peopled by black' merchandise,' and some half dozen white drovers. The real 'people' are thus not only deprived of the patrimony which our abolition of the laws of entail and primogeniture was especially intended to secure them; are not only driven off the fairest portions of the soil, like the Scotch Highlanders and the Irish peasantry, but literature and religion are fast disappearing in that portion of this continent on which Providence seems to have intended them to flourish most."

IV. INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY ON SOUTHERN SOCIETY

1 Those who watch the enormous export of cotton from the South, and who are accustomed to reckon up its value, as it goes forward, million on million, hundred million on hundred million, year after year, say that it is incomprehensible, if it be not incredible, that the people of the South are not rich and living in luxury unknown elsewhere. It is asking too much that such statements as I have made should be received without any explanation. I have found this to be so, and so far as the explanation appears in the attendant social phenomena of the country, I shall endeavour to set it forth, sustaining the accuracy of my report by the evidence of competent Southern witnesses.

The present system of American slavery, notwithstanding the enormous advantages of wealth which the cotton monopoly is supposed to offer, prevents the people at large from having "comfortable homes," ("the necessaries of life, the usual luxuries of country life, viz.: church, school, music, and lectures, as well as bread, cleanliness"). For nine-tenths of the citizens, comfortable homes, as the words would be understood by the mass of the citizens of the North and of England, are, under the present arrangements, out of the question.

Examine almost any rural district of the South, study its history, and this will be evident. . . . How is it in a district of entirely rich soil? Suppose it to be of twenty square miles, with a population of six hundred, all told, and with an ordinarily convenient

1 Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom [1861], II, 286, 288-292, 294-295, 299–301, 304, 305.

access by river navigation to market. The whole of the available cotton land in this case will probably be owned by three or four men, and on these men the demand for cotton will have had, let us suppose, its full effect. Their tillage land will be comparatively well cultivated. Their houses will be comfortable, their furniture and their food luxurious. They will, moreover, not only have secured the best land on which to apply their labour, but the best brute force, the best tools, and the best machinery for ginning and pressing, all superintended by the best class of overseers. The cotton of each will be shipped at the best season, perhaps all at once, on a boat, or by trains expressly engaged at the lowest rates of freight. It will everywhere receive special attention and care, because it forms together a parcel of great value. The merchants will watch the markets closely to get the best prices for it, and when sold the cash returns to each proprietor will be enormously large. As the expenses of raising and marketing cotton are in inverse ratio to the number of hands employed, planters nearly always immediately reinvest their surplus funds in slaves; and as there is a sufficient number of large capitalists engaged in cottongrowing to make a strong competition for the limited number of slaves which the breeding States can supply, it is evident that the price of a slave will always be as high as the product of his labour, under the best management, on the most valuable land, and with every economical advantage which money can procure, will warrant. But suppose that there are in the district besides these three or four large planters, their families and their slaves, a certain number of whites, who do not own slaves. The fact of their being non-slaveholders is evidence that they are as yet without capital. In this case one of two tendencies must soon be developed. Either being stimulated by the high price of cotton they will grow industrious, will accumulate capital and purchase slaves, and owning slaves will require a larger amount of land upon which to work them than they require for their own labour alone, thus being led to buy out one of the other planters, or to move elsewhere themselves before they have acquired an established improvement of character from their prosperity; or, secondly, they will not purchase slaves, but either expend currently for their own comfort, or hoard the results

of their labour. If they hoard they will acquire no increase of comfort or improvement of character on account of the demand. If they spend all their earnings, these will not be sufficient, however profitable their cotton culture may be supposed, to purchase luxuries much superior to those furnished to the slaves of the planters, because the local demand, being limited to some fifty white families, in the whole district of twenty square miles, is not enough to draw luxuries to the neighbourhood, unless they are brought by special order, and at great expense from the nearest shipping port. Nor is it possible for such a small number of whites to maintain a church or a newspaper, nor yet a school, unless it is one established by a planter, or two or three planters, and really of a private and very expensive character.

Suppose, again, another district in which either the land is generally less productive or the market less easy of access than in the last, or that both is the case. The stimulus of the cotton demand is, of course, proportionately lessened. In this case, equally with the last, the richest soils, and those most convenient to the river or the railroad, if there happens to be much choice in this respect, will assuredly be possessed by the largest capitalists, that is, the largest slaveholders, who may nevertheless be men of but moderate wealth and limited information. If so, their standard of comfort will yet be low, and their demand will consequently take effect very slowly in increasing the means of comfort, and rendering facilities for obtaining instruction more accessible to their neighbours. But suppose, notwithstanding the disadvantages of the district in its distance from market, that their sales of cotton, the sole export of the district, are very profitable, and that the demand for cotton is constantly increasing. A similar condition with regard to the chief export of a free labour community would inevitably tend to foster the intelligence and industry of a large number of people. It has this effect with only a very limited number of the inhabitants of a plantation district consisting in large part as they must of slaves. These labourers may be driven to work harder, and may be furnished with better tools for the purpose of increasing the value of cotton which is to be exchanged for the luxuries which the planter is learning to demand for himself, but it is for himself and for his

family alone that these luxuries will be demanded. The wages or means of demanding home comfort of the workmen are not at all influenced by the cotton demand: the effect, therefore, in enlarging and cheapening the local supply of the means of home comfort will be almost inappreciable, while the impulse generated in the planter's mind is almost wholly directed toward increasing the cotton crop through the labour of his slaves alone. His demand upon the whites of the district is not materially enlarged in any way. The slave population of the district will be increased in number, and its labour more energetically directed, and soon the planters will find the soil they possess growing less productive from their increasing drafts upon it. There is plenty of rich unoccupied land to be had for a dollar an acre a few hundred miles to the west, still it is no trifling matter to move all the stock, human, equine, and bovine, and all the implements and machinery of a large plantation. Hence, at the same time, perhaps, with an importation from Virginia of purchased slaves, there will be an active demand among the slaveholders for all the remaining land in the district on which cotton can be profitably grown. Then sooner or later, and with a rapidity proportionate to the effect of the cotton demand, the white population of the district divides, one part, consisting of a few slaveholders, obtains possession of all the valuable cotton land, and monopolizes for a few white families all the advantages of the cotton demand. A second part removes with its slaves, if it possess any, from the district, while a third continues to occupy the sand hills, or sometimes perhaps takes possession of the exhausted land which has been vacated by the large planters, because they, with all their superior skill and advantages of capital, could not cultivate it longer with profit.

The population of the district, then, will consist of the large landowners and slaveowners, who are now so few in number as to be unnoticeable either as producers or consumers; of their slaves, who are producers but not consumers (to any important extent), and of this forlorn hope of poor whites, who are, in the eyes of the commercial world, neither producers nor consumers. .

South Carolina affords the fairest example of the tendency of the Southern policy, because it is the oldest cotton State, and

because slavery has been longest and most strongly and completely established there. But the same laws are seen in operation leading to the same sure results everywhere.

As to the extent to which the process is carried, Mr. Gregg says:

I think it would be within bounds to assume that the planting capital withdrawn within that period [the last twenty-five years] would, judiciously applied, have drained every acre of swamp land in South Carolina, besides resuscitating the old, worn-out land, and doubling the crops — thus more than quadrupling the productive power of the agriculture of the State.

It would be consoling to hope that this planters' capital in the new region to which it is driven were used to better results. Does the average condition of the people of western Louisiana and Texas, as I have exhibited it to the reader in a former chapter, justify such a hope? When we consider the form in which this capital exists, and the change in the mode of its investment which is accomplished when it is transferred from South Carolina, we perceive why it does not.

If we are told that the value of one hundred thousand dollars has been recently transferred from Massachusetts to a certain township of Illinois, we reasonably infer that the people of this town will be considerably benefited thereby.

We think what an excellent saw mill and grist mill, what an assortment of wares, what a good inn, what a good school, what fine breeding stock, what excellent seeds and fruit trees, what superior machinery and implements, they will be able to obtain there now; and we know that some of these or other sources of profit, convenience, and comfort to a neighbourhood, are almost certain to exist in all capital so transferred. In the capital transferred from South Carolina, there is no such virtue- none of consequence. In a hundred thousand dollars of it there will not be found a single mill, nor a waggon load of "store goods"; it will hardly introduce to the neighbourhood whither it goes a single improvement, convenience, or comfort. At least ninety thousand dollars of it will consist in slaves, and if their owners go with them it is hard to see in what respect their real home comfort is greater.

We must admit, it is true, that they are generally better satisfied, else this transfer would not be so unremitting as it is. The motive