so long a journey to the North, to be manufactured there, and come
back to us at so high a price? It is because all spare cash is sunk here in
purchasing negroes.'" And again at another stage of his tour: "That slave
labour is more expensive than free is an opinion which is certainly gaining
ground in the higher parts of Alabama, and is now professed openly by some
Northerners who have settled there. One of them said to me, 'Half the
population of the South is employed in seeing that the other half do their
work, and they who do work accomplish half what they might do under a
better system.' 'We cannot,' said another,[89] 'raise capital enough for
new cotton factories because all our savings go to buy negroes, or as has
lately happened, to feed them when the crop is deficient."

[Footnote 89: Sir Charles Lyell, _Second Visit to the United States_
(London, 1850), II, 35, 84, 85.]

The planters, who were the principal Southern capitalists, trod in a
vicious circle. They bought lands and slaves wherewith to grow cotton,
and with the proceeds ever bought more slaves to make more cotton; and
oftentimes they borrowed heavily on their lands and slaves as collateral in
order to enlarge their scale of production the more speedily. When slave
prices rose the possessors of those in the cotton belt seldom took profit
from the advance, for it was a rare planter who would voluntarily sell his
operating force. When crops failed or prices fell, however, the loans might
be called, the mortgages foreclosed, and the property sold out at panic
levels. Thus while the slaves had a guarantee of their sustenance, their
proprietors, themselves the guarantors, had a guarantee of nothing. By
virtue, or more properly by vice, of the heavy capitalization of the
control of labor which was a cardinal feature of the ante-bellum regime,
they were involved in excessive financial risks.

The slavery system has often been said to have put so great a stigma on
manual labor as to have paralyzed the physical energies of the Southern
white population. This is a great exaggeration; and yet it is true that the
system militated in quite positive degree against the productivity of the
several white classes. Among the well-to-do it promoted leisure by giving
rise to an abnormally large number of men and women who whether actually
or nominally performing managerial functions, did little to bring sweat
to their brows. The proportion of white collars to overalls and