maintenance, which would be the only conceivable source of gain in the premises, would not have been effected, but the planter would merely have an invalid on his hands instead of a worker.  Still further, the slaves had recourses of their own, even aside from appeals for legal redress.  They might shoot or stab the oppressor, burn his house, or run away, or resort to any of a dozen other forms of sabotage.  These possibilities the masters knew as well as the slaves.  Mere passive resistance, however, in cases where even that was needed, would generally prove effective enough.

Finally, if all the foregoing arguments be dismissed as fallacious, there still remains the factor of slave prices as a deterrent in certain periods.  If when slaves were cheap and their produce dear it might be feasible and profitable to exhaust the one to increase the other, the opportunity would surely vanish when the price relations were reversed.  The trend of the markets was very strong in that direction.  Thus at the beginning of the nineteenth century a prime field hand in the upland cotton belt had the value of about 1,500 pounds of middling cotton; by 1810 this value had risen to 4,500 pounds; by 1820 to 5,500; by 1830 to 6,000; by 1840 to 8,300; from 1843 to 1853 it was currently about 10,000; and in 1860 it reached about 16,000 pounds.  Comparison of slave values as measured in the several other staples would show quite similar trends, though these great appreciations were accompanied by no remotely proportionate increase of the slaves’ industrial capacities.  The figures tell their own tale of the mounting preposterousness of any calculated exhaustion of the human chattels.

The tradition in anti-slavery circles was however too strong to die.  Various travelers touring the South, keen for corroborative evidence but finding none, still nursed the belief that a further search would bring reward.  It was like the rainbow’s end, always beyond the horizon.  Thus the two Englishmen, Marshall Hall and William H. Russell, after scrutinizing many Southern localities and finding no slave exhaustion, asserted that it prevailed either in a district or in a type of establishment which they had not examined.  Hall, who traveled far in the Southern states and then merely touched at Havana on his way home, wrote:  “In the United States the life of the slave has been cherished and his offspring promoted.  In Cuba the lives of the slaves have been ‘used up’ by excessive labour, and increase in number disregarded.  It is said, indeed, that the slave-life did not extend beyond eight or ten years."[69] Russell recorded his surprise at finding that the Louisiana planters made no reckoning whatever of the cost of their slaves’ labor, that Irish gangs nevertheless did the ditching, and that the slave children of from nine to eleven years were at play, “exempted from that cruel fate which befalls poor children of their age in the mining and manufacturing districts of England”; and then upon glimpsing