The North was annually acquiring thousands of immigrants who came at their own expense, who worked zealously for wages payable from current earnings, and who possessed all the inventive and progressive potentialities of European peoples.  But aspiring captains of industry at the South could as a rule procure labor only by remitting round sums in money or credit which depleted their working capital and for which were obtained slaves fit only for plantation routine, negroes of whom little initiative could be expected and little contribution to the community’s welfare beyond their mere muscular exertions.  The negroes were procured in the first instance mainly because white laborers were not to be had; afterward when whites might otherwise have been available the established conditions repelled them.  The continued avoidance of the South by the great mass of incoming Europeans in post-bellum decades has now made it clear that it was the negro character of the slaves rather than the slave status of the negroes which was chiefly responsible.  The racial antipathy felt by the alien whites, along with their cultural repugnance and economic apprehensions, intrenched the negroes permanently in the situation.  The most fertile Southern areas when once converted into black belts tended, and still tend as strongly as ever, to be tilled only by inert negroes, the majority of whom are as yet perhaps less efficient in freedom than their forbears were as slaves.

The drain of funds involved in the purchase of slaves was impressive to contemporaries.  Thus Governor Spotswood wrote from Virginia to the British authorities in 1711 explaining his assent to a L5 tax upon the importation of slaves.  The members of the legislature, said he, “urged what is really true, that the country is already ruined by the great number of negros imported of late years, that it will be impossible for them in many years to discharge the debts already contracted for the purchase of those negroes if fresh supplys be still poured upon them while their tobacco continues so little valuable, but that the people will run more and more in debt."[87] And in 1769 a Charleston correspondent wrote to a Boston journal:  “A calculation having been made of the amount of purchase money of slaves effected here the present year, it is computed at L270,000 sterling, which sum will by that means be drained off from this province."[88]

[Footnote 87:  Virginia Historical Society Collections, I, 52.]

[Footnote 88:  Boston Chronicle, Mch. 27, 1769.]

An unfortunate fixation of capital was likewise remarked.  Thus Sir Charles Lyell noted at Columbus, Georgia, in 1846 that Northern settlers were “struck with the difficulty experienced in raising money here by small shares for the building of mills.  ‘Why,’ say they, ’should all our cotton make so long a journey to the North, to be manufactured there, and come back to us at so high a price?  It is because