With cotton at the average price of the last few years, we have supplied a very small portion of India and China with goods, in competition with their hand-made goods of same material. With new markets opening in Japan and China, and by the building of railroads in India, we have to meet a constantly decreasing supply of raw material as compared with the demand. Give us cotton at six to seven cents, at which free labor and skill could well afford it, and the manufacturing industry of New England would receive a development unknown before. But when we ask more cotton of slavery, we are answered by its great prophet, De Bow; that because we are willing to pay a high price we can not have it; for he says, 'Although land is to be had in unlimited quantities, whenever cotton rises to ten cents, labor becomes too dear to increase production rapidly.'
And this is what the great system of slave labor has accomplished. The production of its great staple, cotton, is in the hands of less than 100,000 men. In 1850 there were in all the Southern States only 170,000 men owning more than five slaves each, and they owned 2,800,000 out of 3,300,000.
These men have by their system rendered labor degrading,—they have driven out their non-slaveholding neighbors by hundreds of thousands to find homes and self-respect in the free air of the great West,—they have reduced those who remain to a condition of ignorance scarcely to be found in any other country claiming to be civilized—so low that even the slaves look down upon the 'mean white trash,'—they have sapped the very foundations of honor and morality, so that 'Southern chivalry' has become the synonym for treachery, theft, and dishonor in every form,—they have reached a depth of degradation only to be equalled by those Northern men who would now prevent this war from utterly destroying slavery,—they have literally skinned over a vast area of country, leaving it for the time a desert, and with an area of 368,312,320 acres in the eight cotton States, they have now under cultivation in cotton less than 6,000,000 (an area scarcely larger than the little State of Massachusetts); they have less than two slave laborers to the square mile; and their only opposition to the re-opening of the African slave-trade is upon the ground that an increase of laborers will but reduce the price of cotton, give the planters a great deal more trouble and less profit, and only benefit their enemies in New and Old England.
Have not the manufacturer, the consumer, the business man, the farmer, the soldier, every free man, every friend of the poor whites of the South who are not yet free men, a right and an interest in claiming that this monopoly of 100,000 cotton planters shall cease, their estates be confiscated for their treason, and divided among our soldiers, to repay them for their sacrifices in the cause of their country? First of all, however, let us claim the 100,000,000 acres, not the property of any individual, but fought for and paid for by the United States, and then given to that most ungrateful of all the rebel States, Texas—the great 'Cotton State.'
Upon these fertile lands, and in this most profitable branch of agriculture, let us find the bounty for our soldiers, the reward for their sacrifices, and our own security for the future good order of the state.
By so doing we shall silence the outcry of the South that ours is a war of conquest (since the right of the government to the public lands of Texas is unquestionable), and, at the same time, furnish a powerful incentive to the zeal of our soldiers.
I have compiled a few facts and statements in regard to the soil and climate of Texas from Capt. Marcy's Exploration of the Red River, in which he was accompanied by Captain, now General, McLellan, from the Texas Almanac, a most violent pro-slavery publication, and from the letters of a friend, a loyal Texan, who has been driven from his home, and is now in the North.
In advocating the Memphis and El Paso route for the Pacific Railroad, Captain Marcy writes as follows:—
The road alluded to, immediately after leaving Fulton, Ark., leads to an elevated ridge dividing the waters that flow into Red River from those of the Sulphur and Trinity, and continues upon it, with but few deviations from the direct course for El Paso and Dona Ana to near the Brazos River, a distance of three hundred and twenty miles, and mostly through the northern part of Texas. This portion of the route has its locality in a country of surpassing beauty and fertility, and possesses all the requisites for attracting and sustaining a dense farming population. It is diversified with prairies and woodland, and is bountifully watered with numerous spring brooks, which flow off upon either side of the ridge above-mentioned. The crest of the ridge is exceedingly smooth and level, and is altogether the best natural or artificial road I ever traveled over for the same distance.
After leaving this ridge, the road crosses the Brazos near very extensive fields of bituminous coal, which burns readily, with a clear flame, and is very superior in quality.