of slaves
was more than counterbalanced by the gain of freemen; in some
portions of Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky the replacement
of the one by the other was at so evenly compensating a rate that
the volume of industry was not affected; but in other parts of

those states and in the rural districts of the rice coast the depletion
of slaves was not in any appreciable measure offset by
immigration. This applies also to the older portions of the eastern
cotton belt.

Throughout the northern and eastern South doubts had often
been expressed that slave labor was worth its price. Thus
Philip Fithian recorded in his Virginia diary in 1774 a conversation
with Mrs. Robert Carter in which she expressed an opinion,
endorsed by Fithian, "that if in Mr. Carter's or in any gentleman's
estate all the negroes should be sold and the money put
to interest in safe hands, and let the land which the negroes now
work lie wholly uncultivated, the bare interest of the price of the
negroes would be a much greater yearly income than what is now
received from their working the lands, making no allowance at
all for the trouble and risk of the masters as to crops and negroes."[82]
In 1814 John Randolph said: "It is notorious that
the profits of slave labor have been for a long time on the decrease,
and that on a fair average it scarcely reimburses the expense
of the slave," and concluded by prophesying that a continuance
of the tendency would bring it about "in case the slave
shall not elope from his master, that his master will run away
from him."[83] Four years later William Elliott of Beaufort,
South Carolina, wrote that in the sea-island cotton industry for a
decade past the high valuations of lands and slaves had been
wholly unjustified. On the one hand, said he, the return on investments
was extremely small; on the other, it was almost impossible
to relieve an embarrassed estate by the sale of a part,
for the reduction of the scale of operations would cause a more
than proportionate reduction of income.[84]

The remorseless advance of slave prices as measured in their
produce tended to spread the adverse conditions noted by Elliott
into all parts of the South; and by the close of the 'fifties it is
fairly certain that no slaveholders but those few whose plantations
lay in the most advantageous parts of the cotton and sugar

districts and whose managerial ability was exceptionally great
were earning anything beyond what would cover their maintenance
and carrying charges.

Achille Loria has repeatedly expressed the generalization that
slaves have been systematically overvalued wherever the institution
has prevailed, and he has attempted to explain the phenomenon
by reference to an economic law of his own formulation
that capitalists always and everywhere exploit labor by devices
peculiarly adapted to each régime in turn. His latest argument
in the premises is as follows: Man, who is by nature dispersively
individualistic, is brought into industrial coördination
only by coercion. Isolated labor if on exceptionally fertile soil
or if equipped with specially efficient apparatus or if supernormal
in energy may produce a surplus income, but ordinarily it
can earn no more than a bare subsistence. Associative labor
yields so much greater returns that masters of one sort or another
emerge in every progressive society to replace dispersion
with concentration and to engross most of the accruing enhancement
of produce to themselves as captains of industry. This
"persistent and continuous coercion, compelling them to labour
in conformity to a unitary plan or in accordance with a concentrating
design" is commonly in its earlier form slavery, and
slaveholders are thus the first possessors of capital. As capitalists
they become perpetually concerned with excluding the laborers
from the proprietorship of land and the other means of production.
So long as land is relatively abundant this can be accomplished
only by keeping labor enslaved, and enslavement cannot
be maintained unless the slaves are prevented from buying
their freedom. This prevention is procured by the heightening
of slave prices at such a rate as to keep the cost of freedom always
greater than the generality of the slaves can pay with their
own accumulated savings or peculia. Slave prices in fact,
whether in ancient Rome or in modern America, advanced disproportionately
to the advantage which the owners could derive
from the ownership. "This shows that an element of speculation
enters into the valuation of the slave, or that there is a hypervaluation
of the slave. This is the central phenomenon of

slavery; and it is to this far more than to the indolence of slave
labour that is due the low productivity of slave states, the permanently
unstable equilibrium of the slaveholding enterprise, and
its inevitable ruin." The decline of earnings and of slave prices
promotes a more drastic oppression, as in Roman Sicily, to reduce
the slave's peculium and continue the prevention of his self-purchase.
When this device is about to fail of its purpose the
masters may foil the intention of the slaves by changing them
into serfs, attaching the lands to the laborers as an additional
thing to be purchased as a condition of freedom. The value of
the man may now be permitted to fall to its natural level. Finally,
when the growth of population has made land so dear that
common laborers in freedom cannot save enough to buy farms,
the occasion for slavery and serfdom lapses. Laborers may now
be freed to become a wage-earning proletariat, to take their own
risks. An automatic coercion replaces the systematic; the labor
stimulus is intensified, but the stress of the employer is diminished.
The laborer does not escape from coercion, but merely
exchanges one of its forms for another.[85]

Now Loria falls into various fallacies in other parts of his
book, as when he says that southern lands are generally more
fertile than northern and holds that alone, to the exclusion of
climate and racial qualities, responsible for the greater prevalence
of slavery ancient and modern in southerly latitudes; or
when he follows Cairnes in asserting that upon the American
slave plantations "the only form of culture practised was spade
culture, merely agglomerating upon a single area of land a number
of isolated laborers"; or when he contends that either slavery
or serfdom since based on force and fraud "destroys the possibility
of fiduciary credit by cancelling the conditions [of trust
and confidence] which alone can foster it."[86] Such errors disturb
one's faith. In the presentation of his main argument, furthermore,
he not only exaggerates the cleavage between capitalists
and laborers, the class consciousness of the two groups and
the rationality of capitalistic purpose, but he falls into calamitous

ambiguity and confusion. The central phenomenon of
slavery, says he, is speculation or the overvaluation
of the slave. He thereupon assumes that speculation always means overvaluation,
ignoring its downward possibility, and he accounts for the
asserted universal and continuously increasing overvaluation by
reference to the desire of masters to prevent slaves from buying
their freedom. Here he ignores essential historic facts. In
American law a slave's peculium had no recognition; and the
proportion of slaves, furthermore, who showed any firm disposition
to accumulate savings for the purpose of buying their freedom
was very small. Where such efforts were made, however,
they were likely to be aided by the masters through facilities for
cash earnings, price concessions and honest accounting of instalments,
notwithstanding the lack of legal requirements in the
premises. Loria's explanation of the "central phenomenon" is
therefore hardly tenable.

A far sounder basic doctrine is that of the accountant Gibson,
recited at the beginning of this chapter, that the valuation of a
slave is theoretically determined by the reckoning of his prospective
earnings above the cost of his maintenance. In the actual
Southern regime, however, this was interfered with by several
influences. For one thing, the successful proprietors of small
plantations could afford to buy additional slaves at somewhat
more than the price reckoned on per capita earnings, because
the advance of their establishments towards the scale of maximum
efficiency would reduce the proportionate cost of administration.
Again, the scale of slaveholdings was in some degree a
measure of social rank, and men were accordingly tempted by
uneconomic motives to increase their trains of retainers. Both
of these considerations stimulated the bidding. On the other
hand conventional morality deterred many proprietors from selling
slaves except under special stress, and thereby diminished
the offers in the market. If the combination of these factors is
not adequate as an explanation, there remain the spirit of inflation
characteristic of a new country and the common desire for
tangible investments of a popularly sanctioned sort. All staple
producers were engaged in a venturesome business. Crops were

highly uncertain, and staple prices even more so. The variability
of earnings inured men to the taking of risks and spurred
them to borrow money and buy more of both lands and slaves
even at inflated prices in the hope of striking it rich with a few
years' crops. On the other hand when profits actually accrued
there was nothing available as a rule more tempting than slaves
as investments. Corporation securities were few and unseasoned;
lands were liable to wear out and were painfully stow in
liquidation; but slaves were a self-perpetuating stock whose
ownership was a badge of dignity, whose management was generally
esteemed a pleasurable responsibility, whose labor would
yield an income, and whose value could be realized in cash with
fair promptitude in time of need. No calculated overvaluation
by proprietors for the sake of keeping the slaves enslaved need
be invented. Loria's thesis is a work of supererogation.

But whatever may be the true explanation it is clear that slave
prices did rise to immoderate heights, that speculation was kept
rife, and that in virtually every phase, after the industrial occupation
of each area had been accomplished, the maintenance of the
institution was a clog upon material progress. The economic virtues
of slavery lay wholly in its making labor mobile, regular and
secure. These qualities accorded remarkably, so far as they went,
with the requirements of the plantation system on the one hand
and the needs of the generality of the negroes on the other. Its
vices were more numerous, and in part more subtle.

The North was annually acquiring thousands of immigrants
who came at their own expense, who worked zealously for wages
payable from current earnings, and who possessed all the inventive
and progressive potentialities of European peoples. But aspiring
captains of industry at the South could as a rule procure
labor only by remitting round sums in money or credit which depleted
their working capital and for which were obtained slaves
fit only for plantation routine, negroes of whom little initiative
could be expected and little contribution to the community's welfare
beyond their mere muscular exertions. The negroes were
procured in the first instance mainly because white laborers were
not to be had; afterward when whites might otherwise have been

available the established conditions repelled them. The continued
avoidance of the South by the great mass of incoming Europeans
in post-bellum decades has now made it clear that it was
the negro character of the slaves rather than the slave status of
the negroes which was chiefly responsible. The racial antipathy
felt by the alien whites, along with their cultural repugnance and
economic apprehensions, intrenched the negroes permanently in
the situation. The most fertile Southern areas when once converted
into black belts tended, and still tend as strongly as ever,
to be tilled only by inert negroes, the majority of whom are as
yet perhaps less efficient in freedom than their forbears were as
slaves.

The drain of funds involved in the purchase of slaves was impressive
to contemporaries. Thus Governor Spotswood wrote
from Virginia to the British authorities in 1711 explaining his assent
to a £5 tax upon the importation of slaves. The members of
the legislature, said he, "urged what is really true, that the country
is already ruined by the great number of negros imported of late
years, that it will be impossible for them in many years to discharge
the debts already contracted for the purchase of those negroes
if fresh supplys be still poured upon them while their tobacco
continues so little valuable, but that the people will run more
and more in debt."[87] And in 1769 a Charleston correspondent
wrote to a Boston journal: "A calculation having been made of
the amount of purchase money of slaves effected here the present
year, it is computed at £270,000 sterling, which sum will by
that means be drained off from this province."[88]

An unfortunate fixation of capital was likewise remarked.
Thus Sir Charles Lyell noted at Columbus, Georgia, in 1846 that
Northern settlers were "struck with the difficulty experienced
in raising money here by small shares for the building of
mills. 'Why,' say they, 'should all our cotton make so long a
journey to the North, to be manufactured there, and come back
to us at so high a price? It is because all spare cash is sunk here
in purchasing negroes.'" And again at another stage of his tour:

"That slave labour is more expensive than free is an poinion which
is certainly gaining ground in the higher parts of Alabama, and
is now professed openly by some Northerners who have settled
there. One of them said to me, 'Half the population of the South
is employed in seeing that the other half do their work, and they
who do work accomplish half what they might do under a better
system.' We cannot,' said another,[89] raise capital enough for
new cotton factories because all our savings go to buy negroes, or
as has lately happened, to feed them when the crop is deficient."

The planters, who were the principal Southern capitalists, trod
in a vicious circle. They bought lands and slaves wherewith to
grow cotton, and with the proceeds ever bought more slaves to
make more cotton; and oftentimes they borrowed heavily on
their lands and slaves as collateral in order to enlarge their scale
of production the more speedily. When slave prices rose the
possessors of those in the cotton belt seldom took profit from the
advance, for it was a rare planter who would voluntarily sell his
operating force. When crops failed or prices fell, however, the
loans might be called, the mortgages foreclosed, and the property
sold out at panic levels. Thus while the slaves had a guarantee
of their sustenance, their proprietors, themselves the guarantors,
had a guarantee of nothing. By virtue, or more properly
by vice, of the heavy capitalization of the control of labor which
was a cardinal feature of the ante-bellum régime, they were involved
in excessive financial risks.

The slavery system has often been said to have put so great
a stigma on manual labor as to have paralyzed the physical energies
of the Southern white population. This is a great exaggeration;
and yet it is true that the system militated in quite positive
degree against the productivity of the several white classes.
Among the well-to-do it promoted leisure by giving rise to an
abnormally large number of men and women who whether
actually or nominally performing managerial functions, did
little to bring sweat to their brows. The proportion of white
collars to overalls and of muslin frocks to kitchen aprons was

greater than in any other Anglo-Saxon community of equal income.
The contrast so often drawn between Southern gentility
and Northern thrift had a concrete basis in fact. At the
other extreme the enervation of the poor whites, while mainly
due to malaria and hookworm, had as a contributing cause the
limitation upon their wage-earning opportunity which the slavery
system imposed. Upon the middle class and the yeomanry,
which were far more numerous and substantial[90] than has been
commonly realized, the slavery system exerted an economic influence
by limiting the availability of capital and by offering the
temptation of an unsound application of earnings. When a
prospering farmer, for example, wanted help for himself in his
fields or for his wife indoors, the habit of the community
prompted him to buy or hire slaves at a greater cost than free
labor would normally have required.[91] The high price of slaves,
furthermore, prevented many a capable manager from exercising
his talents by debarring him from the acquisition of labor
and the other means of large-scale production.

Finally, the force of custom, together with the routine efficiency
of slave labor itself, caused the South to spoil the market
for its distinctive crops by producing greater quantities than the
world would buy at remunerative prices. To this the solicitude
of the masters for the health of their slaves contributed. The
harvesting of wheat, for example, as a Virginian planter observed
in a letter to his neighbor James Madison, in the days when harvesting
machinery was unknown, required exertion much more
severe than the tobacco routine, and was accordingly, as he put
it, "by no means so conducive to the health of cur negroes, upon
whose increase (miserabile diciu!) our principal profit depends."[92]
The same letter also said: "Where there is negro
slavery there will be laziness, carelessness and wastefulness. Nor
is it possible to prevent them. Severity increases the evil, and
humanity does not lessen it."

On the whole, the question whether negro labor in slavery was
more or less productive than free negro labor would have been
is not the crux of the matter. The influence of the slaveholding
régime upon the whites themselves made it inevitable that the
South should accumulate real wealth more slowly than the contemporary
North. The planters and their neighbors were in
the grip of circumstance. The higher the price of slaves the
greater was the absorption of capital in their purchase, the
blacker grew the black belts, the more intense was the concentration
of wealth and talent in plantation industry, the more complete
was the crystallization of industrial society. Were there
any remedies available? Certain politicians masquerading as
economists advocated the territorial expansion of the régime as
a means of relief. Their argument, however, would not stand
analysis. On one hand virtually all the territory on the continent
climatically available for the staples was by the middle of
the nineteenth century already incorporated into slaveholding
states; on the other hand, had new areas been available the chief
effects of their exploitation would have been to heighten the
prices of slaves and lower the prices of crops. Actual expansion
had in fact been too rapid for the best interests of society, for
it had kept the population too sparse to permit a proper development
of schools and the agencies of communications.

With a view to increase the power of the South to expand, and
for other purposes mainly political, a group of agitators in the
'fifties raised a vehement contention in favor of reopening the
African slave trade in full volume. This, if accomplished, would
have lowered the cost of labor, but its increase of the crops
would have depressed staple prices in still greater degree;
its unsettling of the slave market would have hurt vested interests;
and its infusion of a horde of savage Africans would have
set back the progress of the negroes already on hand and have
magnified permanently the problems of racial adjustment.

The prohibition of the interstate slave trade was another project
for modifying the situation. It was mooted in the main by
politicians alien to the régime. If accomplished it would have
wrought a sharp differentiation in the conditions within the several

groups of Southern states. An analogy may be seen in the
British possessions in tropical America, where, following the
Stoppage of the intercolonial slave trade in 1807, a royal commission
found that the average slave prices as gathered from sale
records between 1822 and 1830 varied from a range in the old
and stagnant colonies of £27 4s. II 3/4d. in Bermuda, £29 18s. 9 3/4d.
in the Bahamas, £47 1s. in Barbados and £44 15s. 2 1/4d. in Jamaica,
to £105 4s., £114 11s. and £120 4s. 7 l/2d. respectively in
the new and buoyant settlements of Trinidad, Guiana and British
Honduras.[93] If the interstate transfer had been stopped, the
Virginia, Maryland and Carolina slave markets would have been
glutted while the markets of every southwestern state were swept
bare. Slave prices in the former would have fallen to such levels
that masters would have eventually resorted to manumission
in self-defence, while in the latter all existing checks to the inflation
of prices would have been removed and all the evils consequent
upon the capitalization of labor intensified.

Another conceivable plan would have been to replace slavery at
large by serfdom. This would have attached the negroes to
whatever lands they chanced to occupy at the time of the legislation.
By force of necessity it would have checked the depletion
of soils; but by preventing territorial transfer it would
have robbed the negroes and their masters of all advantages afforded
by the virginity of unoccupied lands. Serfdom could
hardly be seriously considered by the citizens of a new and
sparsely settled country such as the South then was.

"Finally the conversion of slaves into freemen by a sweeping
emancipation was a project which met little endorsement except
among those who ignored the racial and cultural complications.
Financially it would work drastic change in private fortunes,
though the transfer of ownership from the masters to the laborers
themselves need not necessarily have great effect for the time
being upon the actual wealth of the community as a whole. Emancipation
would most probably, however, break down the plantation
system by making the labor supply unstable, and fill the

country partly with peasant farmers and partly with an unattached
and floating negro population. Exceptional negroes and
mulattoes would be sure to thrive upon their new opportunities,
but the generality of the blacks could be counted upon to relax
into a greater slackness than they had previously been permitted
to indulge in. The apprehension of industrial paralysis, however
appears to have been a smaller factor than the fear of social
chaos as a deterrent in the minds of the Southern whites from
thoughts of abolition.

The slaveholding régime kept money scarce, population sparse
and land values accordingly low; it restricted the opportunities
of many men of both races, and it kept many of the natural resources
of the Southern country neglected. But it kept the main
body of labor controlled, provisioned and mobile. Above all it
maintained order and a notable degree of harmony in a community
where confusion worse confounded would not have been far
to seek. Plantation slavery had in strictly business aspects at
least as many drawbacks as it had attractions. But in the large
it was less a business than a life; it made fewer fortunes than it
made men.