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

by Henry Charles Carey

It will be said, however, that if food should so much increase in value as to render it desirable for Virginia to retain the whole growth of her population, black and white, the necessary effect would, be a great rise in the price of cotton, and a great increase in the wealth of the planters further South, who would be desirous to have negroes, even at greatly increased prices. That the price of cotton would rise is quite certain. Nothing keeps it down but the low price of food, which forces out the negroes of the Northern States, and thus, maintains the domestic slave trade; and there is no reason to doubt that not only would there be a large increase in its price, but that the power to pay for it would increase with equal rapidity. More negro labour would then certainly be needed, and then would exist precisely the state of things that leads inevitably to freedom. When two masters seek one labourer, the latter becomes free; but when two labourers seek one master, the former become enslaved. The increased value of negro labour would render it necessary for the owners of negroes to endeavour to stimulate the labourer to exertion, and this could be done only by the payment of wages for over-work, as is even now done to a great extent. At present, the labour of the slave is in a high degree unproductive, as will be seen by the following passage from a letter to the New York Daily Times, giving the result of information derived from a gentleman of Petersburgh, Virginia, said to be "remarkable for accuracy and preciseness of his information:"—

"He tells me," says the writer, "he once very carefully observed how mush labour was expended in securing a crop of very thin wheat, and found that it took four negroes one day to cradle, rake, and bind one acre. (That is, this was the rate at which the field was harvested.) In the wheat-growing districts of Western New York, four men would be expected to do five acres of a similar crop.

"Mr. Griscom further states, as his opinion, that four negroes do not, in the ordinary agricultural operations of this State, accomplish as much as one labourer in New Jersey. Upon my expressing my astonishment, he repeated it as his deliberately formed opinion.

"I have since again called on Mr. Griscom, and obtained permission to give his name with the above statement. He also wishes me to add, that the ordinary waste in harvesting, by the carelessness of the negroes, above that which occurs in the hands of Northern labourers, is large enough to equal what a Northern farmer would consider a satisfactory profit on the crop."

To bring into activity all this vast amount of labour now wasted, it is needed to raise the cost of man, by raising the price of food; and that is to be done by bringing the farmer's market to his door, and thus giving value to labour and land. Let the people of Maryland and Virginia, Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee be enabled to bring into activity their vast treasures of coal and iron ore, and to render useful their immense water-powers—free the masters from their present dependence on distant markets, in which they must sell all they produce, and must buy all they consume—and the negro slave becomes free, by virtue of the same great law that in past times has freed the serf of England, and is now freeing the serf of Russia. In all countries of the world man has become free as land has acquired value, and as its owners have been enriched; and in all man has become enslaved as land has lost its value, and its owners have been impoverished.[212]

CHAPTER XXI.

OF THE DUTY OF THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND.

The English politico-economical system denounced by Adam Smith had not failed before the close of the last century to be productive of results in the highest degree unfavourable to man; and to account for them it became necessary to discover that they were the inevitable result of certain great natural laws; and to this necessity it was that the world was indebted for the Ricardo-Malthusian system, which may be briefly stated in the following propositions:—

First: That in the commencement of cultivation, when population is small and land consequently abundant, the best soils—those capable of yielding the largest return, say one hundred quarters to a given quantity of labour—alone are cultivated.

Second: That with the progress of population, the fertile lands are all occupied, and there arises a necessity for cultivating those yielding a smaller return; and that resort is then had to a second, and afterward to a third and a fourth class of soils, yielding respectively ninety, eighty, and seventy quarters to the same quantity of labour.