ana. For the use of this
document, the MS. of which is in the possession of Mr. John Stone Ware,
White-Castle, La., I am indebted to Mr. V. Alton Moody, of the University
of Michigan, now Lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Force in France.]

The further question arises: how could a master who set himself to work a
slave to death in seven years make sure on the one hand that the demise
would not be precipitated within a few months instead, and on the other
that the consequence would not be merely the slave's incapacitation instead
of his death? In the one case a serious loss would be incurred at once; in
the other the stoppage of the slave's maintenance, which would be the only
conceivable source of gain in the premises, would not have been effected,
but the planter would merely have an invalid on his hands instead of a
worker. Still further, the slaves had recourses of their own, even aside
from appeals for legal redress. They might shoot or stab the oppressor,
burn his house, or run away, or resort to any of a dozen other forms of
sabotage. These possibilities the masters knew as well as the slaves. Mere
passive resistance, however, in cases where even that was needed, would
generally prove effective enough.

Finally, if all the foregoing arguments be dismissed as fallacious, there
still remains the factor of slave prices as a deterrent in certain periods.
If when slaves were cheap and their produce dear it might be feasible and
profitable to exhaust the one to increase the other, the opportunity would
surely vanish when the price relations were reversed. The trend of the
markets was very strong in that direction. Thus at the beginning of the
nineteenth century a prime field hand in the upland cotton belt had the
value of about 1,500 pounds of middling cotton; by 1810 this value had
risen to 4,500 pounds; by 1820 to 5,500; by 1830 to 6,000; by 1840 to
8,300; from 1843 to 1853 it was currently about 10,000; and in 1860 it
reached about 16,000 pounds. Comparison of slave values as measured in the
several other staples would show quite similar trends, though these great
appreciations were accompanied by no remotely proportionate increase of
the slaves' industrial capacities. The figures tell their own tale of
the mounting preposterousness of any calculated exhaustion of the human
chattels.

The tradition in anti-slavery circles was however too strong to die.
Various travelers touring the South, keen for corroborati