TABLE IV.
Parishes where negroes exceed whites less than two to one.
| Whites. | Slaves. | Free negroes. | Val. ag. prod. '58. | |
| Claiborne, | 4,618 | 7,003 | 58 | $857,675 |
| De Soto, | 4,459 | 7,301 | 29 | 739,945 |
| Morehouse, | 3,620 | 5,468 | 14 | 785,370 |
| Nachitoches, | 5,987 | 7,939 | 775 | 1,120,718 |
| Caddo, | 4,073 | 5,978 | 44 | 1,056,130 |
| Bossier, | 3,646 | 7,195 | 11 | 1,155,010 |
| 26,403 | 40,784 | 931 | 5,674,848 |
The total value of the agricultural productions, divided by the aggregate population, 68,168, gives to each inhabitant $83 25. In table II the aggregate population was 63,768, nearly seven negroes to one white man; the value of the agricultural products divided, gave each $138 07, instead of $83 25. The parishes of table II, with an aggregate population of 63,768, seven sixths of whom were slaves, produced $8,854,770 worth of agricultural products; whereas, the parishes of table IV, containing a population of 68,168, the slaves being less than double the number of whites, produced three millions less of agricultural products than a smaller aggregate population produced in those parishes where the negroes outnumbered the whites nearly seven to one.
The report of the auditor of public accounts for the year 1859, does not contain the necessary data for making comparisons in the parishes on the lower stem of the Mississippi river, by reason of crevasses and other disastrous causes. The valuable pamphlet of Edward J. Forstale, on the agricultural products of Louisiana, will supply that deficiency, though of a much older date. It appears from Mr. Forstale, that, so far back as 1844, "on well conducted estates, the average value of sugar and molasses, per slave, was $237 50, estimating sugar at 4 cents, and molasses at 15 cents," while the general average in the sugar district, per slave, was, in the year 1844, only $150 31, from which he deducted $75 for expenses. By examining his Monograph, it will be seen that the great bulk of the sugar and molasses was produced in those parishes having the heaviest negro population in proportion to the white. Thus, St. Martin's, with a total population more than three times as large as St. Charles, and with a negro population more than twice as numerous, produced, in 1844, only 5,000 hogsheads, while St. Charles produced upward of 12,000. The white population of St. Charles is only 883, while that of the slaves is 3,769. The white population of St. Martin is 6,400, and the negro population 8,200. Assumption and Ascension are adjoining parishes. Assumption contains more than three thousand whites, and three hundred slaves over and above the population of Ascension. It has more land than Ascension, yet it pays $2,200 less taxes on lands than Ascension, and its gross taxes are $1,500 less than Ascension. The value of its agricultural products is likewise less.
These lessons by comparison might be indefinitely extended, by dropping the report of the auditor of public accounts of Louisiana, and taking up the statistics of the churches, and the last United States census. The statistics of the American churches prove that the slaveholding States contain more Christian communicants, in proportion to the population, including black and white, than the non-slaveholding—South Carolina more than Massachusetts, Virginia more than Pennsylvania, Kentucky more than Ohio. The report proves that in the cotton and sugar region, the white people who have few or no negroes, are poor and helpless, but when supplied with seven times their own number of negroes, they are the richest and most powerful agricultural people on the earth. The census will prove that the landed property of those who are thus supplied with from three to seven times their own number of negroes, if sold at its assessed value, and the proceeds of sales divided equally among all the inhabitants, black and white, each individual would have a larger sum than any Pennsylvanian, New Yorker, or New Englander, would have, if the land in the richest counties were sold at its assessed value, and the proceeds of sales divided equally among the inhabitants of the said county. For instance, if the land in some of the richest counties of Pennsylvania, say Adams, Berks, Centre, Chester, and Washington, were all sold, and the proceeds divided among the inhabitants, each individual would have only about half as much as each negro and white man would have, if the lands of Carroll, Madison, Concordia, and Tensas, where the negroes outnumber the whites seven to one, were all sold, and the proceeds equally divided among blacks and whites.
Comparisons, instituted upon the data furnished by the United States census, will show that what Virginia wants is more negroes, and what Pennsylvania wants is more white laborers. In some counties in Pennsylvania, Cambria and Carbon for instance, the land, if sold and proceeds divided, would not give each inhabitant $75 a piece, the most of the land being uncultivated for want of laborers. Ohio, Wyoming, and Nicholas counties, in Virginia, with an aggregate population exceeding thirty thousand, have only 222 negro slaves. The land, if sold and divided, would not give each inhabitant one hundred dollars. In Accomac, Albemarle, York, Prince Edward, and Prince George, the negro population is about equal to the white. The land, if sold and equally divided, would give each individual from $150 to $220, which is nearly as much as the inhabitants of the best counties of Pennsylvania would have from the proceeds of sales of these lands. Land, per acre, is cheaper in Virginia than in Pennsylvania, because much the largest portion of the Virginia lands are unimproved for the want of laborers, while the largest portion of the Pennsylvania lands are under cultivation. The cotton States and Louisiana are sucking the life-blood out of Virginia by draining that noble old State of her agricultural laborers. The high price of negroes is ruining Virginia. In Sussex, Southampton, Northampton, and many other counties, which send most negroes to the cotton States, the inhabitants have lost more in the fall in the price of their land, than they have gained in the high price they got for their negroes. The land, if sold and divided, would give each individual only fifty-seven dollars, less than three dollars an acre. Oxford is Great Britain's eye, or rather the telescope which is used to see afar off, to direct British policy. Mr. Jefferson saw the importance of a university of the first class, to be used as a telescope to look into the distance, to direct Virginia, or what ought to be the same thing, American policy, as Oxford directs British policy. Hence he devoted the latter years of his life to establishing an institution for that very purpose.
Long before the West India emancipation act was passed, it was known by the learned graduates and fellows of Oxford, that negroes would not work as free laborers; and that their emancipation would ruin the British West Indies. British policy, however, to build up India, imperatively demanded the sacrifice to be made, as Russian policy demanded the sacrifice of Moscow. The African race furnished the only laborers, who could compete with the Mongolian race in producing the rich products of tropical agriculture. Great Britain had a hundred and fifty millions of the bronze and yellow-skin Asiatics under her command, and only wanted the black-skin Africans out of the way, to monopolize tropical agriculture. To carry out the British policy of becoming, not only mistress of the seas, but mistress of the boundless wealth of tropical and tropicoid climates, the learned graduates of Oxford and Cambridge raised a hue and cry against the inhumanity of the middle passage. So little truth was there in it, that when the committee of the United States Senate, appointed to consider the causes of the mortality prevailing on emigrant ships from Europe to this country, and the means for the better protection of the health of the passengers, did me the honor in 1854 to request my views on the subject, I replied (see "Report of the Select Committee of U. S. Senate on the Sickness and Mortality on Emigrant Ships," pages 119-144—Washington, 1854), recommending certain rules to be adopted to preserve the health and ameliorate the condition of emigrants on shipboard, which appeared to me to be the best. But, subsequently, a little volume fell into my hands containing the rules of the African slave-traders, half a century ago, which were so much better than those I had recommended, I called the attention of the chairman of the Senate's committee, the Hon. Hamilton Fish, to them, advising him by all means to adopt the African slave-traders' rules, if he had any regard for the health and comfort of the European emigrants. In the latter part of the last century no one pretended, as now, that the negro lost any thing by exchanging slavery in Africa for the more benign system of slavery in America. But it was the imaginary sufferings on the middle passage, which brought humanity with her eyes shut to lend to British policy a helping hand to close Africa and prevent her sable sons from exchanging their barbarous masters for civilized ones. America consented to that policy. The Southern tobacco-planters, believing they had as many negroes as the cultivation of tobacco required, had petitioned the king before the Revolution, to close the African slave trade. He did not do it. After the Revolution it was not only closed, but declared to be piracy, by the federal government. The policy which closed it may have been good policy or bad at that time. It soon gave the non-slaveholding States the ascendency in the Union. The question, whether they shall retain that ascendency, will depend very much upon whether they continue to abuse the power they acquired over the South by cutting off the supply of Southern laborers. Having ascertained that the negro would not work as a free man, the next move of British policy was, to set those free who were already in America. All parties in England, some by one artifice and some by another, were ultimately led to promote the British policy of negro abolitionism. From England it was brought over to the United States, took root and grew so rapidly as soon to become a most disturbing element in both church and state. We had no colleges at the North, and scarcely any churches which knew the advantages humanity and Christianity derived from the mutual aid the black and white races afford each other. The most of them are and were virtually European colleges located in America. This has enabled those learned men in Great Britain, who guide and direct British policy, to make a nose of wax of the great body of the educated classes in the United States. The prominence given to the Latin language, to the neglect of the Greek and Hebrew, in our schools and colleges, has greatly tended to fill the heads of the students with monarchical ideas, and to prevent them from understanding and appreciating the institutions of their own country. The study of Homer and the Greek classics favors genuine republicanism, by fostering a high-toned moral virtue, and by creating a love for nature and for political institutions founded upon her laws; while the study of Virgil, and other Latin text-books, used in our schools and colleges, has a strong tendency to lead to a sickly sentimental admiration for nominal instead of real freedom, and for governments founded upon usurpations and artificial distinctions, as that of the Cæsars was, and as that of Great Britain is. There is as much difference between Homer and Virgil as between nature and art. The Latin, being a derivative language, and of very little use, would long since have been banished from the schools, but for the aid monarchy derives from its binding men of letters, as Virgil bound the Muses, to the footstool of thrones, to flatter the frail humanity thereon with the incense of divine honors. Homer's Muses, like true Americans, pay no higher honors to the diadem on the king's head than to the gaudy plumage of the peacock's tail. Young America would derive great advantages from an intimate acquaintance with Homer. He wrote in a language which gives to all the arts and sciences their technical terms. Hence, the previous study of the Greek makes the acquaintance of the various sciences comparatively easy to the learner. The Greek and Hebrew being original languages, can be acquired in much less time than the Latin, which is a derivative language. It is to be hoped that the great University of the South, about to be established on the cool and salubrious plateau of the Cumberland Mountains, if it does not banish Latin, will at least give a greater degree of prominence to the Greek and Hebrew, the two languages in which the Scriptures were originally written. By comparing "The Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Education, 1859, with "Les Lois concernant les Ecoles Publique dans l'Etat de la Louisiane, 1849," it will be perceived, that the New England system of public education is not adapted to Louisiana and the South. The laws are excellent, if the system itself was in conformity to the spirit of our political institutions. After ten years' trial, we learn from the Report of the Superintendent, that they can not be carried out, as no laws can be, which are theoretical, burdensome, troublesome, expensive, and void of practical benefits. If a law were passed by the State of Louisiana appropriating three hundred thousand dollars per annum to furnishing every family with a loaf of bread every day, it could not be executed. More than half the families would not accept the bread. The Report of the Superintendent of Public Education proves that more than half the families in Louisiana will not accept of the mental food the State offers to their children. Some parishes will not receive any of it. Tensas, for instance, which is taxed $16,000 for the support of public schools, has "not a single public school," says the Report, "in it, yet nearly every planter has a school in his own house." The truth is, that government does more harm than good by interfering with the domestic concerns of our people. If let alone, they would not need governmental aid in furnishing food for either the body or the mind. The South would have been far ahead in education, manufactures, and internal improvements, if the federal government had not interfered, to shut out the only kind of laborers who can labor in the cane and cotton field and live. The system of public education, all admit, has failed in the country, but, it is asserted, has succeeded very well in New Orleans. If the tree be judged by its fruits it is poisonous instead of salutary, to republican institutions, in our great cities. If the boys whom it has taught to read novels, had been put to trades, they could not have been driven away from the polls after they had grown to be men. There has been virtually no election in New Orleans, and in many of our large cities, for the last five or six years; whether from fear or indifference, it proves that the system of education is defective. America wants a University to raise the standard of morals, manners, and learning, so high, that every individual will be as secure from personal violence at the sacred ballot-box, as at the church altar. America wants schools to raise the standard of moral virtue so high, that every American citizen, naturalized or native, may confidently rely upon government putting forth its whole power to protect him in all the rights and privileges of an American citizen, both at home and abroad.
