The expense of boarding, clothes, taxes, and so forth, of a male slave, is estimated by Robert C. Hall, a Maryland planter, at $45 per annum; this in a climate but little milder than that of New York, and in a breeding state. By J. D. Messenger, Jerusalem, Virginia: “The usual estimate for an able-bodied labourer—three barrels of corn, and 250 pounds of well-cured bacon, seldom using beef or pork; peas and potatoes substitute about one-third the allowance of bread” (maize). By R. G. Morris, Amherst County, Va.: “Not much beef is used on our estates; bacon, however, is used much more freely, three pounds a week being the usual allowance. The quantity of milk used by slaves is frequently considerable.”-Pat. Office Report, 1848.
On the most valuable plantation, with one exception, which I visited in the South, no meat was regularly provided for the slaves, but a meal of bacon was given them “occasionally.”
Louisiana is the only State in which meat is required, by law, to be furnished the slaves. I believe the required ration is four pounds a week, with a barrel of corn (flour barrel of ears of maize) per month, and salt. (This law is a dead letter, many planters in the State making no regular provision of meat for their force.) In North Carolina the law fixes “a quart of corn per day” as the proper allowance of food for a slave. In no other States does the law define the quantity, but it is required, in general terms, to be sufficient for the health of the slave; and I have no doubt that suffering from want of food is rare. The food is everywhere, however, coarse, crude, and wanting in variety; much more so than that of our prison convicts.
Does argument, that the condition of free-labourers is, on the whole, better than that of slaves, or that simply they are generally better fed, and more comfortably provided, seem to any one to be unnecessary? Many of our newspapers, of the largest circulation, and certainly of great influence among people—probably not very reflective, but certainly not fools—take the contrary for granted, whenever it suits their purpose. The Southern newspapers, so far as I know, do so, without exception. And very few Southern writers, on any subject whatever, can get through a book, or even a business or friendly letter, to be sent North, without, in some form or other, asserting that Northern labourers might well envy the condition of the slaves. A great many Southern gentlemen—gentlemen whom I respect much for their moral character, if not for their faculties of observation—have asserted it so strongly and confidently, as to shut my mouth, and by assuring me that they had personally observed the condition of Northern labourers themselves, and really knew that I was wrong, have for a time half convinced me against my long experience. I have, since my return, received letters to the same effect: I have heard the assertion repeated by several travellers, and even by Northerners, who had resided long in the South: I have heard it publicly repeated in Tammany Hall, and elsewhere, by Northern Democrats: I have seen it in European books and journals: I have, in times past, taken its truth for granted, and repeated it myself. Such is the effect of the continued iteration of falsehood.
Since my return I have made it a subject of careful and extended inquiry. I have received reliable and unprejudiced information in the matter, or have examined personally the food, the wages, and the habits of the labourers in more than one hundred different farmers’ families, in every Free State (except California), and in Canada. I have made personal observations and inquiries of the same sort in Great Britain, Germany, France, and Belgium. In Europe, where there are large landed estates, which are rented by lordly proprietors to the peasant farmers, or where land is divided into such small portions that its owners are unable to make use of the best modern labour-saving implements, the condition of the labourer, as respects food, often is as bad as that of the slave often is—never worse than that sometimes is. But in general, even in France, I do not believe it is generally or frequently worse; I believe it is, in the large majority of cases, much better than that of the majority of slaves. And as respects higher things than the necessities of life—in their intellectual, moral, and social condition, with some exceptions on large farms and large estates in England, bad as is that of the mass of European labourers, the man is a brute or a devil who, with my information, would prefer that of the American slave. As to our own labourers, in the Free States, I have already said enough for my present purpose.
But it is time to speak of the extreme cases, of which so much use has been made, in the process of destroying the confidence of the people of the United States in the freedom of trade, as applied to labour.
In the year 1855, the severest winter ever known occurred at New York, in conjunction with unprecedentedly high prices of food and fuel, extraordinary business depression, unparalleled marine disasters, and the failure of establishments employing large numbers of men and women. At the same time, there continued to arrive, daily, from five hundred to one thousand of the poorer class of European peasantry. Many of these came, expecting to find the usual demand and the usual reward for labour, and were quite unprepared to support themselves for any length of time unless they could obtain work and wages. There was consequently great distress.
We all did what we thought we could, or ought, to relieve it; and with such success, that not one single case of actual starvation is known to have occurred in a close compacted population of over a million, of which it was generally reported fifty thousand were out of employment. Those who needed charitable assistance were, in nearly every case, recent foreign immigrants, sickly people, cripples, drunkards, or knaves taking advantage of the public benevolence, to neglect to provide for themselves. Most of those who received assistance would have thrown a slave’s ordinary allowance in the face of the giver, as an insult; and this often occurred with more palatable and suitable provisions. Hundreds and hundreds, to my personal knowledge, during the worst of this dreadful season, refused to work for money-wages that would have purchased them ten times the slave’s ordinary allowance of the slave’s ordinary food. In repeated instances, men who represented themselves to be suffering for food refused to work for a dollar a day. A labourer, employed by a neighbour of mine, on wages and board, refused to work unless he was better fed. “What’s the matter,” said my neighbour; “don’t you have enough?” “Enough; yes, such as it is.” “You have good meat, good bread, and a variety of vegetables; what do you want else?” “Why, I want pies and puddings, too, to be sure.” Another labourer left another neighbour of mine, because, as he alleged, he never had any meat offered him except beef and pork; he “didn’t see why he shouldn’t have chickens.”
And these men went to New York, and joined themselves to that army on which our Southern friends exercise their pity—of labourers out of work—of men who are supposed to envy the condition of the slave, because the “slave never dies for want of food.”[38]
In the depth of winter, a trustworthy man wrote us from Indiana:—