The following tables will show how this is, both as to the colored and the white races.
Increase of Slave Population.
| Years. | No. of Slaves. | Increase. | Per ct. of Increase. |
| 1790 | 697,897 | ||
| 1800 | 893,041 | 195,144 | 28 |
| 1810 | 1,191,364 | 298,323 | 32 |
| 1820 | 1,538,064 | 346,700 | 29 |
| 1830 | 2,009,031 | 470,967 | 29 |
| 1840 | 2,487,855 | 478,324 | 24 |
| 1850 | 3,204,313 | 716,958 | 29 |
| 1860 | 4,002,996 | 798,683 | 25 |
The average increase in every ten years during the seventy years has been about 28 per cent.
Increase Of Whole Population, Including Slaves And Emigrants.
| Years | Population | Increase | Per ct. of Increase. |
| 1790 | 3,929,872 | 1,376,080 | |
| 1800 | 5,305,952 | 1,376,080 | 37 |
| 1810 | 7,239,814 | 1,933,862 | 36 |
| 1820 | 9,688,131 | 2,398,817 | 33 |
| 1830 | 12,866,920 | 3,228,789 | 34 |
| 1840 | 17,063,353 | 4,196,433 | 33 |
| 1850 | 23,191,876 | 6,128,523 | 36 |
| 1860 | 31,676,217 | 8,484,341 | 36 |
The average increase in every ten years would be about 35 per cent.
Deducting from this latter table the slaves, the emigrants, and children born of emigrants, now included in it, and the ratio of increase is below 27 per cent every ten years. So that if anything should occur to check the tide of emigration, the blacks in this country would increase in a faster ratio than the whites.
We can form some idea as to the danger of such a check, when we advert to the fact that the emigration which in 1854 was 427,833, fell off in 1858 to 144,652.
To finish the picture which these figures present to us, let us carry the mind forward a decade or two. At the average rate of increase of the blacks, namely, 28 per cent, we shall have, of the slave population alone, and excluding the free blacks, 5,060,585 in 1870, and 6,577,584 in 1880. And by that time they will be increasing at the rate of 150,000 to 200,000 a year.