lave that
had brought $100 brought $500, and some even $1,000. What made slavery
no scourge, but a great religious moral blessing? The answer is, the
cotton gin and the cotton interest that gave a new desire to promote
slavery, to spread it, and to use its labour. For Eli Whitney had made
cotton to be king. Cotton encouraged slavery; slavery at last
threatened the Union and so brought on the Civil War.

The value of the slave as an economic machine depended upon his
physique, health and general endurance. The slave hunters were
Portuguese, Spaniards and Arabs, who drove the negroes in gangs down to
the coast, where they were loaded upon the slave ships. When the trade
was brisk and prices high, the hold of the ship was crowded to
suffocation, and intense suffering was inevitable. Landing at Savannah
or Charleston, Mobile or New Orleans, the slaves were sold at wholesale,
in the auction place. Later, the slave dealer drove them in gangs
through the villages, where they were sold at retail. The cost of a
slave varied with the price of cotton. Of the three million one hundred
thousand slaves living in the South in 1850, one million eight hundred
thousand were raising cotton. That was the great export, the basis of
prosperity. So great was the demand in England for Southern cotton that
profits were enormous. The Secretary of the Treasury in Buchanan's time
published a list of forty Southern planters in Louisiana and
Mississippi. One of them had five hundred negroes and sold the cotton
from his plantation at a net profit of one hundred thousand dollars.
Each negro, therefore, netted his master that year five hundred dollars.
The working life of a slave was short, scarcely more than seven years,
and for that reason the ablest negro was never worth more than from a
thousand to twelve hundred dollars.

But if the cost of free labour was high, the cost of supporting the
slave under the Southern climate was very low. The climate of the Gulf
States is gentle, soft and propitious. Of forty planters who published
their statements, the average cost of clothing and feeding a slave for
one year was thirty dollars. One Louisiana planter, however, showed that
one hundred slaves on his plantation had cost him in cash outlay seven
hundred and fifty dollars for the entire year. This planter states that
his slaves raised their own corn, converted it into meal and bread,
raised their own sugar-cane, made their own molasses, built their own