The Conflict with Slavery and Others, Complete, Volume VII, - The Works of Whittier: the Conflict with Slavery, Politics - and Reform, the Inner Life and Criticism by John Greenleaf Whittier
page 33 of 335 (09%)
page 33 of 335 (09%)
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would do as much work in that afternoon, when employed for their own
benefit, as in the whole day when employed in their master's service." "Now after this confession," said Mr. Pitt, "the house might burn all its calculations relative to the negro population. A negro, if he worked for himself, could no doubt do double work. By an improvement, then, in the mode of labor, the work in the islands could be doubled." 4. "In coffee districts it is usual for the master to hire his people after they have done the regular task for the day, at a rate varying from 10d. to 15.8d. for every extra bushel which they pluck from the trees; and many, almost all, are found eager to earn their wages." 5. In a report made by the commandant of Castries for the government of St. Lucia, in 1822, it is stated, in proof of the intimacy between the slaves and the free blacks, that "many small plantations of the latter, and occupied by only one man and his wife, are better cultivated and have more land in cultivation than those of the proprietors of many slaves, and that the labor on them is performed by runaway slaves;" thus clearly proving that even runaway slaves, under the all-depressing fears of discovery and oppression, labor well, because the fruits of their labor are immediately their own. Let us look at this subject from another point of view. The large sum of money necessary for stocking a plantation with slaves has an inevitable tendency to place the agriculture of a slave-holding community exclusively in the hands of the wealthy, a tendency at war with practical republicanism and conflicting with the best maxims of political economy. Two hundred slaves at $200 per head would cost in the outset $40,000. Compare this enormous outlay for the labor of a single plantation with |
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