In the year 1846 the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States addressed a circular of inquiries to persons engaged in various businesses throughout the country, to obtain information of the national resources. In reply to this circular, forty-eight sugar-planters, of St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana, having compared notes, made the following statement of the usual expenses of a plantation, which might be expected to produce, one year with another, one hundred hogsheads of sugar:—
| Household and family expenses | $1,000 | |
| Overseer’s salary | 400 | |
| Food and clothing for 15 working hands, at $30 | 450 | |
| Food and clothing for 15 old negroes and children, at $15 | 225 | |
| 1½ per cent. on capital invested (which is about $40,000), to keep it in repair | 600 | |
| 2,675 | ||
| 50 hogsheads sugar, at 4 cents per pound (net proceeds) | $2,000 | |
| 25 hogsheads sugar, at 3 cents per pound (net proceeds) | 750 | |
| 25 hogsheads sugar, at 2 cents per pound (net proceeds) | 500 | |
| 4,000 gallons of molasses, at 10 cents | 400 | |
| 3,650 | ||
| Leaving a profit of | $975 | |
Another gentleman furnished the following estimate of the expenses of one of the larger class of plantations, working one hundred slaves, and producing, per annum, four to five hundred hogsheads of sugar:—
| Overseer | $1,500 |
| Physician’s attendance (by contract, $3 a head, of all ages) | 300 |
| Yearly repairs to engine, copper work, resetting of sugar kettles, etc., at least | 900 |
| Engineer, during grinding season | 200 |
| Pork, 50 pounds per day—say, per annum, 90 hogsheads, at $12 | 1,080 |
| Hoops | 80 |
| Clothing, two full suits per annum, shoes, caps, hats, and 100 blankets, at least $15 per slave | 1,500 |
| Mules or horses, and cattle to replace, at least | 500 |
| Implements of husbandry, iron, nails, lime, etc., at least | 1,000 |
| Factor’s commission, 2½ per cent. | 500 |
| $7,560 |
(It should be noticed that in this estimate the working force is considered as being equal, in first-class hands, to but one-third of the whole number of slaves.) — In the report of an Agricultural Society, the work of one hand, on a well-regulated sugar-estate, is put down at the cultivation of five acres—producing 5,000 pounds of sugar, and 125 gallons of molasses; the former valued on the spot at 5½ cents per pound, and the latter at 18 cents per gallon—together, $297.50. The annual expenses, per hand, including wages paid, horses, mules, and oxen, physician’s bills, etc., $105. An estate of eighty negroes annually costs $8,330. The items are as follows—Salt meat and spirits, $830; clothing, $1,200; medical attendance and medicines, $400; Indian corn, $1,090 (total for food and drink of negroes, and other live stock, $24 per head of the negroes, per annum. For clothing $15); overseer and sugar-maker’s salary, $1,000; taxes $300. The capital invested in 1,200 acres of land, with its stock of slaves, horses, mules, and working oxen, is estimated at $147,200. One-third, or 400 acres, being cultivated annually in cane, it is estimated, will yield 400,000 pounds, at 5½ cents, and 10,000 gallons molasses at 18 cents—together $23,800. Deduct annual expense, as before, $8,330, an apparent profit remains of $15,470 or 10 3-7 per cent. interest on the investment. The crop upon which these estimates were based, has been considered an uncommonly fine one.
These estimates are all made by persons anxious to maintain the necessity of protection to the continued production of sugar in the United States, and who are, therefore, under strong temptation to over-estimate expenditures.
In the first statement, the cost of clothing and boarding a first-rate, hard-working man is stated to be $30 a year. A suit of winter clothing and a pair of trousers for summer, a blanket for bedding, a pair of shoes and a hat, must all at least be included under the head of clothing; and these, however poor, could not certainly cost, altogether, less than $10. For food, then, $20 a year is a large estimate, which is 5½ cents. a day. This is for the best hands; light hands are estimated at half this cost. Does the food of a first-rate labourer, anywhere in the free world, cost less? The lowest price paid by agricultural labourers in the Free States of America for board is 21 cents a day, that is, $1.50 a week; the larger part probably pay at least twice as much as this.
On most plantations, I suppose, but by no means on all, the slaves cultivate “patches,” and raise poultry for themselves. The produce is nearly always sold to get money to buy tobacco and Sunday finery. But these additions to the usual allowance cannot be said to be provided for them by their masters. The labour expended in this way for themselves does not average half a day a week per slave; and many planters will not allow their slaves to cultivate patches, because it tempts them to reserve for and to expend in the night-work the strength they want employed in their service during the day, and also because the produce thus obtained is made to cover much plundering of their master’s crops, and of his live stock.[36] The free labourer also, in addition to his board, nearly always spends something for luxuries—tobacco, fruit, and confections, to say nothing of dress and luxuries and recreations.
The fact is, that ninety-nine in a hundred of our free labourers, from choice and not from necessity—for the same provisions cost more in Louisiana than they do anywhere in the Northern States—live, in respect to food, at least four times as well as the average of the hardest-worked slaves on the Louisiana sugar-plantations. And for two or three months in the year I have elsewhere shown that these are worked with much greater severity than free labourers at the North ever are. For on no farm, and in no factory, or mine, even when double wages are paid for night-work, did I ever hear of men or women working regularly eighteen hours a day. If ever done, it is only when some accident makes it especially desirable for a few days.
I have not compared the comfort of the light hands, in which, besides the aged and children, are evidently included most of the females of the plantation, with that of factory girls and apprentices; but who of those at the North was ever expected to find board at four cents a day, and obliged to save money enough out of such an allowance to provide him or herself with clothing? But that, manifestly and beyond the smallest doubt of error (except in favour of free labour), expresses the condition of the Louisiana slave. Forty-eight of the most worthy planters of the State attest it in an official document, published by order of Congress.
There is no reason for supposing that the slaves are much, if any, better fed elsewhere than in Louisiana. I was expressly told in Virginia that I should find them better fed in Louisiana than anywhere else. In the same Report of Mr. Secretary Walker, a gentleman in South Carolina testifies that he considers that the “furnishing” (food and clothing) of “full-tasked hands” costs $15 a year.[37]
The United States army is generally recruited from our labouring class, and a well-conditioned and respectable labourer is not very often induced to join it. The following, taken from an advertisement, for recruits, in the Richmond Enquirer, shows the food provided:
“Daily Rations.—One and a quarter pounds of beef, one and three-sixteenths pounds of bread; and at the rate of eight quarts of beans, eight pounds of sugar, four pounds of coffee, two quarts of salt, four pounds of candles, and four pounds of soap, to every hundred rations.”
From an advertisement for slaves to be hired by the year, to work on a canal, in the Daily Georgian:
“Weekly Allowance.—They will be provided with three and a half pounds of pork or bacon, and ten quarts of gourd seed corn per week, lodged in comfortable shanties, and attended by a skilful physician.”
The expense of boarding, clothes, taxes, and so forth, of a male slave, is estimated by Robert C. Hall, a Maryland planter, at $45 per annum; this in a climate but little milder than that of New York, and in a breeding state. By J. D. Messenger, Jerusalem, Virginia: “The usual estimate for an able-bodied labourer—three barrels of corn, and 250 pounds of well-cured bacon, seldom using beef or pork; peas and potatoes substitute about one-third the allowance of bread” (maize). By R. G. Morris, Amherst County, Va.: “Not much beef is used on our estates; bacon, however, is used much more freely, three pounds a week being the usual allowance. The quantity of milk used by slaves is frequently considerable.”-Pat. Office Report, 1848.
On the most valuable plantation, with one exception, which I visited in the South, no meat was regularly provided for the slaves, but a meal of bacon was given them “occasionally.”
Louisiana is the only State in which meat is required, by law, to be furnished the slaves. I believe the required ration is four pounds a week, with a barrel of corn (flour barrel of ears of maize) per month, and salt. (This law is a dead letter, many planters in the State making no regular provision of meat for their force.) In North Carolina the law fixes “a quart of corn per day” as the proper allowance of food for a slave. In no other States does the law define the quantity, but it is required, in general terms, to be sufficient for the health of the slave; and I have no doubt that suffering from want of food is rare. The food is everywhere, however, coarse, crude, and wanting in variety; much more so than that of our prison convicts.
Does argument, that the condition of free-labourers is, on the whole, better than that of slaves, or that simply they are generally better fed, and more comfortably provided, seem to any one to be unnecessary? Many of our newspapers, of the largest circulation, and certainly of great influence among people—probably not very reflective, but certainly not fools—take the contrary for granted, whenever it suits their purpose. The Southern newspapers, so far as I know, do so, without exception. And very few Southern writers, on any subject whatever, can get through a book, or even a business or friendly letter, to be sent North, without, in some form or other, asserting that Northern labourers might well envy the condition of the slaves. A great many Southern gentlemen—gentlemen whom I respect much for their moral character, if not for their faculties of observation—have asserted it so strongly and confidently, as to shut my mouth, and by assuring me that they had personally observed the condition of Northern labourers themselves, and really knew that I was wrong, have for a time half convinced me against my long experience. I have, since my return, received letters to the same effect: I have heard the assertion repeated by several travellers, and even by Northerners, who had resided long in the South: I have heard it publicly repeated in Tammany Hall, and elsewhere, by Northern Democrats: I have seen it in European books and journals: I have, in times past, taken its truth for granted, and repeated it myself. Such is the effect of the continued iteration of falsehood.
Since my return I have made it a subject of careful and extended inquiry. I have received reliable and unprejudiced information in the matter, or have examined personally the food, the wages, and the habits of the labourers in more than one hundred different farmers’ families, in every Free State (except California), and in Canada. I have made personal observations and inquiries of the same sort in Great Britain, Germany, France, and Belgium. In Europe, where there are large landed estates, which are rented by lordly proprietors to the peasant farmers, or where land is divided into such small portions that its owners are unable to make use of the best modern labour-saving implements, the condition of the labourer, as respects food, often is as bad as that of the slave often is—never worse than that sometimes is. But in general, even in France, I do not believe it is generally or frequently worse; I believe it is, in the large majority of cases, much better than that of the majority of slaves. And as respects higher things than the necessities of life—in their intellectual, moral, and social condition, with some exceptions on large farms and large estates in England, bad as is that of the mass of European labourers, the man is a brute or a devil who, with my information, would prefer that of the American slave. As to our own labourers, in the Free States, I have already said enough for my present purpose.
But it is time to speak of the extreme cases, of which so much use has been made, in the process of destroying the confidence of the people of the United States in the freedom of trade, as applied to labour.
In the year 1855, the severest winter ever known occurred at New York, in conjunction with unprecedentedly high prices of food and fuel, extraordinary business depression, unparalleled marine disasters, and the failure of establishments employing large numbers of men and women. At the same time, there continued to arrive, daily, from five hundred to one thousand of the poorer class of European peasantry. Many of these came, expecting to find the usual demand and the usual reward for labour, and were quite unprepared to support themselves for any length of time unless they could obtain work and wages. There was consequently great distress.
We all did what we thought we could, or ought, to relieve it; and with such success, that not one single case of actual starvation is known to have occurred in a close compacted population of over a million, of which it was generally reported fifty thousand were out of employment. Those who needed charitable assistance were, in nearly every case, recent foreign immigrants, sickly people, cripples, drunkards, or knaves taking advantage of the public benevolence, to neglect to provide for themselves. Most of those who received assistance would have thrown a slave’s ordinary allowance in the face of the giver, as an insult; and this often occurred with more palatable and suitable provisions. Hundreds and hundreds, to my personal knowledge, during the worst of this dreadful season, refused to work for money-wages that would have purchased them ten times the slave’s ordinary allowance of the slave’s ordinary food. In repeated instances, men who represented themselves to be suffering for food refused to work for a dollar a day. A labourer, employed by a neighbour of mine, on wages and board, refused to work unless he was better fed. “What’s the matter,” said my neighbour; “don’t you have enough?” “Enough; yes, such as it is.” “You have good meat, good bread, and a variety of vegetables; what do you want else?” “Why, I want pies and puddings, too, to be sure.” Another labourer left another neighbour of mine, because, as he alleged, he never had any meat offered him except beef and pork; he “didn’t see why he shouldn’t have chickens.”
And these men went to New York, and joined themselves to that army on which our Southern friends exercise their pity—of labourers out of work—of men who are supposed to envy the condition of the slave, because the “slave never dies for want of food.”[38]
In the depth of winter, a trustworthy man wrote us from Indiana:—
“Here, at Rensselaer, a good mechanic, a joiner or shoemaker, for instance—and numbers are needed here—may obtain for his labour in one week:
and have a couple of dollars left in his pocket, to start with the next Monday morning.”
The moment the ice thawed in the spring, the demand for mechanics exceeded the supply, and the workmen had the master-hand of the capitalists. In June, the following rates were willingly paid to the different classes of workmen—some of the trades being on strike for higher:—
| Dollars per Week. | |
| Boiler-maker | 12 to 20 |
| Blacksmith | 12 to 20 |
| Baker | 9 to 14 |
| Barber | 7 to 10 |
| Bricklayer | 14 to 15 |
| Boat-builder | 15 |
| Cooper | 8 to 12 |
| Carpenter (house) | 15 |
| Confectioner | 8 to 12 |
| Cigar-maker | 9 to 25 |
| Car-driver (city cars) | 10 |
| Car-conductor (city cars) | 10½ |
| Engineer, common | 12 to 15 |
| Engineer, locomotive | 15 |
| Harness-maker | 10 |
| Mason | 10 to 15 |
| Omnibus-driver | 10 |
| Printer | 10 to 25 |
| Plumber | 15 |
| Painter (house) | 15 |
| Pianoforte maker | 10 to 14 |
| Shipwright | 18 |
| Ship-caulker | 18 |
| Ship-fastener | 18 |
| Shoemaker | 16 |
| Sign painter | 25 to 30 |
| Sail-maker | 15 |
| Tailor | 8 to 17 |
At this time I engaged a gardener, who had been boarding for a month or two in New York, and paying for his board and lodging $3 a week. I saw him at the dinner-table of his boarding house, and I knew that the table was better supplied with a variety of wholesome food, and was more attractive, than that of the majority of slaveowners with whom I have dined.
Amasa Walker, formerly Secretary of State in Massachusetts, is the authority for the following table, showing the average wages of a common (field-hand) labourer in Boston (where immigrants are constantly arriving, and where, consequently, there is often a necessity, from their ignorance and accidents, of charity, to provide for able bodied persons), and the prices of ten different articles of sustenance, at three different periods:—
Wages of Labour and Food at Boston.
| 1836. Wages. $1.25 per day. |
1840. Wages. $1 per day. |
1843. Wages. $1 per day. |
|
| Dollars. | Dollars. | Dollars. | |
| 1 barrel flour | 9.50 | 5.50 | 4.75 |
| 25 lbs. sugar, at 9c. | 2.25 | 2.00 | 1.62 |
| 10 gals. molasses, 42½c. | 4.25 | 2.70 | 1.80 |
| 100 lbs. pork | 4.50 | 8.50 | 5.00 |
| 14 lbs. coffee, 12½c. | 1.75 | 1.50 | 5.00 |
| 28 lbs. rice | 1.25 | 1.00 | 75 |
| 1 bushel corn meal | 96 | 65 | 62 |
| 1 do rye meal | 1.08 | 83 | 73 |
| 30 lbs. butter, 22c. | 6.60 | 4.80 | 4.20 |
| 20 lbs. cheese, 10c. | 2.00 | 1.60 | 1.40 |
| 44.00 | 28.98 | 22.00 |
This shows that in 1836 it required the labour of thirty-four and a half days to pay for the commodities mentioned; while in 1840 it required only the labour of twenty-nine days, and in 1843 that of only twenty-three and a half days to pay for the same. If we compare the ordinary allowance of food given to slaves per month—as, for instance, sixteen pounds pork, one bushel corn meal, and, say one quart of molasses on an average, and a half pint of salt—with that which it is shown by this table the free labourer is usually able to obtain by a month’s labour, we can estimate the comparative general comfort of each.
I am not all disposed to neglect the allegation that there is sometimes great suffering among our free labourers. Our system is by no means perfect; no one thinks it so: no one objects to its imperfections being pointed out. There was no subject so much discussed in New York that winter as the causes, political and social, which rendered us liable to have labourers, under the worst possible combination of circumstances, liable to difficulty in procuring satisfactory food.
But this difficulty, as a serious thing, is a very rare and exceptional one (I speak of the whole of the Free States): that it is so, and that our labourers are ordinarily better fed and clothed than the slaves, is evident from their demands and expectations, when they are deemed to be suffering. When any real suffering does occur, it is mainly a consequence and a punishment of their own carelessness and improvidence, and is in the nature of a remedy.
And in every respect, for the labourer, the competitive system, in its present lawless and uncertain state, is far preferable to the slave system; and any labourer, even if he were a mere sensualist and materialist, would be a fool to wish himself a slave.
One New York newspaper, having a very large circulation at the South, but a still larger at the North, in discussing this matter, last winter, fearlessly and distinctly declared—as if its readers were expected to accept the truth of the assertion at once, and without argument—that the only sufficient prevention of destitution among a labouring class was to be found in slavery; that there was always an abundance of food in the Slave States, and hinted that it might yet be necessary, as a security against famine, to extend slavery over the present Free States. This article is still being copied by the Southern papers, as testimony of an unwilling witness to the benevolence and necessity of the eternal slavery of working people.
The extracts following, from Southern papers, will show what has occurred in the slave country in the meanwhile:
“For several weeks past, we have noticed accounts of distress among the poor in some sections of the South, for the want of bread, particularly in Western Georgia, East and Middle Alabama. Over in Coosa, corn-cribs are lifted nightly; and one poor fellow (corn thief) lately got caught between the logs, and killed! It is said there are many grain-hoarders in the destitute regions, awaiting higher prices! The L—d pity the poor, for his brother man will not have any mercy upon his brother.”—Pickens Republican, Carrolton, Ala., June 5, 1855.
“We regret that we are unable to publish the letter of Governor Winston, accompanied by a memorial to him from the citizens of a portion of Randolph county, showing a great destitution of breadstuffs in that section, and calling loudly for relief.
“The Claiborne Southerner says, also, that great destitution in regard to provisions of all kinds, especially corn, prevails in some portions of Perry county.”—Sunny South, Jacksonville, Ala., May 26, 1855.
“As for wheat, the yield in Talladega, Tallapoosa, Chambers, and Macon, is better even than was anticipated. Flour is still high, but a fortnight will lower the price very materially. We think that wheat is bound to go down to $1.25 to $1.50 per bushel, though a fine article commands now $2.25.
“Having escaped famine—as we hope we have—we trust the planting community of Alabama will never again suffer themselves to be brought so closely in view of it. Their want of thrift and foresight has come remarkably near placing the whole country in an awful condition. It is only to a kind Providence that we owe a deliverance from a great calamity, which would have been clearly the result of man’s short-sightedness.”—Montgomery Mail, copied in Savannah Georgian, June 25, 1855.
“Wheat crops, however, are coming in good, above an average; but oats are entirely cut off. I am issuing commissary, this week for the county, to distribute some corn bought by the Commissioner’s Court, for the destitute of our county; and could you have witnessed the applicants, and heard their stories, for the last few days, I am satisfied you could draw a picture that would excite the sympathy of the most selfish heart. I am free to confess that I had no idea of the destitution that prevails in this county. Why, sir, what do you think of a widow and her children living, for three days and nights, on boiled weeds, called pepper grass?—yet such, I am credibly informed, has been the case in Chambers County.”—From a letter to the editor of the Montgomery (Ala.) Journal, from Hon. Samuel Pearson, Judge of Probate, for Chambers County, Alabama.
“Famine in Upper Georgia.—We have sad news from the north part of Georgia. The Dalton Times says that many people are without corn, or means to procure any. And, besides, there is none for sale. In some neighbourhoods, a bushel could not be obtained for love or money. Poor men are offering to work for a peck of corn a day. If they plead, Our children will starve,’ they are answered, ‘So will mine, if I part with the little I have.’ Horses and mules are turned out into the woods, to wait for grass, or starve. The consequence is, that those who have land can only plant what they can with the hoe—they cannot plough. It is seriously argued that, unless assisted soon, many of the poor class of that section will perish.”—California Paper.[39]
No approach to anything like such a state of things as those extracts portray (which extended over parts of three agricultural States) ever occurred, I am sure, in any rural district of the Free States. Even in our most thickly-peopled manufacturing districts, to which the staple articles of food are brought from far-distant regions, assistance from abroad, to sustain the poor, has never been asked; nor do I believe the poor have ever been reduced, for weeks together, to a diet of corn. But this famine at the South occurred in a region where most productive land can be purchased for from three to seven dollars an acre; where maize and wheat grow kindly; where cattle, sheep, and hogs, may be pastured over thousands of acres, at no rent; where fuel has no value, and at a season of the year when clothing or shelter is hardly necessary to comfort.
It is a remarkable fact that this frightful famine, unprecedented in North America, was scarcely noticed, in the smallest way, by any of those Southern papers which, in the ordinary course of things, ever reach the North. In the Charleston, Savannah, and Mobile papers, received at our commercial reading-rooms, I have not been able to find any mention of it at all—a single, short, second-hand paragraph in a market report excepted. But these journals had columns of reports from our papers, and from their private correspondents, as well as pages of comment, on the distress of the labourers in New York City the preceding winter.
In 1837, the year of repudiation in Mississippi, a New Orleans editor describes the effect of the money-pressure upon the planters, as follows:—
“They are now left without provisions, and the means of living and using their industry for the present year. In this dilemma, planters, whose crops have been from 100 to 700 bales, find themselves forced to sacrifice many of their slaves, in order to get the common necessaries of life, for the support of themselves and the rest of their negroes. In many places, heavy planters compel their slaves to fish for the means of subsistence, rather than sell them at such ruinous rates. There are, at this moment, thousands of slaves in Mississippi, that know not where the next morsel is to come from. The master must be ruined, to save the wretches from being starved.”
Absolute starvation is as rare, probably, in slavery, as in freedom; but I do not believe it is more so. An instance is just recorded in the New Orleans Delta. Other papers omit to notice it—as they usually do facts which it may be feared will do discredit to slavery—and even the Delta, as will be seen, is anxious that the responsibility of the publication should be fixed upon the coroner:
“Inquest.—Death from neglect and starvation.—The body of an old negro, named Bob, belonging to Mr. S. B. Davis, was found lying dead in the woods, near Marigny Canal, on the Gentilly Road, yesterday. The coroner held an inquest; and, after hearing the evidence, the jury returned a verdict of ‘Death from starvation and exposure, through neglect of his master.’ It appeared from the evidence that the negro was too old to work any more, being nearly seventy; and so they drove him forth into the woods to die. He had been without food for forty-eight hours, when found by Mr. Wilbank, who lives near the place, and who brought him into his premises on a wheelbarrow, gave him something to eat, and endeavoured to revive his failing energies, which had been exhausted from exposure and want of food. Every effort to save his life, however, was unavailing, and he died shortly after being brought to Mr. Wilbank’s. The above statement we publish, as it was furnished us by the coroner.”—Sept. 18, 1855.
This is the truth, then—is it not?—The slaves are generally sufficiently well-fed to be in tolerable working condition; but not as well as our free labourers generally are: slavery, in practice, affords no safety against occasional suffering for want of food among labourers, or even against their starvation any more than the competitive system; while it withholds all encouragement from the labourer to improve his faculties and his skill; destroys his self-respect; misdirects and debases his ambition, and withholds all the natural motives which lead men to endeavour to increase their capacity of usefulness to their country and the world. To all this, the occasional suffering of the free labourer is favourable, on the whole. The occasional suffering of the slave has no such advantage. To deceit, indolence, malevolence, and thievery, it may lead, as may the suffering—though it is much less likely to—of the free labourer; but to industry, cultivation of skill, perseverance, economy, and virtuous habits, neither the suffering, nor the dread of it as a possibility, ever can lead the slave, as it generally does the free labourer, unless it is by inducing him to run away.