Both himself and his hands are of the least
possible value to the community. By maintaining his system he excludes
cheap labor from the cultivation of cotton,--slave-labor being the
most wasteful and the most expensive of any. He purchases for his
laborers the least possible amount of manufactured articles, and he
wastes his own expenditure in the purchase of foreign luxuries.
Reference has been made to the increase to be expected in the product
of wool, after the removal or destruction of Slavery.
We import annually 30,000,000 pounds of wool, and make little or no use
of the best region for growing wool in the whole country,--the western
slope of the Alleghany and Cumberland Mountains and of the Blue Ridge.
Free laborers will not go there, although few slaves are there to be
found; for they well know that there is no respect or standing for the
free laborer in any Slave State.
Again, throughout the uplands of Georgia, the Carolinas, and Alabama,
it has been proved that sheep can be raised upon the English system
with the greatest success. Upon their light lands, (selling at less
than $1 per acre,) turnips can be raised in great abundance and fed to
sheep in the field, and by the process the fields brought to a point of
fertility, for cotton or grain, equal to the best bottom-lands of
Mississippi or Louisiana.
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