But the new prosperity and the increased acreage for cotton in the South
created an enormous market for slaves, and soon the sea swarmed with
slave ships. Prices advanced five hundred per cent, until a slave that
had brought $100 brought $500, and some even $1,000. What made slavery
no scourge, but a great religious moral blessing? The answer is, the
cotton gin and the cotton interest that gave a new desire to promote
slavery, to spread it, and to use its labour. For Eli Whitney had made
cotton to be king. Cotton encouraged slavery; slavery at last
threatened the Union and so brought on the Civil War.

The value of the slave as an economic machine depended upon his
physique, health and general endurance. The slave hunters were
Portuguese, Spaniards and Arabs, who drove the negroes in gangs down to
the coast, where they were loaded upon the slave ships. When the trade
was brisk and prices high, the hold of the ship was crowded to
suffocation, and intense suffering was inevitable. Landing at Savannah
or Charleston, Mobile or New Orleans, the slaves were sold at wholesale,
in the auction place. Later, the slave dealer drove them in gangs
through the villages, where they were sold at retail. The cost of a
slave varied with the price of cotton. Of the three million one hundred
thousand slaves living in the South in 1850, one million eight hundred
thousand were raising cotton. That was the great export, the basis of
prosperity. So great was the demand in England for Southern cotton that
profits were enormous. The Secretary of the Treasury in Buchanan's time
published a list of forty Southern planters in Louisiana and
Mississippi. One of them had five hundred negroes and sold the cotton
from his plantation at a net profit of one hundred thousand dollars.
Each negro, therefore, netted his master that year five hundred dollars.
The working life of a slave was short, scarcely more than seven years,
and for that reason the ablest negro was never worth more than from a