The Battle of Principles | Page 7

market for slaves, and soon the sea
swarmed with slave ships. Prices advanced five hundred per cent, until
a slave that had brought $100 brought $500, and some even $1,000.
What made slavery no scourge, but a great religious moral blessing?
The answer is, the cotton gin and the cotton interest that gave a new
desire to promote slavery, to spread it, and to use its labour. For 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