Slavery ‘on a grander scale…’

There is a presumed history of things that is taught to most, that even the less powerful from amongst the elites believe…and then there is another history of these events, that only a relative few and powerful know.  It is important for those wishing to see not only the preservation of their own people, but the other various peoples of the world as well that make up humanity, to have an excellent grasp of the past so as to see clearly as to what to do in the present.  Hence entries here such as this…

Published in 1853 by US based economist Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879), this is an in-depth examination of the new, more virulent, incredibly destructive variant of slavery, euphamistically referred to as ‘cheap labor’, an integral part of the ‘New Order’ of things, which is central  to the ideology of Multi-Culturalism, and what remained of the ghastly far less profitable, primitive, classical system of chattel slavery that cheap labor was fast replacing.    Filled with many contemporary accounts and facts this is of as much interest today as it was then.  Obviously it is best to simply pay people what the labor is worth rather than trying to find ways to steal labor thru variants of slavery as a relative few, though powerful do, at about just everyone else’s very great expense.  Appropriately the book is entitled The Slave Trade.

Some excerpts

Henry Charles Carey

“It is the slave trade of the last century reproduced on a grander scale…” Carey regarding ‘cheap labor’

The Slave Trade
Domestic and Foreign
Why It Exists, and How it May Be Extinguished

By Henry Charles Carey

Author of “Principles of Political Economy,” “The Past, The Present, and The Future”, Etc., Etc.

Preface

The subject discussed in the following pages is one of great importance, and especially to the people of this country.  The views presented for consideration, both as regards the cause of evil and the mode of cure;  but it does not follow necessarily that they are not correct, — as the reader may readily satisfy himself by reflecting upon the fact, that there is scarcely an opinion he now holds, that has not, and at no very distant period, been deemed quite as heretical as any here advanced.  In reflecting upon them, and upon the facts by which they are supported, he is requested to bear in mind that the latter are, with very few exceptions, drawn from writers holding views directly opposed to those of the author of this volume;  and not therefore to be suspected of any exaggeration of the injurious effects of the system here treated as leading to slavery, or the beneficial ones resulting from that here described as tending to establish perfect and universal freedom of thought, speech, action and trade.

Philadelphia, March, 1853.

Chapter I.
The Wide Extent of Slavery

Slavery still exists throughout a large portion of what we are accustomed to regard as the civilized world.  In some countries, men are forced to take the chance of a lottery for the determination of the question whether they shall or shall not be transported to distant and unhealthy countries, there most probably to perish, leaving behind them impoverished mothers and sisters to lament their fate.  In others, they are seized on the highway and sent to sea for long terms of years, while parents, wives, and sisters, who had been dependent on their exertions, are left to perish of starvation, or driven to vice or crime to procure the means of support.  In a third class, men, their wives, and children, are driven from their homes to perish in the road, or to endure the slavery of dependence on public charity until pestilence shall send them to their graves, and thus clear the way for a fresh supply of others like themselves.  In a fourth, we see men driven to selling themselves for long periods at hard labour in distant countries, deprived of the society of parents, relatives, or friends.  In a fifth, men, women, and children are exposed to sale, and wives are separated from husbands, while children are separated from parents.  In some, white men, and, in others, black men, are subjected to the lash, and to other of the severest and most degrading punishments.  In some places men are deemed valuable, and they are well fed and clothed.  In others, man is regarded as “a drug” and population as “a nuisance” and Christian men are warned that their duty to God and to society requires that they should permit their fellow-creatures to suffer every privation and distress, short of “absolute, death,” with a view to prevent the increase of numbers…

Chapter 20 juxtaposes cheap labor and chattel slavery in the United States, one of the few places of the world where the two variations of slavery co-existed for a time. Much is said about ‘free trade’ as well. The simple, but obvious, suggestion of paying good wages is made, and to steer away from the incredibly socially destructive idea of forever attempting to cheapen labor.

b]“And yet this system, which looks everywhere to the enslavement of man, is dignified by the name of ‘free trade.’”The Slave trade

The Means by Which Slaves Are Now Often Transported in Modern Times

“...Unhappily, however, for us, our legislators were smitten with a love of the system called free trade.  They were of opinion that we were, by right, an agricultural nation, and that so we must continue;  and that the true way to produce competition for the purchase of labour was to resolve the whole nation into a body of farmers — and the tariff of 1842 was repealed.

If the reader will now turn to page 107, he will see how large must have been the domestic slave trade from 1835 to 1840, compared with that of the period from 1840 to 1845.  The effect of this in increasing the crop and reducing the price of cotton was felt with great severity in the latter period,[2] and it required time to bring about a change.  We are now moving in the same direction in which we moved from 1835 to 1840.  For four years past, we have not only abandoned the building of mills and furnaces, but have closed hundreds of old ones, and centralization, therefore, grows from day to day.  The farmer of Ohio can no longer exchange his food directly with the maker of iron.  He must carry it to New York, as must the producer of cotton in Carolina;  who sees the neighbouring factory closed.[3]  Local places of exchange decline, and great cities take their place;  and with the growth of centralization grows the slave trade, North and South.  Palaces rise in New York and Philadelphia, while droves of black slaves are sent to Texas to raise cotton, and white ones at the North perish of disease, and sometimes almost of famine.  “We could tell,” says a recent writer in one of the New York journals—

“Of one room, twelve feet by twelve, in which were five resident families, comprising twenty persons of both sexes and all ages, with only two beds, without partition or screen, or chair or table, and all dependent for their miserable support upon the sale of chips, gleaned from the streets, at four cents a basket — of another, still smaller and still more destitute, inhabited by a man, a woman, two little girls, and a boy, who were supported by permitting the room to be used as a rendezvous by the abandoned women of the street — of another, an attic room seven feet by five, containing scarcely an article of furniture but a bed, on which lay a fine-looking man in a raging fever, without medicine or drink or suitable food, his toil-worn wife engaged in cleaning dirt from the floor, and his little child asleep on a bundle of rags in the corner — of another of the same dimensions, in which we found, seated on low boxes around a candle placed on a keg, a woman and her oldest daughter, (the latter a girl of fifteen, and, as we were told, a prostitute,) sewing on shirts, for the making of which they were paid four cents apiece, and even at that price, out of which they had to support two small children, they could not get a supply of work —of another of about the same size occupied by a street rag-picker and his family, the income of whose industry was eight dollars a month — of another, scarcely larger, into which we were drawn by the terrific screams of a drunken man beating his wife, containing no article of furniture whatever — another warmed only by a tin pail of lighted charcoal placed in the centre of the room, over which bent a blind man endeavouring to warm himself;  around him three or four men and women swearing and quarrelling;  in one corner on the floor a woman, who had died the day previous of disease, and in another two or three children sleeping on a pile of rags;  (in regard to this room, we may say that its occupants were coloured people, and from them but a few days previous had been taken and adopted by one of our benevolent citizens a beautiful little white girl, four or five years of age, whose father was dead and whose mother was at Blackwell’s Island) another from which not long;  since twenty persons, sick with fever were taken to the hospital, and every individual of them died.  But why extend the catalogue?  Or why attempt to convey to the imagination by words the hideous squalor and the deadly effluvia;  the dim, undrained courts, oozing with pollution;  the dark narrow stairways decayed with age, reeking with filth, and overrun with vermin;  the rotten floors, ceilings begrimed, crumbling, ofttimes too low to permit you to stand upright, and windows stuffed with rags;  or why try to portray the gaunt shivering forms and wild ghastly faces in these black and beetling abodes, wherein from cellar to garret

——‘All life dies, death lives, and nature breeds
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, unutterable!’”

New York Courier and Inquirer.

Our shops are now everywhere filled with the products of the cheap labour of England — of the labour of those foreign women who make shirts at a penny apiece, finding the needles and the thread, and of those poor girl’s who spend a long day at making artificial flowers for which they receive two pence, and then eke out the earnings of labour by the wages of prostitution; and our women are everywhere driven from employment — the further consequences of which may be seen in the following extract from another journal of the day:—

“A gentleman who had been deputed to inquire into the condition of this class of operatives, found one of the most expert of them working from five o’clock in the morning until eleven at night, yet earning only about three dollars a week.  Out of this, she had to pay a dollar and a half for board, leaving a similar amount for fuel, clothing, and all other expenses.  Her condition, however, as compared with that of her class generally, was one of opulence.  The usual earnings were but two dollars a week, which, as respectable board, could be had nowhere for less;  than a dollar and a half, left only fifty cents for everything else.  The boarding-houses, even at this price, are of the poorest character, always noisome and unhealthy, and not unfrequently in vile neighbourhoods.  With such positive and immediate evils to contend with, what wonder that so many needlewomen take ‘the wages of sin?’”

“Among the cases brought to light in New York, was that of an intelligent and skilful dressmaker, who was found in the garret of a cheap boarding-house, out of work, and nor are such instances unfrequent.  The small remuneration which these workwomen receive keeps them living from hand to mouth, so that, in case of sickness, or scarcity of work, they are sometimes left literally without a crust.” — Philadelphia Evening-Bulletin.

If females cannot tend looms, make flowers, or do any other of those things in which mind takes in a great degree the place of physical power, they must make shirts at four cents apiece, or resort to prostitution — or, they may work in the fields;  and this is nearly the latitude of choice allowed to them under the system called free trade.  Every furnace that is closed in Pennsylvania by the operation of this system, lessens the value of labour in the neighbourhood, and drives out some portion of the people to endeavour to sell elsewhere their only commodity, labour.  Some seek the cities and some go West to try their fortunes.  So, too, with the closing of woollens mills in New York, and cotton mills in New England.  Every such ease compels people to leave their old homes and try to find new ones — and in this form the slave trade now exists at the North to a great extent.  The more people thus driven to the cities, the cheaper is labour, and the more rapid is the growth of drunkenness and crime; and these effects are clearly visible in the police reports of all our cities.[4]  Centralization, poverty, and crime go always hand in hand with each other.

The closing of mills and furnaces in Maryland lessens the demand for labour there, and the smaller that demand the greater must be the necessity on the part of those who own slaves to sell them to go South;  and here we find the counterpart of the state of things already described as existing in New York.  The Virginian, limited to negroes as the only commodity into which he can manufacture his corn and thus enable it to travel cheaply to market, sends his crop to Richmond, and the following extract of a letter from that place shows how the system works:—

“Richmond, March 3, 1853.

“I saw several children sold;  the girls brought the highest price.  Girls from 12 to 18 years old brought from $500 to $800.
“I must say that the slaves did not display as much feeling as I had expected, as a general thing — but there was one noble exception — God bless her! and save her, too!! as I hope he will in some way, for if he does not interpose, there were no men there that would.

“She was a fine-looking woman about 25 years old, with three beautiful children.  Her children as well as herself were neatly dressed.  She attracted my attention at once on entering the room, and I took my stand near her to learn her answers to the various questions put to her by the traders.  One of these traders asked her what was the matter with her eyes?  Wiping away the tears, she replied, ‘I s’pose I have been crying.’  ‘Why do you cry?’  ‘Because I have left my man behind, and his master won’t let him come along.’  ‘Oh, if I buy you, I will furnish you with a better husband, or man, as you call him, than your old one.’  ‘I don’t want any better and won’t have any other as long as he lives.’  ‘Oh, but you will though, if I buy you,’  ‘No, massa, God helping me, I never will.’” — New York Tribune

At the North, the poor girl driven out from the cotton or the woollens mill is forced to make shirts at four cents each, or sell herself to the horrible slavery of prostitution.  At the South, this poor woman, driven put from Virginia, may perhaps at some time be found making one of the dramatis personæ in scenes similar to those here described by Dr. Howe:—

“If Howard or Mrs. Fry ever discovered so ill-administered a den of thieves as the New Orleans prison, they never described it.  In the negro’s apartment I saw much which made me blush that I was a white man;  and which for a moment stirred up an evil spirit in my animal nature.  Entering a large paved court-yard, around which ran galleries filled with slaves of all ages, sexes, and colours, I heard the snap of a whip, every stroke of which sounded like the sharp crack of a pistol.  I turned my head, and beheld a sight which absolutely chilled me to the marrow of my bones, and gave me, for the first time in my life, the sensation of my hair stiffening at the roots.  There lay a black girl flat upon her face on a board, her two thumbs tied, and fastened to one end, her feet tied and drawn tightly to the other end, while a strap passed over the small of her back, and fastened around the board, compressed her closely to it.  Below the strap she was entirely naked.  By her side, and six feet off, stood a huge negro, with a long whip, which he applied with dreadful power and wonderful precision.  Every stroke brought away a strip of skin, which clung to the lash, or fell quivering on the pavement, while the blood followed after it.  The poor creature writhed and shrieked, and in a voice which showed alike her fear of death and her dreadful agony, screamed to her master who stood at her head, ‘Oh, spare my life;  don’t cut my soul out!’  But still fell the horrid lash;  still strip after strip peeled off from the skin;  gash after gash was cut in her living flesh, until it became a livid and bloody mass of raw and quivering muscle.
“It was with the greatest difficulty I refrained from springing upon the torturer, and arresting his lash;  but alas, what could I do, but turn aside to hide my tears for the sufferer, and my blushes for humanity!

“This was in a public and regularly organized prison;  the punishment was one recognised and authorized by the law.  But think you the poor wretch had committed a heinous offence, and had been convicted thereof, and sentenced to the lash?  Not at all!  She was brought by her master to be whipped by the common executioner, without trial, judge, or jury, just at his beck or nod, for some real or supposed offence, or to gratify his own whim or malice.  And he may bring her day after day, without cause assigned, and inflict any number of lashes he pleases, short of twenty-five, provided only he pays the fee.  Or if he choose, he may have a private whipping-board on his own premises, and brutalize himself there.

“A shocking part of this horrid punishment was its publicity, as I have said;  it was in a court-yard, surrounded by galleries, which were filled with coloured persons of all sexes — runaway slaves committed for some crime, or slaves up for sale.  You would naturally suppose they crowded forward and gazed horror-stricken at the brutal spectacle below;  but they did not;  many of them hardly noticed it, and many were entirely indifferent to it.  They went on in their childish pursuits, and some were laughing outright in the distant parts of the galleries;— so low can man created in God’s image be sunk in brutality.”

Where, however, lies the fault of all this?  Cheap cotton cannot be supplied to the world unless the domestic slave trade be maintained, and all the measures of England are directed toward obtaining a cheap and abundant supply of that commodity, to give employment to that “cheap and abundant supply of labour” so much desired by the writers in the very journal that furnished to its readers this letter of Dr. Howe.[5]  To produce this cheap cotton the American labourer must be expelled from his home in Virginia to the wilds of Arkansas, there to be placed, perhaps, under the control of a Simon Legree.[6]  That he may be expelled, the price of corn must be cheapened in Virginia;  and that it may be cheapened, the cheap labourer of Ireland must be brought to England there, to compete with the Englishman for the reduction of labour to such a price as will enable England to “smother in their infancy” all attempts at manufacturing corn into any thing but negroes for Arkansas.  That done, should the Englishman’s “blood boil” on reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he is told to recollect that it is “to his advantage that the slave should be permitted to wear his chains in peace.”  And yet this system, which looks everywhere to the enslavement of man, is dignified by the name of “free trade.”

The cheap-labour system of England produces the slave trade of America, India, and Ireland; and the manner in which it is enabled to produce that effect, and the extent of its “advantage” to the people of England itself, is seen in the following extract from a speech delivered at a public meeting in that country but a few weeks since:—

“The factory-law was so unblushingly violated that the chief inspector of that part of the factory district, Mr. Leonard Horner, had found himself necessitated to write to the Home Secretary, to say that he dared not, and would not send any of his sub-inspectors into certain districts until he had police protection. *** And protection against whom?  Against the factory-masters!  Against the richest men in the district, against the most influential men in the district, against the magistrates of the district, against the men who hold her Majesty’s commission, against the men who sat in the Petty Sessions as the representatives of royalty. *** And did the masters suffer for their violation of the law?  In his own district it was a settled custom of the male, and to a great extent of the female workers in factories, to be in bed from 9, 10 or 11 o’clock on Sunday, because they were tired out by the labour of the week.  Sunday was the only day on which they could rest their wearied frames. *** It would generally be found that, the longer the time of work, the smaller the wages. *** He would rather be a slave in South Carolina, than a factory operative in England.” — Speech of Rev, Dr. Bramwell, at Crampton.

The whole profit, we are told, results from “the last hour,” and were that hour taken from the master, then the people of Virginia might be enabled to make their own cloth and iron, and labour might there become so valuable that slaves would cease to be exported to Texas, and cotton must then rise in price;  and in order to prevent the occurrence of such unhappy events, the great cotton manufacturers set at defiance the law of the land!  The longer the working hours the more “cheap and abundant” will be the “supply of labour,” — and it is only by aid of this cheap, or slave, labour that, as we are told, “the supremacy of England in manufactures can be maintained.”  The cheaper the labour, the more rapid must be the growth of individual fortunes, and the more perfect the consolidation of the land.  Extremes thus always meet.  The more splendid the palace of the trader, whether in cloth, cotton, negroes, or Hindoos, the more squalid will be the poverty of the labourer, his wife and children, — and the more numerous the diamonds on the coat of Prince Esterhazy, the more ragged will be his serfs.  The more that local places of exchange are closed, the greater will be the tendency to the exhaustion and abandonment of the land, and the more flourishing will be the slave trade, North and South, — and the greater will be the growth of pro-slavery at the South, and anti-slavery at the North.

The author continues…

...The master of slaves, whether wearing a crown or carrying a whip, is himself a slave;  and that such is the case with nations as well as individuals, the reader may perhaps be satisfied if he will follow out the working of the British system as here described by the reviewer.  For half a century Irish labour has been, as we are here told, poured into England, producing a glut in the market, and lowering not only the wages, but also the standard of comfort among English labourers.  This is quite true;  but why did these men come?  Because labour was cheaper in Ireland than in England.  Why was it so?  Because, just half a century since, it was provided by the Act of Union that the women and children of Ireland should either remain idle or work in the field.  Prior to the centralization by that act of all power in the British Parliament, the people of that country had been vigorously engaged in the effort to produce competition for the purchase of labour at home;  and had they been permitted to continue on in that direction, it would have risen to a level with English labour, and then it could not have been profitably exported.  This, however, they were not permitted to do.  Their furnaces and factories were closed, and the people who worked in them were driven to England to seek their bread, and wages fell, because the price of all commodities, labour included, tends to a level, and whatever reduces them anywhere tends to reduce them everywhere.  The price of English labour fell because the Act of Union had diminished the value of that of Ireland.

If we desire to know to what extent it had this effect, we must look to the consequences of an over-supply of perishable articles.  Of all commodities, labour is the most perishable, because it must be sold on the instant or it is wasted, and if wasted, the man who has it to sell may perish himself.  Now we know that an over-supply of even iron, equal to ten percent, will reduce prices thirty, forty, or fifty percent, and that an excess of a single hundred thousand bales in the crop of cotton makes a difference of ten percent upon three millions of bales, whereas a diminution to the same extent will make a difference of ten percent in the opposite direction.  Still more is this the case with oranges and peaches, which must be sold at once or wasted.  With an excess in the supply of either, they are often abandoned as not worth the cost of gathering and carrying to market.  A small excess in the supply of men, women, and children so far reduces their value in the eyes of the purchaser of labour, that he finds himself, as now in England, induced to regard it as a mercy of Heaven when famine, pestilence, and emigration clear them out of his way; and he is then disposed to think that the process “cannot be carried too far nor continued too long.”

Irish labour, having been cheapened by the provisions of the Act of Union, was carried to the market of England for sale, and thus was produced a glut of the most perishable of all commodities;  and the effect of that glut must have been a diminution in the general price of labour in England that far more than compensated for the increased number of labourers.  Admitting, however, that the diminution was no more than would be so compensated, it would follow, of course, that the quantity of wages paid after a year’s immigration was the same that it had previously been.  That it was not, and could not have been so great, is quite certain;  but it is not needed to claim more than that there was no increase.  It follows, necessarily, that while the quantity of wages to be expended in England against food and clothing remained the same, the number of persons among whom it was to be divided had increased, and each had less to expend.  This of course diminished the power to purchase food, and to a much greater degree diminished the demand for clothing, for the claims of the stomach are, of all others, the most imperious.  The reader will now see that the chief effect thus produced by cheap labour is a reduction in the domestic demand for manufactured goods.  As yet, however, we are only at the commencement of the operation.  The men who had been driven from Ireland by the closing of Irish factories, had been consumers of food,[9] but as they could no longer consume at home, it became now necessary that that food should follow them to England, and the necessity for this transportation tended largely to diminish the prices of all food in Ireland, and of course the value of labour and land.  Each new depression in the price of labour tended to swell the export of men, and the larger that export the greater became, of course, the necessity for seeking abroad a market for food.  Irish food came to swell the supply, but the English market for it did not grow, because the greater the glut of men, the smaller became the sum of wages to be laid out against food;  and thus Irish and English food were now contending against each other, to the injury, of English and Irish labour and land.  The lower the price of food in England, the less was the inducement to improve the land, and the less the demand for labour the less the power to buy even food, while the power to pay for clothing diminished with tenfold rapidity.  With each step in this direction the labourer lost more and more the control over his own actions, and became more and more enslaved.  The decline in the home demand for manufactures then produced a necessity for seeking new markets, for underworking the Hindoo, and for further cheapening labour;  and the more labour was cheapened the less became the demand for, and the return to capital.  Land, labour, and capital thus suffered alike from the adoption of a policy having for its object to prevent the people of Ireland from mining coal, making iron, or availing themselves of the gratuitous services of those powerful agents so abundantly provided by nature for their use.

The reader may, perhaps, appreciate more fully the evil effects of this course upon an examination of the reverse side of the picture.  Let us suppose that the Irishman could at once be raised from being the slave of the landholder to becoming a freeman, exercising control over the application of his labour, and freely discussing with his employer what should be his reward, — and see what would be the effect.  It would at once establish counter-attraction, and instead of a constant influx of people from Ireland into England, there would be a constant afflux to that country, and in a little time the whole mass of Irish labour that now weighs on the English market would be withdrawn, and wages would rise rapidly.  At the cost of the landholder, it will be said.  On the contrary, to his profit.  The Irishman at home, fully employed, would consume thrice the food he can now obtain, and Irish food would at once cease to press on the English market, and the price of English food would rise.  This, of course, would offer new inducements to improve the land, and, this would make a demand for labour and capital, the price of both of which would rise.  These things, however, it will be said, would be done at the cost of the manufacturer.  On the contrary, to his advantage Ireland now consumes but little of English manufactures.  “No one,” says the Quarterly Review, “ever saw an English scarecrow with such rags” as are worn by hundreds of thousands of the people of Ireland.  Raise the value of Irishmen at home, make them free, and the Irish market will soon require more manufactured goods than now go to all India.  Raise the value of man in Great Britain, and the domestic market will absorb an amount of commodities that would now be deemed perfectly incredible.

1 In the first half of this period the export was small, whereas in the last one, 1836 to 1840, it must have been in excess of the growth of population.

2 From 1842 to 1845 the average crop was 2,250,000 bales, or half a million more than the average of the four previous years. From 1847 to 1850 the average was only 2,260,000 bales, and the price rose, which could not have been the case had the slave trade been as brisk between 1840 and 1845 as it had been between 1835 and 1840.

3 See page 108, ante, for the sale of the negroes of the Saluda Manufacturing Company.

4 The following passage from one of the journals of the day is worthy of careful perusal by those who desire to understand the working of the present system of revenue duties, under which the mills and furnaces of the country have to so great an extent been closed, and the farmers and planters of the country to so great an extent been driven to New York to make all their exchanges:—
“ Mr. Matsell [chief of police, New York] tells us that during the six months ending 31st December, 1852, there have been 19,901 persons arrested for various offences, giving a yearly figure of nearly 40,000 arrests. *** The number of arrests being 40,000, or thereabouts, in a population of say 600,000, gives a percentage of 6.6 on the whole number of inhabitants.  We have no data to estimate the state of crime in Paris under the imperial régime; but in London the returns of the metropolitan police for 1850, show 70,827 arrests, out of a population of some two millions and a half, giving a percentage of less than three on the whole number of inhabitants.  Thus crimes are in New York rather more than twice as frequent as in London.  Indeed, if we make proper allowance for the superior vigilance, and organization of the metropolitan police of London, and for the notorious inefficiency of our own police force, we shall probably find that, in proportion to the population, there is in New York twice as much crime as in London.  This is an appalling fact — a disgraceful disclosure.” — New York Herald, March 21, 1853.

5 North British Review, Nov. 1852.

6 See Uncle Tom’s Cabin, chap. xxxi.

7 Letters to Lord Aberdeen, by the Right Hon. W.E. Gladstone, 9, 10, 12.

8 Rev. Sidney Smith.

9 See page 109, ante.

10 It is commonly supposed that the road toward freedom lies through cheapening the products of slave labour; but the reader may readily satisfy himself that it is in that direction lies slavery. Freedom grows with growing wealth, not growing poverty.  To increase the cost of raising slaves, and thus to increase the value of man at home, produces exactly the effect anticipated from the other course of operation, because the value of the land and its produce grows more rapidly than the value of that portion of the negro’s powers that can be obtained from him as a slave — that is, without the payment of wages.

The Slave Trade

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