Finally the conversion of slaves into freemen by a sweeping emancipation was a project which met little endorsement except among those who ignored the racial and cultural complications.  Financially it would work drastic change in private fortunes, though the transfer of ownership from the masters to the laborers themselves need not necessarily have great effect for the time being upon the actual wealth of the community as a whole.  Emancipation would most probably, however, break down the plantation system by making the labor supply unstable, and fill the country partly with peasant farmers and partly with an unattached and floating negro population.  Exceptional negroes and mulattoes would be sure to thrive upon their new opportunities, but the generality of the blacks could be counted upon to relax into a greater slackness than they had previously been permitted to indulge in.  The apprehension of industrial paralysis, however, appears to have been a smaller factor than the fear of social chaos as a deterrent in the minds of the Southern whites from thoughts of abolition.

The slaveholding regime kept money scarce, population sparse and land values accordingly low; it restricted the opportunities of many men of both races, and it kept many of the natural resources of the Southern country neglected.  But it kept the main body of labor controlled, provisioned and mobile.  Above all it maintained order and a notable degree of harmony in a community where confusion worse confounded would not have been far to seek.  Plantation slavery had in strictly business aspects at least as many drawbacks as it had attractions.  But in the large it was less a business than a life; it made fewer fortunes than it made men.

CHAPTER XX

TOWN SLAVES

Southern households in town as well as in country were commonly large, and the dwellings and grounds of the well-to-do were spacious.  The dearth of gas and plumbing and the lack of electric light and central heating made for heavy chores in the drawing of water, the replenishment of fuel and the care of lamps.  The gathering of vegetables from the kitchen garden, the dressing of poultry and the baking of relays’ of hot breads at meal times likewise amplified the culinary routine.  Maids of all work were therefore seldom employed.  Comfortable circumstances required at least a cook and a housemaid, to which might be added as means permitted a laundress, a children’s nurse, a seamstress, a milkmaid, a butler, a gardener and a coachman.  While few but the rich had such ample staffs as this, none but the poor were devoid of domestics, and the ratio of servitors to the gross population was large.  The repugnance of white laborers toward menial employment, furthermore, conspired with the traditional predilection of householders for negroes in a lasting tenure for their intimate services and gave the slaves a virtual monopoly of this calling.  A census of Charleston in 1848,[94] for example, enumerated 5272 slave domestics as compared with 113 white and 27 free colored servants.  The slaves were more numerous than the free also in the semi-domestic employments of coachmen and porters, and among the dray-men and the coopers and the unskilled laborers in addition.