nstead of diminished. "They are easily trained
to habits of industry and patient endurance," he said, "and by the
concentration of all their faculties ... their imitative faculties become
cultivated to a very high degree, their muscles become trained and obedient
to the will, so that whatever they see done they are quick in learning to
do."[44] The company was impelled by Graves' enthusiasm to resort to slave
labor exclusively, partly on hire from their owners and partly by purchase.
At the height of this regime, in 1851, the slave operatives numbered
158.[45] But whether from the incapacity of the negroes as mill hands or
from the accumulation of debt through the purchase of slaves, the company
was forced into liquidation at the close of the following year.[46]

[Footnote 42: _Georgia Courier_ (Augusta, Ga.), Apr. 24, 1828, reprinted in
_Plantation and Frontier_, II, 258.]

[Footnote 43: _DeBow's Review_, IV, 256.]

[Footnote 44: Letter of J. Graves, May 15, 1849, in the Augusta, Ga.,
_Chronicle_, June 1, 1849. Cf. also J.B. D Debow, _Industrial Resources of
the Southern and Western States_ (New Orleans, 1852), II, 339.]

[Footnote 45: _DeBow's Review_, XI, 319, 320.]

[Footnote 46: _Augusta Chronicle_, Jan. 5, 1853.]

Corporations had reason at all times, in fact, to prefer free laborers over
slaves even on hire, for in so doing they escaped liabilities for injuries
by fellow servants. When a firm of contractors, for example, advertised
in 1833 for five hundred laborers at $15 per month to work on the Muscle
Shoals canal in northern Alabama, it deemed it necessary to say that in
cases of accidents to slaves it would assume financial responsibility "for
any injury or damage that may hereafter happen in the process of blasting
rock or of the caving of banks."[47] Free laborers, on the other hand,
carried their own risks. Except when some planter would take a contract for
grading in his locality, to be done under his own supervision in the spare
time of his gang, slaves were generally called for in canal and railroad
work only when the supply of free labor was inadequate.

[Footnote 47: Reprinted in E.S. Abdy, _Journal of a Residence in the United
States_ (London, 1835), II, 109.]

Slaveowners, on the other hand, were equally reluctant to hire their slaves
to such corporations or contractors except in times of special depression,
for construction camps from their lack of sanitation, discipline,
domesticity and sta