[Footnote 23:  These items were reprinted in George M. Weston, Who are and who may be Slaves in the U.S. [1856].]

[Footnote 24:  Southern Banner, Jan. 11, 1855, endorsing an editorial of similar tone in the New York Express.]

[Footnote 25:  Southern Watchman (Athens, Ga.), Jan. 21, 1858.]

[Footnote 26:  What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation Auction Sale of Slaves at Savannah, March 2d and 3d, 1859.  A Sequel to Mrs. Kemble’s Journal [1863].  This appears to have been a reprint of an article in the New York Tribune.  The slaves were sold in family parcels comprising from two to seven persons each.]

[Footnote 27:  MS. record in the Ordinary’s office at Macon, Ga.  Probate Returns, vol. 9, pp. 2-7.]

[Footnote 28:  Edward Ingle, Southern Sidelights (New York [1896]), p. 294. note.]

Editorial warnings were now more vociferous than before.  The Federal Union of Milledgeville said for example:  “There is a perfect fever raging in Georgia now on the subject of buying negroes....  Men are borrowing money at exorbitant rates of interest to buy negroes at exorbitant prices.  The speculation will not sustain the speculators, and in a short time we shall see many negroes and much land offered under the sheriff’s hammer, with few buyers for cash; and then this kind of property will descend to its real value.  The old rule of pricing a negro by the price of cotton by the pound—­that is to say, if cotton is worth twelve cents a negro man is worth $1,200.00, if at fifteen cents then $1,500.00—­does not seem to be regarded.  Negroes are 25 per cent. higher now with cotton at ten and one half cents than they were two or three years ago when it was worth fifteen and sixteen cents.  Men are demented upon the subject.  A reverse will surely come."[29]

[Footnote 29:  Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Jan. 17, 1860, reprinted with endorsement in the Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), Jan. 26, 1860, and reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, II, 73, 74.]

The fever was likewise raging in the western South,[30] and it persisted until the end of 1860.  Indeed the peak of this price movement was evidently cut off by the intervention of war.  How great an altitude it might have reached, and what shape its downward slope would have taken had peace continued, it is idle to conjecture.  But that a crash must have come is beyond a reasonable doubt.

[Footnote 30:  Prices at Lebanon, Tenn., and Franklin, Ky., are given in Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, XI, 774 (Dec., 1859).]