ork _Tribune_. The slaves were sold in family parcels
comprising from two to seven persons each.]

[Footnote 27: MS. record in the Ordinary's office at Macon, Ga. Probate
Returns, vol. 9, pp. 2-7.]

[Footnote 28: Edward Ingle, _Southern Sidelights_ (New York [1896]), p.
294. note.]

Editorial warnings were now more vociferous than before. The _Federal
Union_ of Milledgeville said for example: "There is a perfect fever raging
in Georgia now on the subject of buying negroes.... Men are borrowing money
at exorbitant rates of interest to buy negroes at exorbitant prices. The
speculation will not sustain the speculators, and in a short time we shall
see many negroes and much land offered under the sheriff's hammer, with few
buyers for cash; and then this kind of property will descend to its real
value. The old rule of pricing a negro by the price of cotton by the
pound--that is to say, if cotton is worth twelve cents a negro man is
worth $1,200.00, if at fifteen cents then $1,500.00--does not seem to be
regarded. Negroes are 25 per cent. higher now with cotton at ten and one
half cents than they were two or three years ago when it was worth fifteen
and sixteen cents. Men are demented upon the subject. A reverse will surely
come."[29]

[Footnote 29: _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Jan. 17, 1860,
reprinted with endorsement in the _Southern Banner_ (Athens, Ga.), Jan. 26,
1860, and reprinted in _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 73, 74.]

The fever was likewise raging in the western South,[30] and it persisted
until the end of 1860. Indeed the peak of this price movement was evidently
cut off by the intervention of war. How great an altitude it might have
reached, and what shape its downward slope would have taken had peace
continued, it is idle to conjecture. But that a crash must have come is
beyond a reasonable doubt.

[Footnote 30: Prices at Lebanon, Tenn., and Franklin, Ky., are given in
_Hunt's Merchants' Magazine_, XI, 774 (Dec., 1859).]

The Charleston _Mercury_[31] attributed the advance of slave prices in the
fifties mainly to the demand of the railroads for labor. This was borne
out in some degree by the transactions of the railroad companies whose
headquarters were in that city. The president of the Charleston and
Savannah Railroad Company, endorsing the arguments which had been advanced
by a writer in _DeBows Review_,[32] recommended in his first annual report,
1855, an extensive purchase of slaves for the