[Footnote 33:  Ibid., XVIII, 404-406.]

[Footnote 34:  U.B.  Phillips, Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt (New York, 1908), p. 205.]

[Footnote 35:  South Carolina Railroad Company Reports for 1860 and 1865.]

The Brandon Bank, at Brandon, Mississippi, which was virtually identical with the Mississippi and Alabama Railroad Company, bought prior to 1839, $159,000 worth of slaves for railroad employment, but it presumably lost them shortly after that year when the bank and the railroad together went bankrupt.[36] The state of Georgia had bought about 190 slaves in and before 1830 for employment in river and road improvements, but it sold them in 1834,[37] and when in the late ’forties and the ’fifties it built and operated the Western and Atlantic Railroad it made no repetition of the earlier experiment.  In the ’fifties, indeed, the South Carolina Railroad Company was almost unique in its policy of buying slaves for railroad purposes.

[Footnote 36:  Niles’ Register, LVI, 130 (April 27, 1839).]

[Footnote 37:  U.B.  Phillips, Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt, pp. 114, 115; W.C.  Dawson, Compilation of Georgia Laws, p. 399; O.H.  Prince, Digest of the Laws of Georgia, p. 742.]

The most cogent reason against such a policy was not that the owned slaves increased the current charges, but that their purchase involved the diversion of capital in a way which none but abnormal circumstances could justify.  In the year 1846 when the superintendent of the South Carolina company made his recommendation, slave prices were abnormally low and cotton prices were leaping in such wise as to make probable a strong advance in the labor market.  By 1855, however, the price of slaves had nearly doubled, and by 1860 it was clearly inordinate.  The special occasion for a company to divert its funds or increase its capital obligations had accordingly vanished, and sound policy would have suggested the sale of slaves on hand rather than the purchase of more.  The state of Louisiana, indeed, sold in 1860[38] the force of nearly a hundred slave men which it had used on river improvements long enough for many of its members to have grown old in the service.[39]

[Footnote 38:  Board of Public Works Report for 1860 (Baton Rouge, 1861), p. 7.]

[Footnote 39:  State Engineer’s Report for 1856 (New Orleans, 1857), p. 7.]

Manufacturing companies here and there bought slaves to man their works, but in so doing added seriously to the risks of their business.  A news item of 1849 reported that an outbreak of cholera at the Hillman Iron Works near Clarksville, Tenn., had brought the death of four or five slaves and the removal of the remainder from the vicinity until the epidemic should have passed.[40] A more normal episode of mere financial failure was that which wrecked the Nesbitt Manufacturing Company whose plant was located on Broad River in