company's construction gangs,
reckoning that at the price of $1,000, with interest at 7 per cent. and
life insurance at 2-1/2 per cent. the annual charge would be little more
than half the current cost in wages at $180. The yearly cost of maintenance
and superintendence, reckoned at $20 for clothing, $15 for corn, molasses
and tobacco, $1 for physician's fees, $10 for overseer's wages and $15 for
tools and repairs, he said, would be the same whether the slaves were hired
or bought.[33] How largely the company adopted its president's plan is not
known. For the older and stronger South Carolina Railroad Company, however,
whose lines extended from Charleston to Augusta, Columbia and Camden,
detailed records in the premises are available. This company was created
in 1843 by the merging of two earlier corporations, one of which already
possessed eleven slaves. In February, 1845, the new company bought three
more slaves, two of which cost $400 apiece and the third $686. At the end
of the next year the superintendent reported: "After hands for many years
in the company's service have acquired the knowledge and skill necessary to
make them valuable, the company are either compelled to submit to higher
rates of wages imposed or to pass others at a lower rate of compensation
through the same apprenticeship, with all the hazard of a strike, in their
turn, by the owners."[34] The directors, after studying the problem thus
presented, launched upon a somewhat extensive slave-purchasing programme,
buying one in 1848 and seven in 1849 at uniform prices of $900; one in
1851 at $800 thirty-seven in 1852, all but two of which were procured in a
single purchase from J.C. Sproull and Company, at prices from $512.50 to
$1,004.50, but mostly ranging near $900; and twenty-eight more at various
times between 1853 and 1859, at prices rising to $1,500. Finally, when two
or three years of war had put all property, of however precarious a nature,
at a premium over Confederate currency, the company bought another slave
in August, 1863, for $2,050, and thirty-two more in 1864 at prices ranging
from $2,450 to $6,005.[35] All of these slaves were males. No ages or
trades are specified in the available records, and no statement of the
advantages actually experienced in owning rather than hiring slaves.

[Footnote 31: Reprinted in William Chambers, _American Slavery and Colour_
(London, 1857), P. 207.]

[Footnote 32: _DeBow's Review_, XVII, 76-82.]

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