Although this phase of the advancing valuation gave no occasion for regret, other phases brought a spread of dismay and apprehension.  In an essay of 1859 Edmund Ruffin analyzed the effects in Virginia.  In the last fifteen years, he said, the value of slaves had been doubled, solely because of the demand from the lower South.  The Virginians affected fell into three classes.  The first were those who had slaves to be sold, whether through pressure of debt or in the legal division of estates or in the rare event of liquidating a surplus of labor.  These would receive advantage from high prices.  The second were those who wishing neither to buy nor sell slaves desired merely to keep their estates intact.  These were, of course, unaffected by the fluctuations.  The third were the great number of enterprising planters and farmers who desired to increase the scale of their industrial operations and who would buy slaves if conditions were propitious but were debarred therefrom by the immoderate prices.  When these men stood aside in the bidding the manual force and the earning power of the commonwealth were depleted.  The smaller volume of labor then remaining must be more thinly applied; land values must needs decline; and the shrewdest employers must join the southward movement.  The draining of the slaves, he continued, would bring compensation in an inflow of white settlers only when the removal of slave labor had become virtually complete and had brought in consequence the most extreme prostration of land prices and of the incomes of the still remaining remnant of the original population.  The exporting of labor, at whatever price it might be sold, he likened to a farmer’s conversion of his plow teams into cash instead of using them in his work.  According to these views, he concluded, “the highest prices yet obtained from the foreign purchasers of our slaves have never left a profit to the state or produced pecuniary benefit to general interests.  And even if prices should continue to increase, as there is good reason to expect and to dread, until they reach $2000 or more for the best laborers, or $1200 for the general average of ages and sexes, these prices, though necessarily operating to remove every slave from Virginia, will still cause loss to agricultural and general interests in every particular sale, and finally render the state a desert and a ruin."[78]

[Footnote 78:  Edmund Ruffin, “The Effects of High Prices of Slaves,” in DeBow’s Review, XXVI, 647-657 (June, 1859).]

At Charleston a similar plaint was voiced by L.W.  Spratt.  In early years when the African trade was open and slaves were cheap, said he, in the Carolina lowlands “enterprise found a profitable field, and necessarily therefore the fortunes of the country bloomed and brightened.  But when the fertilizing stream of labor was cut off, when the opening West had no further supply to meet its requisitions, it made demands upon the accumulations of the seaboard.