the homesteads of some Creole small proprietors, he wrote:  “It is among these men that, at times, slavery assumes its harshest aspect, and that slaves are exposed to the severest labor."[70] Johann Schoepf on the other hand while travelling many years before on the Atlantic seaboard had written:  “They who have the largest droves [of slaves] keep them the worst, let them run naked mostly or in rags, and accustom them as much as possible to hunger, but exact of them steady work."[71] That no concrete observations were adduced in any of these premises is evidence enough, under the circumstances, that the charges were empty.

[Footnote 69:  Marshall Hall, The Two-fold Slavery of the United States (London, 1854), p. 154.]

[Footnote 70:  W.H.  Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston, 1863), pp. 274, 278.]

[Footnote 71:  Johann David Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, A.J.  Morrisson, tr. (Philadelphia, 1911), II, 147.  But see ibid., pp. 94, 116, for observations of a general air of indolence among whites and blacks alike.]

The capital value of the slaves was an increasingly powerful insurance of their lives and their health.  In four days of June, 1836, Thomas Glover of Lowndes County, Alabama, incurred a debt of $35 which he duly paid, for three visits with mileage and prescriptions by Dr. Salley to his “wench Rina";[72] and in the winter of 1858 Nathan Truitt of Troup County, Georgia, had medical attendance rendered to a slave child of his to the amount of $130.50.[73] These are mere chance items in the multitude which constantly recur in probate records.  Business prudence required expenditure with almost a lavish hand when endangered property was to be saved.  The same consideration applied when famines occurred, as in Alabama in 1828[74] and 1855.[75] Poverty-stricken freemen might perish, but slaveowners could use the slaves themselves as security for credits to buy food at famine prices to feed them.[76] As Olmsted said, comparing famine effects in the South and in Ireland, “the slaves suffered no physical want—­the peasant starved."[77] The higher the price of slaves, the more stringent the pressure upon the masters to safeguard them from disease, injury and risk of every sort.

[Footnote 72:  MS. receipt in private possession.]

[Footnote 73:  MS. probate records at LaGrange, Ga.]

[Footnote 74:  Charleston, City Gazette, May 28, 1828.]

[Footnote 75:  Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, pp. 707, 708, quoting contemporary newspapers.]

[Footnote 76:  Cf.  D.D.  Wallace, Life of Henry Laurens, p. 429.]

[Footnote 77:  Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, p. 244.]