been kept freely open, the bringing of great numbers to meet the demand in prosperous times would quite possibly have so burdened the country with surplus slaves in subsequent periods of severe depression that slave prices would have fallen virtually to zero, and the slaveholding community would have been driven to emancipate them wholesale as a means of relieving the masters from the burden of the slaves’ support.  The foes of slavery had long reckoned that the abolition of the foreign trade would be a fatal blow to slavery itself.  The event exposed their fallacy.  Thomas Clarkson expressed the disappointment of the English abolitionists in a letter of 1830:  “We certainly have been deceived in our first expectations relative to the fruit of our exertions.  We supposed that when by the abolition of the slave trade the planters could get no more slaves, they would not only treat better those whom they then had in their power, but that they would gradually find it to their advantage to emancipate them.  A part of our expectations have been realized; ... but, alas! where the heart has been desperately wicked, we have found no change.  We did not sufficiently take into account the effect of unlimited power on the human mind.  No man likes to part with power, and the more unbounded it is, the less he likes to part with it.  Neither did we sufficiently take into account the ignominy attached to a black skin as the badge of slavery, and how difficult it would be to make men look with a favourable eye upon what they had looked [upon] formerly as a disgrace.  Neither did we take sufficiently into account the belief which every planter has, that such an unnatural state as that of slavery can be kept up only by a system of rigour, and how difficult therefore it would be to procure a relaxation from the ordinary discipline of a slave estate."[35]

[Footnote 35:  MS. in private possession.]

If such was the failure in the British West Indies, the change in conditions in the United States was even greater; for the rise of the cotton industry concurred with the prohibition of the African trade to enhance immensely the preciousness of slaves and to increase in similar degree the financial obstacle to a sweeping abolition.

CHAPTER IX

THE INTRODUCTION OF COTTON AND SUGAR

The decade following the peace of 1783 brought depression in all the plantation districts.  The tobacco industry, upon which half of the Southern people depended in greater or less degree, was entering upon a half century of such wellnigh constant low prices that the opening of each new tract for its culture was offset by the abandonment of an old one, and the export remained stationary at a little less than half a million hogsheads.  Indigo production was decadent; and rice culture was in painful transition to the new tide-flow system.  Slave prices everywhere, like those of most other investments, were declining in