by offering the temptation of an unsound application of earnings.  When a prospering farmer, for example, wanted help for himself in his fields or for his wife indoors, the habit of the community prompted him to buy or hire slaves at a greater cost than free labor would normally have required.[91] The high price of slaves, furthermore, prevented many a capable manager from exercising his talents by debarring him from the acquisition of labor and the other means of large-scale production.

[Footnote 90:  D.R.  Hundley, Social Relations in our Southern States (New York, 1860), pp. 91-100, 193-303; John M. Aughey, The Iron Furnace, or Slavery and Secession (Philadelphia, 1863), p. 231.]

[Footnote 91:  F.L.  Olmsted, Journey through Texas, p. 513.]

Finally, the force of custom, together with the routine efficiency of slave labor itself, caused the South to spoil the market for its distinctive crops by producing greater quantities than the world would buy at remunerative prices.  To this the solicitude of the masters for the health of their slaves contributed.  The harvesting of wheat, for example, as a Virginian planter observed in a letter to his neighbor James Madison, in the days when harvesting machinery was unknown, required exertion much more severe than the tobacco routine, and was accordingly, as he put it, “by no means so conducive to the health of our negroes, upon whose increase (miserabile dictu!) our principal profit depends."[92] The same letter also said:  “Where there is negro slavery there will be laziness, carelessness and wastefulness.  Nor is it possible to prevent them.  Severity increases the evil, and humanity does not lessen it.”

[Footnote 92:  Francis Corbin to James Madison, Oct. 10, 1819, in the Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, XLIII, 263.]

On the whole, the question whether negro labor in slavery was more or less productive than free negro labor would have been is not the crux of the matter.  The influence of the slaveholding regime upon the whites themselves made it inevitable that the South should accumulate real wealth more slowly than the contemporary North.  The planters and their neighbors were in the grip of circumstance.  The higher the price of slaves the greater was the absorption of capital in their purchase, the blacker grew the black belts, the more intense was the concentration of wealth and talent in plantation industry, the more complete was the crystallization of industrial society.  Were there any remedies available?  Certain politicians masquerading as economists advocated the territorial expansion of the regime as a means of relief.  Their argument, however, would not stand analysis.  On one hand virtually all the territory on the continent climatically available for the staples was by the middle of the nineteenth century already incorporated into slaveholding states; on the other hand, had new areas been available the chief effects of their exploitation would have been to heighten the prices of slaves and lower the prices of crops.  Actual expansion had in fact been too rapid for the best interests of society, for it had kept the population too sparse to permit a proper development of schools and the agencies of communications.