BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW STATES.

75

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

It has been contended that the constant drain of slaves must

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

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

76

THE INTERNAL SLAVE TRADE.

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

OUTLINE OF THE ECONOMY OF SLAVE SOCIETIES. 77

CHAPTER V.

INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF SLAVE SOCIETIES.

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

78

NO ELEMENT OF PROGRESS

dispersed in a semi-savage condition over a vast territory. In course of time the system begins to bear its fruit. The more fertile soils of the country, tasked again and again to render the same products, at length become exhausted, and refuse any longer to yield up their riches to servile hands; but there are new soils within reach which the plough has not yet touched, regions of high fertility, pre-eminently fitted for the cultivation of slave products, bordering however on the tropics, and unfavourable to human life when engaged in severe toil. At this point a new phase of the system discloses itself. A division of labour takes place. A portion of the slaveholders with their slave bands move forward to occupy the new territory, while the remainder, holding to their old seats, become the breeders of slaves for those who have left them, and take, as their part, the repairing from their more healthy populations the waste of slave life produced by tropical toil. Thus, as the domain of slavery is extended, its organization becomes more complete, and the fate of the slave population more harsh and hopeless. Slavery in its simple and primitive form is developed into slavery supported by a slave trade-into slavery expansive, aggressive, destructive of human life, regardless of human ties, -into slavery in its most dangerous and most atrocious form; and for the system thus matured a secure basis is afforded by the principles of population. Such is an outline of the economy of society in the Slave States of North America, as I have ventured to describe it; and the condition of facts which it discloses goes far, as it seems to me, to establish the conclusion that it is a structure essentially different from any form of social life which has hitherto been known among progressive communities, and one which, if allowed to proceed in its normal development undisturbed by intervention from without, can only conduct to one issue-an organized barbarism of the most relentless and formidable kind.

But it may be well to pursue this inquiry somewhat further. If the germs of a future civilization are contained in the social system which has been described, in what department of it are they to be found? Among the mean whites? Among the slaves? Among the slave masters?

The mean whites, as has been shown, are the natural growth of the slave system; their existence and character flowing necessarily from two facts—the slaves, which render the capitalists independent of their services,* and the wilderness, the

* "The rich," said General Marion, and in these few words he sketched the whole working of slavery, "have no need of the poor, because they have their own slaves to do their work."

IN SLAVE COMMUNITIES.

79

constant feature of slave countries, which enables them to exist without engaging in regular work. There is no capital to support them as hired labourers, and they have the means of subsisting, in a semi-savage condition, without it. Under these circumstances, by what steps are they to advance to an improvement of their condition?

It will perhaps be thought that with a vast unappropriated territory around them the mean whites may be expected in time to become peasant proprietors, and to cultivate the districts which they now merely occupy. This is undoubtedly what would happen with an influx of Northern settlers. But the mean whites lack for such a lot two indispensable requisites, capital and industry. Had they the latter, they might perhaps in time acquire the former; but regular industry is only known to them as the vocation of slaves, and it is the one fate which above all others they desire to avoid. They will for a time, indeed, when pressed for food, their ordinary resources of hunting or plunder failing them, hire themselves out for occasional services; but, so soon as they have satisfied the immediate need, they hasten to escape from the degradation of industry, and are as eager as Indians to return to their wilds.

Another means of redemption is sometimes imagined for the mean whites. It is thought that, with the progress of population in the Slave States, they will ultimately be forced into competition with the slaves, and that, this competition once effectually commenced, the whites once engaged in regular industry, the superiority of free to servile labour will become manifest, and will gradually lead to the displacement of the latter. In this way, it is anticipated, the problem of abolishing slavery, and that of elevating the white population, may in the natural course of events be effectually solved by the same process. Unfortunately this cheering view is entirely unsustained by any foundation of fact. Population in slave communities follows laws of growth of its own. It increases, it is true, but by dispersion, not by concentration, and consequently the pressure upon the poor white, which it is assumed will force him into competition with the slave, is never likely to be greater than at the present moment. reached the starvation point,

In fact it has In fact it has now in many districts but without producing any of the effects which are anticipated from it. But, again, the free labour of the South possesses none of that superiority to slave labour, which is characteristic of free labour when reared in free communities. This is a distinction which in economic