42 AGRICULTURAL CAPABILITIES OF NORTH AND SOUTII.

on an extensive scale.* On the other hand, for the raising of cereal crops this condition is not so essential. Even where labour is abundant and that labour free, the large capitalist does not in this mode of farming appear on the whole to have any preponderating advantage over the small proprietor, who, with his family, cultivates his own farm, as the example of the best cultivated states in Europe proves. Whatever superiority he may have in the power of combining and directing labour seems to be compensated by the greater energy and spirit which the sense of property gives to the exertions of the small proprietor. But there is another essential circumstance in which these two classes of crops differ. A single labourer, Mr. Russell tells us,† can cultivate twenty acres of wheat or Indian corn, while he cannot manage more than two of tobacco, or three of cotton. It appears from this that tobacco and cotton fulfil that condition which we saw was essential to the economical employment of slaves-the possibility of working large numbers within a limited space; while wheat and Indian corn, in the cultivation of which the labourers are dispersed over a wide surface, fail in this respect. We thus find that cotton, and the class of crops of which cotton may be taken as the type, favour the employment of slaves in the competition with peasant proprietors in two leading ways: first, they need extensive combination and organization of labour-requirements which slavery is eminently calculated to supply, but in respect to which the labour of peasant proprietors is defective; and secondly, they allow of labour being concentrated, and thus minimize the cardinal evil of slave-labour-the reluctance with which it is yielded. On the other hand, the cultivation of cereal crops, in which extensive combination of labour is not important, and in which the operations of industry are widely diffused, offers none of these advantages for the employment of slaves, while it is remarkably fitted to bring out in Ibid., pp. 141, 164.

* Russell's North America, p. 141.

The same observation had been made by De Tocqueville, who in the following passage has suggested a further reason for the unsuitableness of slave-labour for raising cereal crops :-"It has been observed that slave-labour is a very expensive method of cultivating corn. The farmer of cornland in a country where slavery is unknown, habitually retains a small number of labourers in his service, and at seedtime and harvest he hires several additional hands, who only live at his cost for a short period. But the agriculturist in a slave state is obliged to keep a large number of slaves the whole year round, in order to sow his fields and to gather in his crops, although their services are only required for a few weeks; but slaves are unable to wait till they are hired, and to subsist by their own labour in the mean time like free labourers: in order to have their services, they must be bought. Slavery, independently of its general disadvantages, is therefore still more inapplicable to countries in which corn is cultivated than to those which produce crops of a different kind."-Democracy in America vol. ii. p. 233.

SLAVE AND FREE PRODUCTS.

43

the highest degree the especial excellencies of the industry of free proprietors. Owing to these causes it has happened that slavery has been maintained in the Southern States, which favour the growth of tobacco, cotton, and analogous products, while, in the Northern States, of which cereal crops are the great staple, it from an early period declined and has ultimately died out. And in confirmation of this view it may be added that wherever in the Southern States the external conditions are especially favourable to cereal crops, as in parts of Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, and along the slopes of the Alleghanies, there slavery has always failed to maintain itself. It is owing to this cause that there now exists in some parts of the South a considerable element of free labouring population.

These considerations appear to explain the permanence of slavery in one division of North America, and its disappearance from the other; but there are other conditions essential to the economic success of the institution besides those which have been brought into view in the above comparison, to which it is necessary to advert in order to a right understanding of its true basis. These are high fertility in the soil, and a practically unlimited extent of it.

The necessity of these conditions to slavery will be apparent by reflecting on the unskilfulness and want of versatility in slave labour to which we have already referred.

When the soils are not of good quality cultivation needs to be elaborate; a larger capital is expended; and with the increase of capital the processes become more varied, and the agricultural implements of a finer and more delicate construction. With such implements slaves cannot be trusted, and for such processes they are unfit.* It is only, therefore, where the

* "I am here shewn tools," says Mr. Olmsted, "that no man in his senses, with us, would allow a labourer, to whom he was paying wages, to be encumbered with; and the excessive weight and clumsiness of which, I would judge, would make work at least ten per cent. greater than with those ordinarily used with us. And I am assured that, in the careless and clumsy way they must be used by the slaves, anything lighter or less rude could not be furnished them with good economy, and that such tools as we constantly give our labourers, and find our profit in giving them, would not last out a day in a Vírginia cornfield-much lighter and more free from stones though it be than ours.

So, too, when I ask why mules are so universally substituted for horses on the farm, the first reason given, and confessedly the most conclusive one, is that horses cannot bear the treatment that they always must get from negroes; horses are always soon foundered or crippled by them, while mules will bear cudgelling, and lose a meal or two now and then, and not be materially injured, and they do not take cold or get sick, if neglected or overworked. But I do not need to go further than to the window of the room in which I am writing, to see at almost any time, treatment of cattle that would insure the immediate discharge of the driver by almost any farmer owning them in the North." In another State, a Southern farmer

41

FERTILITY OF THE SOIL.

natural fertility of the soil is so great as to compensate for the inferiority of the cultivation,* where nature does so much as to leave little for art, and to supersede the necessity of the more difficult contrivances of industry, that slave labour can be turned to profitable account.†

Further, slavery, as a permanent system, has need not merely of a fertile soil, but of a practically unlimited extent of it. This arises from the defect of slave labour in point of versatility. As has been already remarked, the difficulty of teaching the slave anything is so great-the result of the compulsory ignorance in which he is kept, combined with want of intelligent interest in his work that the only chance of rendering his labour profitable is, when he has once learned a lesson, to keep him to that lesson for life. Accordingly where agricultural operations are carried on by slaves the business of each gang is always restricted to the raising of a single product. Whatever crop be best

describes to him "as a novelty, a plough 'with a sort of wing, like,' on one side, that pushed off and turned over a slice of the ground; from which it appeared that he had, until recently, never seen a mould-board; the common ploughs of this country being constructed on the same principle as those of the Chinese, and only rooting the ground like a hog or a mole-not cleaving and turning."-Seaboard Slave States, pp. 46, 47, 402.

*Mr. Russell (pp. 164, 165) states that the soil on which the sea-island cotton is raised is "poor, consisting for the most part of light sand;" but this is scarcely an exception to the statement in the text. The peculiar qualities of the soil in question, and the high price which its products are consequently enabled to command, render it, in an economic sense, a fertile soil," however it may be designated by an agriculturist as "poor."

In a debate in the House of Lords last session on the annexation of St. Domingo by Spain, it was stated by the Duke of Newcastle, that, in reply to the remonstrances of the British government relative to the apprehended introduction of slavery into that island, the Spanish government had referred to the great fertility of the soil of St. Domingo, which renders slavery unnecessary; in which reasoning his grace, as well as Lord Brougham, appeared to acquiesce.

"The culture [of tobacco] being once established [in Virginia] there were many reasons," says Mr. Olmsted, "growing out of the social structure of the colony, which for more than a century kept the industry of the Virginians confined to this one staple. These reasons were chiefly the difficulty of breaking the slaves, or training the bond-servants to new methods of labour; the want of enterprise or ingenuity in the proprietors to contrive other profitable occupations for them; and the difficulty or expense of distributing the guard or oversight, without which it was impossible to get any work done at all, if the labourers were separated, or worked in any other way than side by side, in gangs, as in the tobacco fields. Owing to these causes, the planters kept on raising tobacco with hardly sufficient intermission to provide themselves with the grossest animal sustenance, though often by reason of the excessive quantity raised, scarcely anything could be got for it.".. "Tobacco is not now considered peculiarly and excessively exhaustive: in a judicious rotation, especially as a preparation for wheat, it is an admirable fallow-crop, and under a scientific system of agriculture, it is grown with no continued detriment to the soil. But in Virginia it was grown without interruption or alteration, and the fields rapidly deteriorated in fertility."-Seaboard Slave States, pp. 237, 238.

EXHAUSTING EFFECTS OF SLAVE CULTURE.

45

suited to the character of the soil and the nature of slave industry, whether cotton, tobacco, sugar, or rice, that crop is cultivated, and that crop only. Rotation of crops is thus precluded by the conditions of the case. The soil is tasked again and again to yield the same product, and the inevitable result follows. After a short series of years its fertility is completely exhausted, the planter abandons the ground which he has rendered worthless, and passes on to seek in new soils for that fertility under which alone the agencies at his disposal can be profitably employed. The practical results of the system are thus described by a native of the South:-"I can show you with sorrow, in the older portions of Alabama, and in my native county of Madison, the sad memorials of the artless and exhausting culture of cotton. Our small planters, after taking the cream off their lands, unable to restore them by rest, manures, or otherwise, are going further west and south in search of other virgin lands, which they may and will despoil and impoverish in like manner. Our wealthier planters, with greater means and no more skill, are. buying out their poorer neighbours, extending their plantations, and adding to their slave force. The wealthy few, who are able to live on smaller profits, and to give their blasted fields some rest, are thus pushing off the many, who are merely independent. . . In traversing that county one will discover numerous farm-houses, once the abode of industrious and intelligent freemen, now occupied by slaves, or tenantless, deserted, and dilapidated; he will observe fields, once fertile, now unfenced, abandoned, and covered with those evil harbingers-fox-tail and broom-sedge; he will see the moss growing on the mouldering walls of once thrifty villages; and will find 'one only master grasps the whole domain' that once furnished happy homes for a dozen families. Indeed, a country in its infancy, where, fifty years ago, scarce a forest tree had been felled by the axe of the pioneer, is already exhibiting the painful signs of senility and decay apparent in Virginia and the Carolinas; the freshness of its agricultural glory is gone, the vigour of its youth is extinct, and the spirit of desolation seems brooding over it."* Even in Texas, before it had yet been ten years under the dominion of this devastating system, Mr. Olmsted tells us that the spectacle so familiar and so melancholy in all the older Slave States was already not unfrequently seen by the traveller "an abandoned plantation of

* Address of the Hon. C. C. Clay, jun., a slaveholder and advocate of slavery, reported by the author in De Bow's Review, and quoted by Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p 576.

46

ECONOMIC SUCCESS OF SLAVERY:

'worn out' fields with its little village of dwellings, now a home only for wolves and vultures."

Slave cultivation, therefore, precluding the conditions of rotation of crops or skilful management, tends inevitably to exhaust the land of a country, and consequently requires for its permanent success not merely a fertile soil but a practically unlimited extent of it.*

To sum up, then, the conclusions at which we have arrived, the successful maintenance of slavery, as a system of industry, requires the following conditions:-1st. Abundance of fertile soil; and, 2nd. A crop the cultivation of which demands combination and organization of labour on an extensive scale, and admits of its concentration. It is owing to the presence of these conditions that slavery has maintained itself in the Southern States of North America, and to their absence that it has disappeared from the Northern States.

CHAPTER III.

INTERNAL ORGANIZATION OF SLAVE COMMUNITIES.

THE explanation offered in the last chapter of the success and failure of slavery, in different portions of North America resolved itself into the proposition, that in certain cases the institution was found to be economically profitable while it proved unprofitable in others. From this position-the profitableness of slavery under given external conditions-the inference is generally made by those who advocate or look with indulgence on the system, that slavery must be regarded as conducive to at least the material well-being of countries in which these conditions exist; and these conditions being admittedly present in the Slave States of North America, it is concluded that the abolition of slavery in those states would necessarily be attended with a diminution of their wealth, and by consequence, owing

* Olmsted's Texas, p. xiv. If there be any fact upon which all competent witnesses to the condition of the Slave States are agreed it is the rapid deterioration of the soil under slave cultivation. On this point English, French, and American writers, the opponents and advocates of slavery, are at one. Yet a writer in the Saturday Review (Nov. 2, 1861) does not hesitate, on his own unsupported authority, to characterize this belief as "a popular fallacy." If it be a fallacy, it is certainly not only a popular but a plausible one, since it has succeeded in deceiving Miss Martineau, Olmsted, Russell, Stirling, and every writer of the least pretension to authority on the subject, no matter what his leanings. It is for the teader to make his choice between their united testimony and the closet experience of a Saturday Reviewer.