New England has five hundred and eighteen thousand five hundred and thirty-two families, and four hundred and forty-seven thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine dwellings. The five slave States have five hundred and six thousand nine hundred and sixty-eight families, and four hundred and ninety-six thousand three hundred and sixty-nine dwellings. Here we see the astonishing fact, that with an equal population, New England has eleven thousand five hundred and sixty-four more families than these five slave States, and that these five slave States have forty-eight thousand five hundred and eighty more dwellings than New England—so that New England actually has seventy thousand seven hundred and forty-three families without a home. In New England one family in every seven is without a home, while in these five old slave States only one family in every fifty-two is without a home.
According to the average number of persons composing a family, New England has three hundred and seventy-three thousand seven hundred of her people thrown upon the world without a place to call home.
It is truly painful to think of the effects upon morals and virtue, which must flow from this state of things; and it is a pleasure to a philanthropic heart to think of the superior condition of the slaveholding people, who so generally have homes, where parents can throw the shield of protection around their offspring, and guard them against the dangers and demoralizing tendencies of an unprotected condition.
There is another class of facts, equally astonishing, disclosed by the census, and which belong to the comparison we are now making, between States which were organized originally by Puritan orthodoxy and New England freedom on one side, and by infidel slaveholders and slavery on the other. They are facts which relate to natural increase in a State. One of the boasts of Northern freemen is the increase of their population. With such a climate as New England, it was to be expected that the people would increase faster, and live longer, than in the climate of these five slave States. It is well known that a large portion of the population of these five Southern States have a fatal climate to contend with, and that everywhere else on the globe, under similar circumstances, a diminished increase of births, and an increased amount of deaths has been the result. But the census, as if disregarding climate, and slavery, and the universal experience of all ages, testifies that there is twenty-seven per cent. more of births, and thirty-three per cent. less of deaths in the five old slave States, than there is in the six New England States.
New England, with an equal population, and eleven thousand five hundred and sixty-four more families, has sixteen thousand five hundred and thirty-four less annual births, and ten thousand one hundred and fifty-two more annual deaths, than these five sickly old Southern slave States. The annual births in New England are sixty-one thousand one hundred and forty-eight; and in the five slave States seventy-seven thousand six hundred and eighty-three. In New England the annual deaths are forty-two thousand three hundred and sixty-eight; in the five slave States thirty-two thousand two hundred and sixteen.
In New England the ratio of births is one to forty-four; in the five slave States one to thirty-five. In New England the ratio of deaths is one to sixty-four; in the five slave States it is one to eighty-five.
The slaves are not in this estimate of births and deaths; they are in the census, however, and that shows that they multiply considerably faster, and are less liable to die than the freemen of New England.
Here are facts which contradict all history and all experience. In a sickly Southern climate, among slaveholders, people actually multiply faster, and die slower, than they do among freemen without slavery, in one of the purest and healthiest Northern climates in the world. How is this to be accounted for? Why do people multiply rapidly? Is it because they live in a healthy climate? Why do they die rapidly? Is it because they live in a sickly climate? Our census contradicts both suppositions. Where, then, does the cause lie? Will excluding slavery from a community cause them to multiply more rapidly and die slower? The census says, No!
The census testifies that the proportion of births is twenty-seven per cent. greater, and the proportion of deaths thirty-three per cent. less, among slaveholders, in a community where slavery has existed for more than two hundred years, under all the disadvantages of a sickly climate, than among free men in the pure climate of New England. A man, in his right mind, will demand an explanation of these astonishing facts. They are easily explained. The census discloses a degree of poverty in New England, which scatters seventy thousand families to the four winds of heaven, and feeds (as we shall presently see) the poor-house, with one hundred and thirty-five per cent. more of paupers than is found in these slave States. This is no condition of things to increase births, or diminish deaths, unless brothels give increase, and squalid poverty the requisite sympathy and aid, to recover the sick and dying, from the period of infancy to that of old age.
We proceed to compare other facts, which have a bearing upon the relative merits of different institutions in securing social prosperity.