“Wheat crops, however, are coming in good, above an average; but oats are entirely cut off. I am issuing commissary, this week for the county, to distribute some corn bought by the Commissioner’s Court, for the destitute of our county; and could you have witnessed the applicants, and heard their stories, for the last few days, I am satisfied you could draw a picture that would excite the sympathy of the most selfish heart. I am free to confess that I had no idea of the destitution that prevails in this county. Why, sir, what do you think of a widow and her children living, for three days and nights, on boiled weeds, called pepper grass?—yet such, I am credibly informed, has been the case in Chambers County.”—From a letter to the editor of the Montgomery (Ala.) Journal, from Hon. Samuel Pearson, Judge of Probate, for Chambers County, Alabama.
“Famine in Upper Georgia.—We have sad news from the north part of Georgia. The Dalton Times says that many people are without corn, or means to procure any. And, besides, there is none for sale. In some neighbourhoods, a bushel could not be obtained for love or money. Poor men are offering to work for a peck of corn a day. If they plead, Our children will starve,’ they are answered, ‘So will mine, if I part with the little I have.’ Horses and mules are turned out into the woods, to wait for grass, or starve. The consequence is, that those who have land can only plant what they can with the hoe—they cannot plough. It is seriously argued that, unless assisted soon, many of the poor class of that section will perish.”—California Paper.[39]
No approach to anything like such a state of things as those extracts portray (which extended over parts of three agricultural States) ever occurred, I am sure, in any rural district of the Free States. Even in our most thickly-peopled manufacturing districts, to which the staple articles of food are brought from far-distant regions, assistance from abroad, to sustain the poor, has never been asked; nor do I believe the poor have ever been reduced, for weeks together, to a diet of corn. But this famine at the South occurred in a region where most productive land can be purchased for from three to seven dollars an acre; where maize and wheat grow kindly; where cattle, sheep, and hogs, may be pastured over thousands of acres, at no rent; where fuel has no value, and at a season of the year when clothing or shelter is hardly necessary to comfort.
It is a remarkable fact that this frightful famine, unprecedented in North America, was scarcely noticed, in the smallest way, by any of those Southern papers which, in the ordinary course of things, ever reach the North. In the Charleston, Savannah, and Mobile papers, received at our commercial reading-rooms, I have not been able to find any mention of it at all—a single, short, second-hand paragraph in a market report excepted. But these journals had columns of reports from our papers, and from their private correspondents, as well as pages of comment, on the distress of the labourers in New York City the preceding winter.
In 1837, the year of repudiation in Mississippi, a New Orleans editor describes the effect of the money-pressure upon the planters, as follows:—
“They are now left without provisions, and the means of living and using their industry for the present year. In this dilemma, planters, whose crops have been from 100 to 700 bales, find themselves forced to sacrifice many of their slaves, in order to get the common necessaries of life, for the support of themselves and the rest of their negroes. In many places, heavy planters compel their slaves to fish for the means of subsistence, rather than sell them at such ruinous rates. There are, at this moment, thousands of slaves in Mississippi, that know not where the next morsel is to come from. The master must be ruined, to save the wretches from being starved.”
Absolute starvation is as rare, probably, in slavery, as in freedom; but I do not believe it is more so. An instance is just recorded in the New Orleans Delta. Other papers omit to notice it—as they usually do facts which it may be feared will do discredit to slavery—and even the Delta, as will be seen, is anxious that the responsibility of the publication should be fixed upon the coroner:
“Inquest.—Death from neglect and starvation.—The body of an old negro, named Bob, belonging to Mr. S. B. Davis, was found lying dead in the woods, near Marigny Canal, on the Gentilly Road, yesterday. The coroner held an inquest; and, after hearing the evidence, the jury returned a verdict of ‘Death from starvation and exposure, through neglect of his master.’ It appeared from the evidence that the negro was too old to work any more, being nearly seventy; and so they drove him forth into the woods to die. He had been without food for forty-eight hours, when found by Mr. Wilbank, who lives near the place, and who brought him into his premises on a wheelbarrow, gave him something to eat, and endeavoured to revive his failing energies, which had been exhausted from exposure and want of food. Every effort to save his life, however, was unavailing, and he died shortly after being brought to Mr. Wilbank’s. The above statement we publish, as it was furnished us by the coroner.”—Sept. 18, 1855.
This is the truth, then—is it not?—The slaves are generally sufficiently well-fed to be in tolerable working condition; but not as well as our free labourers generally are: slavery, in practice, affords no safety against occasional suffering for want of food among labourers, or even against their starvation any more than the competitive system; while it withholds all encouragement from the labourer to improve his faculties and his skill; destroys his self-respect; misdirects and debases his ambition, and withholds all the natural motives which lead men to endeavour to increase their capacity of usefulness to their country and the world. To all this, the occasional suffering of the free labourer is favourable, on the whole. The occasional suffering of the slave has no such advantage. To deceit, indolence, malevolence, and thievery, it may lead, as may the suffering—though it is much less likely to—of the free labourer; but to industry, cultivation of skill, perseverance, economy, and virtuous habits, neither the suffering, nor the dread of it as a possibility, ever can lead the slave, as it generally does the free labourer, unless it is by inducing him to run away.