The number of plantations of this class, and the proportion of those employed upon them to the whole body of negroes in the country, is as I have said, rapidly increasing. At the present prices of cotton the large grower has such advantages over the small, that the owner of a plantation of fifty slaves, favourably situated, unless he lives very recklessly, will increase in wealth so rapidly and possess such a credit that he may very soon establish or purchase other plantations, so that at his death his children may be provided for without reducing the effective force of negroes on any division of his landed estate. The excessive credit given to such planters by negro dealers and tradesmen renders this the more practicable. The higher the price of cotton the higher is that of negroes, and the higher the price of negroes the less is it in the power of men of small capital to buy them. Large plantations of course pay a much larger per centage on the capital invested in them than smaller ones; indeed the only plausible economical defence of slavery is simply an explanation of the advantages of associated labour, advantages which are possessed equally by large manufacturing establishments in which free labourers are brought together and employed in the most effective manner, and which I can see no sufficient reason for supposing could not be made available for agriculture did not the good results flowing from small holdings, on the whole, counterbalance them. If the present high price of cotton and the present scarcity of labour at the South continues, the cultivation of cotton on small plantations will by-and-by become unusual, for the same reason that hand-loom weaving has become unusual in the farm houses of Massachusetts.
But whatever advantages large plantations have, they accrue only to their owners and to the buyers of cotton; the mass of the white inhabitants are dispersed over a greater surface, discouraged and driven toward barbarism by them, and the blacks upon them, while rapidly degenerating from all that is redeeming in savage-life, are, it is to be feared, gaining little that is valuable of civilization.
In the report of the Grand Jury of Richland District, South Carolina, in eighteen hundred and fifty-four, calling for a re-establishment of the African slave trade,[35] it is observed: “As to the moralty of this question, it is scarcely necessary for us to allude to it; when the fact is remarked that the plantations of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas have been and are daily settled by the removal of slaves from the more northern of the Slave States, and that in consequence of their having been raised in a more healthy climate and in most cases trained to pursuits totally different, the mortality even on the best-ordered farms is so great that in many instances the entire income is expended in the purchase of more slaves from the same source in order to replenish and keep up those plantations, while in every case the condition of the slave, if his life is spared, is made worse both physically and morally. * * * And if you look at the subject in a religious point of view, the contrast is equally striking, for when you remove a slave from the more northern to the more southern parts of the slaveholding States, you thereby diminish his religious opportunities.”
I believe that this statement gives an exaggerated and calumnious report of the general condition of the slaves upon the plantations of the States referred to—containing, as they do, nearly one half of the whole slave population of the South—but I have not been able to resist the conviction that in the districts where cotton is now grown most profitable to the planters, the oppression and deterioration of the negro race is much more lamentable than is generally supposed by those who like myself have been constrained, by other considerations, to accept it as a duty to oppose temperately but determinately the modern policy of the South, of which this is an immediate result. Its effect on the white race, I still consider to be infinitely more deplorable.
CHAPTER VI.
SLAVERY AS A POOR-LAW SYSTEM.
In the year 1846 the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States addressed a circular of inquiries to persons engaged in various businesses throughout the country, to obtain information of the national resources. In reply to this circular, forty-eight sugar-planters, of St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana, having compared notes, made the following statement of the usual expenses of a plantation, which might be expected to produce, one year with another, one hundred hogsheads of sugar:—
| Household and family expenses | $1,000 | |
| Overseer’s salary | 400 | |
| Food and clothing for 15 working hands, at $30 | 450 | |
| Food and clothing for 15 old negroes and children, at $15 | 225 | |
| 1½ per cent. on capital invested (which is about $40,000),to keep it in repair | 600 | |
| 2,675 | ||
| 50 hogsheads sugar, at 4 cents per pound (net proceeds) | $2,000 | |
| 25 hogsheads sugar, at 3 cents per pound (net proceeds) | 750 | |
| 25 hogsheads sugar, at 2 cents per pound (net proceeds) | 500 | |
| 4,000 gallons of molasses, at 10 cents | 400 | |
| 3,650 | ||
| Leaving a profit of | $975 | |
Another gentleman furnished the following estimate of the expenses of one of the larger class of plantations, working one hundred slaves, and producing, per annum, four to five hundred hogsheads of sugar:—
| Overseer | $1,500 |
| Physician’s attendance (by contract, $3 a head, of all ages) | 300 |
| Yearly repairs to engine, copper work, resetting of sugar kettles, etc., at least | 900 |
| Engineer, during grinding season | 200 |
| Pork, 50 pounds per day—say, per annum, 90 hogsheads, at $12 | 1,080 |
| Hoops | 80 |
| Clothing, two full suits per annum, shoes, caps, hats, and 100 blankets, at least $15 per slave | 1,500 |
| Mules or horses, and cattle to replace, at least | 500 |
| Implements of husbandry, iron, nails, lime, etc., at least | 1,000 |
| Factor’s commission, 2½ per cent. | 500 |
| $7,560 |
(It should be noticed that in this estimate the working force is considered as being equal, in first-class hands, to but one-third of the whole number of slaves.) — In the report of an Agricultural Society, the work of one hand, on a well-regulated sugar-estate, is put down at the cultivation of five acres—producing 5,000 pounds of sugar, and 125 gallons of molasses; the former valued on the spot at 5½ cents per pound, and the latter at 18 cents per gallon—together, $297.50. The annual expenses, per hand, including wages paid, horses, mules, and oxen, physician’s bills, etc., $105. An estate of eighty negroes annually costs $8,330. The items are as follows—Salt meat and spirits, $830; clothing, $1,200; medical attendance and medicines, $400; Indian corn, $1,090 (total for food and drink of negroes, and other live stock, $24 per head of the negroes, per annum. For clothing $15); overseer and sugar-maker’s salary, $1,000; taxes $300. The capital invested in 1,200 acres of land, with its stock of slaves, horses, mules, and working oxen, is estimated at $147,200. One-third, or 400 acres, being cultivated annually in cane, it is estimated, will yield 400,000 pounds, at 5½ cents, and 10,000 gallons molasses at 18 cents—together $23,800. Deduct annual expense, as before, $8,330, an apparent profit remains of $15,470 or 10 3-7 per cent. interest on the investment. The crop upon which these estimates were based, has been considered an uncommonly fine one.