Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1

by John Bright

The particular facts with regard to this I need not, perhaps, enter into; but I find, if I compare the prices of cotton in Liverpool from 1856 to 1860 with the prices from 1841 to 1845, that every pound of cotton brought from America and sold in Liverpool fetched in the last five years more than twenty per cent in excess of what it did in the former five years, notwithstanding that we were every year in greater difficulties through finding our supply of cotton insufficient.

But what was the reason that we did not get enough? It was because there was not labour enough in the Southern States. You see every day in the newspapers that there are four millions of slaves, but of those four millions of slaves some are growing tobacco, some rice, and some sugar; a very large number are employed in domestic servitude, and a large number in factories, mechanical operations, and business in towns; and there remain only about one million negroes, or only one-quarter of the whole number, who are regularly engaged in the cultivation of cotton.

Now, you will see that the production of cotton and its continued increase must depend upon the constantly increasing productiveness of the labour of those one million negroes, and on the natural increase of population from them. Well, the increase of the population of the slaves in the United States is rather less than two and a-half per cent, per annum, and the increase on the million will be about twenty-five thousand a-year; and the increased production of cotton from that increased amount of labour consisting of twenty-five thousand more negroes every year will probably never exceed—I believe it has not reached—one hundred and fifty thousand bales per annum. The exact facts with regard to this are these: that in the ten years from 1841 to 1850 the average crop was 2,173,000 bales, and in the ten years from 1851 to 1860 it was 3,252,000, being an increase of 1,079,000 bales in the ten years, or only about 100,000 bales of increase per annum.

I have shown that the increase of production must depend upon the increase of labour, because every other element is in abundance—soil, climate, and so forth. (A Voice: 'How about sugar?') A Gentleman asks about sugar. If in any particular year there was an extravagant profit upon cotton, there might be, and there probably would be, some abstraction of labour from the cultivation of tobacco, and rice, and sugar, in order to apply it to cotton, and a larger temporary increase, of growth might take place; but I have given you the facts with regard to the last twenty years, and I think you will see that my statement is correct. Now, can this be remedied under slavery? I will show you how it cannot. And first of all, everybody who is acquainted with American affairs knows that there is not very much migration of the population of the Northern States into the Southern States to engage in the ordinary occupations of agricultural labour. Labour is not honourable and is not honoured in the South; and therefore free labourers from the North are not likely to go South. Again, of all the emigration from this country— amounting as it did, in the fifteen years from 1846 to 1860, to two millions five hundred thousand persons, being equal to the whole of the population of this great city—a mere trifle went South and settled there to pursue the occupation of agriculture; they remained in the North, where labour is honourable and honoured.

Whence, then, could the planters of the South receive their increasing labour? Only from the slave-ship and the coast of Africa. But, fortunately for the world, the United States Government has never yet become so prostrate under the heel of the slave-owner as to consent to the reopening of the slave-trade. Therefore the Southern planter was in this unfortunate position: he could not tempt, perhaps he did not want, free labourers from the North; he could not tempt, perhaps he did not want, free labourers from Europe; and if he did want, he was not permitted to fetch slave labour from Africa. Well, that being so, we arrive at this conclusion—that whilst the cultivation of cotton was performed by slave labour, you were shut up for your hope of increased growth to the small increase that was possible with the increase of two and a half per cent per annum in the population of the slaves, about one million in number, that have been regularly employed in the cultivation of cotton.

Then, if the growth was thus insufficient—and I as one connected with the trade can speak very clearly upon that point—I ask you whether the production and the supply were not necessarily insecure by reason of the institution of slavery? It was perilous within the Union. In this country we made one mistake in our forecast of this question: we did not believe that the South would commit suicide; we thought it possible that the slaves might revolt. They might revolt, but their subjugation was inevitable, because the whole power of the Union was pledged to the maintenance of order in every part of its dominions.

But if there be men who think that the cotton trade would be safer if the South were an independent State, with slavery established there in permanence, they greatly mistake; because, whatever was the danger of revolt in the Southern States whilst the Union was complete, the possibility of revolt and the possibility of success would surely be greatly increased if the North were separate from the South, and the negro had only his Southern master, and not the Northern power, to contend against.

But I believe there is little danger of revolt, and no possibility of success. When the revolt took place in the island of St. Domingo, the blacks were far superior in numbers to the whites. In the Southern States it is not so. Ignorant, degraded, without organization, without arms, and scarcely with any faint hope of freedom for ever, except the enthusiastic hope which they have when they believe that God will some day stretch out His arm for their deliverance—I say that under these circumstances, to my mind, there was no reasonable expectation of revolt, and that they had no expectation whatever of success in any attempt to gain their liberty by force of arms.

But now we are in a different position. Slavery itself has chosen its own issue, and has chosen its own field. Slavery—and when I say slavery, I mean the slave power—has not trusted to the future; but it has rushed into the battle-field to settle this great question; and having chosen war, it is from day to day sinking to inevitable ruin under it. Now, if we are agreed—and I am keeping you still to Lancashire and to its interests for a moment longer—that this vast industry with all its interests of capital and labour has been standing on a menacing volcano, is it not possible that hereafter it may be placed upon a rock which nothing—can disturb?

Imagine—what of course some people will say I have no right to imagine— imagine the war over, the Union restored and slavery abolished—does any man suppose that there would afterwards be in the South one single negro fewer than there are at present? On the contrary, I believe there would be more. I believe there is many a negro in the Northern States, and even in Canada, who, if the lash, and the chain, and the branding- iron, and the despotism against which even he dared not complain, were abolished for ever, would turn his face to the sunny lands of the South, and would find himself happier and more useful there than he can be in a more Northern clime.