Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom: American Slavery Through Foreigner's Eyes. Frederick Law Olmsted
want of better labour in this region as at first sight there appeared to be, when a supply was so near at hand. I compared notes with every northern man I met who had been living for some time in Virginia, and some I found able to give me quite exact statements of personal experience, with which, in the cases they mentioned, it could not be doubted that labourers costing, all things considered, the same wages, had taken four times as long to accomplish certain tasks of rude work in Virginia as at the north, and that in house service, four servants accomplished less, while they required vastly more looking after, than one at the north.
I left Virginia, having remained much longer than I at first intended, in trying to satisfy myself about this matter — quite satisfied as to the general fact, not at all satisfied with any theories of demand and supply which had been offered me, or which had occurred to me, in the way of explanation of it. My perplexity was increased by certain apparent exceptions to the general rule; but they were, all things considered, unimportant, and rather served as affording contrasts, on the ground, to satisfy me of the correctness of my general conclusion. I subsequently returned, and spent another month in virginia, after visiting the cotton states, and I also spent three months in kentucky and other parts of the slave states where the climate is unsuitable for the production of cotton, and with the information which I had in the meantime obtained, I continued to study both the question of fact, and the question of cause. The following conclusions to which my mind tended strongly in the first month, though I did not then adopt them altogether with confidence, were established at length in my convictions.
1. The cash value of a slave's labour in Virginia is, practically, the cash value of the same labour minus the cost of its transportation, acclimatizing, and breaking in to cotton-culture in Mississippi.
2. The cost of production, or the development of natural wealth in Virginia, is regulated by the cost of slave labour: (that is to say) the competition of white labour does not materially reduce it; though it doubtless has some effect, at least in certain districts, and with reference to certain productions or branches of industry.
3. Taking infants, aged, invalid, and vicious and knavish slaves into account, the ordinary and average cost of a certain task of labour is more than double in Virginia what it is in the free states adjoining.
4. The use of land and nearly all other resources of wealth in Virginia is much less valuable than the use of similar property in the adjoining free states, these resources having no real value until labour is applied to them. (the census returns of 1850 show that the sale value of farm lands by the acre in Virginia is less than one-third the value of farm lands in the adjoining free state of Pennsylvania, and less than one-fifth than that of the farm lands of the neighbouring free state of new jersey.)
5. Beyond the bare necessities of existence, poor shelter, poor clothing, and the crudest diet, the mass of the citizen class of Virginia earn very little and are very poor — immeasurably poorer than the mass of the people of the adjoining free states.
6. So far as this poverty is to be attributed to personal constitution, character, and choice, it is not the result of climate.
7. What is true of Virginia is measurably true of all the border slave states, though in special cases the resistance of slavery to a competition of free labour is more easily overcome. In proportion as this is the case, the cost of production is less, the value of production greater, the comfort of the people is greater; they are advancing in wealth as they are in intelligence, which is the best form or result of wealth.
I went on my way into the so-called cotton states, within which I travelled over, first and last, at least three thousand miles of roads, from which not a cotton plant was to be seen, and the people living by the side of which certainly had not been made rich by cotton or anything else. And for every mile of road-side upon which I saw any evidence of cotton production, I am sure that I saw a hundred of forest or waste land, with only now and then an acre or two of poor corn half smothered in weeds; for every rich man's house, I am sure that I passed a dozen shabby and half-furnished cottages, and at least a hundred cabins — mere hovels, such as none but a poor farmer would house his cattle in at the north. And I think that, for every man of refinement and education with whom I came in contact, there were a score or two superior only in the virtue of silence, and in the manner of self complacency, to the sort of people we should expect to find paying a large price for a place from which a sight could be got at a gallows on an execution day at the north, and a much larger number of what poor men at the north would themselves describe as poor men: not that they were destitute of certain things which are cheap at the south, — fuel for instance, — but that they were almost wholly destitute of things the possession of which, at the north, would indicate that a man had begun to accumulate capital — more destitute of these, on an average, than our day-labourers. In short, except in certain limited districts, mere streaks by the side of rivers, and in a few isolated spots of especially favoured soil away from these, I found the same state of things which I had seen in Virginia, but in a more aggravated form. At least five hundred white men told me something of their own lives and fortunes, across their own tables, and with the means of measuring the weight of their words before my eyes; and I know that white men seldom want an abundance of coarse food in the cotton states: the proportion of the free white men who live as well in any respect as our working classes at the north, on an average, is small, and the citizens of the cotton states, as a whole, are poor. They work little, and that little, badly; they earn little, they sell little; they buy little, and they have little — very little — of the common comforts and consolations of civilized life. Their destitution is not material only; it is intellectual and it is moral. I know not what virtues they have that rude men everywhere have not; but those which are commonly attributed to them, I am sure that they lack: they are not generous or hospitable; and, to be plain, I must say that their talk is not the talk of even courageous men elsewhere. They boast and lack self-restraint, yet, when not excited, are habitually reserved and guarded in expressions of opinion very much like cowardly men elsewhere. But, much cotton is produced in the cotton states, and by the labour of somebody; much cotton is sold and somebody must be paid for it; there are rich people; there are good markets; there is hospitality, refinement, virtue, courage, and urbanity at the south. All this is proverbially true. Who produces the cotton? Who is paid for it? Where are, and who are, the rich and gentle people?
I can answer in part at least.
I have been on plantations on the Mississippi, the Red River, and the Brazos bottoms, whereon I was assured that ten bales of cotton to each average prime field-hand had been raised. The soil was a perfect garden mould, well drained and guarded by levees against the floods; it was admirably tilled; I have seen but few northern farms so well tilled: the labourers were, to a large degree, tall, slender, sinewy, young men, who worked from dawn to dusk, not with spirit, but with steadiness and constancy. They had good tools; their rations of bacon and corn were brought to them in the field, and eaten with efficient despatch between the cotton plants. They had the best sort of gins and presses, so situated that from them cotton bales could be rolled in five minutes to steamboats, bound direct to the ports on the gulf. They were superintended by skillful and vigilant overseers. These plantations were all large, so large as to yet contain much fresh land, ready to be worked as soon as the cultivated fields gave out in fertility. If it was true that ten bales of cotton to the hand had been raised on them, then their net profit for the year had been, not less than two hundred and fifty dollars for each hand employed. Even at seven bales to the hand the profits of cotton planting are enormous. Men who have plantations producing at this rate, can well afford to buy fresh hands at fourteen hundred dollars a head. They can even afford to employ such hands for a year or two in clearing land, ditching, leveeing, fencing, and other preparatory work, buying, meantime, all the corn and bacon they need, and getting the best kind of tools and cattle, and paying fifteen per cent. Per annum interest on all the capital required for this, as many of them do. All this can be well afforded to establish new plantations favourably situated, on fresh soil, if there is a reasonable probability that they can after all be made to produce half a dozen seven-bale crops. And a great many large plantations do produce seven bales to the hand for years in succession. A great many more produce seven bales occasionally. A few produce even ten bales occasionally, though by no means as often as is reported.
Now, it is not at a Roman lottery alone that one may see