thousand to twelve hundred dollars.

But if the cost of free labour was high, the cost of supporting the
slave under the Southern climate was very low. The climate of the Gulf
States is gentle, soft and propitious. Of forty planters who published
their statements, the average cost of clothing and feeding a slave for
one year was thirty dollars. One Louisiana planter, however, showed that
one hundred slaves on his plantation had cost him in cash outlay seven
hundred and fifty dollars for the entire year. This planter states that
his slaves raised their own corn, converted it into meal and bread,
raised their own sugar-cane, made their own molasses, built their own
houses out of the forest hard by. The slaves also raised their own
bacon, but unfortunately the price of meat was so high as to make its
use only an occasional luxury. North Carolina passed a law commanding
the planters to give their slaves meat at certain intervals, but the
law remained a dead letter. Other states, by legal enactment, fixed the
amount of meal that should be given to slaves.

When Fanny Kemble, the English actress, retired from the stage, it was
to marry a Southern planter, and her autobiography and private letters
throw a flood of light upon the life of the slaves upon a typical
plantation in the cotton States. She says that the planter expected that
about once in seven years he must buy a new set of hands; that the
slaves did little in the winter, but they worked fifteen hours a day in
the spring, and often eighteen hours a day in the summer until the
cotton was picked. She adds that the negro children used to beg her for
a taste of meat, just as English children plead for a little candy. She
states that on her husband's estate slave breeding was most important
and remunerative, and that the increase and the young slaves sold made
it possible for the plantation to pay its interest. "Every negro child