for the purchase was to be obtained!...  How small a pittance of the produce of the years 1783, ’4, ‘5, altho’ amounting to upwards of 400,000 sterling a year on an average, hath been applied toward lessening old burdens!...  What then was the consequence?  The merchants were driven to the exportation of gold and silver, which so rapidly followed; ... a diminution of the value of the capital as well as the annual produce of estates in consequence of the fallen price; ... the recovery of new debts as well as old in effect suspended, while the numerous bankruptcies which have happened in Europe amongst the merchants trading to America, the reproach of which is cast upon us, have proclaimed to all the trading nations to guard against our laws and policy, and even against our moral principles."[17]

[Footnote 16:  MS. among the Gibbes papers In the capitol at Columbia, S.C.]

[Footnote 17:  Charleston Morning Post, Dec. 13, 1786 quoted in the American Historical Review, XIV, 537, 538]

The depression continued with increasing severity into the following decade, when it appears that many of the planters in the Charleston district were saved from ruin only by the wages happily drawn from the Santee Canal Company in payment for the work of their slaves in the canal construction gangs.[18] The conditions and prospects in Virginia at the same time are suggested by a remark of George Washington in 1794 on slave investments:  “I shall be happily mistaken if they are not found to be a very troublesome species of property ere many years have passed over our heads."[19]

[Footnote 18:  Samuel DuBose, “Reminiscences of St. Stephen’s Parish,” in T.G.  Thomas, ed., History of the Huguenots in South Carolina (New York, 1887), pp. 66-68.]

[Footnote 19:  New York Public Library Bulletin, II, 15.  This letter has been quoted at greater length at the beginning of chapter VIII above.]

Prices in this period were so commonly stated in currency of uncertain depreciation that a definite schedule by years may not safely be made.  It is clear, however, that the range in 1783 was little lower than it had been on the eve of the war, while in 1795 it was hardly more than half as high.  For the first time in American history, in a period of peace, there was a heavy and disquieting fall in slave prices.  This was an earnest of conditions in the nineteenth century when advances and declines alternated.  From about 1795 onward the stability of the currency and the increasing abundance of authentic data permit the fluctuations of prices to be measured and their causes and effects to be studied with some assurance.