On the other hand, Thomas R. Dew, whose cogent essay of 1832 marks the turn of the prevailing Southern sentiment toward a firm support of slavery, attributed the lack of prosperity in the South to the tariff policy of the United States, while he largely ignored the question of labor efficiency.  His central theme was the imperative necessity of maintaining the enslavement of the negroes on hand until a sound plan was devised and made applicable for their peaceful and prosperous disposal elsewhere.  Among Dew’s disciples, William Harper of South Carolina admitted that slave labor was dear and unskillful, though he thought it essential for productive industry in the tropics and sub-tropics, and he considered coercion necessary for the negroes elsewhere in civilized society.  James H. Hammond, likewise, agreed that “as a general rule ... free labor is cheaper than slave labor,” but in addition to the factor of race he stressed the sparsity of population in the South as a contributing element in economically necessitating the maintenance of slavery.[10]

[Footnote 10:  “Essay” (1832), Harper’s “Memoir” (1838), and Hammond’s “Letters to Clarkson” (1845) are collected in the Pro-Slavery Argument (Philadelphia, 1852).]

Most of the foregoing Southern writers were men of substantial position and systematic reasoning.  N.A.  Ware, on the other hand who in 1844 issued in the capacity of a Southern planter a slender volume of Notes on Political Economy was both obscure and irresponsible.  Contending as his main theme that protective tariffs were of no injury to the plantation interests, he asserted that slave labor was incomparably cheaper than free, and attempted to prove it by ignoring the cost of capital and by reckoning the price of bacon at four cents a pound and corn at fifteen cents a bushel.  Then, curiously, he delivered himself of the following:  “When slavery shall have run itself out or yielded to the changes and ameliorations of the times, the owners and all dependent upon it will stand appalled and prostrate, as the sot whose liquor has been withheld, and nothing but the bad and worthless habit left to remind the country of its ruinous effects.  The political economist, as well as all wise statesmen in this country, cannot think of any measure going to discharge slavery that would not be a worse state than its existence.”  His own remedy for the depression prevailing at the time when he wrote, was to divert a large proportion of the slaves from the glutted business of staple agriculture into manufacturing, for which he thought them well qualified.[11] Equally fantastic were the ideas of H.C.  Carey of Pennsylvania who dealt here and there with slavery in the course of his three stout volumes on political economy.  His lucubrations are negligible for the present survey.

[Footnote 11:  [N.A.  Ware] Notes on Political Economy as applicable to the United States.  By a Southern Planter (New York, 1844), pp. 200-204.]