states.  At those levels prices remained virtually fixed, in most markets, for nearly a decade as an effect of South Carolina’s reopening of her ports and of the hampering of export commerce by the Napoleonic war.  The latter factor prevented even the congressional stoppage of the foreign slave trade in 1808 from exerting any strong effect upon slave prices for the time being except in the sugar district.  The next general movement was in fact a downward one of about $100 a head caused by the War of 1812.  At the return of peace the prices leaped with parallel perpendicularity in all the markets from $400-$500 in 1814 to twice that range in 1818, only to be upset by the world-wide panic of the following year and to descend to levels of $400 to $600 in 1823.  Then came a new rise in the cotton and sugar districts responding to a heightened price of their staples, but for once not evoking a sympathetic movement in the other markets.  A small decline then ensuing gave place to a soaring movement at New Orleans, in response to the great stimulus which the protective tariff of 1828 gave to sugar production.  The other markets began in the early thirties to make up for the tardiness of their rise; and as a feature of the general inflation of property values then prevalent everywhere, slave prices rose to an apex in 1837 of $1,300 in the purchasing markets and $1,100 in Virginia.  The general panic of 1837 began promptly to send them down; and though they advanced in 1839 as a consequence of a speculative bolstering of the cotton market that year, they fell all the faster upon the collapse of that project, finding new levels of rest only at a range of $500-$700.  A final advance then set in at the middle of the forties which continued until the highest levels on record were attained on the eve of secession and war. [Illustration:  PRICES OF SLAVES AND OF COTTON.]

There are thus in the slave price diagram for the nineteenth century a plateau, with a local peak rising from its level in the sugar district, and three solid peaks—­all of them separated by intervening valleys, and all corresponding more or less to the elevations and depressions in the cotton range.  The plateau, 1803-1812, was prevented from producing a peak in the eastern markets by the South Carolina repeal of the slave trade prohibition and by the European imbroglio.  The first common peak, 1818, and its ensuing trough came promptly upon the establishment of the characteristic regime of the ante-bellum period, in which the African reservoir could no longer be drawn upon to mitigate labor shortages and restrain the speculative enhancement of slave prices.  The trough of the ’twenties was deeper and broader in the upper and eastern South than elsewhere partly because the panic of 1819 had brought a specially severe financial collapse there from the wrecking of mushroom canal projects and the like.[21] It is remarkable that so wide a spread of rates in the several districts prevailed for so long a period as here appears.  The statistics may of course be somewhat at fault, but there is reason for confidence that their margin of error is not great enough to vitiate them.