Olmsted records that a day's work on the cotton plantation during the picking season was fifteen hours, and at grinding time on the sugar plantation, eighteen. South Carolina legislatively fixed a day's work at fifteen hours. But the overseers, than whom the world has never seen a more despised, cruel and unprincipled set of men, knew no limit to the length of the working day, save their own will. The overseer who raised the heaviest cotton crop and saved it ranked highest of his kind: the slave was at his mercy; the owner seldom knew the cruelties of the overseer: the slave dare not report, the overseer had no thought of reporting them, and the lash made the cotton crop. And negro overseers were the most cruel of all: the negro driver who kept the slave gang busy in the field was too often the incarnation of brutality. Dead slaves were forgotten if the cotton crop was highly profitable: bales could be transformed into slaves to work a new crop.

The declaration of the constitution of Kentucky, in 1850, that the right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction; and the right of an owner of a slave as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever, was a record of facts throughout the South. Olmsted saw slaves treated as property; the death of a slave was noted no more than the death of a mule; some planters did not hesitate to work their slaves to death, calculating that all there was in a slave could be gotten out of him in seven or eight years; a new supply was cheaper because more profitable than wornout slaves. The result followed that to kill a negro was not considered murder; it may be foolish for a farmer to kill his mule but it is not murder. All Southern legislation on capital offenses exempted from legal guilt the white man who killed a slave that offered resistance: the owner's authority over the slave was supreme and no slave could give evidence against a white man. The despotism possible was seldom exercised; owners and overseers had every incentive to keep the slave well and strong but "bad niggers" had short shrift and the worst offense

a slave could commit was to run away. There was no limit to the punishment that might be inflicted upon the refractory and the threat of the overseer was usually a sufficient incentive to the slave. This reduction of the slave to property was the very basis and life of slavery. An institution must be judged by its essentials, and the essential right of the owner to the slave was the right of property. The result was the steady, relentless, unavoidable pressure toward and into brutality. Olmsted observed the slave gangs at work on the cotton plantations and could understand why the slave owners looked upon the slaves as property: the slaves were brutes, the shreds and patches of humanity within them only making their brutality plainer.

To-day when some wretched negro commits the crime of crimes, North or South, and the community is in arms. against him, who remembers that his grandfather was a brute on a cotton plantation and that the Constitution and laws of the United States and the final decisions of its highest courts, half a century ago, declared that the brute was a piece of property? It seems odd that property, or a descendant of property, if property can have posterity, can commit a crime. Yet Olmsted remarks that cotton growing and cruelty to slaves necessarily went together: there was no other way to make cotton a profitable crop. Three-fifths of all the slaves were employed on the cotton plantations.

If the system of slavery tended to make brutes of male slaves, what was its effect on the females? "Their lives," Frances Kemble records in her Journal, "are for the most part those of mere animals; their increase is literally mere animal breeding, to which every encouragement is given, for it adds to the master's live-stock and the value of his estate;" and in this degradation, she records further, the negro woman took pride: "the more frequently she adds to the number of her master's live-stock by bringing new slaves into the world, the more claims she will have upon his consideration and goodwill." The demand for slaves in the

lower South and the unprofitableness of slave labor in the border States tended to convert slavery throughout the upper South into a stock-breeding institution. There was a scale of values for children of different ages.

"The demand for cotton and negroes went hand in hand," writes the historian Rhodes; "a high price of the staple made a high value for the human cattle. A traveller going through the South would hear hardly more than two subjects discussed in public places, the price of cotton and the price of slaves. This kind of property was very high in the decade before the war, a good field hand being worth from one thousand to fifteen hundred dollars. Since the adoption of the Constitution the price of slaves had increased many fold, and after 1835 the advance was especially marked. The need of slaves in the cotton region kept slavery alive in the border States; for the Southwest was a ready purchaser of negroes, and Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky, which States could employ slave labor to little advantage, always had a surplus for sale. The salubrious climate of these States produced a hardy laborer who was in great request in the cotton and sugar districts. The negroes of Virginia and Kentucky considered it a cruel doom to be sold to go South, as it was well understood that harder work and poorer fare would be their lot. The annual waste of life on the sugar plantations of Louisiana was two and one-half per cent over and above the natural increase. On the cotton estates the increase, if any, was slight. On one of the best managed estates in Mississippi, Olmsted learned that the net increase amounted to four per cent. Nevertheless, between 1830 and 1850 the slave population of Maryland decreased and that of Virginia remained stationary; while Louisiana more than doubled, Alabama nearly trebled, and Mississippi almost quintupled their number of slaves. These facts disclose the internal slave trade, and the most wretched aspect of the institution that of breeding slaves for market.

"Even so methodical and frugal a planter as Washington found that if negroes were kept on the same land, and they

and all their increase supported upon it, their owner would gradually become more and more embarrassed or impoverished. Yet the financial remedy was not adopted by Washington; he made a rule neither to buy nor sell slaves. Jefferson, although in easy circumstances when he retired. from the presidency, could not make both ends meet on his Monticello estate, and died largely in debt. Madison sold

some of his best land to feed the increasing number of his negroes, but he confessed to Harriet Martineau that the week before she visited him he had been obliged to sell a dozen of his slaves. We may be certain that it was with great reluctance that the gentlemen of Virginia came to the point of breeding negroes to make money; but it was the easiest way to maintain their ancient state, so they eventually overcame their scruples. Even before Madison died, the professor of history and metaphysics in the college at which Jefferson was educated wrote in a formal paper: 'The slaves in Virginia multiply more rapidly than in most of the Southern States; the Virginians can raise cheaper than they can buy; in fact, it is one of their great sources of profit;' and the writer seemed to exult over the fact that they were now 'exporting slaves' very rapidly. He wrote his defense of slavery in 1832, and then thought that Virginia was annually sending six thousand negroes to the Southern market. For the ten years preceding 1860 the average annual importation of slaves into seven Southern States from the slave-breeding States was not far from twenty-five thousand. In Virginia the number of women. exceeded that of men, and they were regarded in much the same way as are brood-mares. A Virginia gentleman, in conversation with Olmsted, congratulated himself 'because his women were uncommonly good breeders; he did not suppose there was a lot of women anywhere that bred faster than his; he never heard of babies coming so fast as they did on his plantation;—and every one of them, in his estimation, was worth two hundred dollars, as negroes were selling now, the moment it drew breath.' Frederick Douglas

had a master, professedly a Christian, opening and closing the day with family prayer, who boasted that he bought a woman slave simply 'as a breeder.' When James Freeman Clarke visited Baltimore, a friend who had been to a party one night said there was pointed out to him a lady richly and fashionably dressed, and apparently one moving in the best society, who derived her income from the sale of the children of a half-dozen negro women she owned, although their husbands belonged to other masters. Sometimes a negro woman would be advertised for sale as being 'very prolific in her generating qualities.' The law in none of the States recognized slave marriages; in all of them the Roman principle, that the child followed the condition of the mother, was the recognized rule. Except in Louisiana, there was no law to prevent the violent separation of husbands from wives, or children from their parents. The church conformed its practice to the law. The question was put to the Savannah River Baptist Association, whether in the case that slaves were separated, they should be allowed to marry again. The answer was in the affirmative, because the separation was civilly equivalent to death, and the ministers believed that in the sight of God it would be so viewed.' It would not be right, therefore, to forbid second marriages. It was proper that the slaves should act in obedience to their masters and raise up for them progeny.

"The money return for this degradation of humankind came mainly from the growth of cotton. Of the 3,177,000 slaves in 1850, De Bow estimated that 1,800,000 of them were engaged in the cotton-culture. The value of this crop amounted to more than that of the combined production of sugar and rice. Cotton was then, as now, not only the most important article of commerce of the South, but was by far the greatest export of the whole country. It formed the basis of the material prosperity of the South, and there was economic foundation for the statement, so arrogantly made, that 'Cotton is king.'