The Continental Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 3, March 1862 | Page 9

would there be in New England, if every laborer or mechanic cost his employer $800 to $1500 before he could be set to work, and if each one who undertook to labor upon his own account, and was not so purchased, were stigmatized and degraded and termed 'mean white trash?'
It will again be objected that the theory of the cotton planter is to raise all the food and make all the clothing on the plantation. The cultivation of cotton in the best manner is described by Southern writers as a process of gardening. Now what would be thought of a market gardener at the North who should keep a large extra force for the purpose of spinning yarn on a frame of six to ten spindles, and weaving it up on a rude hand loom? Would this not be protection to home industry in its most absurd extreme? But this is the plantation system.
The correctness of the estimate of cost can be tested in some degree by the rates at which able-bodied slaves are hired out. Many lists can be found in Southern papers; the latest found by the writer is in De Bow's Review of 1860.
A list of fourteen slaves, comprising 'a blacksmith, his wife, eight field hands, a lame negro, an old man, an old woman and a young woman,' were hired out for the year 1860, in Claiborne Parish, La., at an average of $289 each, the highest being $430 for the blacksmith, and $171 for 'Juda, old woman.'
The Southern States have thus far retained almost a monopoly of the cotton trade of the civilized world by promptly furnishing a fair supply of cotton of the best quality, and at prices which defied competition from the only region from which it was to be feared, viz., India. This monopoly has been retained, notwithstanding the steadily increasing demand and higher prices of the last few years.
Improvements in machinery have enabled manufacturers to pay full wages to their operatives, both in this country and in England, and to pay higher prices for their cotton than they did a few years since, without materially enhancing the cost of their goods, the larger product of cloth from a less number of hands and the saving of waste offsetting the higher price of cotton; but it is not probable that the cost of labor upon cotton goods can be hereafter materially reduced. The cost of labor upon the heavy sheetings and drills which form the larger part of our exports is now only one and one-half cents per yard, and the cost of oil, starch, and all other materials except cotton, less than one-half cent, making less than two cents for cost of manufacturing; but with cotton at ten cents to the planter and twelve and one-half cents to the spinner, the cost of cotton in the yard of same goods is five cents.
With cotton at the average price of the last few years, we have supplied a very small portion of India and China with goods, in competition with their hand-made goods of same material. With new markets opening in Japan and China, and by the building of railroads in India, we have to meet a constantly decreasing supply of raw material as compared with the demand. Give us cotton at six to seven cents, at which free labor and skill could well afford it, and the manufacturing industry of New England would receive a development unknown before. But when we ask more cotton of slavery, we are answered by its great prophet, De Bow; that because we are willing to pay a high price we can not have it; for he says, 'Although land is to be had in unlimited quantities, whenever cotton rises to ten cents, labor becomes too dear to increase production rapidly.'
And this is what the great system of slave labor has accomplished. The production of its great staple, cotton, is in the hands of less than 100,000 men. In 1850 there were in all the Southern States only 170,000 men owning more than five slaves each, and they owned 2,800,000 out of 3,300,000.
These men have by their system rendered labor degrading,--they have driven out their non-slaveholding neighbors by hundreds of thousands to find homes and self-respect in the free air of the great West,--they have reduced those who remain to a condition of ignorance scarcely to be found in any other country claiming to be civilized--so low that even the slaves look down upon the 'mean white trash,'--they have sapped the very foundations of honor and morality, so that 'Southern chivalry' has become the synonym for treachery, theft, and dishonor in every form,--they have reached a depth of degradation only to be equalled by those Northern men who would now prevent this war from utterly destroying