American Negro Slavery · Chapter 22Bus (4)
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[Footnote 90: D.R. Hundley, Social Relations in our Southern States (New York, 1860), pp. 91-100, 193-303; John M. Aughey, The Iron Furnace, or Slavery and Secession (Philadelphia, 1863), p. 231.]
[Footnote 91: F.L. Olmsted, Journey through Texas, p. 513.]
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 our negroes, upon whose increase (miserabile dictu!) 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."
[Footnote 92: Francis Corbin to James Madison, Oct. 10, 1819, in the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, XLIII, 263.]
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 4_s_. 11-3/4_d_. in Bermuda, £29 18_s_. 9-3/4_d_. in the Bahamas, £47 1_s_. in Barbados and £44 15_s_. 2-1/4_d_. in Jamaica, to £105 4_s_., £114 11_s_. and £120 4_s_. 7-1/2_d_ 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.
[Footnote 93: Accounts and Papers [of the British Government], 1837-1838, vol. 48, [p. 329].]
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.