cade slaveowners
were willing to take almost any wages offered; and in its final year the
Georgia Railroad paid only $70 to $75 for section hands. In 1850, however,
this rate leaped to $100 and $110, and caused a partial substitution of
white laborers for the hired slaves;[27] but the brevity of any relief
procured by this recourse is suggested by a news item from Chattanooga in
1852 reporting that the commonest labor commanded a dollar a day, that
mechanics were all engaged far in advance, that much building was perforce
being postponed, and that all persons who might be seeking employment were
urged to answer the city's call.[28] By 1854 the continuing advance began
to discommode rural employers likewise. A Norfolk newspaper of the time
reported that the current wages of $150 for ordinary hands and $225 for
the best laborers, together with life insurance for the full value of
the slaves, were so high that prudent farmers were curtailing their
operations.[29] At the beginning of 1856 the wages in the Virginia tobacco
factories advanced some fifteen per cent. over the rates of the preceding
year;[30] and shortly afterward several of these establishments took refuge
in the employment of white women for their lighter processes.[31] In 1860
there was a culmination of this rise of slave wages throughout the South,
contemporaneous with that of their purchase prices. First-rate hands
were engaged by the Petersburg tobacco factories at $225;[32] and in
northwestern Louisiana the prime field hands in a parcel of slaves hired
for the year brought from $300 to $360 each, and a blacksmith $430.[33] The
general average then prevalent for prime unskilled slaves, however, was
probably not much above two hundred dollars. While the purchase price of
slaves was wellnigh quadrupled in the three score years of the nineteenth
century, slave wages were little more than doubled, for these were of
course controlled not by the fluctuating hopes and fears of what the
distant future might bring but by the sober prospect of the work at hand.

[Footnote 25: Advertisement in the Savannah newspapers, reprinted in J.S.
Buckingham, _Slave States_ (London, 1842), I, 137.]

[Footnote 26: MS. minutes of the board of aldermen, in the town hall at
Milledgeville, Ga. Item dated Feb. 23, 1841.]

[Footnote 27: Georgia Railroad Company _Report_ for 1850, p. 13.]

[Footnote 28: Chattanooga _Advertiser_, quoted in the Augusta _Chronicle_,
June 6, 1852.]

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