Ivan Vazov - "Epopee to the Forgotten"

Jacob A. Riis - "The Making of an American"

Arthur Conan Doyle - "The White Company"

Leo Tolstoy/Lyof N. Tolstoi - "What to do?"

The trade, domestic and foreign

H >> Henry Charles Carey >> The trade, domestic and foreign




1851...... 12,000,000 cwts. Average 16s. 9d.... £10,050,000
1852...... 11,500,000 " " 20s. 3d.... 11,643,750
----------
Gain on short crop ............................. 1,593,750
If now we compare 1850 with 1851,
the following is the result:--
1851 as above .................................. 10,050,000
1850...... 11,000,000 cwts. Average 21s. 9d.... 11,971,250
----------
1,921,250
Now if this reduction of export had been
a consequence of increased domestic
consumption, we should have to add the
value of that million to the product,
and this would give............................. 1,187,500
----------
£3,108,750
==========

We have here a difference of thirty per cent., resulting from a
diminution of export to the amount of one-twelfth of the export to
Europe, and not more than a twenty-fourth of the whole crop. Admitting
the crop to have been 24,000,000 of cwts., and it must have been more,
the total difference produced by this abstraction of four per cent.
from the markets of Europe would be more than six millions of pounds,
or thirty millions of dollars. Such being the result of a difference
of four per cent., if the people of Cuba, Brazil, India, and other
countries were to turn some of their labour to the production of
cloth, iron, and other commodities for which they are now wholly
dependent on Europe, and thus diminish their necessity for export to
the further extent of two per cent., is it not quite certain that the
effect would be almost to double the value of the sugar crop of the
world, to the great advantage of the free cultivator of Jamaica, who
would realize more for his sugar, while obtaining his cloth and his
iron cheaper? If he could do this would he not become a freer man? Is
not this, however, directly the reverse of what is sought by those who
believe the prosperity of England to be connected with cheap sugar,
and who therefore desire that competition for the sale of sugar should
be _unlimited_, while competition, for the sale of cloth is to be
_limited_?

"Unlimited competition" looks to competition for the sale of raw
produce in the markets of England, and to the destruction of any
competition with England for the sale of manufactured goods; and it is
under this system that the poor labourer of Jamaica is being
destroyed. He is now more a slave than ever, because his labour yields
him less of the necessaries and comforts of life than when a master
was bound to provide for him.

Such is a brief history of West India slavery, from its commencement
to the present day, and from it the reader will be enabled to form an
estimate of the judgment which dictated immediate and unconditional
emancipation, and of the humanity that subsequently dictated unlimited
freedom of competition for the sale of sugar. That of those who
advocated emancipation vast numbers were actuated by the most praise
worthy motives, there can be no doubt; but unenlightened enthusiasm
has often before led almost to crime, and it remains to be seen if the
impartial historian, will not, at a future day, say that such has been
here the case. As regards the course which has been since pursued
toward these impoverished, ignorant, and, defenceless people, he will
perhaps have less difficulty; and it is possible that in recording it,
the motives which led to it, and the results, he may find himself
forced to place it among crimes of the deepest dye.




CHAPTER X.

HOW SLAVERY GREW AND IS MAINTAINED IN THE UNITED STATES.


The first attempt at manufacturing any species of cloth in the North
American provinces produced a resolution on the part of the House of
Commons, [1710,] that "the erecting of manufactories in the colonies
had a tendency to lessen their dependence on Great Britain." Soon
afterward complaints were made to Parliament that the colonists were
establishing manufactories for themselves, and the House of Commons
ordered the Board of Trade to report on the subject, which was done at
great length. In 1732, the exportation of hats from province to
province was prohibited, and the number of apprentices to be taken by
hatters was limited. In 1750 the erection of any mill or other engine
for splitting or rolling iron was prohibited; but pig iron was allowed
to be imported into England duty free, that it might there be
manufactured and sent back again. At a later period, Lord Chatham
declared that he would not permit the colonists to make even a hobnail
for themselves--and his views were then and subsequently carried into
effect by the absolute prohibition in 1765 of the export of artisans,
in 1781 of woollen machinery, in 1782 of cotton machinery and
artificers in cotton, in 1785 of iron and steel-making machinery and
workmen in those departments of trade, and in 1799 by the prohibition
of the export of colliers, lest other countries should acquire the art
of mining coal.

The tendency of the system has thus uniformly been--

I. To prevent the application of labour elsewhere than in England to
any pursuit but that of agriculture, and thus to deprive the weaker
portion of society--the women and children--of any employment but in
the field.

II. To compel whole populations to produce the same commodities, and
thus to deprive them of the power to make exchanges among themselves.

III. To compel them, therefore, to export to England all their produce
in its rudest forms, at great cost of transportation.

IV. To deprive them of all power of returning to the land the manure
yielded by its products, and thus to compel them to exhaust their
land.

V. To deprive them of the power of associating together for the
building of towns, the establishment of schools, the making of roads,
or the defence of their rights.

VI. To compel them, with every step in the process of exhausting the
land, to increase their distances from each other and from market.

VII. To compel the waste of all labour that could not be employed in
the field.

VIII. To compel the waste of all the vast variety of things almost
valueless in themselves, but which acquire value as men are enabled to
work in combination with each other.[44]

IX. To prevent increase in the value of land and in the demand for the
labour of man; and,

X. To prevent advance toward civilization and freedom.

That such were the tendencies of the system was seen by the people of
the colonies. "It is well known and understood," said Franklin, in
1771, "that whenever a manufacture is established which employs a
number of hands, it raises the value of lands in the neighbouring
country all around it, partly by the greater demand near at hand for
the produce of the land, and partly from the plenty of money drawn by
the manufactures to that part of the country. It seems, therefore," he
continued, "the interest of all our farmers and owners of lands, to
encourage our young manufactures in preference to foreign ones
imported among us from distant countries." Such was the almost
universal feeling of the country, and to the restriction on the power
to apply labour was due, in a great degree, the Revolution.

The power to compel the colonists to make all their exchanges abroad
gave to the merchants of England, and to the government, the same
power of taxation that we see to have been so freely exercised in
regard to sugar. In a paper published in 1750, in the London General
Advertiser, it was stated that Virginia then exported 50,000 hhds. of
tobacco, producing £550,000, of which the ship-owner, the underwriter,
the commission merchant, and the government took £450,000, leaving to
be divided between the land-owner and labourer only £100,000, or
about eighteen per cent., which is less even than the proportion
stated by _Gee_, in his work of that date. Under such circumstances
the planter could accumulate little capital to aid him in the
improvement of his cultivation.

The Revolution came, and thenceforward there existed no legal
impediments to the establishment of home markets by aid of which the
farmer might be enabled to lessen the cost of transporting his produce
to market, and his manure from market, thus giving to his land some of
those advantages of situation which elsewhere add so largely to its
value. The prohibitory laws had, however, had the effect of preventing
the gradual growth of the mechanic arts, and Virginia had no towns of
any note, while to the same circumstances was due the fact that
England was prepared to put down all attempts at competition with her
in the manufacture of cloth, or of iron. The territory of the former
embraced forty millions of acres, and her widely scattered population
amounted to little more than 600,000. At the North, some descriptions
of manufacture had grown slowly up, and the mechanics were much more
numerous, and towns had gradually grown to be very small cities; the
consequence of which was that the farmer there, backed by the artisan,
always his ally, was more able to protect himself against the trader,
who represented the foreign manufacturer. Everywhere, however, the
growth of manufactures was slow, and everywhere, consequently, the
farmer was seen exhausting his land in growing wheat, tobacco, and
other commodities, to be sent to distant markets, from which no manure
could be returned. With the exhaustion of the land its owners became,
of course, impoverished, and there arose a necessity for the removal
of the people who cultivated it, to new lands, to be in turn
exhausted. In the North, the labourer thus circumstanced, _removed
himself_. In the South, he had _to be removed_. Sometimes the planter
abandoned his land and travelled forth with all his people, but more
frequently he found himself compelled to part with some of his slaves
to others; and thus has the domestic slave trade grown by aid of the
exhaustive process to which the land and its owner have been
subjected.

The reader may obtain some idea of the extent of the exhaustion that
has taken place, by a perusal of the following extracts from an
address to the Agricultural Society of Albemarle County, Virginia, by
one of the best authorities of the State, the Hon. Andrew Stevenson,
late Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Minister to England.

Looking to what is the "real situation" of things, the speaker asks--

"Is there an intelligent and impartial man who can cast his eyes over
the State and not be impressed with the truth, deplorable as it is
afflicting, that the produce of most of our lands is not only small
in proportion to the extent in cultivation, but that the lands
themselves have been gradually sinking and becoming worse, under a
most defective and ruinous system of cultivation?" "The truth is," he
continues, "we must all feel and know that the spirit of agricultural
improvement has been suffered to languish too long in Virginia, and
that it is now reaching a point, in the descending scale, from which,
if it is not revived, and that very speedily, our State must continue
not only third or fourth in population, as she now is, but consent to
take her station among her smaller sisters of the Union."

The cause of this unhappy state of things he regards as being to be
found in "a disregard of scientific knowledge" and "a deep-rooted
attachment to old habits of cultivation," together with the "practice
of hard cropping and injudicious rotation of crops, leading them to
cultivate more land than they can manure, or than they have means of
improving;" and the consequences are found in the fact that in all the
country east of the Blue Ridge, the average product of wheat "does not
come up to seven bushels to the acre," four of which are required to
restore the seed and defray the cost of cultivation, leaving to the
land-owner for his own services and those of a hundred acres of land,
three hundred bushels, worth, at present prices, probably two hundred
and seventy dollars! Even this, however, is not as bad an exhibit as
is produced in reference to another populous district of more than a
hundred miles in length--that between Lynchburg and Richmond--in which
the product is estimated at _not exceeding six bushels to the acre_!
Under such circumstances, we can scarcely be surprised to learn from
the speaker that the people of his great State, where meadows abound
and marl exists in unlimited quantity, import potatoes from the poor
States of the North, and are compelled to be dependent upon them for
hay and butter, the importers of which realize fortunes, while the
farmers around them are everywhere exhausting their land and obtaining
smaller crops in each successive year.

Why is this so? Why should Virginia import potatoes and hay, cheese
and butter? An acre of potatoes may be made to yield four hundred
bushels, and meadows yield hay by tons, and yet her people raise
wheat, of which they obtain six or seven bushels to the acre, and
corn, of which they obtain fifteen or twenty, and with the produce of
these they buy butter and cheese, pork and potatoes, which yield to
the producer five dollars where they get one--and import many of these
things too, from States in which manufacturing populations abound, and
in which all these commodities should, in the natural course of
things, be higher in price than in Virginia, where all, even when
employed, are engaged in the cultivation of the soil. The answer to
these questions is to be found in the fact that the farmers and
planters of the State can make no manure. They raise wheat and corn,
which they send elsewhere to be consumed; and the people among whom it
is consumed put the refuse on their own lands, and thus are enabled to
raise crops that count by tons, which they then exchange with the
producers of the wheat produced on land that yields six bushels to the
acre.

"How many of our people," continues the speaker, "do we see disposing
of their lands at ruinous prices, and relinquishing their birthplaces
and friends, to settle themselves in the West; and many not so much
from choice as from actual inability to support their families and
rear and educate their children out of the produce of their exhausted
lands--once fertile, but rendered barren and unproductive by a
ruinous system of cultivation.

"And how greatly is this distress heightened, in witnessing, as we
often do, the successions and reverses of this struggle between going
and staying, on the part of many emigrants. And how many are there,
who after removing, remain only a few years and then return to seize
again upon a portion of their native land, and die where they were
born. How strangely does it remind us of the poor shipwrecked
mariner, who, touching in the midst of the storm the shore, lays hold
of it, but is borne seaward by the receding wave; but struggling
back, torn and lacerate, he grasps again the rock, with bleeding
hands, and still clings to it, as a last and forlorn hope. Nor is
this to be wondered at. Perhaps it was the home of his childhood--the
habitation of his fathers for past generations--the soil upon which
had been expended the savings and nourishment, the energies and
virtues of a long life--'the sweat of the living, and the ashes of
the dead.'

"Oh! how hard to break such ties as these.

"This is no gloomy picture of the imagination; but a faithful
representation of what most of us know and feel to be true. Who is it
that has not had some acquaintance or neighbour--some friend,
perhaps some relative, forced into this current of emigration, and
obliged from necessity, in the evening, probably, of a long life, to
abandon his State and friends, and the home of his fathers and
childhood, to seek a precarious subsistence in the supposed El
Dorados of the West?"

This is a terrible picture, and yet it is but the index to one still
worse that must follow in its train. Well does the hon. speaker say
that--

"There is another evil attending this continual drain of our
population to the West, next in importance to the actual loss of the
population itself, and that is, its tendency to continue and enlarge
our wretched system of cultivation.

"The moment some persons feel assured that for present gain they can
exhaust the fertility of their lands in the old States, and then
abandon them for those in the West, which, being rich, require
neither the aid of science nor art, the natural tendency is at once
to give over all efforts at improvement themselves, and kill their
land as quickly as possible--then sell it for what it will bring or
abandon it as a waste. And such will be found to be the case with too
many of the emigrants from the lowlands of Virginia."

Another distinguished Virginian, Mr. Ruffin, in urging an effort to
restore the lands that have been exhausted, and to bring into activity
the rich ones that have never been drained, estimates the advantages
to be derived by Lower Virginia alone at $500,000,000. "The strength,
physical, intellectual, and moral, as well as the revenue of the
commonwealth, will," he says,

"Soon derive new and great increase from the growing improvements of
that one and the smallest of the great divisions of her territory,
which was the poorest by natural constitution--still more, the
poorest by long exhausting tillage--its best population gone or going
away, and the remaining portion sinking into apathy and degradation,
and having no hope left except that which was almost universally
entertained of fleeing from the ruined country and renewing the like
work of destruction on the fertile lands of the far West."

If we look farther South, we find the same state of affairs. North
Carolina abounds in rich lands, undrained and uncultivated, and coal
and iron ore abound. Her area is greater than that of Ireland, and yet
her population is but 868,000; and it has increased only 130,000 in
twenty years, and, from 1830 to 1840; the increase was only 16,000. In
South Carolina, men have been everywhere doing precisely what has been
described in reference to Virginia; and yet the State has, says
Governor Seabrook, in his address to the State Agricultural Society,
"millions of uncleared acres of unsurpassed fertility, which seem to
solicit a trial of their powers from the people of the plantation
States." * * "In her borders," he continues, "there is scarcely a
vegetable product essential to the human race that cannot be
furnished." Marl and lime abound, millions of acres of rich
meadow-land remain in a state of nature, and "the seashore parishes,"
he adds, "possess unfailing supplies of salt mud, salt grass, and
shell-lime." So great, nevertheless, was the tendency to the
abandonment of the land, that in the ten years from 1830 to 1840 the
white population increased but 1000 and the black but 12,000, whereas
the natural increase would have given 150,000!

Allowing Virginia, at the close of the Revolution, 600,000 people, she
should now have, at the usual rate of increase, and excluding all
allowance for immigration, 4,000,000, or one to every ten acres; and
no one at all familiar with the vast advantages of the state can doubt
her capability of supporting more than thrice that number.[45]
Nevertheless, the total number in 1850 was but 1,424,000, and the
increase in twenty years had been but 200,000, when it should have
been 1,200,000. If the reader desire to know what has become of all
these people, he may find most of them among the millions now
inhabiting Alabama and Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas;
and if he would know why they are now there to be found, the answer to
the question may be given in the words--"They borrowed from the earth,
and they did not repay, and therefore she expelled them." It has been
said, and truly said, that "the nation which commences by exporting
food will end by exporting men."

When men come together and combine their efforts, they are enabled to
bring into activity all the vast and various powers of the earth; and
the more they come together, the greater is the value of land, the
greater the demand, for labour, the higher its price, and the greater
the freedom of man. When, on the contrary, they separate from each
other, the greater is the tendency to a decline in the value of land,
the less is the value of labour, and the less the freedom of man. Such
being the case, if we desire to ascertain the ultimate cause of the
existence of the domestic slave trade, it would seem to be necessary
only to ascertain the cause of the exhaustion of the land. The reason
usually assigned for this will be found in the following passage,
extracted from one of the English journals of the day;--

"The mode of agriculture usually coincident with the employment of
slave labour is essentially exhaustive, and adapted therefore only to
the virgin-richness of a newly-colonized soil. The slave can plant,
and dig, and hoe: he works rudely and lazily with rude tools: and his
unwilling feet tread the same path of enforced labour day after day.
But slave labour is not adapted to the operations of scientific
agriculture, which restores its richness to a wornout soil; and it is
found to be a fact that the planters of the Northern slave States,
as, _e.g._, Virginia, gradually desert the old seats of civilization,
and advance further and further into the yet untilled country.
Tobacco was the great staple of Virginian produce for many years
after that beautiful province was colonized by Englishmen. It has
exhausted the soil; grain crops have succeeded, and been found hardly
less exhaustive; and emigration of both white and coloured population
to the West and South has taken place to a very large extent, The
result may be told in the words of an American witness:--'That part
of Virginia which lies upon tide waters presents an aspect of
universal decay. Its population diminishes, and it sinks day by day
into a lower depth of exhaustion and poverty. The country between
tide waters and the Blue Ridge is fast passing into the same
condition. Mount Vernon is a desert waste; Monticello is little
better, and the same circumstances which have desolated the lands of
Washington and Jefferson have impoverished every planter in the
State. Hardly any have escaped, save the owners of the rich bottom
lands along James River, the fertility of which it seems difficult
utterly to destroy.'[46] Now a Virginia planter stands in much the
same relation to his plantation as an absentee Irish landlord to his
estate; the care of the land is in each case handed over to a
middleman, who is anxious to screw out of it as large a return of
produce or rent as possible; and pecuniary embarrassment is in both
cases the result. But as long as every pound of cotton grown on the
Mississippi and the Red River finds eager customers in Liverpool, the
price of slaves in those districts cannot fail to keep up. In many
cases the planter of the Northern slave States emigrates to a region
where he can employ his capital of thews and sinews more profitably
than at home. In many others, he turns his plantation into an
establishment for slave breeding, and sells his rising stock for
labour in the cottonfield."--_Prospective Review_ Nov. 1852.

Unhappily, however, for this reasoning precisely the same exhaustion
is visible in the Northern States, as the reader may see by a perusal
of the statements on this subject given by Professor Johnson, in his
"Notes on North America," of which the following is a specimen:--

"Exhaustion has diminished the produce of the land, formerly the
great staple of the country. When the wheat fell off, barley, which
at first yielded fifty or sixty bushels, was raised year after year,
till the land fell away from this, and became full of weeds."--Vol.
i. 259.

Rotation of crops cannot take place at a distance from market The
exhaustive character of the system is well shown in the following
extract:--

"In the State of New York there are some twelve million acres of
improved land, which includes all meadows and enclosed pastures. This
area employs about five hundred thousand labourers, being an average
of twenty-four acres to the hand. At this ratio, the number of acres
of improved land in the United States is one hundred, and twenty
millions. But New York is an old and more densely populated State
than an average in the Union; and probably twenty-five acres per head
is a juster estimate for the whole country. At this rate, the
aggregate is one hundred and twenty-five millions. Of these improved
lands, it is confidently believed that at least four-fifths are now
suffering deterioration in a greater or less degree.

"The fertility of some, particularly in the planting States, is
passing rapidly away; in others, the progress of exhaustion is so
slow as hardly to be observed by the cultivators themselves. To keep
within the truth, the annual income from the soil may be said to be
diminished ten cents an acre on one hundred million acres, or
four-fifths of the whole.

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