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Nothing could be more preposterous, nothing more stupid, than the dogma that slavery is a curse to the country. On the contrary, the heaviest calamity that could befall any slave State on this continent, the greatest curse that an angry Providence could inflict upon the South, would be the destruction of its slave institution. The North ascribe its own rapid increase in population and wealth chiefly to the immigration of foreigners; and does so with reason. The foreigner comes over, in the general, destitute, obliged to work, and willing to labor with his own hands. The Yankee lives upon his wits; but the foreign laborer is a real producer--he works with his own hands, he digs the earth, and he produces food for his own consumption as well as for that of his Yankee taskmaster. Well may the North ascribe its prosperity in a great degree to the immigrant; for that individual becomes a producer from the outset, and not until he accumulates a little capital by his manual industry, does he imitate the Yankee, resort to his wits for a livelihood, and resolve himself into a consumer.
It is from immigration that the North derives its chief want, its most exigent desideratum--labor, manual labor; dirt digging, soil tilling labor; the labor decreed against man by the curse of Eden; the labor that brings to his brow the dust and the sweat. Various are the devices which the Yankee contrives to avoid, himself, this sweat of the brow--machines without number, factories where women and girls are made to work in droves; ligneous nutmegs and hams; protective tariffs, and like inventions. But the influx of penniless immigrants from Europe, was the Yankee's godsend--poor, necessitous, stout, sinewy immigrants, used to privation and toil, willing to labor with their hands, anxious to barter their service for mere bread. But the evil of immigrant labor is, that it is not permanent. Industry in our flourishing country soon brings its reward of accumulated means and easy competency. The humble, industrious immigrant soon grows too well-to-do to be willing or obliged to sweat and toil longer. His service at the shovel and the hoe is but an apprenticeship of a few years, at the end of which he becomes, in his turn, an imployer [sic] and consumer, rather than a laboring producer.
It is this windfall of labor by the millions, pouring into the North during the last twenty years, that has been the leading agent in the rapid development and great prosperity of that section. It remained at the North because it was wanted there. It did not come South, because we had it already.--The defect of this species of labor is its want of permanency--is the fact that it is not (as to the individual) a life time service, but a mere apprenticeship of a few years--Virginia contains half a million of life time laborers, descendants of Ham, doubly decreed to service by the divine edicts pronounced against Adam and Canaan--to service for life, service in perpetuity--Suppose that, by some fell decree, every laboring immigrant in the North were suddenly swept from that stiff necked land, who will estimate the thousand millions of loss that would be instantly inflicted upon all its busy interests? Labor, labor, is the jewel of great price in a nation's casket.--Labor is the bread and breath of a State.
It is proposed to bind Virginia to a political association that will impede her labor like a pestilence. It is proposed to chain her to a destiny that at once exiles from her borders the grandest body of productive labor to be found in any State upon the globe. It is proposed, by allying the mother of States to the emigrants of New England, not merely to make her an alien and an enemy to her daughters of the South, but to bereave her of her institution of African labor, a handmaid that was born and fostered with her, that has attended her from youth to age, and to whose faithful and efficient service she owes all her comeliness and comfort.
To show the productive value of this slave system to Virginia, we have only to contrast the property values of those counties within her borders which have few slaves, with those which have many slaves. There could not be a better exponent of the wealth of each than the taxes levied upon them by the Commonwealth; for except the inconsiderable stipend which is levied per capita, these taxes are all levied directly in proportion to the values existing in the counties, which values are the product exclusively of the labor operating in those counties. For the purpose of exhibiting this contrast we have coupled together in eight or ten pairs, a county from the nonslaveholding portion of the State and a county from the slaveholding, bringing together such as contain nearly equal numbers of white inhabitants. It will be found that in every one of the cases adduced below, (and we will extend the remark without fear of contradiction that in every case which can be adduced at all,) the amount of the taxes paid by the slaveholding county is more than double, often treble, that paid by the county having few or no slaves. In each couple given, the first is a Western, the second an Eastern county:
Counties Whites Taxation
Harrison 18,182 $15,192
Halifax 11,066 51,617
Difference paid by slave labor in Halifax $36,425
Tucker 1,396 $2,267
Warwick, (half as many,) 662 3,577
Could there be a more striking illustration of the productive power of slave labor than the foregoing figures afford? Could there be more conclusive proof of their value to the State, and to every interest in the State? The taxes it pays are but the index of the property it has earned for the taxation to be levied upon. The taxes it pays are but a general fund annually contributed to the Treasury of the Commonwealth, in which every citizen, be he resident upon the Ohio or the Holston, has as direct an interest as the Eastern planter. And yet the submissionists of Virginia propose to fix her in a condition to be abruptly robbed of this labor. Worse than Abolitionists, they are willing to be parricides.--Richmond Dispatch
Should have put this on the 'Slavery, THE Cause?' thread. Makes for a good point that slavery was THE point.
Sincerely,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
"But the evil of immigrant labor is, that it is not permanent. Industry in our flourishing country soon brings its reward of accumulated means and easy competency. The humble, industrious immigrant soon grows too well-to-do to be willing or obliged to sweat and toil longer. His service at the shovel and the hoe is but an apprenticeship of a few years, at the end of which he becomes, in his turn, an imployer [sic] and consumer, rather than a laboring producer."
Well I have a problem with this pro-slavery editorial by the Richmond Dispatch. As far as I'm aware there were maybe a few immigrants to the north who became "well-to-do", and dropped out of the labor force. The majority of them sweated and toiled, in un-regulated sweat shops ,and lived in crowded tenements until they died, usually at a rather young age. The argument being proffered here,as far as I can tell is that slave labor stayed on the job longer than immigrant labor, who supposedly got rich quick and left the labor force, thereby justifying slavery.
Terry
I remember posting this article some time ago, and it's certain that the writer's intent was not to address the morality of slavery in the South, but to promote the productive and economic value of slavery. At the same time, the author attempts to expose the hypocricy of the moral high ground that was taken by the North, while they housed their own brand of cheap labour in Northern factories.
Along with the thousands of men who toiled in unfavourable conditions, many Northern factories employed women and children who were forced to work fourteen to sixteen hour days with lack of heating, cooling, ventilation, the constant threat of fire, and lack of medical care.
As you pointed out Terry, very few immigrants could pull themselves up by the bootstraps to rise above their own poverty and go on to become one of the wealthy, when the only time granted to them was spent in the pursuit of feeding their families. And while the South progressed agriculturally because of slavery, the North advanced industrially while riding on the laurels of European immigrants.
Thanks for your reply Dawna: I'm sure slavery WAS more productive and economically viable for the south. The slaves weren't paid and they couldn't leave, and had little to no choice in the matter at all, whereas northern industrial labor, while being underpaid in many cases, and working in atrocious conditions, were still free to leave when they wished. The author of that article seems absolutely oblivious, while touting the advantages of slave labor, seemingly without a twinge of conscience, that they were ENSLAVED HUMANS.
While agreeing absolutely that slavery was abhorrent and that slaves had no option to leave, I must agree with Dawna that Northern hypocrisy was blatant. Northerners turned a blind eye to children working 14 hour days just to put a little bread on the table. And yes, they had the option to leave. But if they left, where would that bread come from? Their pitiful wages literally meant the difference between life and death in some cases. And although these children and their parents were, legally speaking, free, can you call it freedom when to leave these jobs means starvation?
And what of the parents who sent their children into those factories? When your choice as a parent is to have your children work in the dismal conditions or starve, what would you do?
We, in this century, cannot possibly understand what it was like back then. I am in no way condoning slavery. I ask only that we all try to look at the situation through the eyes of someone actually living in 1860.
The South was caught in a vicious cycle. Certainly they were making money off of slave labor! A gradual release of the slaves would have been much better, perhaps allowing the slaves to buy their way out with a year's labor with the promise that they could still stay on the land, continue to work their own plots of land and sell their produce as well as hire on to work for their former masters. Children born after, say 1859, would automatically be born free.
This would have perhaps turned some of the inward rage those slaves felt aside, to a certain degree, and given the Southerners more peace of mind rather than thinking the slaves were going to murder them in their beds. (Keep in mind, no one else in the country wanted the blacks to head their way!! The South was the logical place for them to stay, it was their home.) Also please keep an open mind to the fact that in many cases these slaves considered the whites their families, and vice versa.) With no education they would naturally turn to someone they'd always known to help them get started in their new way of life.
Turn aside the theories expressed here that slaves had habitually been beaten by their masters. Economically speaking, this would have been bad business. There would have been no profit in injuring someone who could be a hard worker for you and had cost you considerable money. And yes, I DO agree that there were some evil people in the South who beat slaves; I am not denying that fact. I only take issue with the assumption that most slave owners beat their slaves.
This was a horrible situation, a veritable vicious cycle that had to be broken in some way. In the above paragraph I attempted to give just one way that slavery could have been ended. (And I can't overlook the fact that virtually every other country had solved their slavery problem without resorting to war and a bloodbath.)
On the opposite side, In the early years of the 19th century children between the ages of 7 and 12 years made up one-third of the workforce in U.S. factories. (And please note that there was no way to know that these children weren't sent into the factories until age 7. If families needed that pittance earned by their wages, children as young as 5 lied about their age in order to work at parents' instructions.) In addition, many adults held puritanical ideas regarding the evils of idleness among children, and so cooperated with employers, helping them recruit young factory hands from indigent families.
It wasn't until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that things actually began to change. So, even though the North was up in arms about slave labor and fought a war, saying partially that it was to right this wrong, they themselves saw nothing wrong with working children in factories and sweatshops and continually struck down every effort to correct this situation until 1938, a full 77 years after the onset of the WBTS.
No one has permission to use any material from any of my posts on any CWT forum, the archives, or any other forum without my express written permission.
There was a theoretical right to withdraw one's labour from a Northern sweatshop. People of unusual energy, ability and determination were able to break out of this environment and make a success of their lives. But this is broadly analogous with the opportunities for escape which presented themselves to slaves who likewise possessed energy, ability and determination. Men like Frederick Douglass. Legally, the situations were utterly different. In practice, they were fundamentally alike.
Thea: Thanks for your post. I agree that working conditions in many factories were bad, and I stated that in my post. But I still cannot agree that those conditions were as bad as being enslaved, and all that entailed, such as being horse-whipped in some cases, and stooped over picking cotton all day in the hot sun, without pay. Thanks....Terry
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