The following is written by a gentleman, “whose name,” says the editor of De Bow’s “Review,” “has long been illustrious for the services he has rendered to the South.”
“All of you must be aware of the condition of the class of people I allude to. What progress have they made in the last hundred years, and what is to be their future condition, unless some mode of employment be devised to improve it? A noble race of people! reduced to a condition but little above the wild Indian of the forest, or the European gipsy, without education, and, in many instances, unable to procure the food necessary to develop the natural man. They seem to be the only class of people in our State who are not disposed to emigrate to other countries, while our wealthy and intelligent citizens are leaving us by scores, taking with them the treasures which have been accumulated by mercantile thrift, as well as by the growth of cotton and the consequent exhaustion of the soil.”
Says Governor Hammond, also of South Carolina, in an address before the South Carolina Institute:—
“According to the best calculations which, in the absence of statistic facts, can be made, it is believed that, of the 300,000 white inhabitants of South Carolina, there are not less than 50,000, whose industry, such as it is, and compensated as it is, is not, in the present condition of things, and does not promise, hereafter, to be, adequate to procure them, honestly, such a support as every white person in this country is and feels himself entitled to.
“Some cannot be said to work at all. They obtain a precarious subsistence by occasional jobs, by hunting, by fishing, sometimes by plundering fields or folds, and, too often, by what is, in its effects, far worse—trading with slaves, and seducing them to plunder for their benefit.”
In another part of the same address, Governor Hammond says, that “$18 or, at the most $19, will cover the whole necessary annual cost of a full supply of wholesome and palatable food, purchased in the market;” meaning, generally, in South Carolina. From a comparison of these two extracts, it will be evident that $19 per annum is high wages for the labour of one-sixth of all the white population of South Carolina—and that one-sixth exclusive of the classes not obliged to labour for their living.
South Carolina affords the fairest example of the tendency of the Southern policy, because it is the oldest cotton State, and because slavery has been longest and most strongly and completely established there. But the same laws are seen in operation leading to the same sure results everywhere. Some carefully compiled statistics of the seaboard district of Georgia will be found in [Appendix (D)], showing the comparative condition of the people in the rich sea-island counties, and those in their rear, the latter consisting in large proportion of poor or worn-out lands. I recapitulate here the more exact of these statistics:—
Population.—A large majority of the whole white population resides within the barren counties, of which the slave population is less than one-fourteenth that of the aggregate slave population of the whole.
Wealth.—The personal estate of the whites of these upper counties is, on an average, less than one-sixth that of the others.
Education.—As the wealthy are independent of public schools, the means of education are scarcely more available for those who are not rich in one than the other, the school-houses being, on an average, ten and a half miles apart in the less populous, thirteen and three-quarters miles apart in the more populous.