About the same time Dr. Thomas Cooper, president of South Carolina College, wrote:  “Slave labour is undoubtedly the dearest kind of labour; it is all forced, and forced too from a class of human beings who have the least propensity to voluntary labour even when it is to benefit themselves alone.”  The cost of rearing a slave to the age of self support, he reckoned, including insurance, at forty dollars a year for fifteen years.  The usual work of a slave field hand, he thought, was barely two-thirds of what a white laborer at usual wages would perform, and from his earnings about forty dollars a year must be deducted for his maintenance.  When interest on the investment and a proportion of an overseer’s wages were deducted in addition, he thought the prevalent rate, six to eight dollars a month and board valued at forty or fifty dollars a year, for free white farm hands in the Northern states gave a decisive advantage to those who hired laborers over those who owned them.  “Nothing will justify slave labour in point of economy,” he concluded, “but the nature of the soil and climate which incapacitates a white man from labouring in the summer time, as on the rich lands in Carolina and Georgia extending one hundred miles from the seaboard."[7]

[Footnote 7:  Thomas Cooper, Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy, (Columbia [S.C.], 1826), pp. 94, 95.]

The economic vices of slavery as exemplified in Virginia were elaborated in an essay printed in 1832 attributed to Jesse Burton Harrison of that state.  Slavery, said this essay, drives away free workmen by stigmatizing labor, for “nothing but the most abject necessity would lead a white man to hire himself to work in the fields under the overseer”; it causes exhaustion of the soil by reason of the negligence it promotes in the workmen and the stress which overseers are fain to put upon immediate returns; it discourages all forms of industry but plantation tillage, furthermore, for although it has not and perhaps cannot be proved that slaves may not be successfully employed in manufactures, the community has gone and tends still to go, on that assumption; it discourages mechanic skill, for the slaves never acquire more than the rudiments of artisanry, and the planters discourage white craftsmen by giving preference uniformly to their own laborers.  Slave labor is dearer than free, because of its lack of incentive; the regime costs the community the services of the immigrants who would otherwise enter; and finally it promotes waste instead of frugality on the part of both masters and slaves.  The only means by which Virginia could procure profit from slaves, it concluded, was that of raising them for sale to the lower South; but such profit could only be gained systematically at a complete sacrifice of honor.[8]

[Footnote 8:  [Jesse Burton Harrison], Review of the Slave Question, extracted from the American Quarterly Review, Dec. 1832.  By a Virginian (Richmond, 1833).]