Suppose a plantation stocked with 100 slaves, men, women, and piccaninnies, at 8500 each, $50,000 Interest at 8 per cent., a low rate for the South, 4,000 Customary allowance for life insurance or mortality, 1,000 Overseer’s wages, 1,000 House and provisions, 500 Doctor’s fees, hospital, and medicines, 500 Renewal and repairs of negro quarters, 500 Clothing and food, at $1 per week for each slave, 5,200
                                         ______
12,700

Credit.

Increase to keep good the mortality, 2
Annual gain, 2-335/1000, say         3
Gain, 5, at $500                2,500
Net cost,                      10,200

The usual allowance for field hands is one-third,—­allow it to be forty in a hundred, the cost of each would be $255 per annum, or $21.25 per month.

Let each one make his own allowance for the disadvantage of having the larger portion of the capital of a State locked up in a tool which would do more and better work if recognized as a man and representing no invested capital.  How much productive industry would there be in New England, if every laborer or mechanic cost his employer $800 to $1500 before he could be set to work, and if each one who undertook to labor upon his own account, and was not so purchased, were stigmatized and degraded and termed ‘mean white trash?’

It will again be objected that the theory of the cotton planter is to raise all the food and make all the clothing on the plantation.  The cultivation of cotton in the best manner is described by Southern writers as a process of gardening.  Now what would be thought of a market gardener at the North who should keep a large extra force for the purpose of spinning yarn on a frame of six to ten spindles, and weaving it up on a rude hand loom?  Would this not be protection to home industry in its most absurd extreme?  But this is the plantation system.

The correctness of the estimate of cost can be tested in some degree by the rates at which able-bodied slaves are hired out.  Many lists can be found in Southern papers; the latest found by the writer is in De Bow’s Review of 1860.

A list of fourteen slaves, comprising ’a blacksmith, his wife, eight field hands, a lame negro, an old man, an old woman and a young woman,’ were hired out for the year 1860, in Claiborne Parish, La., at an average of $289 each, the highest being $430 for the blacksmith, and $171 for ‘Juda, old woman.’

The Southern States have thus far retained almost a monopoly of the cotton trade of the civilized world by promptly furnishing a fair supply of cotton of the best quality, and at prices which defied competition from the only region from which it was to be feared, viz., India.  This monopoly has been retained, notwithstanding the steadily increasing demand and higher prices of the last few years.