[Footnote 43:  DeBow’s Review, IV, 256.]

[Footnote 44:  Letter of J. Graves, May 15, 1849, in the Augusta, Ga., Chronicle, June 1, 1849.  Cf. also J.B.  D Debow, Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States (New Orleans, 1852), II, 339.]

[Footnote 45:  DeBow’s Review, XI, 319, 320.]

[Footnote 46:  Augusta Chronicle, Jan. 5, 1853.]

Corporations had reason at all times, in fact, to prefer free laborers over slaves even on hire, for in so doing they escaped liabilities for injuries by fellow servants.  When a firm of contractors, for example, advertised in 1833 for five hundred laborers at $15 per month to work on the Muscle Shoals canal in northern Alabama, it deemed it necessary to say that in cases of accidents to slaves it would assume financial responsibility “for any injury or damage that may hereafter happen in the process of blasting rock or of the caving of banks."[47] Free laborers, on the other hand, carried their own risks.  Except when some planter would take a contract for grading in his locality, to be done under his own supervision in the spare time of his gang, slaves were generally called for in canal and railroad work only when the supply of free labor was inadequate.

[Footnote 47:  Reprinted in E.S.  Abdy, Journal of a Residence in the United States (London, 1835), II, 109.]

Slaveowners, on the other hand, were equally reluctant to hire their slaves to such corporations or contractors except in times of special depression, for construction camps from their lack of sanitation, discipline, domesticity and stability were at the opposite pole from plantations as places of slave residence.  High wages were no adequate compensation for the liability to contagious and other diseases, demoralization, and the checking of the birth rate by the separation of husbands and wives.  The higher the valuation of slave property, the greater would be the strength of these considerations.

Slaves were a somewhat precarious property under all circumstances.  Losses were incurred not only through disease[48] and flight but also through sudden death in manifold ways, and through theft.  A few items will furnish illustration.  An early Charleston newspaper printed the following:  “On the ninth instant Mr. Edward North at Pon Pon sent a sensible negro fellow to Moon’s Ferry for a jug of rum, which is about two miles from his house; and he drank to that excess in the path that he died within six or seven hours."[49] From the Eutaws in the same state a correspondent wrote in 1798 of a gin-house disaster:  “I yesterday went over to Mr. Henry Middleton’s plantation to view the dreadful effects of a flash of lightning which the day before fell on his machine house in which were about twenty negro men, fourteen of which were killed immediately."[50] In 1828 the following appeared in a newspaper at New Orleans:  “Yesterday towards one o’clock P.M., as