The Battle of Principles | Page 7

Eli Whitney had made cotton to be king. Cotton encouraged slavery; slavery at last threatened the Union and so brought on the Civil War.
The value of the slave as an economic machine depended upon his physique, health and general endurance. The slave hunters were Portuguese, Spaniards and Arabs, who drove the negroes in gangs down to the coast, where they were loaded upon the slave ships. When the trade was brisk and prices high, the hold of the ship was crowded to suffocation, and intense suffering was inevitable. Landing at Savannah or Charleston, Mobile or New Orleans, the slaves were sold at wholesale, in the auction place. Later, the slave dealer drove them in gangs through the villages, where they were sold at retail. The cost of a slave varied with the price of cotton. Of the three million one hundred thousand slaves living in the South in 1850, one million eight hundred thousand were raising cotton. That was the great export, the basis of prosperity. So great was the demand in England for Southern cotton that profits were enormous. The Secretary of the Treasury in Buchanan's time published a list of forty Southern planters in Louisiana and Mississippi. One of them had five hundred negroes and sold the cotton from his plantation at a net profit of one hundred thousand dollars. Each negro, therefore, netted his master that year five hundred dollars. The working life of a slave was short, scarcely more than seven years, and for that reason the ablest negro was never worth more than from a thousand to twelve hundred dollars.
But if the cost of free labour was high, the cost of supporting the slave under the Southern climate was very low. The climate of the Gulf States is gentle, soft and propitious. Of forty planters who published their statements, the average cost of clothing and feeding a slave for one year was thirty dollars. One Louisiana planter, however, showed that one hundred slaves on his plantation had cost him in cash outlay seven hundred and fifty dollars for the entire year. This planter states that his slaves raised their own corn, converted it into meal and bread, raised their own sugar-cane, made their own molasses, built their own houses out of the forest hard by. The slaves also raised their own bacon, but unfortunately the price of meat was so high as to make its use only an occasional luxury. North Carolina passed a law commanding the planters to give their slaves meat at certain intervals, but the law remained a dead letter. Other states, by legal enactment, fixed the amount of meal that should be given to slaves.
When Fanny Kemble, the English actress, retired from the stage, it was to marry a Southern planter, and her autobiography and private letters throw a flood of light upon the life of the slaves upon a typical plantation in the cotton States. She says that the planter expected that about once in seven years he must buy a new set of hands; that the slaves did little in the winter, but they worked fifteen hours a day in the spring, and often eighteen hours a day in the summer until the cotton was picked. She adds that the negro children used to beg her for a taste of meat, just as English children plead for a little candy. She states that on her husband's estate slave breeding was most important and remunerative, and that the increase and the young slaves sold made it possible for the plantation to pay its interest. "Every negro child born was worth two hundred dollars the moment it drew breath."
It was this separation of families that touched the heart of Fanny Kemble Butler, and stirred the indignation of Harriet Martineau, who at the end of her year at the South wrote that she would rather walk through a penitentiary or a lunatic asylum than through the slave quarters that stood in the rear of the great house where she was entertained. It is this element that explains the statement of John Randolph of Virginia. Conversing one evening about the notable orations to which he had listened, the great lawyer said that the most eloquent words he had ever heard were "spoken on the auction block by a slave mother." It seemed that she pleaded with the auctioneer and the spectators not to separate her from her children and her husband, and she made these men, who were trafficking in human life, realize the meaning of Christ's words, "Woe unto him that doth offend one of My little ones; it were better for him that a millstone were placed about his neck and that he were cast into the depths of the sea."
In this era of industrial education for the coloured race it