be here and will do as he has always done ‘during the time I have managed him.’  No drink will be offered him.  All on my part will be done to bring John all right.”  Finally, on October 15, Capers reported:  “I have found John as good a driver as when I left him on Santee.  Bad management was the cause of his being sold, and [I] am glad you have been the fortunate man to get him."[48]

[Footnote 48:  Plantation and Frontier, I, 337, 338.]

Leaving aside for the present, as topics falling more fitly under the economics of slavery, the questions of the market breeding of slaves in the border states and the working of them to death in the lower South, as well as the subject of inflations and depressions in slave prices, it remains to mention the chief defect of the slave trade as an agency for the distribution of labor.  This lay in the fact that it dealt only in lifetime service.  Employers, it is true, might buy slaves for temporary employment and sell them when the need for their labor was ended; but the fluctuations of slave prices and of the local opportunity to sell those on hand would involve such persons in slave trading risks on a scale eclipsing that of their industrial earnings.  The fact that slave hiring prevailed extensively in all the Southern towns demonstrates the eagerness of short term employers to avoid the toils of speculation.

CHAPTER XII

THE COTTON REGIME

It would be hard to overestimate the predominance of the special crops in the industry and interest of the Southern community.  For good or ill they have shaped its development from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.  Each characteristic area had its own staple, and those districts which had none were scorned by all typical Southern men.  The several areas expanded and contracted in response to fluctuations in the relative prices of their products.  Thus when cotton was exceptionally high in the early ’twenties many Virginians discarded tobacco in its favor for a few years,[1] and on the Louisiana lands from Baton Rouge to Alexandria, the planters from time to time changed from sugar to cotton and back again.[2] There were local variations also in scale and intensity; but in general the system in each area tended to be steady and fairly uniform.  The methods in the several staples, furthermore, while necessarily differing in their details, were so similar in their emphasis upon routine that each reinforced the influence of the others in shaping the industrial organization of the South as a whole.

[Footnote 1:  Richmond Compiler, Nov. 25, 1825, and Alexandria Gazette, Feb. 11, 1826, quoted in the Charleston City Gazette, Dec. 1, 1825 and Feb. 20, 1826; The American Farmer (Baltimore, Dec. 29, 1825), VII, 299.]

[Footnote 2:  Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine, IX, 149.]