The enormous profits caused slaves to be very high in this section and in great demand. There were only two possible sources of supply:—first, the illicit traffic already spoken of; second, the domestic slave trade. A good negro from twenty to thirty years of age would command from $800 to $1,200.[72] Indeed, it is stated that at one time during this early period they sold for as much as $2,000.[73] This fact in connection with the fact that in 1817 the average price of a negro in Virginia was only $300, and the depreciation by 1829 to $150, gives us the reason for the rise of the domestic slave trade. It was over and again stated in the Virginia Legislature of 1832 that the value of negroes in Virginia was regulated not by their profitableness at home but by the Southwestern demand.[74] The great difference in the price of slaves in the buying States and the selling States was an inducement to a certain class of men to engage in the business of buying them up and carrying them South. The profits were from one-third to one-half on an average after expenses were paid.[75] Slave traders soon got rich. Williams, a Washington dealer, boasted in 1850 that he made $30,000 in a few months.[76] It is said the firm of Franklin & Armfield, of Alexandria, made $33,000 in 1829.[77] In 1834 Armfield, of this same firm, was reputed to be worth nearly $500,000 which he had accumulated in the business.[78] Ingraham tells of a man who had amassed more than a million dollars in this traffic.[79] More instances might be given but this is enough to show that the traffic was profitable.
The cultivation of rice[80] and sugar, especially sugar, used up slaves rapidly. As a consequence slaves were in demand in the rice and sugar sections, not only because of the expansion of these industries, but to take the place of those that died. In 1829 the statement was made in a report of the Agricultural Society of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that the annual loss of life on well conducted sugar plantations was two and one-half per cent. more than the annual increase. In 1830, the Hon. J.L. Johnson in a letter to the Secretary of the Treasury gave evidence of a thorough study of the subject and arrived at the same conclusion.[81]
We come now to consider the one thing, the prime factor, which brought about the wonderful agricultural prosperity of the Southwest—cotton. Sugar and rice could only be grown in certain limited sections. Rice principally in South Carolina and sugar in Louisiana; but the cotton field came to cover the larger part of nine great States.
Until toward the end of the eighteenth century the production of cotton in this country was very small. In 1793, however, Eli Whitney invented his machine for separating the seed from the cotton. This soon revolutionized the industry. While the cotton crop of the United States in 1793 was only 5,000,000 pounds, by 1808 it had increased to 80,000,000, and remained about the same or rather declined during the war of 1812, but the very year peace was established its production went up to 100,000,000 pounds, and the year following (1816) to 125,000,000. By 1834 it had grown to 460,000,000.[82] During the whole of this period, with slight fluctuations, cotton continued high, but after 1835 it began to decline and reached low-water mark at the average price of 5¾ cents per pound in 1845, which was scarcely the cost of production.[83] However, the crop of 1839 according to the census reports was 790,479,275 pounds, nearly double the crop of the five years previous. During the next decade though the price went up after 1845[84] the crop increased less than 200,000,000 pounds being only 987,637,200 in 1849, but during the following ten years it more than doubled, being 2,397,238,140 pounds in 1859.[85] Of this enormous crop the four States of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia produced more than two-thirds, while Virginia contributed about 1,400.[86] But Virginia and North Carolina in 1801 had produced more than two-fifths of the cotton raised in the country. In 1826 when, according to the official reports they reached their greatest production, Virginia grew 25,000,000 pounds and North Carolina 18,000,000, or nearly five times as much as in 1801, yet this proportion had fallen to about one-seventh. Eight years afterward Virginia's crop had fallen to 10,000,000 pounds and North Carolina's to 9,500,000,[87] and their production continued to decline.[88] Hammond says that "the higher cost of raising cotton in the more northern latitudes, and the uncertainty of the plant reaching maturity before the arrival of the frosts, prevented the rapid growth of cotton culture in these States after 1830 which took place elsewhere, especially as the continual decline in the price of the staple only emphasized the disadvantages under which the planters of these States labored."[89]
But while decline was noticeable in the Northern States, the States at the Southwest were going ahead by leaps and bounds. The same year (1843) Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, from which no cotton had been reported in 1801, produced together 232,000,000 pounds, while South Carolina increased its crops from 2,000,000 to 65,500,000 and Georgia from 10,000,000 to 75,000,000 pounds during the same time.[90]
As the cotton field extended of course the demand for labor increased and that labor was necessarily negro slave labor, for it was thought that the white man could not endure work under a tropical sun, while the organism of the negro was especially adapted to it.[91] As a consequence negroes were secured from every possible source.
In short, negroes and cotton soon came to be inseparably associated. The amount of cotton that could be raised depended upon the number of negroes to be secured to work it. The value of a negro was measured by his usefulness in the cotton field.[92] De Bow estimated that in 1850 out of the 2,500,000 slaves in the Southern States about 1,800,000[93] of them, or nearly three-fourths were engaged in the cotton industry, leaving for all other purposes only about 700,000, or about the same number as there was in the whole United States in 1790, at which time the production of cotton was only 1,500,000 pounds.[94] Thus it is seen that while cotton demanded all the increase of slaves from whatever source from that time forward all other things merely held their own. However, if we subtract the number engaged in the sugar industry, which was 150,000[95] in 1850 for the reason that it was a new crop developed during the early part of the century,[96] it is noticed that other things lost. From this we conclude it was only natural that the surplus slave population of the older slave States where it was useless was to be drained off to the cotton States. Some of the Southern papers, notably the "Richmond Enquirer," over and again called attention to the relation of cotton and negroes. In 1859 it says:
"The price of cotton it is well known pretty much regulates the price of slaves in the South, and a bale of cotton and a 'likely nigger' are about well balanced in the scale of pecuniary appreciation."[97]
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