Frederick Law Olmsted

“ Yet I doubt not that the conspirators themselves, trust at this moment, as they ever have trusted, even less to the supposed helpless condition of the government than to the supposed advantages of the cotton monopoly to the Slave States, and to the supposed superiority of a community of privileged classes over an actual democracy.
“No! you dare not make war upon cotton; no power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king; until lately the Bank of England was king; but she tried to put her screws, as usual, the fall before the last, on the cotton crop, and was utterly vanquished. ”

“ The cabin was small, dirty, crowded, close, and smoky. Finding a warm spot in the deck, over the furnace, and to leeward of the chimney, I pillowed myself on my luggage and went to sleep.
The ringing of the boat’s bell awoke me, after no great lapse of time, and I found we were in a small creek, heading southward. Presently we reached a wharf, near which stood a locomotive and train. A long, narrow plank having been run out, half a dozen white men, including myself, went on shore. Then followed as many negroes, who appeared to be a recent purchase of their owner. ”

“ No white people, however, were to be seen, but two negroes sat in the mouth of a wigwam, husking maize, and a couple of hungry hounds came bounding over the zig-zag, gateless fence, as if they had agreed with each other that they would wait no longer for the return of their master, but would straightway pull down the first traveller that passed, and have something to eat before they were quite famished. ”

“ Coming directly from my farm in New York to Eastern Virginia, I was satisfied, after a few weeks’ observation, that the most of the people lived very poorly; that the proportion of men improving their condition was much less than in any Northern community; and that the natural resources of the land were strangely unused, or were used with poor economy. It was “the hiring season,” and I had daily opportunities of talking with farmers, manufacturers, miners, and labourers, with whom the value of labour and of wages was then the handiest subject of conversation. ”

“ A gentleman who had some free men in his employment in Virginia, that he had procured in New York, told me that he had been astonished, when a dam that he had been building began to give way in a freshet, to see how much more readily than negroes they would obey his orders, and do their best without orders, running into the water waist-deep, in mid-winter, without any hesitation or grumbling. ”

“ Peace is now not possible until the people of the South are well convinced that the form of society, to fortify which is the ostensible purpose of the war into which they have been plunged, is not worthy fighting for, or until we think the sovereignty of our convictions of Justice, Freedom, Law and the conditions of Civilization in this land to be of less worth than the lives and property of our generation. ”

“ If the walling up of the legitimate entrance has caused the impression, in a stranger, that he is being led to a prison or fortress, instead of the place for transacting the public business of a Free State by its chosen paid agents, it is not removed when on approaching this side door, he sees before it an armed sentinel—a meek-looking man in a livery of many colours, embarrassed with a bright-bayoneted firelock, which he hugs gently, as though the cold iron, this frosty day, chilled his arm. ”

“ In Albemarle there are over thirteen thousand slaves to less than twelve thousand whites.
Among the native Virginians I find most intelligent men, very ready to assert that slavery is no disadvantage to Virginia, and, as necessary to the maintenance of this assertion, that slave-labour is no clearer than free-labour, that is, than free-labour would be, if slavery did not exist. It is even said—and, as I have shown, it is practically true, at least wherever slavery has not in a great measure withdrawn from the field—that white labour cannot live in competition with slave-labour. ”

“ An arbitrary political line may divide the north part from the south part, but there is no such line in nature: there can be none, socially. While water runs downhill, the currents and counter currents of trade, of love, of consanguinity, and fellowship, will flow north and south. The unavoidable comminglings of the people in a land like this, upon the conditions which the slavery of a portion of the population impose, make it necessary to peace that we should all live under the same laws and respect the same flag. ”

“ The civilized world is dependent upon the Slave States of America for a supply of cotton. The demand for this commodity has, during many years, increased faster than the supply. Sales are made of it, now, to the amount of two hundred millions of dollars in a year, yet they have a vast area of soil suitable for its production which has never been broken. With an enormous income, then, upon a steadily rising market, they hold a vast idle capital yet to be employed. Such a monopoly under such circumstances must constitute those who possess it the richest and most powerful people on the earth. ”

“ A well-informed capitalist and slave-holder remarked, that negroes could not be employed in cotton factories. I said that I understood they were so in Charleston, and some other places at the South.
“It may be so, yet,” he answered, “but they will have to give it up.”
The reason was, he said, that the negro could never be trained to exercise judgment; he cannot be made to use his mind; he always depends on machinery doing its own work, and cannot be made to watch it. He neglects it until something is broken or there is great waste. ”

“ Those necessities would not be less, but, on the contrary, far more imperative, were the south an independent people. If the South has reason to declare itself independent of our long-honoured constitution, and of our common court of our common laws, on account of a past want of invariable tenderness on the part of each one of our people towards its necessities, how long could we calculate to be able to preserve ourselves from occurrences which would be deemed to abrogate the obligations of a mere treaty of peace? ”

“ It appears to me evident, however, from the manner in which I hear the traffic spoken of incidentally, that the cash value of a slave for sale, above the cost of raising it from infancy to the age at which it commands the highest price, is generally considered among the surest elements of a planter’s wealth. Such a nigger is worth such a price, and such another is too old to learn to pick cotton, and such another will bring so much, when it has grown a little more, I have frequently heard people say, in the street, or the public-houses. ”

“ I am sure, upon consideration, that this phrase would convey no unjust idea of the life of the majority of the Virginians, whom I have seen, to the people of a New England manufacturing town.
I have said that there are points where the forces of wealth seem to have concentrated. As a rule the farm-labour of a slave accomplishes not half as much in a day, as at the North; that of a white man, probably, not a third; that of most mechanics, because of their carelessness and unfaithfulness, much less than of most at the North, although they are paid more than there. ”

“ Until the discovery of guano—more valuable to us than the mines of California—I looked upon the possibility of renovating our soil, of ever bringing it to a point capable of producing remunerating crops, as utterly hopeless. Our up-lands were all worn out, and our bottom-lands fast failing, and if it had not been for guano, to revive our last hope, a few years more and the whole country must have been deserted by all who desired to increase their own wealth, or advance the cause of civilization by a proper cultivation of the earth. ”

“ Hundreds of slaves in New Orleans must be constantly reflecting and saying to one another, “I am as capable of taking care of myself as this Irish hod-carrier, or this German market-gardener; why can’t I have the enjoyment of my labour as well as they? I am as capable of taking care of my own family as much as they of theirs; why should I be subject to have them taken from me by those other men who call themselves our owners? Our children have as much brains as the children of these white neighbours of ours, who not long ago were cooks and waiters at the hotels ”

“ One of the grand errors, out of which this rebellion has grown, came from supposing that whatever nourishes wealth and gives power to an ordinary civilized community, must command as much for a slave-holding community. The truth has been overlooked that the accumulation of wealth and the power of a nation are contingent not merely upon the primary value of the surplus of productions of which it has to dispose, but very largely also upon the way in which the income from its surplus is distributed and reinvested. ”

“ Thus it is evident that, great as is the need for more labourers here, there is a still greater demand for them to raise cotton; and in order to supply this demand, the Virginians suffer the most extreme inconvenience. The wonder is, that their own demand for labour is not supplied by free labourers. But it appears that where negro slavery has long existed, certain occupations are, by custom, assigned to the slaves, and a white man is not only reluctant to engage himself in those occupations, but is greatly disinclined to employ other whites in them. ”

“ Do teach the detestable Abolitionist of the North his duty, and open his eyes to the misery and starvation that surround his own home. Teach him to love his brethren of the South, and teach him to let Slavery alone in the South, while starvation and destitution surround him at the North ”

“ I have been visiting a farm, cultivated entirely by free labour. The proprietor told me that he was first led to disuse slave-labour, not from any economical considerations, but because he had become convinced that there was an essential wrong in holding men in forced servitude with any other purpose than to benefit them alone, and because he was not willing to allow his own children to be educated as slave-masters. ”

“ That the true people of the United States could have allowed the mutiny to proceed so far, before rising in their strength to resist it, is due chiefly to the instructive reliance which every grumbler really gets to have under our forms of society in the ultimate common-sense of the great body of the people, and to the incredulity with which the report has been regarded, that slavery had made such a vast difference between the character of the South and that of the country at large. ”

“ Let those who have not gained credit while hale and young, sufficient to support themselves in comfort when prevented by age or infirmity from further labour, be supported by a tax upon all the negroes of the plantation, or of a community. Improvidence, and pretence of inability to labour, will then be disgraceful.
When any man has a balance to his credit equal to his value as a slave, let that constitute him a free man. It will be optional with him and his employer whether he shall continue longer in the relation of servant. ”

“ Thus they break, waste, and destroy everything they handle—abuse horses and cattle—tear, burn, or rend their own clothing, and, paying no attention to the rights of property, steal others to replace what they have destroyed. They wander about at night, and keep in a half-nodding state by day. They slight their work—cut up corn, cane, cotton, and tobacco, when hoeing it, as if for pure mischief. They raise disturbances with their overseers, and among their fellow-servants, without cause or motive, and seem to be insensible to pain when subjected to punishment. ”

“ As you get by, the white mother and babies, and the tall, frequently ill-humoured master, on horseback, or walking with his gun, urging up the black driver and his oxen. As a scout ahead, is a brother, or an intelligent slave, with the best gun, on the look-out for a deer or a turkey. We passed in the day perhaps one hundred persons attached to these trains, probably an unusual number; but the immigration this year had been retarded and condensed by the fear of yellow fever, the last case of which, at Nachitoches, had indeed begun only the night before our arrival. ”

“ Oh, any of you fond parents, who know that any of your dear, sweet, little ones may be, oh! at any moment snatched right away from your bosom, and cast into hell fire, oh! there to suffer torment for ever and ever, and ever and ever—Oh! come out here and help us pray for them! Oh, any of you wives that has got an unconverted husband, that won’t go along with you to eternal glory, but is set upon being separated from you, oh! ”

“ At least five hundred white men told me something of their own lives and fortunes, across their own tables, and with the means of measuring the weight of their words before my eyes; and I know that white men seldom want an abundance of coarse food in the cotton States: the proportion of the free white men who live as well in any respect as our working classes at the North, on an average, is small, and the citizens of the cotton States, as a whole, are poor. ”

“ It is hard to admire what is common; and it is, perhaps, asking too much of the citizens of Raleigh, that they should plant for ornament, or even cause to be retained about such institutions as their Lunatic Asylum, the beautiful evergreens that crowd about the town; but can any man walk from the Capitol oaks to the pine grove, a little beyond the Deaf and Dumb Institution, and say that he would not far rather have the latter than the former to curtain in his habitation? ”

“ No government could long control its own people, no government could long exist, that would allow its citizens to be subject to such indignities under a foreign government as those to which the citizens of the United States heretofore have been required to submit under their own, for the sake of the tranquillity of the South. ”

“ I say all sorts of human service. What the South will have to pay for the service of true statesmanship, the world has now to see.
Whither the profits of cotton go, it is not my purpose, here, to undertake to show. I will barely notice the hypocritical statement made for the English market as an apology for this mad crime of the slaveholders, that they are greatly absorbed in contributions made by the planting States to our national treasury in payment of duties on importations. [Pg 27] The cotton-planters pay duties only on what they consume of foreign goods. ”

“ As to labourers, we work chiefly slaves, not because they are cheaper, but rather because they are the only reliable labour we can get. The whites here engage to work for less price than the blacks can be got for; yet they will not work well, and rarely work out the time specified. If any of your friends come here and wish to work whites, I would advise them by all means to bring them with them; for our white labourers are far inferior to our blacks, and our black labour is far inferior to what we read and hear of your labourers. ”

“ The workman who commands much more than the ruling rate of wages is hard to be got, and proverbially accomplishes much more for his employer than the excess of his wages indicates. The man who cannot command the current rates is the first to be dropped off on a reduction, the last to be taken on at an increase of force. As prime field-hand slaves furnish the standard of labour in Virginia, and the vast majority of labourers are far below that standard in quality, their labour is paid much less, and it is of less value relative to its cost. ”

“ But it is said licentiousness at the North is far more captivating, irresistible, and ruinous than at the South. Its very intrigues, cloaks, hazards, and expenses, instead of repressing the passions of young men, exasperate them, and increase its degrading effect upon their character, producing hypocrisy, interfering with high ambitions, destroying self-respect, causing the worst possible results to their health, and giving them habits which are inimical to future domestic contentment and virtue. ”