ions of the average prices
of prime field hands (unskilled young men) in Virginia, at Charleston, in
middle Georgia, and at New Orleans, aL well as the contemporary range of
average prices for cotton of middling grade in the chief American market,
that of New York. The range for prime slaves, it will be seen, rose from
about $300 and $400 a head in the upper and lower South respectively in
1795 to a range of from $400 to $600 in 1803, in consequence of the initial
impulse of cotton and sugar production and of the contemporary prohibition
of the African slave trade by the several states. At those levels prices
remained virtually fixed, in most markets, for nearly a decade as an effect
of South Carolina's reopening of her ports and of the hampering of export
commerce by the Napoleonic war. The latter factor prevented even the
congressional stoppage of the foreign slave trade in 1808 from exerting
any strong effect upon slave prices for the time being except in the sugar
district. The next general movement was in fact a downward one of about
$100 a head caused by the War of 1812. At the return of peace the prices
leaped with parallel perpendicularity in all the markets from $400-$500 in
1814 to twice that range in 1818, only to be upset by the world-wide panic
of the following year and to descend to levels of $400 to $600 in 1823.
Then came a new rise in the cotton and sugar districts responding to a
heightened price of their staples, but for once not evoking a sympathetic
movement in the other markets. A small decline then ensuing gave place to
a soaring movement at New Orleans, in response to the great stimulus which
the protective tariff of 1828 gave to sugar production. The other markets
began in the early thirties to make up for the tardiness of their rise; and
as a feature of the general inflation of property values then prevalent
everywhere, slave prices rose to an apex in 1837 of $1,300 in the
purchasing markets and $1,100 in Virginia. The general panic of 1837
began promptly to send them down; and though they advanced in 1839 as a
consequence of a speculative bolstering of the cotton market that year,
they fell all the faster upon the collapse of that project, finding new
levels of rest only at a range of $500-$700. A final advance then set in
at the middle of the forties which continued until the highest levels on
record were attained on the eve of secession and war. [Illustration: PRICES
OF SLAVES AND OF COTTON.]