Part 16 (2/2)

The social stigma upon slave dealing doubtless enhanced the profits of the traders by diminis.h.i.+ng the compet.i.tion. The difference in the scales of prices prevailing at any time in the cheapest and the dearest local markets was hardly ever less than thirty per cent. From such a margin, however, there had to be deducted not only the cost of feeding, clothing, sheltering, guarding and transporting the slaves for the several months commonly elapsing between purchase and sale in the trade, but also allowances for such loss as might occur in transit by death, illness, accident or escape. At some periods, furthermore, slave prices fell so rapidly that the prospect of profit for the speculator vanished. At Columbus, Georgia, in December, 1844, for example, it was reported that a coffle from North Carolina had been marched back for want of buyers.[40]

But losses of this sort were more than offset in the long run by the upward trend of prices which was in effect throughout the most of the ante-bellum period. The Southern planters sometimes cut into the business of the traders by going to the border states to buy and bring home in person the slaves they needed.[41] The building of railways speeded the journeys and correspondingly reduced the costs. The Central of Georgia Railroad improved its service in 1858 by inst.i.tuting a negro sleeping car [42]--an accommodation which apparently no railroad has furnished in the post-bellum decades.

[Footnote 40: _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Dec. 31, 1844.]

[Footnote 41: Andrews, _Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade_, p.171.]

While the traders were held in common contempt, the incidents and effects of their traffic were viewed with mixed emotions. Its employment of shackles was excused only on the ground of necessary precaution. Its breaking up of families was generally deplored, although it was apologized for by thick-and-thin champions of everything Southern with arguments that negro domestic ties were weak at best and that the separations were no more frequent than those suffered by free laborers at the North under the stress of economic necessity. Its drain of money from the districts importing the slaves was regretted as a financial disadvantage. On the other hand, the citizens of the exporting states were disposed to rejoice doubly at being saved from loss by the depreciation of property on their hands [43] and at seeing the negro element in their population begin to dwindle;[44] but even these considerations were in some degree offset, in Virginia at least, by thoughts that the shrinkage of the blacks was not enough to lessen materially the problem of racial adjustments, that it was prime young workmen and women rather than culls who were being sold South, that white immigration was not filling their gaps, and that accordingly land prices were falling as slave prices rose.[45]

[Footnote 42: Central of Georgia Railroad Company _Report_ for 1859.]

[Footnote 43: _National Intelligencer_ (Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.), Jan. 19, 1833.]

[Footnote 44: R.R. Howison, _History of Virginia_ (Richmond, Va., 1846-1848), II. 519, 520.]

[Footnote 45: Edmund Ruffin, ”The Effects of High Prices of Slaves,” in _DeBow's Review_, XXVI, 647-657 (June, 1859).]

Delaware alone among the states below Mason and Dixon's line appears to have made serious effort to restrict the outgoing trade in slaves; but all the states from Maryland and Kentucky to Louisiana legislated from time to time for the prohibition of the inward trade.[46] The enforcement of these laws was called for by citizen after citizen in the public press, as demanded by ”every principle of justice, humanity, policy and interest,”

and particularly on the ground that if the border states were drained of slaves they would be transferred from the pro-slavery to the anti-slavery group in politics.[47] The state laws could not const.i.tutionally debar traders from the right of transit, and as a rule they did not prohibit citizens from bringing in slaves for their own use. These two apertures, together with the pa.s.siveness of the public, made the legislative obstacles of no effect whatever. As to the neighborhood trade within each community, no prohibition was attempted anywhere in the South.

[Footnote 46: These acts are summarized in W.H. Collins, _Domestic Slave Trade_, chap. 7.]

[Footnote 47: _Louisiana Gazette_, Feb. 25, 1818 and Jan. 29, 1823; _Louisiana Courier_, Jan. 13, 1831; _Georgia Journal_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Dec. 4, 1821, reprinted in _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 67-70; _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Feb. 6, 1847.]

On the whole, instead of hampering migration, as serfdom would have done, the inst.i.tution of slavery made the negro population much more responsive to new industrial opportunity than if it had been free. The long distance slave trade found its princ.i.p.al function in augmenting the westward movement. No persuasion of the ignorant and inert was required; the fiat of one master set them on the road, and the fiat of another set them to new tasks. The local branch of the trade had its main use in transferring labor from impoverished employers to those with better means, from pa.s.sive owners to active, and from persons with whom relations might be strained to others whom the negroes might find more congenial. That this last was not negligible is suggested by a series of letters in 1860 from William Capers, overseer on a Savannah River rice plantation, to Charles Manigault his employer, concerning a slave foreman or ”driver” named John. In the first of these letters, August 5, Capers expressed pleasure at learning that John, who had in previous years been his lieutenant on another estate, was for sale. He wrote: ”Buy him by all means. There is but few negroes more competent than he is, and he was not a drunkard when under my management.... In speaking with John he does not answer like a smart negro, but he is quite so. You had better say to him who is to manage him on Savannah.” A week later Capers wrote: ”John arrived safe and handed me yours of the 9th inst. I congratulate you on the purchase of said negro.

He says he is quite satisfied to be here and will do as he has always done 'during the time I have managed him.' No drink will be offered him. All on my part will be done to bring John all right.” Finally, on October 15, Capers reported: ”I have found John as good a driver as when I left him on Santee. Bad management was the cause of his being sold, and [I] am glad you have been the fortunate man to get him.”[48]

[Footnote 48: _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 337, 338.]

Leaving aside for the present, as topics falling more fitly under the economics of slavery, the questions of the market breeding of slaves in the border states and the working of them to death in the lower South, as well as the subject of inflations and depressions in slave prices, it remains to mention the chief defect of the slave trade as an agency for the distribution of labor. This lay in the fact that it dealt only in lifetime service. Employers, it is true, might buy slaves for temporary employment and sell them when the need for their labor was ended; but the fluctuations of slave prices and of the local opportunity to sell those on hand would involve such persons in slave trading risks on a scale eclipsing that of their industrial earnings. The fact that slave hiring prevailed extensively in all the Southern towns demonstrates the eagerness of short term employers to avoid the toils of speculation.

CHAPTER XII

THE COTTON ReGIME

It would be hard to overestimate the predominance of the special crops in the industry and interest of the Southern community. For good or ill they have shaped its development from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

Each characteristic area had its own staple, and those districts which had none were scorned by all typical Southern men. The several areas expanded and contracted in response to fluctuations in the relative prices of their products. Thus when cotton was exceptionally high in the early 'twenties many Virginians discarded tobacco in its favor for a few years,[1] and on the Louisiana lands from Baton Rouge to Alexandria, the planters from time to time changed from sugar to cotton and back again.[2] There were local variations also in scale and intensity; but in general the system in each area tended to be steady and fairly uniform. The methods in the several staples, furthermore, while necessarily differing in their details, were so similar in their emphasis upon routine that each reinforced the influence of the others in shaping the industrial organization of the South as a whole.

[Footnote 1: _Richmond Compiler_, Nov. 25, 1825, and _Alexandria Gazette_, Feb. 11, 1826, quoted in the _Charleston City Gazette_, Dec. 1, 1825 and Feb. 20, 1826; _The American Farmer_ (Baltimore, Dec. 29, 1825), VII, 299.]

[Footnote 2: _Hunt's Merchant's Magazine_, IX, 149.]

At the height of the plantation system's career, from 1815 to 1860, indigo production was a thing of the past; hemp was of negligible importance; tobacco was losing in the east what it gained in the west; rice and sea-island cotton were stationary; but sugar was growing in local intensity, and upland cotton was ”king” of a rapidly expanding realm.

The culture of sugar, tobacco and rice has been described in preceding chapters; that of the fleecy staple requires our present attention.

The outstanding features of the landscape on a short-staple cotton plantation were the gin house and its attendant baling press. The former was commonly a weatherboarded structure some forty feet square, raised about eight feet from the ground by wooden pillars. In the middle of the s.p.a.ce on the ground level, a great upright hub bore an iron-cogged pinion and was pierced by a long horizontal beam some three feet from the ground.

Draught animals. .h.i.tched to the ends of this and driven in a circular path would revolve the hub and furnish power for transmission by cogs and belts to the gin on the floor above. At the front of the house were a stair and a platform for unloading seed cotton from the wagons; inside there were bins for storage, as well as a s.p.a.ce for operating the gin; and in the rear a lean-to room extending to the ground level received the flying lint and let it settle on the floor. The press, a skeleton structure nearby, had in the center a stout wooden box whose interior length and width determined the height and thickness of the bales but whose depth was more than twice as great as the intended bale's width. The floor, the ends and the upper halves of the sides of the box were built rigidly, but the lower sides were hinged at the bottom, and the lid was a block sliding up and down according as a great screw from above was turned to left or right. The screw, sometimes of cast iron but preferably of wood as being less liable to break under strain without warning, worked through a block mortised into a timber frame above the box, and at its upper end it supported two gaunt beams which sloped downward and outward to a horse path encircling the whole.

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