the question whether negro labor in slavery was more or less
productive than free negro labor would have been is not the crux of the
matter. The influence of the slaveholding regime upon the whites themselves
made it inevitable that the South should accumulate real wealth more slowly
than the contemporary North. The planters and their neighbors were in the
grip of circumstance. The higher the price of slaves the greater was the
absorption of capital in their purchase, the blacker grew the black belts,
the more intense was the concentration of wealth and talent in plantation
industry, the more complete was the crystallization of industrial society.
Were there any remedies available? Certain politicians masquerading as
economists advocated the territorial expansion of the regime as a means
of relief. Their argument, however, would not stand analysis. On one hand
virtually all the territory on the continent climatically available for the
staples was by the middle of the nineteenth century already incorporated
into slaveholding states; on the other hand, had new areas been available
the chief effects of their exploitation would have been to heighten the
prices of slaves and lower the prices of crops. Actual expansion had in
fact been too rapid for the best interests of society, for it had kept the
population too sparse to permit a proper development of schools and the
agencies of communications.

With a view to increase the power of the South to expand, and for other
purposes mainly political, a group of agitators in the 'fifties raised a
vehement contention in favor of reopening the African slave trade in full
volume. This, if accomplished, would have lowered the cost of labor, but
its increase of the crops would have depressed staple prices in still
greater degree; its unsettling of the slave market would have hurt vested
interests; and its infusion of a horde of savage Africans would have
set back the progress of the negroes already on hand and have magnified
permanently the problems of racial adjustment.

The prohibition of the interstate slave trade was another project for
modifying the situation. It was mooted in the main by politicians alien to
the regime. If accomplished it would have wrought a sharp differentiation
in the conditions within the several groups of Southern states. An analogy
may be seen in the British possessions in tropical America, where,
following the stoppage of the intercolonial slave trade in 180