Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/381

Rh would have done so completely years ago, had it not been possible to work them at least two hundred and fifty days in a year, against less than one hundred and fifty on our Northern farms, and to settle upon fresh land when the old plantations were worn out. The history of cotton, sugar, and tobacco culture in the South demonstrates that they could be raised successfully by slave labor only so long as they remained monopolies—not but that slave labor should have been immensely profitable. To absolutely control the labor of a man or woman from youth to old age, from ten to fourteen hours per day, and nearly three hundred days in a year, whose house-rent and furniture for a lifetime cost but a few dollars, whose food was of the coarsest and cheapest, and the cost of whose clothing averaged but thirty dollars per year, could not, under ordinary circumstances, be otherwise than profitable. The alleged expense of bringing up children, and of taking care of the aged, was comparatively a small item.

From the scarcity of population in the Southern States, the vested interest in land did not rise in value as in the North. Its average price was never more than about six dollars per acre; and at ten dollars per acre, in many sections at five dollars, one can now take his choice of cotton or sugar plantations. But only in the most favored localities in the North, near some growing city, did real estate increase in value so fast as slave property in the South. A young planter and his wife beginning life, thirty years ago, with six male and as many female slaves, worth five hundred dollars each, found themselves possessed at the beginning of the war, by the law of natural increase, of half a dozen large families, worth at least an average of a thousand dollars per head. Whatever the effect of this upon the interests of the "three million masters without slaves" in the South—the "poor whites," for whose use the commodity of slavery was done up in too large packages—it cannot be denied that the absolute control of slave labor, and the natural increase of slaves in number, tended greatly to enrich the three hundred and forty-six thousand slaveholders, and especially the two hundred and seventy-seven thousand possessed of more than a single "chattel."

But this tendency was more than counterbalanced by the false notions of political economy, the extravagance, the expensive pleasures, and especially by the careless management, of the planters. The care of the plantation was, for the most part, committed to an overseer, who had no direct interest in making a successful crop, or in keeping the plantation in good repair. The slaves, of course, did as little, and got as much for it, as possible. They toiled, but did not accomplish much work. Instead of making money by instructing the labor and using good implements, the idea was to save