could get no more slaves, they would not only treat
better those whom they then had in their power, but that they would
gradually find it to their advantage to emancipate them. A part of our
expectations have been realized; ... but, alas! where the heart has been
desperately wicked, we have found no change. We did not sufficiently take
into account the effect of unlimited power on the human mind. No man likes
to part with power, and the more unbounded it is, the less he likes to
part with it. Neither did we sufficiently take into account the ignominy
attached to a black skin as the badge of slavery, and how difficult it
would be to make men look with a favourable eye upon what they had looked
[upon] formerly as a disgrace. Neither did we take sufficiently into
account the belief which every planter has, that such an unnatural state
as that of slavery can be kept up only by a system of rigour, and how
difficult therefore it would be to procure a relaxation from the ordinary
discipline of a slave estate."[35]

[Footnote 35: MS. in private possession.]

If such was the failure in the British West Indies, the change in
conditions in the United States was even greater; for the rise of the
cotton industry concurred with the prohibition of the African trade to
enhance immensely the preciousness of slaves and to increase in similar
degree the financial obstacle to a sweeping abolition.

CHAPTER IX

THE INTRODUCTION OF COTTON AND SUGAR

The decade following the peace of 1783 brought depression in all the
plantation districts. The tobacco industry, upon which half of the Southern
people depended in greater or less degree, was entering upon a half century
of such wellnigh constant low prices that the opening of each new tract for
its culture was offset by the abandonment of an old one, and the export
remained stationary at a little less than half a million hogsheads. Indigo
production was decadent; and rice culture was in painful transition to the
new tide-flow system. Slave prices everywhere, like those of most other
investments, were declining in so disquieting a manner that as late as the
end of 1794 George Washington advised a friend to convert his slaves into
other forms of property, and said on his own account: "Were it not that I
am principled against selling negroes, as you would cattle in a market, I
would not in twelve months hence be possessed of a single one as a slave.
I shall be happily mistaken if they