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
Let it be indelibly impressed on the mind, however, that this amount,
large as it is, is only a moity of the sum that it has cost to maintain
slavery in North Carolina. From time to time, hundreds upon hundreds of
millions of dollars have left the State, either in search of profitable,
permanent investment abroad, or in the shape of profits to Northern
merchants and manufactures, who have become the moneyed aristocracy of the
country by supplying to the South such articles of necessity, utility, and
adornment, as would have been produced at home but for the pernicious
presence of the peculiar institution.
A reward of Eleven Hundred Millions of Dollars is offered for the
conversion of the lands of North Carolina into free soil. The lands
themselves, desolate and impoverished under the fatal foot of slavery,
offer the reward. How, then, can it be made to appear that the abolition
of slavery in North Carolina, and, indeed, throughout all the Southern
States--for slavery is exceedingly inimical to them all--is not demanded
by every consideration of justice, prudence, and good sense? In 1850, the
total value of all the slaves of the State, at the rate of four hundred
dollars per head, amounted to less than one hundred and sixteen millions
of dollars. Is the sum of one hundred and sixteen millions of dollars more
desirable than the sum of eleven hundred millions of dollars? When a man
has land for sale, does he reject thirty-six dollars per acre and take
three? Non-slaveholding whites! look well to your interests! Many of you
have lands; comparatively speaking, you have nothing else. Abolish
slavery, and you will enhance the value of every league, your own and your
neighbors', from three to thirty-six dollars per acre. Your little tract
containing two hundred acres, now valued at the pitiful sum of only six
hundred dollars, will then be worth seven thousand. Your children, now
deprived of even the meagre advantages of common schools, will then reap
the benefits of a collegiate education. Your rivers and smaller streams,
now wasting their waters in idleness, will then turn the wheels of
multitudinous mills. Your bays and harbors, now unknown to commerce, will
then swarm with ships from every enlightened quarter of the globe.
Non-slaveholding whites! look well to your interests!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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