all spare cash is sunk here in purchasing negroes.’” And again at another stage of his tour:  “That slave labour is more expensive than free is an opinion which is certainly gaining ground in the higher parts of Alabama, and is now professed openly by some Northerners who have settled there.  One of them said to me, ’Half the population of the South is employed in seeing that the other half do their work, and they who do work accomplish half what they might do under a better system.’  ‘We cannot,’ said another,[89] ’raise capital enough for new cotton factories because all our savings go to buy negroes, or as has lately happened, to feed them when the crop is deficient.”

[Footnote 89:  Sir Charles Lyell, Second Visit to the United States (London, 1850), II, 35, 84, 85.]

The planters, who were the principal Southern capitalists, trod in a vicious circle.  They bought lands and slaves wherewith to grow cotton, and with the proceeds ever bought more slaves to make more cotton; and oftentimes they borrowed heavily on their lands and slaves as collateral in order to enlarge their scale of production the more speedily.  When slave prices rose the possessors of those in the cotton belt seldom took profit from the advance, for it was a rare planter who would voluntarily sell his operating force.  When crops failed or prices fell, however, the loans might be called, the mortgages foreclosed, and the property sold out at panic levels.  Thus while the slaves had a guarantee of their sustenance, their proprietors, themselves the guarantors, had a guarantee of nothing.  By virtue, or more properly by vice, of the heavy capitalization of the control of labor which was a cardinal feature of the ante-bellum regime, they were involved in excessive financial risks.

The slavery system has often been said to have put so great a stigma on manual labor as to have paralyzed the physical energies of the Southern white population.  This is a great exaggeration; and yet it is true that the system militated in quite positive degree against the productivity of the several white classes.  Among the well-to-do it promoted leisure by giving rise to an abnormally large number of men and women who whether actually or nominally performing managerial functions, did little to bring sweat to their brows.  The proportion of white collars to overalls and of muslin frocks to kitchen aprons was greater than in any other Anglo-Saxon community of equal income.  The contrast so often drawn between Southern gentility and Northern thrift had a concrete basis in fact.  At the other extreme the enervation of the poor whites, while mainly due to malaria and hookworm, had as a contributing cause the limitation upon their wage-earning opportunity which the slavery system imposed.  Upon the middle class and the yeomanry, which were far more numerous and substantial[90] than has been commonly realized, the slavery system exerted an economic influence by limiting the availability of capital and