A Defence of Virginia / And Through Her, of the South, in Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional Party

by Robert Lewis Dabney

Taking mankind as they are, and not as we may desire them to be, domestic slavery offered the best relation which has yet been found, between labour and capital. It is not asserted that it would be best for a Utopia, where we might imagine the humblest citizen virtuous, intelligent, and provident. But there are no such societies on earth. The business of the legislator, whether human or divine, is with mankind as they are; and while he adapts his institutions to their defects, so as to avoid making them impracticable or mischievous, he should also shape them to elevate and reform as far as possible. The legislator, therefore, in devising a frame of society, should adapt it to a state in which the rich are selfish and the poor indolent and improvident. For, after all that has been boasted of human improvement, this is usually man's condition. Now, in adjusting social institutions, it is all-important to secure physical comfort; because in a state of physical misery and degradation, moral and intellectual improvement are hopeless; and the business of the legislator is more especially to take care of the weak: the strong will take care of themselves. Property is the chief element of political strength; it is this which gives to individuals power in society; for "money answereth all things;" it commands for its possessor whatever he needs for his physical comfort and safety. The great desideratum in all benign legislation is to sustain the class which has no property, against the social depression and physical suffering to which they always tend. That there will always be such a class, at least till the millennium, is certain, for reasons already stated. Now all civilized communities exhibit a natural law which tends to depress the physical condition of those who have no property, who are, usually, the laboring classes. That law is the tendency of population to increase. The area of a country grows no larger, while the number of people in it is perpetually increasing, unless that tendency is already arrested by extreme physical evils. The same acres have, therefore, more and more mouths to feed, and backs to clothe. Consequently, each person must receive a smaller and smaller share of the total proceeds of the earth. The demand perpetually increases in proportion to the supply; and therefore the price of those productions rises, as compared with the price of labour. Hence in every flourishing community, the relative proportion between the price of land, its rents, and the food and clothing which it produces, on the one hand, and the price of manual labour on the other, is perpetually, though slowly, changing. The former rises, the latter sinks. Improvements in agriculture and the arts, extensive conquests, emigrations, or some other cause, may for a time arrest, or even reverse, this process; but such is the general law, and the constant tendency. The very prosperity and growth of the community work this result. The owners of land become richer: those who live by labour become poorer. Physical depression works moral depression, and these overcrowded and under-fed labourers, becoming more reckless, are familiarized with a lower standard of comfort, and continue to increase. This law has wrought in every growing nation on the globe which is without domestic slavery. It is felt in Great Britain, in spite of her vast colonies, where she has disgorged her superfluous mouths and hands, to occupy and feed them on virgin soils: in spite of her conquests, which have centred in her lap the wealth of continents. It has begun to work in the Northern States of America, notwithstanding the development of the arts, and the proximity of the Great West. Every where it reduces the quantity or quality of food and raiment which a day's labour will earn, and perpetually tends to approximate that lowest grade at which the labouring classes can vegetate, multiply, and toil.

What, now, is the remedy? Not agrarianism: this could only aggravate the evil by taking away the incentive to effort, in making its rewards insecure. Not conquest of new territory: the world is now all occupied; and conquest from our neighbours is unjust. We found the remedy in the much-abused institution of domestic slavery. It simply ended this natural, this universal strife between capital and labour, by making labour the property of capital, and thus investing it with an unfailing claim upon its fair share in the joint products of the two. The manner in which slavery effects this is plain. Where labour is free, competition reduces its price to whatever grade the laws of trade may fix; for labour is then a mere commodity in the market, unprotected, and subject to all the laws of demand and supply. The owner of land or capital pays for the labour he needs, in the shape of wages, just the price fixed by the relation of supply and demand; and if that price implies the severest privation for the labourer or his family, it is no concern of his. Should they perish by the inadequacy of the remuneration, it is not his loss: he has but to hire others from the anxious and competing multitude. Moreover, the ties of compassion and charity are vastly weaker than under our system; for that suffering labourer and his family are no more to that capitalist, than any other among the sons of want. But when we make the labour the property of the same persons to whom the land and capital belong, self-interest inevitably impels them to share with the labourer liberally enough to preserve his life and efficiency, because the labour is also, in the language of Moses, "their money," and if it suffers, they are the losers. By this arrangement also, a special tie and bond of sympathy are established between the capitalist and his labourers. They are members of his family. They not only work, but live, on his premises. A disregard of their wants and destitution is ten-fold more glaring, more difficult to perpetrate, and more promptly avenged by his own conscience and public opinion. The bond of domestic affection ensures to the labourer a comfortable share of the fruits of that capital which his labour fecundates. And the law is enabled to make the employer directly responsible for the welfare of the employed. Thus, by this simple and potent expedient, slavery solved the difficulty, and answered the question raised by the gloomy speculations of Malthus, at whom all anti-slavery philosophers have only been able to rail, while equally impotent to overthrow his premises, or to arrest the evils he predicts.

Slavery also presented us with a simple and perfectly efficient preventive of pauperism. The law, public opinion, and natural affection, all joined in compelling each master to support his own sick and superannuated. And the elevation of the free white labourers, which results from slavery, by placing another labouring class below them, by assigning to them higher and more remunerative kinds of labour, and by diffusing a more general prosperity, reduced white pauperism to the smallest possible amount amongst us. In a Virginian slaveholding county, the financial burden of white pauperism was almost inappreciable. Thus, at one touch, our system solved happily, mercifully, justly, the Gordian knot of pauperism, a subject which has completely baffled British wisdom.

The attempt may be made to evade these considerations, by saying that the same law of increase in population will at length operate, in spite of slavery; and that its depressing effects will reveal themselves in this form: that the labouring class will become so numerous, the same alteration between demand and supply of labour will appear, and the slave's labour will be worth no more than his maintenance, when he will cease to sell for any thing. At this stage, it may be urged, self-interest will surely prompt emancipation, and the whole slave system will fall before the evil which it was expected to counteract.

To this there are several answers. The argument implies that the slaves will be, at that stage, relatively very numerous. Then, the political difficulties of emancipation would be proportionably great. The political necessity would overrule the economical tendency, and compel the continuance of the beneficent institution. And while it subsisted, the tie of domestic affection, and the force of law and public opinion, would still secure for slaves a better share in the joint profits of labour and capital, than would be granted to depressed free labour. This was the case in the Roman Empire, where the population of Italy and Sicily was for several centuries as dense as in those modern States where the Malthusian law has worked most deplorably: and yet slavery did not yield, and emancipation did not follow.

But the more complete answer is as follows. We will attempt now to point out an influence which enabled domestic slavery to resist and repair the evils of over-population, vastly better than any other form of labour. As population increases, the size of fortunes which are accumulated increases. Instances of accumulation are more numerous and far more excessive. Density of population, facility of large industrial operations, concentration of number of labourers, with other causes, ensure that rich men will be vastly richer than while population was sparse; and that there will be many more rich men. While a few of these will be misers, as a general rule they will seek to expend their overflowing incomes. But as man's real wants lie within very narrow limits, and the actual necessaries and comforts of life are cheap, the larger part of these overgrown incomes must be spent in superfluities. The money of the many excessively rich men is profusely spent in expensive jewelry, clothing, equipage, ostentatious architecture, useless menials, fine arts, and a thousand similar luxuries. Now the production of all these superfluities absorbs a vast amount of the national labour, and thus diminishes greatly the production of those values which satisfy real wants. A multitude of the labourers are seduced from the production of those more essential values, by the higher prices which luxury and pride are enabled to pay for their objects. Now, although the manufacturers of these superfluities may, individually, secure a better livelihood than those laborers who produce the necessaries of life, yet the result of the withdrawal of so many producing hands is, that the total amount of necessaries produced in the nation is much smaller. There is, then, a less mass of the necessaries of life to divide among the whole number of the citizens; and some people must draw a smaller share from the common stock. Every sensible man knows that these will be the landless, labouring men. The wealth of the rich will, of course, enable them to engross a liberal supply for their own wants, however scant may be that left for the poor. The ability to expend in superfluities is, therefore, a misdirection of just so much of the productive labour of the country, from the creation of essential values, to the producing of that which fills no hungry stomach, clothes no naked back, and relieves no actual, bodily want. And here, after all, is the chief cause why the Malthusian law is found a true and efficient one in civilized communities. For, were the increasing labour of a growing nation wisely and beneficiently directed to draw from the soil and from nature all that they can be made to yield, their fecundity would be found to be practically so unlimited, that the means of existence would keep pace with the increase of population, to almost any extent. The operative cause of the growing depression of the poor is, not that the same acres are compelled to feed more mouths, and clothe more backs, so much as this: that the inducements which excessive wealth gives to the production of superfluities, misdirects so much precious labour, that the fruitfulness of those acres is not made to increase with the increase of mouths. This is proved by the simple fact, that in all the old countries the misery of the lowest classes tends to keep pace with the luxury of the highest. It is proved emphatically by the industrial condition of Great Britain. There is no country in which production is so active; none in which agriculture and the arts are more stimulated by science and intelligence; and yet there is a growing mass of destitution, yearly approaching more frightful dimensions, and testing the endurance of human nature by lower grades of physical discomfort. The reason is not to be sought in her limited territory or crowded population; for if the British Islands have not acres enough to grow their own bread for so many, why is it that so productive a people are not able to pay for abundance of imported bread? It is to be found in the existence of their vast incomes, and the excessive luxury practised by the numerous rich. True, these magnates excuse their vast expenditures in superfluities by the plea, that one of the motives is the "encouragement of industry." But they effect, as we have seen, not an encouragement, but a misdirection of industry. The reason why so many British poor have a scanty share of physical comforts is, that there are so many British rich men who, by their lavish expenditure, tempt and seduce so large a multitude of producing hands from the creation of actual comforts to the creation of superfluities.

What safe remedy can the legislator propose for this evil? Not a violent, agrarian leveling of the larger estates. That, as we have shown, would be wicked and foolish. Nor can it be found in sumptuary laws. The world has tried them to its heart's content, and found them impracticable. It is true, that their adoption showed how clear a perception the ancients had of one truth, which modern political science pretends to ignore. That truth is, that luxury is a social evil. We have shown that it is as wasteful of social wealth as it is of morals. The ancients thought thus, and they were right. Legislators now-a-days, in exploding their remedy as no remedy, seem to desire to cheat themselves into the belief that the disease is no disease. But the ancients were not as stupid as men imagine.

Now, we do not boast that we can offer a perfect remedy. But our system of labour certainly gave us a partial one of inestimable value. Where the rich man is a citizen of a hireling State, his accumulated wealth and profuse income are all spent in superfluities, except the small portion needed for the comforts of life for his own family. But when he is a citizen of a slave State, they are first taxed with the comfortable support of his slaves. The law, public opinion, affection for them, and self-interest, all compel him to make the first appropriation out of that profuse income, to feeding and clothing his slaves, before he proceeds to superfluities. Thus, the proceeds of the accumulations which dense population and social prosperity cause, are rescued from a useless and mischievous expenditure in those luxuries, the purchase of which misdirects public industry, and tempts to a deficient production of the necessaries of life; and are directed where benevolence, mercy, and the public good indicate, to the comfortable maintenance of the labouring people. That this is the effect of domestic slavery on the incomes of the rich, is proved by one familiar fact. It is well known at the South how slaveholders usually murmured when comparing their style of living with that of capitalists in the hireling States of equal nominal wealth. The planter who owned fifty thousand dollars worth of fertile lands, and a hundred slaves, while he lived in far more substantial comfort and plenty, displayed in Virginia far less ostentation and luxury than the merchant or manufacturer of the North who owns the same amount of capital. His house was plainly furnished with the old-fashioned goods of his fathers; his family rode in a plain carriage, drawn by a pair of stout nags which, probably, either did a fair share of ploughing also, or drew a large part of the fuel for the household. He himself was dressed partly in "jeans," woven under the superintendence of his wife; and his boys were at school in a log house, with homespun clothing, and, in summer, bare feet. It was not unusual to hear the slaveholder, when he considered this contrast, complain of slavery as a bad institution for the master. But this was its merciful feature, that it in some measure arrested superfluous luxury, and taxed superfluous income with the more comfortable support of the labourers. In a hireling State, these might be left half-starved on the inadequate compensation which the hard law of supply and demand in the labour-market would compel them to accept, while the capitalist was rioting in a mischievous waste of the overgrown profits of his capital.

The question of the productiveness of slave labour may be anticipated, so far as to point out the fact, that this benevolent diversion of the large incomes from luxurious expenditures to the comfortable maintenance of the slaves, was a diversion from unproductive to productive consumption. The slaves were a productive class; and the increased comfort of their living added greatly to their increase, and their ability to labour. No student of political economy need be told how powerfully national wealth is promoted by any cause which substitutes productive consumption for unproductive.

The truth of these views is confirmed by this fact, which is attested by all experienced slaveholders: that the slaves throughout the South lived in far more comfort than they did a generation ago. And this is truest of those Southern communities where population is densest, and the price and rents of land are highest. As these influences, elsewhere so depressing to the poor, advanced, the standard of comfort for our slaves rose rapidly, instead of falling. How can a more splendid vindication of the benevolence of our system be imagined? Our slaves generally ate more meat, wore more and better clothing, and lived in better houses, than their fathers did.