2. Changes in the market.  A sudden rise in the market with the probability that it will be short, or a gradual fall with a probability that it will be long, is a strong temptation to the master to push his slaves to the utmost, that he may in the one case make all he can, by taking the tide at the flood, and in the other lose as little as may be, by taking it as early as possible in the ebb.

3. High prices.  Whenever the slave-grown staples bring a high price, as is now the case with cotton, every slaveholder is tempted to overwork his slaves.  By forcing them to do double work for a few weeks or months, while the price is up, he can afford to lose a number of them and to lessen the value of all by over-driving.  A cotton planter with a hundred vigorous slaves, would have made a profitable speculation, if, during the years ’34, 5, and 6, when the average price of cotton was 17 cents a pound, he had so overworked his slaves that half of them died upon his hands in ’37, when cotton had fallen to six and eight cents.  No wonder that the poor slaves pray that cotton and sugar may be cheap.  The writer has frequently heard it declared by planters in the lower country, that, it is more profitable to drive the slaves to such over exertion as to use them up, in seven or eight years, than to give them only ordinary tasks and protract their lives to the ordinary period.[26]

[Footnote 26:  The reader is referred to a variety of facts and testimony on this point on the 39th page of this work.]

4. Untimely seasons.  When the winter encroaches on the spring, and makes late seed time, the first favorable weather is a temptation to overwork the slaves, too strong to be resisted by those who hold men as mere working animals.  So when frosts set in early, and a great amount of work is to be done in a little time, or great loss suffered.  So also after a long storm either in seed or crop time, when the weather becomes favorable, the same temptation presses, and in all these cases the master would save money by overdriving his slaves.

5. Periodical pressure of certain kinds of labor. The manufacture of sugar is an illustration.  In a work entitled “Travels in Louisiana in 1802,” translated from the French, by John Davis, is the following testimony under this head:—­

“At the rolling of sugars, an interval of from two to three months, they (the slaves in Louisiana,) work both night and day.  Abridged of their sleep, they scarcely retire to rest during the whole period” See page 81.

In an article on the agriculture of Louisiana, published in the second number of the “Western Review,” is the following:—­“The work is admitted to be severe for the hands, (slaves) requiring, when the process of making sugar is commenced, TO BE PRESSED NIGHT AND DAY.”

It would be for the interest of the sugar planter greatly to overwork his slaves, during the annual process of sugar-making.