essary wants.]

All the plants of Europe grow in the northern parts of the Union; the
South has special productions of its own. It has been observed that
slave labor is a very expensive method of cultivating corn. The farmer
of corn land in a country where slavery is unknown habitually retains a
small number of laborers in his service, and at seed-time and harvest
he hires several additional hands, who only live at his cost for a short
period. But the agriculturist in a slave State is obliged to keep a
large number of slaves the whole year round, in order to sow his fields
and to gather in his crops, although their services are only required
for a few weeks; but slaves are unable to wait till they are hired, and
to subsist by their own labor in the mean time like free laborers; in
order to have their services they must be bought. Slavery, independently
of its general disadvantages, is therefore still more inapplicable to
countries in which corn is cultivated than to those which produce
crops of a different kind. The cultivation of tobacco, of cotton, and
especially of the sugar-cane, demands, on the other hand, unremitting
attention: and women and children are employed in it, whose services are
of but little use in the cultivation of wheat. Thus slavery is naturally
more fitted to the countries from which these productions are derived.
Tobacco, cotton, and the sugar-cane are exclusively grown in the South,
and they form one of the principal sources of the wealth of those
States. If slavery were abolished, the inhabitants of the South would
be constrained to adopt one of two alternatives: they must either change
their system of cultivation, and then they would come into competition
with the more active and more experienced inhabitants of the North; or,
if they continued to cultivate the same produce without slave labor,
they would have to support the competition of the other States of the
South, which might still retain their slaves. Thus, peculiar reasons
for maintaining slavery exist in the South which do not operate in the
North.

But there is yet another motive which is more cogent than all the
others: the South might indeed, rigorously speaking, abolish slavery;
but how should it rid its territory of the black population? Slaves
and slavery are driven from the North by the same law, but this twofold
result cannot be hoped for in the South.

The arguments which I have adduced to show that slavery is more natural
a