The Slave Trade, Domestic And Foreign Part 7

Prices--duty free.

Havana Brown... 17 to 24s. 20 to 27s. 16 to 22s. 19 to 26s.

Brazil Brown... 16 to 20s. 18 to 22s. 12 to 17s. 16 to 20s.

The stocks of 1849 and 1852 were, as we see, nearly alike, and the prices did not greatly differ. Taking them, therefore, as the standard, we see that a _diminution_ of supply so small as to cause a diminution of stock to the extent of about 400,000 cwts., or only _about three per cent. of the import_, added about _fifteen per cent._ to the prices of the whole crop in 1850; whereas a similar _excess_ of supply in 1851 caused a reduction of prices almost as great. The actual quant.i.ty received in Europe in the first ten months of the last year had been 509,000 cwts. less than in the corresponding months of the previous one. The average monthly receipts are about a million of cwts. per month, and if we take the prices of those two years as a standard, the following will be the result:--

1851...... 12,000,000 cwts. Average 16s. 9d.... 10,050,000 1852...... 11,500,000 " " 20s. 3d.... 11,643,750 ---------- Gain on short crop ............................. 1,593,750 If now we compare 1850 with 1851, the following is the result:-- 1851 as above .................................. 10,050,000 1850...... 11,000,000 cwts. Average 21s. 9d.... 11,971,250 ---------- 1,921,250 Now if this reduction of export had been a consequence of increased domestic consumption, we should have to add the value of that million to the product, and this would give............................. 1,187,500 ---------- 3,108,750 ==========

We have here a difference of thirty per cent., resulting from a diminution of export to the amount of one-twelfth of the export to Europe, and not more than a twenty-fourth of the whole crop. Admitting the crop to have been 24,000,000 of cwts., and it must have been more, the total difference produced by this abstraction of four per cent.

from the markets of Europe would be more than six millions of pounds, or thirty millions of dollars. Such being the result of a difference of four per cent., if the people of Cuba, Brazil, India, and other countries were to turn some of their labour to the production of cloth, iron, and other commodities for which they are now wholly dependent on Europe, and thus diminish their necessity for export to the further extent of two per cent., is it not quite certain that the effect would be almost to double the value of the sugar crop of the world, to the great advantage of the free cultivator of Jamaica, who would realize more for his sugar, while obtaining his cloth and his iron cheaper? If he could do this would he not become a freer man? Is not this, however, directly the reverse of what is sought by those who believe the prosperity of England to be connected with cheap sugar, and who therefore desire that compet.i.tion for the sale of sugar should be _unlimited_, while compet.i.tion, for the sale of cloth is to be _limited_?

"Unlimited compet.i.tion" looks to compet.i.tion for the sale of raw produce in the markets of England, and to the destruction of any compet.i.tion with England for the sale of manufactured goods; and it is under this system that the poor labourer of Jamaica is being destroyed. He is now more a slave than ever, because his labour yields him less of the necessaries and comforts of life than when a master was bound to provide for him.

Such is a brief history of West India slavery, from its commencement to the present day, and from it the reader will be enabled to form an estimate of the judgment which dictated immediate and unconditional emanc.i.p.ation, and of the humanity that subsequently dictated unlimited freedom of compet.i.tion for the sale of sugar. That of those who advocated emanc.i.p.ation vast numbers were actuated by the most praise worthy motives, there can be no doubt; but unenlightened enthusiasm has often before led almost to crime, and it remains to be seen if the impartial historian, will not, at a future day, say that such has been here the case. As regards the course which has been since pursued toward these impoverished, ignorant, and, defenceless people, he will perhaps have less difficulty; and it is possible that in recording it, the motives which led to it, and the results, he may find himself forced to place it among crimes of the deepest dye.

CHAPTER X.

HOW SLAVERY GREW AND IS MAINTAINED IN THE UNITED STATES.

The first attempt at manufacturing any species of cloth in the North American provinces produced a resolution on the part of the House of Commons, [1710,] that "the erecting of manufactories in the colonies had a tendency to lessen their dependence on Great Britain." Soon afterward complaints were made to Parliament that the colonists were establis.h.i.+ng manufactories for themselves, and the House of Commons ordered the Board of Trade to report on the subject, which was done at great length. In 1732, the exportation of hats from province to province was prohibited, and the number of apprentices to be taken by hatters was limited. In 1750 the erection of any mill or other engine for splitting or rolling iron was prohibited; but pig iron was allowed to be imported into England duty free, that it might there be manufactured and sent back again. At a later period, Lord Chatham declared that he would not permit the colonists to make even a hobnail for themselves--and his views were then and subsequently carried into effect by the absolute prohibition in 1765 of the export of artisans, in 1781 of woollen machinery, in 1782 of cotton machinery and artificers in cotton, in 1785 of iron and steel-making machinery and workmen in those departments of trade, and in 1799 by the prohibition of the export of colliers, lest other countries should acquire the art of mining coal.

The tendency of the system has thus uniformly been--

I. To prevent the application of labour elsewhere than in England to any pursuit but that of agriculture, and thus to deprive the weaker portion of society--the women and children--of any employment but in the field.

II. To compel whole populations to produce the same commodities, and thus to deprive them of the power to make exchanges among themselves.

III. To compel them, therefore, to export to England all their produce in its rudest forms, at great cost of transportation.

IV. To deprive them of all power of returning to the land the manure yielded by its products, and thus to compel them to exhaust their land.

V. To deprive them of the power of a.s.sociating together for the building of towns, the establishment of schools, the making of roads, or the defence of their rights.

VI. To compel them, with every step in the process of exhausting the land, to increase their distances from each other and from market.

VII. To compel the waste of all labour that could not be employed in the field.

VIII. To compel the waste of all the vast variety of things almost valueless in themselves, but which acquire value as men are enabled to work in combination with each other.[44]

IX. To prevent increase in the value of land and in the demand for the labour of man; and,

X. To prevent advance toward civilization and freedom.

That such were the tendencies of the system was seen by the people of the colonies. "It is well known and understood," said Franklin, in 1771, "that whenever a manufacture is established which employs a number of hands, it raises the value of lands in the neighbouring country all around it, partly by the greater demand near at hand for the produce of the land, and partly from the plenty of money drawn by the manufactures to that part of the country. It seems, therefore," he continued, "the interest of all our farmers and owners of lands, to encourage our young manufactures in preference to foreign ones imported among us from distant countries." Such was the almost universal feeling of the country, and to the restriction on the power to apply labour was due, in a great degree, the Revolution.

The power to compel the colonists to make all their exchanges abroad gave to the merchants of England, and to the government, the same power of taxation that we see to have been so freely exercised in regard to sugar. In a paper published in 1750, in the London General Advertiser, it was stated that Virginia then exported 50,000 hhds. of tobacco, producing 550,000, of which the s.h.i.+p-owner, the underwriter, the commission merchant, and the government took 450,000, leaving to be divided between the land-owner and labourer only 100,000, or about eighteen per cent., which is less even than the proportion stated by _Gee_, in his work of that date. Under such circ.u.mstances the planter could acc.u.mulate little capital to aid him in the improvement of his cultivation.

The Revolution came, and thenceforward there existed no legal impediments to the establishment of home markets by aid of which the farmer might be enabled to lessen the cost of transporting his produce to market, and his manure from market, thus giving to his land some of those advantages of situation which elsewhere add so largely to its value. The prohibitory laws had, however, had the effect of preventing the gradual growth of the mechanic arts, and Virginia had no towns of any note, while to the same circ.u.mstances was due the fact that England was prepared to put down all attempts at compet.i.tion with her in the manufacture of cloth, or of iron. The territory of the former embraced forty millions of acres, and her widely scattered population amounted to little more than 600,000. At the North, some descriptions of manufacture had grown slowly up, and the mechanics were much more numerous, and towns had gradually grown to be very small cities; the consequence of which was that the farmer there, backed by the artisan, always his ally, was more able to protect himself against the trader, who represented the foreign manufacturer. Everywhere, however, the growth of manufactures was slow, and everywhere, consequently, the farmer was seen exhausting his land in growing wheat, tobacco, and other commodities, to be sent to distant markets, from which no manure could be returned. With the exhaustion of the land its owners became, of course, impoverished, and there arose a necessity for the removal of the people who cultivated it, to new lands, to be in turn exhausted. In the North, the labourer thus circ.u.mstanced, _removed himself_. In the South, he had _to be removed_. Sometimes the planter abandoned his land and travelled forth with all his people, but more frequently he found himself compelled to part with some of his slaves to others; and thus has the domestic slave trade grown by aid of the exhaustive process to which the land and its owner have been subjected.

The reader may obtain some idea of the extent of the exhaustion that has taken place, by a perusal of the following extracts from an address to the Agricultural Society of Albemarle County, Virginia, by one of the best authorities of the State, the Hon. Andrew Stevenson, late Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Minister to England.

Looking to what is the "real situation" of things, the speaker asks--

"Is there an intelligent and impartial man who can cast his eyes over the State and not be impressed with the truth, deplorable as it is afflicting, that the produce of most of our lands is not only small in proportion to the extent in cultivation, but that the lands themselves have been gradually sinking and becoming worse, under a most defective and ruinous system of cultivation?" "The truth is," he continues, "we must all feel and know that the spirit of agricultural improvement has been suffered to languish too long in Virginia, and that it is now reaching a point, in the descending scale, from which, if it is not revived, and that very speedily, our State must continue not only third or fourth in population, as she now is, but consent to take her station among her smaller sisters of the Union."

The cause of this unhappy state of things he regards as being to be found in "a disregard of scientific knowledge" and "a deep-rooted attachment to old habits of cultivation," together with the "practice of hard cropping and injudicious rotation of crops, leading them to cultivate more land than they can manure, or than they have means of improving;" and the consequences are found in the fact that in all the country east of the Blue Ridge, the average product of wheat "does not come up to seven bushels to the acre," four of which are required to restore the seed and defray the cost of cultivation, leaving to the land-owner for his own services and those of a hundred acres of land, three hundred bushels, worth, at present prices, probably two hundred and seventy dollars! Even this, however, is not as bad an exhibit as is produced in reference to another populous district of more than a hundred miles in length--that between Lynchburg and Richmond--in which the product is estimated at _not exceeding six bushels to the acre_!

Under such circ.u.mstances, we can scarcely be surprised to learn from the speaker that the people of his great State, where meadows abound and marl exists in unlimited quant.i.ty, import potatoes from the poor States of the North, and are compelled to be dependent upon them for hay and b.u.t.ter, the importers of which realize fortunes, while the farmers around them are everywhere exhausting their land and obtaining smaller crops in each successive year.

Why is this so? Why should Virginia import potatoes and hay, cheese and b.u.t.ter? An acre of potatoes may be made to yield four hundred bushels, and meadows yield hay by tons, and yet her people raise wheat, of which they obtain six or seven bushels to the acre, and corn, of which they obtain fifteen or twenty, and with the produce of these they buy b.u.t.ter and cheese, pork and potatoes, which yield to the producer five dollars where they get one--and import many of these things too, from States in which manufacturing populations abound, and in which all these commodities should, in the natural course of things, be higher in price than in Virginia, where all, even when employed, are engaged in the cultivation of the soil. The answer to these questions is to be found in the fact that the farmers and planters of the State can make no manure. They raise wheat and corn, which they send elsewhere to be consumed; and the people among whom it is consumed put the refuse on their own lands, and thus are enabled to raise crops that count by tons, which they then exchange with the producers of the wheat produced on land that yields six bushels to the acre.

"How many of our people," continues the speaker, "do we see disposing of their lands at ruinous prices, and relinquis.h.i.+ng their birthplaces and friends, to settle themselves in the West; and many not so much from choice as from actual inability to support their families and rear and educate their children out of the produce of their exhausted lands--once fertile, but rendered barren and unproductive by a ruinous system of cultivation.

"And how greatly is this distress heightened, in witnessing, as we often do, the successions and reverses of this struggle between going and staying, on the part of many emigrants. And how many are there, who after removing, remain only a few years and then return to seize again upon a portion of their native land, and die where they were born. How strangely does it remind us of the poor s.h.i.+pwrecked mariner, who, touching in the midst of the storm the sh.o.r.e, lays hold of it, but is borne seaward by the receding wave; but struggling back, torn and lacerate, he grasps again the rock, with bleeding hands, and still clings to it, as a last and forlorn hope. Nor is this to be wondered at. Perhaps it was the home of his childhood--the habitation of his fathers for past generations--the soil upon which had been expended the savings and nourishment, the energies and virtues of a long life--'the sweat of the living, and the ashes of the dead.'

"Oh! how hard to break such ties as these.

"This is no gloomy picture of the imagination; but a faithful representation of what most of us know and feel to be true. Who is it that has not had some acquaintance or neighbour--some friend, perhaps some relative, forced into this current of emigration, and obliged from necessity, in the evening, probably, of a long life, to abandon his State and friends, and the home of his fathers and childhood, to seek a precarious subsistence in the supposed El Dorados of the West?"

This is a terrible picture, and yet it is but the index to one still worse that must follow in its train. Well does the hon. speaker say that--

"There is another evil attending this continual drain of our population to the West, next in importance to the actual loss of the population itself, and that is, its tendency to continue and enlarge our wretched system of cultivation.

"The moment some persons feel a.s.sured that for present gain they can exhaust the fertility of their lands in the old States, and then abandon them for those in the West, which, being rich, require neither the aid of science nor art, the natural tendency is at once to give over all efforts at improvement themselves, and kill their land as quickly as possible--then sell it for what it will bring or abandon it as a waste. And such will be found to be the case with too many of the emigrants from the lowlands of Virginia."

Another distinguished Virginian, Mr. Ruffin, in urging an effort to restore the lands that have been exhausted, and to bring into activity the rich ones that have never been drained, estimates the advantages to be derived by Lower Virginia alone at $500,000,000. "The strength, physical, intellectual, and moral, as well as the revenue of the commonwealth, will," he says,

"Soon derive new and great increase from the growing improvements of that one and the smallest of the great divisions of her territory, which was the poorest by natural const.i.tution--still more, the poorest by long exhausting tillage--its best population gone or going away, and the remaining portion sinking into apathy and degradation, and having no hope left except that which was almost universally entertained of fleeing from the ruined country and renewing the like work of destruction on the fertile lands of the far West."

If we look farther South, we find the same state of affairs. North Carolina abounds in rich lands, undrained and uncultivated, and coal and iron ore abound. Her area is greater than that of Ireland, and yet her population is but 868,000; and it has increased only 130,000 in twenty years, and, from 1830 to 1840; the increase was only 16,000. In South Carolina, men have been everywhere doing precisely what has been described in reference to Virginia; and yet the State has, says Governor Seabrook, in his address to the State Agricultural Society, "millions of uncleared acres of unsurpa.s.sed fertility, which seem to solicit a trial of their powers from the people of the plantation States." * * "In her borders," he continues, "there is scarcely a vegetable product essential to the human race that cannot be furnished." Marl and lime abound, millions of acres of rich meadow-land remain in a state of nature, and "the seash.o.r.e parishes,"

he adds, "possess unfailing supplies of salt mud, salt gra.s.s, and sh.e.l.l-lime." So great, nevertheless, was the tendency to the abandonment of the land, that in the ten years from 1830 to 1840 the white population increased but 1000 and the black but 12,000, whereas the natural increase would have given 150,000!

Allowing Virginia, at the close of the Revolution, 600,000 people, she should now have, at the usual rate of increase, and excluding all allowance for immigration, 4,000,000, or one to every ten acres; and no one at all familiar with the vast advantages of the state can doubt her capability of supporting more than thrice that number.[45]

Nevertheless, the total number in 1850 was but 1,424,000, and the increase in twenty years had been but 200,000, when it should have been 1,200,000. If the reader desire to know what has become of all these people, he may find most of them among the millions now inhabiting Alabama and Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas; and if he would know why they are now there to be found, the answer to the question may be given in the words--"They borrowed from the earth, and they did not repay, and therefore she expelled them." It has been said, and truly said, that "the nation which commences by exporting food will end by exporting men."

When men come together and combine their efforts, they are enabled to bring into activity all the vast and various powers of the earth; and the more they come together, the greater is the value of land, the greater the demand, for labour, the higher its price, and the greater the freedom of man. When, on the contrary, they separate from each other, the greater is the tendency to a decline in the value of land, the less is the value of labour, and the less the freedom of man. Such being the case, if we desire to ascertain the ultimate cause of the existence of the domestic slave trade, it would seem to be necessary only to ascertain the cause of the exhaustion of the land. The reason usually a.s.signed for this will be found in the following pa.s.sage, extracted from one of the English journals of the day;--

"The mode of agriculture usually coincident with the employment of slave labour is essentially exhaustive, and adapted therefore only to the virgin-richness of a newly-colonized soil. The slave can plant, and dig, and hoe: he works rudely and lazily with rude tools: and his unwilling feet tread the same path of enforced labour day after day.

But slave labour is not adapted to the operations of scientific agriculture, which restores its richness to a wornout soil; and it is found to be a fact that the planters of the Northern slave States, as, _e.g._, Virginia, gradually desert the old seats of civilization, and advance further and further into the yet untilled country.

Tobacco was the great staple of Virginian produce for many years after that beautiful province was colonized by Englishmen. It has exhausted the soil; grain crops have succeeded, and been found hardly less exhaustive; and emigration of both white and coloured population to the West and South has taken place to a very large extent, The result may be told in the words of an American witness:--'That part of Virginia which lies upon tide waters presents an aspect of universal decay. Its population diminishes, and it sinks day by day into a lower depth of exhaustion and poverty. The country between tide waters and the Blue Ridge is fast pa.s.sing into the same condition. Mount Vernon is a desert waste; Monticello is little better, and the same circ.u.mstances which have desolated the lands of Was.h.i.+ngton and Jefferson have impoverished every planter in the State. Hardly any have escaped, save the owners of the rich bottom lands along James River, the fertility of which it seems difficult utterly to destroy.'[46] Now a Virginia planter stands in much the same relation to his plantation as an absentee Irish landlord to his estate; the care of the land is in each case handed over to a middleman, who is anxious to screw out of it as large a return of produce or rent as possible; and pecuniary embarra.s.sment is in both cases the result. But as long as every pound of cotton grown on the Mississippi and the Red River finds eager customers in Liverpool, the price of slaves in those districts cannot fail to keep up. In many cases the planter of the Northern slave States emigrates to a region where he can employ his capital of thews and sinews more profitably than at home. In many others, he turns his plantation into an establishment for slave breeding, and sells his rising stock for labour in the cottonfield."--_Prospective Review_ Nov. 1852.

Unhappily, however, for this reasoning precisely the same exhaustion is visible in the Northern States, as the reader may see by a perusal of the statements on this subject given by Professor Johnson, in his "Notes on North America," of which the following is a specimen:--

"Exhaustion has diminished the produce of the land, formerly the great staple of the country. When the wheat fell off, barley, which at first yielded fifty or sixty bushels, was raised year after year, till the land fell away from this, and became full of weeds."--Vol.

i. 259.