bility were at the opposite pole from plantations as
places of slave residence. High wages were no adequate compensation for
the liability to contagious and other diseases, demoralization, and the
checking of the birth rate by the separation of husbands and wives. The
higher the valuation of slave property, the greater would be the strength
of these considerations.

Slaves were a somewhat precarious property under all circumstances. Losses
were incurred not only through disease[48] and flight but also through
sudden death in manifold ways, and through theft. A few items will furnish
illustration. An early Charleston newspaper printed the following: "On the
ninth instant Mr. Edward North at Pon Pon sent a sensible negro fellow to
Moon's Ferry for a jug of rum, which is about two miles from his house;
and he drank to that excess in the path that he died within six or seven
hours."[49] From the Eutaws in the same state a correspondent wrote in 1798
of a gin-house disaster: "I yesterday went over to Mr. Henry Middleton's
plantation to view the dreadful effects of a flash of lightning which the
day before fell on his machine house in which were about twenty negro men,
fourteen of which were killed immediately."[50] In 1828 the following
appeared in a newspaper at New Orleans: "Yesterday towards one o'clock
P.M., as one of the ferry boats was crossing the river with sixteen slaves
on board belonging to General Wade Hampton, with their baggage, a few rods
distant from the shore these negroes, being frightened by the motion of the
boat, all threw themselves on the same side, which caused the boat to fill;
and notwithstanding the prompt assistance afforded, four or five of these
unfortunates perished."[51] In 1839 William Lowndes Yancey, who was then a
planter in South Carolina, lost his whole gang through the poisoning of a
spring on his place, and was thereby bankrupted.[52] About 1858 certain
bandits in western Louisiana abducted two slaves from the home of the Widow
Bernard on Bayou Vermilion. After the lapse of several months they were
discovered in the possession of one Apcher, who was tried for the theft
but acquitted. The slaves when restored to their mistress were put in the
kitchen, bound together by their hands. But while the family was at dinner
the two ran from the house and drowned themselves in the bayou. The
narrator of the episode attributed the impulse for suicide to the taste for
vagabondage and the hatred for w