The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Under the false pretence that the climate of the South is too hot for
white men to labor in the fields, the degradation involved in
field-labor in a Slave State excludes intelligent cultivators from the
cotton-fields, a very large portion of which have a climate less hot
and less unsuitable for white men than that of Philadelphia, while
there is not a river-bottom in the whole South in which the extremes of
heat during the summer are so great as in St. Louis. Slave-labor
cultivates, in a miserable, shiftless manner, less than two per cent,
of the area of the Cotton States; and upon this insignificant portion a
crop of cotton has been raised in one year worth over $200,000,000.
There is ample and conclusive evidence to be found in the statistics of
the few well-managed and well-cultivated cotton-plantations, that
skilful, educated farmers can get more than double the product to the
hand or to the acre that is usually obtained as the result of
slave-labor.
Again, it will be admitted that $350 per annum is more than an average
return for the work of a common laborer on an average New England farm,
including his own support.
It is capable of demonstration from, actual facts that an average
laborer, well directed, can produce a gross value of $1,000 per annum,
upon the uplands of Georgia and South Carolina, in the cultivation of
cotton and grain. Negro slaves under a negro driver, with no white man
on the premises, have produced this result in Hancock County, Georgia,
upon lands previously considered worthless, with a system of
cultivation singular and exceptional in that region, but common in all
well-cultivated sections, namely, a simple rotation of crops and a
moderate amount of manure.
Elevate the negro from a state of slavery to the dignity of a free
laborer, and his consumption of manufactured goods increases
enormously. In proof of this may be cited the trade with Hayti, and the
immense increase in the import of manufactured goods into the British
West Indies since emancipation. Slaves are furnished with two suits of
clothes in a year, made from the coarsest and cheapest materials: it is
safe to estimate, that, if the fair proportion of their earnings were
paid them, their demand upon the North for staple articles would be
doubled, while the importations of silks, velvets, and other foreign
luxuries, upon which their earnings have been heretofore lavished by
their masters, would decrease.
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