Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 by Various
page 26 of 313 (08%)
page 26 of 313 (08%)
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Japan and China, and by the building of railroads in India, we have to
meet a constantly decreasing supply of raw material as compared with the demand. Give us cotton at six to seven cents, at which free labor and skill could well afford it, and the manufacturing industry of New England would receive a development unknown before. But when we ask more cotton of slavery, we are answered by its great prophet, De Bow; that because we are willing to pay a high price we can not have it; for he says, 'Although land is to be had in unlimited quantities, whenever cotton rises to ten cents, labor becomes too dear to increase production rapidly.' And this is what the great system of slave labor has accomplished. The production of its great staple, cotton, is in the hands of less than 100,000 men. In 1850 there were in all the Southern States only 170,000 men owning more than five slaves each, and they owned 2,800,000 out of 3,300,000. These men have by their system rendered labor degrading,--they have driven out their non-slaveholding neighbors by hundreds of thousands to find homes and self-respect in the free air of the great West,--they have reduced those who remain to a condition of ignorance scarcely to be found in any other country claiming to be civilized--so low that even the slaves look down upon the 'mean white trash,'--they have sapped the very foundations of honor and morality, so that 'Southern chivalry' has become the synonym for treachery, theft, and dishonor in every form,--they have reached a depth of degradation only to be equalled by those Northern men who would now prevent this war from utterly destroying slavery,--they have literally skinned over a vast area of country, leaving it for the time a desert, and with an area of 368,312,320 acres in the eight cotton States, they have now under |
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