l wages would perform, and from his earnings
about forty dollars a year must be deducted for his maintenance. When
interest on the investment and a proportion of an overseer's wages were
deducted in addition, he thought the prevalent rate, six to eight dollars
a month and board valued at forty or fifty dollars a year, for free white
farm hands in the Northern states gave a decisive advantage to those who
hired laborers over those who owned them. "Nothing will justify slave
labour in point of economy," he concluded, "but the nature of the soil and
climate which incapacitates a white man from labouring in the summer time,
as on the rich lands in Carolina and Georgia extending one hundred miles
from the seaboard."[7]

[Footnote 7: Thomas Cooper, _Lectures on the Elements of Political
Economy_, (Columbia [S.C.], 1826), pp. 94, 95.]

The economic vices of slavery as exemplified in Virginia were elaborated in
an essay printed in 1832 attributed to Jesse Burton Harrison of that state.
Slavery, said this essay, drives away free workmen by stigmatizing labor,
for "nothing but the most abject necessity would lead a white man to hire
himself to work in the fields under the overseer"; it causes exhaustion of
the soil by reason of the negligence it promotes in the workmen and
the stress which overseers are fain to put upon immediate returns; it
discourages all forms of industry but plantation tillage, furthermore, for
although it has not and perhaps cannot be proved that slaves may not be
successfully employed in manufactures, the community has gone and tends
still to go, on that assumption; it discourages mechanic skill, for the
slaves never acquire more than the rudiments of artisanry, and the planters
discourage white craftsmen by giving preference uniformly to their
own laborers. Slave labor is dearer than free, because of its lack of
incentive; the regime costs the community the services of the immigrants
who would otherwise enter; and finally it promotes waste instead of
frugality on the part of both masters and slaves. The only means by which
Virginia could procure profit from slaves, it concluded, was that of
raising them for sale to the lower South; but such profit could only be
gained systematically at a complete sacrifice of honor.[8]

[Footnote 8: [Jesse Burton Harrison], _Review of the Slave Question,
extracted from the American Quarterly Review, Dec. 1832_. By a Virginian
(Richmond, 1833).]

Daniel R. Goodloe of Nor