The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign / Why It Exists, and How It May Be Extinguished

by Henry Charles Carey

In this country protection has always, to some extent, existed; but at some times it has been efficient, and at others not; and our tendency toward freedom or slavery has always been in the direct ratio of its efficiency or inefficiency. In the period from 1824 to 1833, the tendency was steadily in the former direction, but it was only in the latter part of it that it was made really efficient. Then mills and furnaces increased in number, and there was a steady increase in the tendency toward the establishment of local places of exchange; and then it was that Virginia held her convention at which was last discussed in that State the question of emancipation. In 1833, however, protection was abandoned, and a tariff was established by which it was provided that we should, in a few years, have a system of merely revenue duties; and from that date the abandonment of the older States proceeded with a rapidity never before known, and with it grew the domestic slave trade and the pro-slavery feeling. Then it was that were passed the laws restricting emancipation and prohibiting education; and then it was that the export of slaves from Virginia and the Carolinas was so great that the population of those States remained almost, if not quite stationary, and that the growth of black population fell from thirty per cent., in the ten previous years, to twenty-four percent.[203] That large export of slaves resulted in a reduction of the price of Southern products to a point never before known; and thus it was that the system called free trade provided cheap cotton. Slavery grew at the South, and at the North; for with cheap cotton and cheap food came so great a decline in the demand for labour, that thousands of men found themselves unable to purchase this cheap food to a sufficient extent to feed their wives and their children. A paper by "a farm labourer" thus describes that calamitous portion of our history, when the rapid approach of the system called free trade, under the strictly revenue provisions of the Compromise Tariff, had annihilated competition for the purchase of labour:—

"The years 1839, 1840, and 1841 were striking elucidations of such cases; when the cry of sober, industrious, orderly men—'Give me work! only give me work; MAKE YOUR OWN TERMS—MYSELF AND FAMILY HAVE NOTHING TO EAT'—was heard in our land. In those years thousands of cases of the kind occurred in our populous districts."—Pittsburgh Dispatch.

That such was the fact must be admitted by all who recollect the great distress that existed in 1841-2. Throughout the whole length and breadth of the land, there was an universal cry of "Give me work; make your own terms—myself and family have nothing to eat;" and the consequence of this approach toward slavery was so great a diminution in the consumption of food, that the prices at which it was then exported to foreign countries were lower than they had been for many years; and thus it was that the farmer paid for the system which had diminished the freedom of the labourer and the artisan.

It was this state of things that re-established protection for the American labourer, whether in the field or in the workshop. The tariff of 1842 was passed, and at once there arose competition for the purchase of labour. Mills were to be built, and men were needed to quarry the stone and get out the lumber, and other men were required to lay the stone and fashion the lumber into floors and roofs, doors and windows; and the employment thus afforded enabled vast numbers of men again to occupy houses of their own, and thus was produced a new demand for masons and carpenters, quarrymen and lumbermen. Furnaces were built, and mines were opened, and steam-engines were required; and the men employed at these works were enabled to consume more largely of food, while ceasing to contend with the agricultural labourer for employment on the farm. Mills were filled with females, and the demand for cloths increased, with corresponding diminution in the competition for employment in the making of shirts and coats. Wages rose, and they rose in every department of labour; the evidence of which is to be found in the fact that the consumption of food and fuel greatly increased, while that of cloth almost doubled, and that of iron trebled in the short period of five years.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise than that the reward of labour should rise? The cotton manufacturer needed labourers, male and female, and so did his neighbour of the woollens mill; and the labourers they now employed could buy shoes and hats. The iron-masters and the coal-miners needed workmen, and the men they employed needed cotton and woollen cloths; and they could consume more largely of food. The farmer's markets tended to improve, and he could buy more largely of hats and shoes, ploughs and harrows, and the hatmakers and shoemakers, and the makers of ploughs and harrows, needed more hands; and therefore capital was everywhere looking for labour, where before labour had been looking for capital. The value of cottons, and woollens, and iron produced in 1846, as compared with that of 1842, was greater by a hundred millions of dollars; and all this went to the payment of labour, for all the profits of the iron-master and of the cotton and woollen manufacturer went to the building of new mills and furnaces, or to the enlargement of the old ones. Unhappily, however, for us, our legislators were smitten with a love of the system called free trade. They were of opinion that we were, by right, an agricultural nation, and that so we must continue; and that the true way to produce competition for the purchase of labour was to resolve the whole nation into a body of farmers—and the tariff of 1842 was repealed.

If the reader will now turn to page 107, he will see how large must have been the domestic slave trade from 1835 to 1840, compared with that of the period from 1840 to 1845. The effect of this in increasing the crop and reducing the price of cotton was felt with great severity in the latter period,[204] and it required time to bring about a change. We are now moving in the same direction in which we moved from 1835 to 1840. For four years past, we have not only abandoned the building of mills and furnaces, but have closed hundreds of old ones, and centralization, therefore, grows from day to day. The farmer of Ohio can no longer exchange his food directly with the maker of iron. He must carry it to New York, as must the producer of cotton in Carolina; who sees the neighbouring factory closed. [205] Local places of exchange decline, and great cities take their place; and with the growth of centralization grows the slave trade, North and South. Palaces rise in New York and Philadelphia, while droves of black slaves are sent to Texas to raise cotton, and white ones at the North perish of disease, and sometimes almost of famine. "We could tell," says a recent writer in one of the New York journals—

"Of one room, twelve feet by twelve, in which were five resident families, comprising twenty persons of both sexes and all ages, with only two beds, without partition or screen, or chair or table, and all dependent for their miserable support upon the sale of chips, gleaned from the streets, at four cents a basket—of another, still smaller and still more destitute, inhabited by a man, a woman, two little girls, and a boy, who were supported by permitting the room to be used as a rendezvous by the abandoned women of the street—of another, an attic room seven feet by five, containing scarcely an article of furniture but a bed, on which lay a fine-looking man in a raging fever, without medicine or drink or suitable food, his toil-worn wife engaged in cleaning dirt from the floor, and his little child asleep on a bundle of rags in the corner—of another of the same dimensions, in which we found, seated on low boxes around a candle placed on a keg, a woman and her oldest daughter, (the latter a girl of fifteen, and, as we were told, a prostitute,) sewing on shirts, for the making of which they were paid four cents apiece, and even at that price, out of which they had to support two small children, they could not get a supply of work—of another of about the same size occupied by a street rag-picker and his family, the income of whose industry was eight dollars a month—of another, scarcely larger, into which we were drawn by the terrific screams of a drunken man beating his wife, containing no article of furniture whatever—another warmed only by a tin pail of lighted charcoal placed in the centre of the room, over which bent a blind man endeavouring to warm himself; around him three or four men and women swearing and quarrelling; in one corner on the floor a woman, who had died the day previous of disease, and in another two or three children sleeping on a pile of rags; (in regard to this room, we may say that its occupants were coloured people, and from them but a few days previous had been taken and adopted by one of our benevolent citizens a beautiful little white girl, four or five years of age, whose father was dead and whose mother was at Blackwell's Island;) another from which not long; since twenty persons, sick with fever were taken to the hospital, and every individual of them died. But why extend the catalogue? Or why attempt to convey to the imagination by words the hideous squalor and the deadly effluvia; the dim, undrained courts, oozing with pollution; the dark narrow stairways decayed with age, reeking with filth, and overrun with vermin; the rotten floors, ceilings begrimed, crumbling, ofttimes too low to permit you to stand upright, and windows stuffed with rags; or why try to portray the gaunt shivering forms and wild ghastly faces in these black and beetling abodes, wherein from cellar to garret

——'All life dies, death lives, and nature breeds
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, unutterable!'" N. York Courier and Inquirer.

Our shops are now everywhere filled with the products of the cheap labour of England—of the labour of those foreign women who make shirts at a penny apiece, finding the needles and the thread, and of those poor girl's who spend a long day at making artificial flowers for which they receive two pence, and then eke out the earnings of labour by the wages of prostitution; and our women are everywhere driven from employment—the further consequences of which may be seen in the following extract from another journal of the day:—

"A gentleman who had been deputed to inquire into the condition of this class of operatives, found one of the most expert of them working from five o'clock in the morning until eleven at night, yet earning only about three dollars a week. Out of this, she had to pay a dollar and a half for board, leaving a similar amount for fuel, clothing, and all other expenses. Her condition, however, as compared with that of her class generally, was one of opulence. The usual earnings were but two dollars a week, which, as respectable board, could be had nowhere for less; than a dollar and a half, left only fifty cents for everything else. The boarding-houses, even at this price, are of the poorest character, always noisome and unhealthy, and not unfrequently in vile neighbourhoods. With such positive and immediate evils to contend with, what wonder that so many needlewomen take 'the wages of sin?'"