but the brevity of any relief procured by this recourse is suggested by a news item from Chattanooga in 1852 reporting that the commonest labor commanded a dollar a day, that mechanics were all engaged far in advance, that much building was perforce being postponed, and that all persons who might be seeking employment were urged to answer the city’s call.[28] By 1854 the continuing advance began to discommode rural employers likewise.  A Norfolk newspaper of the time reported that the current wages of $150 for ordinary hands and $225 for the best laborers, together with life insurance for the full value of the slaves, were so high that prudent farmers were curtailing their operations.[29] At the beginning of 1856 the wages in the Virginia tobacco factories advanced some fifteen per cent. over the rates of the preceding year;[30] and shortly afterward several of these establishments took refuge in the employment of white women for their lighter processes.[31] In 1860 there was a culmination of this rise of slave wages throughout the South, contemporaneous with that of their purchase prices.  First-rate hands were engaged by the Petersburg tobacco factories at $225;[32] and in northwestern Louisiana the prime field hands in a parcel of slaves hired for the year brought from $300 to $360 each, and a blacksmith $430.[33] The general average then prevalent for prime unskilled slaves, however, was probably not much above two hundred dollars.  While the purchase price of slaves was wellnigh quadrupled in the three score years of the nineteenth century, slave wages were little more than doubled, for these were of course controlled not by the fluctuating hopes and fears of what the distant future might bring but by the sober prospect of the work at hand.

[Footnote 25:  Advertisement in the Savannah newspapers, reprinted in J.S.  Buckingham, Slave States (London, 1842), I, 137.]

[Footnote 26:  MS. minutes of the board of aldermen, in the town hall at Milledgeville, Ga.  Item dated Feb. 23, 1841.]

[Footnote 27:  Georgia Railroad Company Report for 1850, p. 13.]

[Footnote 28:  Chattanooga Advertiser, quoted in the Augusta Chronicle, June 6, 1852.]

[Footnote 29:  Norfolk Argus, quoted in Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), Jan. 12, 1854.]

[Footnote 30:  Richmond Dispatch, Jan., 1856, quoted in G.M.  Weston, Who are and who may be Slaves in the U.S. (caption).]

[Footnote 31:  Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, XL, 522.]

[Footnote 32:  Petersburg Democrat, quoted by the Atlanta Intelligencer, Jan., 1860.]

[Footnote 33:  DeBow’s Review, XXIX, 374.]