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
In this same State of Maryland, less than one million of dollar's worth of
cotton finds a market, the whole number of bales sold here in 1850
amounting to only twenty-three thousand three hundred and twenty-five,
valued at seven hundred and forty-six thousand four hundred dollars.
Briefly, then, and in round numbers, we may state the case thus: Maryland
buys annually seven millions of dollars worth of hay from the North, and
one million of dollars worth of cotton from the South. Let slaveholders
and their fawning defenders read, ponder and compare.
The exact quantities of Northern hay, rye, and buckwheat flour, Irish
potatoes, fruits, clover and grass seeds, and other products of the soil,
received and consumed in all the slaveholding States, we have no means of
ascertaining; but for all practical purposes, we can arrive sufficiently
near to the amount by inference from the above data, and from what we see
with our eyes and hear with our ears wherever we go. Food from the North
for man or for beast, or for both, is for sale in every market in the
South. Even in the most insignificant little villages in the interior of
the slave States, where books, newspapers and other mediums of
intelligence are unknown, where the poor whites and the negroes are alike
bowed down in heathenish ignorance and barbarism, and where the news is
received but once a week, and then only in a Northern-built stage-coach,
drawn by horses in Northern harness, in charge of a driver dressed
_cap-a-pie_ in Northern habiliments, and with a Northern whip in his
hand,--the agricultural products of the North, either crude, prepared,
pickled or preserved, are ever to be found.
Mortifying as the acknowledgment of the fact is to us, it is our unbiased
opinion--an opinion which will, we believe, be endorsed by every
intelligent person who goes into a careful examination and comparison of
all the facts in the case--that the profits arising to the North from the
sale of provender and provisions to the South, are far greater than those
arising to the South from the sale of cotton, tobacco and breadstuffs to
the North. It follows, then, that the agricultural interests of the North
being not only equal but actually superior to those of the South, the
hundreds of millions of dollars which the commerce and manufactures of the
former annually yield, is just so much clear and independent gain over the
latter. It follows, also, from a corresponding train or system of
deduction, and with all the foregoing facts in view, that the difference
between freedom and slavery is simply the difference between sense and
nonsense, wisdom and folly, good and evil, right and wrong.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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