Elevate the negro from a state of slavery to the dignity of a free
laborer, and his consumption of manufactured goods increases
enormously. In proof of this may be cited the trade with Hayti, and the
immense increase in the import of manufactured goods into the British
West Indies since emancipation. Slaves are furnished with two suits of
clothes in a year, made from the coarsest and cheapest materials: it is
safe to estimate, that, if the fair proportion of their earnings were
paid them, their demand upon the North for staple articles would be
doubled, while the importations of silks, velvets, and other foreign
luxuries, upon which their earnings have been heretofore lavished by
their masters, would decrease.
The commonly received view of the position of the cotton-planter is
that he is in a chronic state of debt. Such is the fact; not, however,
because he does not make a large amount of profit,--for cotton-planting
is the most profitable branch of agriculture in the United States,--but
because his standard of value is a negro, and not a dollar, and, in the
words of a Southern writer, "He is constantly buying more land to make
more cotton to buy more negroes to cultivate more land to raise more
cotton to buy more negroes," and for every negro he buys he gets
trusted for another.
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