A negro above eighteen years of age would bring on an average about $300 in the selling States from 1815 to, say, 1845. Sometimes he would bring a little more, sometimes less.[193] Between the age of ten and the time of sale we will suppose the slave paid for his keeping. But before that time he would be too small to work. There was always some defective stock which could not be sold;[194] this, taken in connection with the fact that all negroes did not live to be ten years of age, probably not more than half,[195] we shall be under the necessity of deducting about one-half of the $300 on this account. This will leave $150 or $15 per year for the possible expense of raising him. A bushel of corn a month would have been about $8 per year for corn; fifty pounds for meat $4. It is not likely he could have been clothed for less than $3, and the $15 is gone, with nothing left for incidentals. We think the above a very fair estimate.[196] In 1829 the average price of negroes in Virginia was estimated at only $150 each.[197] Why did not the border slave States raise hogs instead of negroes? Bacon was at a good price during that period.[198] The fact is the negroes probably increased without any consideration for their master's wishes in the matter. A planter could stop raising hogs whenever he might choose, but it seemed to be hardly within the province of the master to limit the increase of his negroes. And the better they were treated evidently the faster the increase. A man who had one or two hundred negroes, and had scruples about selling them, unless he should be able to add to his landed estate as they increased was in a bad predicament. It seems some such men had the welfare of their negroes at heart and used every means to keep them. Andrews tells of one: "A gentleman," he says, "in one of the poorer counties of Virginia has nearly 200 slaves whom he employs upon a second rate plantation of 8,000 or 10,000 acres, and who constantly brought him into debt, at length he found it necessary to purchase a smaller plantation of good land in another county which he continues to cultivate for no other purpose than to support his negroes."[199] Sometimes men who were in prosperous circumstances would buy land as fast as their slaves increased and settle them upon it.[200]