The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet ItHelper, Hinton Rowan
History
The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It
Helper, Hinton Rowan
Slavery -- United States
"It has been South Carolina's misfortune, in this utilitarian age, to
have her greatest talents and most powerful energies directed to
pursuits, which avail her nothing, in the way of wealth and
prosperity. In the first settlement of a new country, agricultural
industry necessarily absorbs all the time and occupation of its
inhabitants. They must clear the forests and cultivate the earth, in
order to make their bread. This is their first consideration. Then
the mechanical arts, and manufactures, and commerce, must follow in
the footsteps of agriculture, to insure either individual or national
prosperity. No people can be highly prosperous without them. No
people ever have been. Agriculture, alone, will not make or sustain a
great people. The true policy of every people is to cultivate the
earth, manufacture its products, and send them abroad, in exchange
for those comforts and luxuries, and necessaries, which their own
country and their own industry cannot give or make. The dependence of
South Carolina on Europe and the Northern States for all the
necessaries, comforts and luxuries, which the mechanic arts afford,
has, in fact, drained her of her wealth, and made her positively
poor, when compared with her sister States of the Confederacy. It is
at once mortifying and alarming, to see and reflect on our own
dependence in the mechanic arts and manufactures, on strangers and
foreigners. In the Northern States their highest talents and energy
have been diversified, and more profitably employed in developing the
resources of the country, in making new inventions in the mechanic
arts, and enriching the community with science and literature,
commerce and manufactures."
THE VOICE OF GEORGIA.
Of the States strictly Southern, Georgia is, perhaps, the most thrifty.
This prosperous condition of the State is mainly ascribable to her hundred
thousand free white laborers--more than eighty-three thousand of whom are
engaged in agricultural pursuits. In few other slave States are the
non-slaveholders so little under the domination of the oligarchy. At best,
however, even in the most liberal slave States, the social position of the
non-slaveholding whites is but one short step in advance of that of the
negroes; and as there is, on the part of the oligarchy, a constantly
increasing desire and effort to usurp greater power, the more we
investigate the subject the more fully are we convinced that nothing but
the speedy and utter annihilation of slavery from the entire nation, can
save the masses of white people in the Southern States from ultimately
falling to a political level with the blacks--both occupying the most
abject and galling condition of servitude of which it is possible for the
human mind to conceive.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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