THE essential features and tendencies of a regime can best be analyzed in those instances in which it has been most fully developed and most persistently maintained. Isolated phases of American negro slavery may be studied with some success in many places and periods, but its complex working and far-reaching effects can perhaps be learned with relative completeness only from a study of some long settled and very black portion of the Southern black belts. The best example for our purpose is the low-lying coast region of South Carolina and Georgia, which had its focus at Charleston and may well be called the Charleston district. There as elsewhere the establishment of slavery was due entirely to the desire for a labor supply, and its patent effects were chiefly of an economic sort; but the system had also deep and inevitable influences and effects of a social character, and of course developed conspicuous outcroppings in national politics. For all these things the material which can be found for the Charleston district is eloquent.

     The physical features of the district, so different from most other parts of North America, invited the early introduction of the plantation system, with negro labor. The heat, dampness and malaria retarded the growth of the white population and promoted the relative increase of the negroes. The development of rice, indigo and sea-island cotton as staples caused the firm establishment of plantations to utilize the fertile alluvial soil of the lowlands. The splendid harbor and the tongue of elevated and healthful land at Charleston caused the growth there of a genuine capital of the district. The regime thus promoted by the unchanging conditions of nature waxed strong and endured for generations, with far less change than is usual

in American life. Lowland South Carolina began its successful career as a colony in the wilderness, producing staples by the use of negro labor under white control on plantations, with its center and soul at Charleston. Thus it stands to-day, decadent it is true, but not revolutionized. It stands thus far, indeed, as a monument to the power of soil and climate in shaping and preserving systems of human activity, and to the effectiveness of race distinctions in resisting even cataclysmal attempts at alteration.

     The colony was founded in 1670, by settlers who came to seek their fortune. At first they had no staple industry. They labored to produce most of the things they needed, and exported only a small value in naval stores and peltry with which to buy a few European goods. About 1693 came the discovery of rice as a staple for export, and this gave an incentive for procuring a large labor supply and organizing it on the most effective system feasible. Negroes were found to be especially adapted to the climate, and the plantation system was borrowed from the West Indies, where it already flourished. A regime of plantation industrialism was instituted which was strong enough to dominate the situation. The Lords Proprietors, with their attempts at feudalism and arbitrary extraneous control, were brushed away; they were replaced after 1729 by a royal government, which was welcomed because it permitted a very large degree of self-government. The citizens worked out their own destiny, following the line of least resistance, which of course might or might not be the line of greatest permanent efficiency. There arose, then, a peculiar system of industry, commerce and social life as the resultant of physiographic and ethnic influences. Its general features are too familiar to require description here. An important fact was the coordinate growth of the plantations to produce the staples and of the city of Charleston for commerce and incidental industry.

     Indigo and long-staple cotton, as well as rice, were successively found to be producible with profit in the Carolina lowlands. The great demand of the world for these staples caused the growth of a strong local demand for labor, and especially for negroes, who were known to be largely immune to malaria

and unoppressed by the heat. Negro labor, of necessity unfree, furnished the chief supply in both country and city. Plantations were established wherever fertile land could be found in reach of navigation. These were scattered throughout the lowlands, mostly in isolation from one another, but all tending to have the same general features. It was found by experience that the best results in rice and indigo production were obtained from plantations with working forces of about thirty hands each, and the tendency was toward that size in the industrial unit.¹ The spread of a system like this, distributing one white family to every isolated group of from five to twenty or more negro families, in a malarial region, resulted in a situation not fully duplicated elsewhere on the continent. The Africans were too numerous in the early stages for the whites to succeed nearly so well as did the Virginians and the men of the upland cotton belt in taming them to the ways of civilization. The field work was always done in the crudest manner; and the necessity of the master’s moving away from his estate in the warm months, to escape the malaria, involved the adoption of some system of routine which would work with more or less automatic regularity without his own inspiring or impelling presence. Hence the system of “tasks,” by which the white overseer or negro foreman (called a “driver”) assigned a stated measure of land to be worked over by each laborer each day, varying in amount according to the laborer’s classification as an able-bodied, prime or “full hand,” a three-quarter hand, a half-hand, etc. When special work had to be done, like clearing land of its timber, the negroes might be worked in gangs under the master’s direction; but as a rule the task system was followed, as being more nearly automatic and requiring less active and vigilant supervision. Aside from field labor, there was need of such work as cooperage, blacksmithing, boating and domestic service, to which chosen negroes were assigned. In general it was recognized as useless to expect a high degree of efficiency in any branch of plantation labor or service and there was a general contentment with moderate efficiency on the part of the negroes and moderate

profits from their unstrenuous labor. Zeal and growth in skill were encouraged; but, in view of the great numerical preponderance of the negroes, to keep them docile was considered more important than to increase their labor-value.

     In the first stage of plantation and city development, the unskilled labor supply was made up almost wholly of negro slaves, while the whites filled all other ranks, acting as artisans, foremen, farmers, planters, merchants, etc. A few of the whites were indentured servants, and a few white freemen were unskilled laborers, but only a few in either case, and the number was diminishing. It is safe to say that from about 1700 to 1720 there was fairly complete identity of racial, industrial and legal classes; the negroes were unskilled laborers and of slave status; the whites were skilled laborers and managers, and were freemen. The negroes were employed in routine work, the whites filled all the versatile and responsible occupations. There was well-nigh complete subordination of negroes to whites in every respect. Under this arrangement the economic and social needs, as the whites saw them, were harmonious.

     But this simple relation could not long endure. Some of the negroes proved relatively intelligent, acquired moderate skill in handicrafts or proved their capacity for self-direction on a small scale in industry and commerce. These became foremen, boat captains (patroons), peddlers, custom blacksmiths, etc. The emergence of mulattoes, with far greater intelligence, hastened this development. Masters owning the labor of relatively high-grade workmen were naturally disposed to employ that labor to the best advantage to encourage progress of their slaves in skill and thus to save themselves the expense of employing freemen for skilled tasks. The next step, following naturally, was for masters to secure instruction for their most capable youths through apprenticeship, and to set up some of the skilled slaves as craftsmen with shops for public patronage. The city, with its more rapidly growing complexity and specialization of industry, was of course the seat of the earliest and the fullest instances of this development.

     The increasing competition of negro slave artisans with the whites was of the greatest importance as regarded the relations

of the races, because the colony depended mainly upon the outside world for its supply of manufactures and the opportunities for craftsmen in the province were at the best very limited. Competition by the slaves tended to drive out a considerable proportion of the white freemen whose skilled labor would otherwise have been needed. Conditions were gradually becoming more complex: racial, legal and industrial classes were ceasing to be so nearly coterminous as in the earlier time. A number of negroes and mulattoes, indeed, were gradually coming to acquire legal status as freemen, exempt from slavery regulations, but in no wise recognized by the whites as their equals. The presence of these freedmen, of course, still further complicated the situation. The demand for labor was constantly growing, but mainly for unskilled labor. It was chiefly met by the slave trade and the natural increase of the negro population. Skilled trades were entered more and more largely by exceptional negroes and mulattoes. In times of depression, white mechanics were tempted to emigrate in search of better openings; but the persons of color, if slaves, could not migrate, and if legally free, had to stay in most cases because of the dearth of industrial opportunity for them in other quarters of America. Thus the proportion of negroes increased in the trades as well as in the total population, city and country. This state of things aroused considerable apprehension.¹

     The importation of negroes into America had been due, of course, to the economic motive of procuring a labor supply. The regulations of slavery had been instituted for their industrial control—to permit their “breaking in,” their subjection to the rules of civilized labor. With the negroes once on hand in large numbers, however, the enormous contrast between them and the whites in intelligence, standards and institutions—in a word, in race character—brought up a social problem which overshadowed all economic issues. Slavery, originating as a system of labor control, was maintained as still more valuable in safeguarding the standards, institutions and social well-being of the few whites against possible demoralization and overthrow by the numerous blacks. The negroes were required by the system to abandon gradually the habits and points of view acquired in the African jungle, to accept and acquire as far as they could the ideas of the civilization into which they had been brought and to abide by its rules of social conduct. Plantations and slavery made up a system of tutelage and police combined, providing education in civilized industry and life and at the same time preventing successful outbreaks of negro revolt against white control.

     The system showed its kindly or its harsh features, other things being equal, according as the negroes in a given case were relatively docile or fractious. Other things were not always equal: in some cases the mingling of the races in daily life was free and abundant, so that the negroes had ample opportunity to use their imitative faculties and to acquire the white men’s ways; in other cases the negroes were isolated, their masters absent for long periods, white neighbors few and models for imitation not within reach. Under conditions of the latter sort, subjection in full would be required of the negroes, little affection would be inspired, and little loyalty would be engendered to the system or to the society which it safeguarded.

     The Carolina lowland plantations presented the less attractive of these sets of conditions. The acceptance of the situation was slow among the negroes, and their adaptation to it was imperfect. Strict police control was necessary. This firm regulation, in turn, making against the intimate personal associations

common in Virginia and the uplands, tended to preserve the race alienation which had called it into being. The negroes of the South Carolina coast failed to acquire the English language in intelligible form; they clung to voodooism and other things African; and, in spite of their apparent and even oppressive sociability and friendliness, they remained largely foreign in spirit and in custom and subjects of mystery to their masters. The conditions in the Charleston district were always far more similar to those in the West Indies than to those in Virginia and the upland cotton belt.

     Most of the South Carolina coast negroes were unambitious; but some few, as we have seen, and especially the mulattoes, were eager to learn and with their masters’ aid became artisans or otherwise largely self-directing in industry. The situation grew complex and in some ways embarrassing. In the divergence of economic interests and social needs it became increasingly clear that the social needs were paramount. In frequent instances the financial interest of the master lay in giving his capable slaves as much industrial freedom as they could use; but it was a social necessity to keep under complete control every black who could possibly incite or take part in a servile insurrection or otherwise promote disorder. The situation was delicate, as all men knew; and the only sure safeguards against the outbreak of rapine and anarchy lay in watchfulness and masterfulness on the part of the whites.

     It was recited in a legislative act as early as 1712 that

several owners of slaves [are] used to suffer their said slaves to do what and go whither they will and work where they please, upon condition that their said slaves do bring their aforesaid masters so much money as between the said master and slave is agreed upon, for every day the said slave shall be so permitted to employ himself, which practice hath been observed to occasion such slaves to spend their time aforesaid, in looking for opportunities to steal, in order to raise money to pay their masters, as well as to maintain themselves, and other slaves their companions, in drunkenness and other evil courses.¹

     The competitive phase of the race-labor problem was touched

upon by the grand jury of the province in its presentments in 742: “We present as a grievance the want of a law to prevent the hiring out of negro tradesmen, to the great discouragement of the white workmen coming into this province.”¹

     There thus appeared two interests favoring the restriction of negro opportunity. The white laboring men wanted to keep the slaves out of the skilled trades as far as possible, and to that end opposed their being hired out under any circumstances for artisan’s work. The men of the governing class opposed any broadening of negroes’ range of personal freedom as increasing the danger of demoralization and revolt. The white artisans, it seems, had not enough political strength to get their will enacted into law²; and the statutes prohibiting the hiring of their time by slaves were not sufficiently supported by public opinion to secure their enforcement. Like most other provisions of the slave code, this rule was generally disregarded when the interest or inclination of master and slave agreed in favor of its violation. In many cases the law, if enforced, would have seriously hampered industry and commerce. In the city, for example, stevedores, boat hands, messengers, carpenters and day laborers in general were often needed for immediate service; and the employer could not submit to the delay and formality of seeking out and making contracts with the owners of the slaves whose labor he desired. For the sake of a flexible labor supply, some device like that of slaves hiring their own time was essential; and that being the case, the laws prohibiting this arrangement could not, of course, secure general observance. In quiet times, indeed, the citizens fell generally into easy-going practices, each following his own interest in managing his slaves (or letting them manage him) and thinking little of the provisions for public control. The discovery of negro conspiracies

in 1720¹ and 1740² spread alarm in the province and for the time stimulated public sentiment in favor of efficient police and other safeguards; but relaxation of control was not long in following each spasm of police reform.

     From about 1740 to the outbreak of the war for American independence was the heyday of prosperity for the Carolina lowlands. Rice and indigo prices were excellent; the laboring force was rapidly enlarged, the cultivated area was extended and the exports and imports increased. Merchants from many countries gathered at “Charles Town”; and many, acquiring wealth, adopted the Carolina standard of highest gentility and retired from commerce to enter planting careers. The city was beautified with handsome public buildings and private residences; the plantations were equipped with commodious mansions and substantial rice mills, smoke-houses, negro quarters, etc., many of which endure in more or less dilapidation to the present day. Carolina merchants and planters were in close touch through newspapers and correspondence with the whole world of commerce and affairs. Carolina youths were often educated in the colleges of Old England. Planters of a fine type of manhood, culture and ability set a high standard in the commonwealth; and sons strove to fall nothing short of their fathers’ attainments. In consequence, there was efficiency and thorough honesty in government; honor, candor and cordiality in private relations; and kindly consideration, as a very general rule, toward all persons not obviously undeserving. The native slaves were encouraged to progress as far as circumstances

could be made to permit; the imported Africans were broken into service as mildly as possible; all were well fed, adequately clothed and sheltered, and subjected to as a mild a discipline as was compatible with public safety. On the whole, the province was as well-ordered, prosperous and happy in all its elements as could well be with such diverse racial components and so large a latent possibility for disorder and social revolution.

     There were a few blemishes on the generally smooth surface of prosperity and contentment. The heavy volume of the slave trade caused a constant drain of capital to England and New England in payment to the traders; breaking in fresh and refractory Africans was, at the best, unpleasant business; the white mechanics disliked the competition of negroes and mulattoes in their trades, and though the wages of the whites were higher, their number was relatively decreasing; the great and ever-growing mass of half savage negroes, many of them embittered by harsh treatment, was a constant cause for disquiet; and the increasingly strained relations with the mother country were distressing from many points of view. But on the whole, the people, flushed with their success in conquering the wilderness and their unchecked progress in wealth, were consciously happy and bravely optimistic.

     When the war came, the situation was in several respects unique. South Carolina was the only colony that had to deal with large numbers of barbaric Africans. Among persons closely associated with these coast negroes there was little disposition to accept theories of human equality. The most influential citizens, whether “patriot” or “loyalist,” were determined to preserve the existing industrial and social order as a necessary condition of life in the district, no matter what system of government and allegiance should prevail. The conservatism of the people, in fact, saved the state from such an upheaval as afflicted Virginia in the revolutionary period.

     During the war, and for a while afterward, there was grave economic depression in the district. The closing of markets and the military depredations occasioned great though temporary damages, and the loss of the British bounty permanently

killed indigo production. But the plantation system was not broken down. The planters in large number retained their lands and their slaves, and tided over the lean years with hopes for the return of better times.

     About 1786 it was discovered that long-staple cotton, with its high-priced silky fibre, was available as a staple to replace indigo and to supplement rice. Within a few years the new industry was widespread through the Georgia-Carolina lowlands, and planters were becoming serenely prosperous again.

     At the close of the century, however, a wholly new factor was introduced, and in the first decades of the following century the economic situation was seriously modified. As a result of Whitney’s invention of the gin for short-staple cotton in 1793, the whole interior of the Carolinas, of Georgia and of the Southwest became capable of very profitable development by labor of any and every kind. In the relative scarcity of free labor for this vast region, an enormous demand was made by the upland and western cotton districts for slave labor, which after 1808 could be supplied, in the main, only from the old tobacco and rice districts. Slave prices rapidly mounted to unheard of figures; and with the planters of the Charleston district it became a serious question whether the lure of the golden West for their slaves and themselves could be permanently resisted. Many sold part of their negroes to inland settlers; many moved west carrying with them such slaves as they had or could buy. In some years, as in war times and in periods of low cotton prices, the slave trade and the migration slackened; again it would wax so great in volume that only the most conservative could preserve immunity from the Georgia, Alabama or Texas fever. The migration fever and the interior slave trade carried off nearly or quite all the increase from births, importation and immigration in the Charleston lowlands, as is shown by the returns of the successive censuses.¹ In

some decades there was positive shrinkage in districts in which before the Revolution the doubling of numbers within a decade had not been unusual.

     Charleston and all the surrounding country was seriously threatened with not only a relative but an actual decline of population, white and black, of crops and earnings and of political and social consequence. To save the situation, or even to mitigate the decline, it was necessary to improve the existing system of industry, so as to make every resource tell to the utmost. Labor must be made more productive. This result could be attained in part through improvement in administration. Some of the coast planters, for example, developed such fine varieties of cotton, and guarded their crops so well against careless picking, ginning and packing, that the output of their plantations commanded a heavy premium in the market. But in its crux, the problem was, of course, to improve the quality and effectiveness of the labor itself. The system had to be made flexible by giving to every trustworthy slave, who was capable of self-direction, a personal incentive to increase his skill and assiduity. Under such conditions the laws which impeded industrial progress were increasingly disregarded and became dead letters. Slaves by hundreds hired their own time; whites and blacks, skilled and unskilled, worked side by side, with little notice of the color line; trustworthy slaves were practically in a state of industrial freedom; and that tertium

     Statistics for Georgetown prior to 1810 are omitted, because the district then had very different boundaries and area.

quid, the free person of color, always officially unwelcome, was now regarded in private life as a desirable resident of a neighborhood, provided he were a good workman. The liberalizing tendencies were fast relieving the hard-and-fast character of the regime, so far at least as concerned all workmen who were capable of better things than gang and task labor.

     The great mass of the common negroes, it is true, were regarded as suited only for the gangs and unfit for any self-direction in civilized industry; but even in this case a few thinking men saw vaguely from time to time that a less expensive method of control ought to be substituted for chattel slavery, involving as it did the heavy capitalization of life-time labor as a

commodity.¹ This period of economic liberalism produced that phenomenal generation of large-minded and powerful statesmen which included William Lowndes, Cheves, Calhoun, William Smith and McDuffie, fitting successors to Rawlins Lowndes, Gadsden, Rutledge, Izard, Drayton and the Pinckneys. No representatives of a perverse or reactionary commonwealth could have gained so decisive an influence upon American affairs as was exercised by these statesmen in the second decade of the century.

     To this progress of liberalism a single event gave a violent check. In the early summer of 1822 there was discovered in Charleston a wide-spread and well matured conspiracy among the slaves and free negroes for a servile revolt and the destruction of the whites. The leader was Denmark Vesey, and the headquarters of the conspiracy were in his blacksmith shop. Vesey was a native African of unusual ability, who had bought his freedom in 1800 with part of the proceeds of a prize drawn in a lottery and had made himself a dominating person among the negroes of the city. One of Vesey’s right-hand men was Monday Gell, a negro slave of talent, in charge of a harness shop, able to write fluently and much indulged and trusted by his master. Monday, it was afterwards reported, professed to be in correspondence with men of power in Africa and San Domingo who would give aid in the Carolina revolt. The chief organizer among the half-savage, lowest-grade negroes was Gullah Jack, by inheritance a conjurer among the Angolas and reputed to lead a charmed life. Jack, himself little touched by civilization, was unable to plan, but was of great value in rousing the savage nature of his fellows to the desired pitch of frenzy. Another leader was Peter Poyas, who circulated the report that the whites had determined to thin out the negroes and would begin a great killing on July 4. He urged the blacks to rise quickly and forestall the blow. These ringleaders had selected the points at which the negroes in town and outside were to gather, upon a signal to be given at midnight of June 16, and had laid out a program for seizing the guard-house

and arsenal and sweeping the city with fire and sword.¹ An inkling of the conspiracy reached the police on May 30. The first negroes arrested denied all knowledge of a plot; but after a week’s solitary confinement they were ready to talk. Their admissions then led to other arrests and, after another season of tongue-loosening confinement, to still more alarming admissions and in turn to still more arrests. Finally, the evidence brought out at the formal trial of the prisoners laid bare the whole machinery and extent of the plot. The public thus learned the disquieting details in cumulative installments. The general effect of alarm and horror may be better imagined than described. There was apparently, however, no popular hysteria. A special constabulary was appointed for public safety, and a special court to try the negroes under arrest. To its bench were appointed the most substantial, conservative and respected citizens whom Charleston contained. Reputable attorneys were appointed for each side of every case; the trial of each slave was conducted in his owner’s presence; and every other precaution was taken for fairness, justice and security. During two months of unprecedented excitement in Charleston, while the trials were in progress, the Charleston corporation was “proud to say,” in its official report, that

the laws, without even one violation, have ruled with uninterrupted sway that no cruel, vindictive or barbarous modes of punishment have been resorted to that justice has been blended with an enlightened humanity to those who had meted out for us murder, rapine and conflagration in their most savage forms.

     As a result of the trials, thirty-five negroes were sentenced to death and hanged before August 10; twelve were sentenced to death but respited with a view to commutation of sentence; twenty-two were sentenced to transportation; nine were acquitted with a suggestion to their masters that they be transported; and fifty-two were acquitted and discharged. Denmark

Vesey’s plot had passed into history with little noise in the great world outside, but with lasting impress upon the lowland community.

     The effect of Vesey’s plot upon public sentiment in the Charleston district is eloquently shown in a memorial presented by the citizens of Charleston to the South Carolina legislature in the fall of 1822.¹ It begins with a description of the position of the negroes:

Under the influence of mild and generous feelings, the owners of slaves in our state were rearing up a system which extended many privileges to our negroes; afforded them greater protection; relieved them from numerous restraints; enabled them to assemble without the presence of a white person, for the purpose of social intercourse, or religious worship; yielding to them the facilities for securing most of the comforts and many of the luxuries of improved society; and what is of more importance, affording them means of enlarging their minds and extending their information; a system whose establishment many persons could not reflect on without concern and whose rapid extension the experienced among us could not observe but “with fear and trembling,” nevertheless, a system which met the approbation of by far the greater number of our citizens, who exulted in what they termed the progress of liberal ideas upon the subject of slavery, while many good and pious persons fondly cherished the expectation that our negroes would be influenced in their conduct toward their owners by sentiments of affection and gratitude.

     But, the document goes on to relate, a dreadful plot was forming which has now by providential means been discovered. It is the duty of the people and the state to provide preventives for such occurrences in future, and hence this petition to the legislature. Constructive suggestions now follow:

After a careful inquiry into the existing evils of our slave system, and

after mature reflection on the remedies to be adopted, [we] humbly recommend that laws be passed to the following effects:

     1st. To send out of our state, never again to return, all free persons of color They form a third class in our society, enjoying more privileges than the slaves, and yet possessing few of the rights of the master; a class of persons having and exercising the right of moving unrestrained over every part of the state; of acquiring property, of amassing wealth to an unlimited extent, of procuring information on every subject, and of uniting themselves in associations or societies—yet, still a class, deprived of all political rights, subjected equally with the slaves to the police regulations for persons of color, and sensible that by no peaceable and legal methods can they render themselves other than a degraded class in your society Restraints are always irksome The free persons of color must be discontented with their situation. The hopes of the free negroes will increase with their numbers

     The free persons of color will not emigrate, consequently the white people must; so that, as the free people of color are extending their lines, the whites are contracting theirs. This is not a mere speculation, but a fact sufficiently emphasized already. Every winter, considerable number of Germans, Swiss and Scotch arrive in Charleston, with the avowed intention of settling amongst us, but are soon induced to emigrate towards the West by perceiving most of the mechanical arts performed by free persons of color. Thus we learn, that the existence of this class among us is in the highest degree detrimental to our safety

The presence of free persons of color, the memorial continues, sets conditions before the eyes of the slaves which they cannot peaceably realize; it makes their labor irksome and offers many temptations; and the intimate association of these persons with the slaves permits at all times the dissemination of dangerous ideas and news items which the slaves would not otherwise learn. The memorialists admit that inconvenience would arise from the expulsion of the free persons of color, but urge that that must be tolerated for the general welfare. A stern policy, they assert, is necessary, “that we may extinguish at once every gleam of hope which the slaves may indulge of ever becoming free and that we may proceed to govern them on the only principle that can maintain slavery, the principle of fear.’”

     They recommend, further, that the number of slaves to be hired out should be limited by law, and no slave should be allowed to work as a mechanic unless under the immediate control of his master. Most of those who work out, they say, are largely released from control, to work or idle or attend meetings and conspire without hindrance.

But there is another consideration. The facility for obtaining work is not always the same Irregularity of habits is thus acquired; this irregularity produces restlessness of disposition, which delights in mischief and detests quiet. The same remarks will apply to the negro mechanics, who having a stated portion of labor to perform, are masters of the remainder of the day, when the work is ended.

The memorial closes with still other recommendations for the repression of free persons of color and a more strict police over negroes in general. On the whole, an authoritative expression of more reactionary sentiment would be hard to discover.

     Two years prior to this excitement a pamphleteer had written “We regard our negroes as the ‘Jacobins’ of the country, against whom we should always be upon our guard, and who, though we fear no permanent effects from any insurrectionary movement on their part, should be watched with an eye of steady and unremitted attention.”¹ In 1820 little heed seems to have been given to this writer; but when the terrible discovery of the great plot had been made, his words were read as those of a prophet.

     The fright of 1822 soon passed; no important changes in the general system were instituted; and the previous conditions of life and industry were in the main restored. That period of excitement, however, was epoch-making, in that it checked the growth of liberalism and prepared the community for its sensitive hostility to the Garrisonian agitation for the overthrow of negro slavery.

     During the remainder of the ante-bellum period the industrial and social conditions of the Charleston district underwent little change. The need for collective efficiency continued to be felt,

and in most cases the actual restrictions on labor were no more severe. Racial, industrial and legal classes were still by no means identical. That free persons of color had a really excellent industrial opportunity in Charleston, and that many of them used it to advantage, is proved by the tax lists of the city. The list for 1860, which is available in print, gives the names of 360 persons of color whose property was assessed in that year. The real estate owned by them was valued for taxation at $724,570. Of these 360 taxpayers, there were 130 who owned slaves aggregating 390 in number. The largest number of slaves held by a person of color was fourteen; the average number was three. In this list of persons of color, thirteen were classed as Indians; their real estate aggregated $73,300, and nine of them owned thirty-three slaves. It is quite probable, however, that most of these so-called Indians had a large infusion of negro blood. This showing of the wealth and slaveholding of the free persons of color demonstrates that industrial opportunity was fairly free for them, and that a number of mulattoes, at least, made large use of their chance to earn money and save it.

     By good fortune, we have a census of the city of Charleston for the year 1848,² which in its industrial tables gives complete data for a statistical view of the relation of racial, legal and industrial classes in the later ante-bellum period. In summary it is here presented. It shows how large was the intermingling of the races and legal classes in nearly all the important industrial occupations.³ Neither the public dread of disorder nor the class dislike of negro competition could arrest the forces that urged the community toward the increase of its industrial efficiency.

     The following table of slave prices is of value for study in many connections besides that in which it is here used. The prices quoted are the average prices, as well as can be ascertained, of prime field hands for the locality in the years stated. The averages for the Charleston district have been made from a great mass of manuscript bills of sale of slaves bought and sold in Charleston, recorded and now preserved among the archives in the state capitol at Columbia. The origin of the data for the Georgia cotton belt, and the method of handling the figures, have been explained in my article on the economic cost of slaveholding.¹

     A comparison of these two local tables shows that slave prices at Charleston after about 1800 were practically never above those prevailing in the upland cotton belt; but that the

interior usually offered a premium which often ranged from one hundred to several hundred dollars per head for prime field hands. The fact that in the face of this premium the planting families of the coast retained such a multitude of slaves in their district throughout the whole period shows that the spirit of the planters was not wholly commercial. It shows that the typical slaveholder of the coast deliberately and constantly preferred the career of the useful captain of industry to the life of the idle rich. Otherwise, the temptation to sell his slaves west would have been irresistible. There is abundant unconscious evidence that the typical planter had a controlling distaste for selling slaves except in emergencies. The dominating consideration with masters and mistresses was not that of great profit, but that of comfortable living in pleasant surroundings, with a consciousness of important duties well performed. However radical they might by force of circumstances become in politics, the Carolina planters were beyond question careful, moderate and intelligently conservative in matters of industry and social policy. But invincible powers, through largely misinformed sentiment, were being arrayed against them; and their unending task of race discipline was destined to most serious disturbance, if not, as it may prove, to permanent arrest.

     With the great Civil War and its aftermath we are not now concerned. The killing off of the flower of Carolina manhood in the war time, the heart-breaking sorrow of the women and the old men who stayed at home, the black despair of the oncoming generation, the great upheaval and demoralization in the so-called Reconstruction period and the gradual return thereafter to moderately healthful conditions do not lie within the scope of this paper. It remains only to attempt a general résumé of the situation in the later ante-bellum period.

     In the slaveholding districts there was fully as much particularism and competition among the industrial units as anywhere else in America. A condition of the life of the system, in such a region as the Carolina lowlands, was efficiency; and the increasing competition of the West called for an increase of efficiency if the relative standards of prosperity and of comfort were to be maintained. This affected both city and country and

was the direct concern of every member of the industrial and commercial community. The struggle for increased efficiency tended to make every laborer who was capable of self-direction free to direct his own industrial efforts and to promote his full equipment by education for his work. It tended to cause negroes, mulattoes and whites to be put upon the same industrial footing, and to cause the capable slave to be given industrial freedom, under the system of hiring him to himself or otherwise securing to him rewards in some measure proportional to the value of the work done by him. This was the economic requirement of the times.

     But the social requirement was largely in direct conflict with this. The community had always in contemplation the possibility of social death from negro upheaval and control, as illustrated in San Domingo, and the milder fate of industrial stagnation and decay from premature emancipation, as illustrated in Jamaica.¹ To save their commonwealth from approaching either fate, the Carolinians contended with might and main against any abolition to be imposed from without, and in their local regulations they introduced every possible safeguard against successful conspiracy. Through laws enacted, reenacted and fortified, they provided for strict patrol and general police, forbade the teaching of negroes to read, forbade masters to hire to slaves their time, forbade negroes to assemble without white persons being present, and restricted private emancipation. These laws were more or less observed or more or less disregarded according to the course of events and the play of public sentiment between the social and economic points of view.

     From the social point of view, all persons of color were of one class and regarded as all very possibly dangerous; from the

economic point of view all capable negroes and mulattoes were looked upon as the equals of the whites in their industrial class, and therefore meriting and requiring the same industrial freedom and incentive that the whites enjoyed. Public opinion oscillated between these two positions; but inclined more generally to the restrictive point of view after Vesey’s plot and during the Garrisonian agitation. Official policy in general inclined toward safeguarding society; but private policy was more controlled by economic needs, and in that highly individualistic community private policy largely dominated. Society and industry in fact confronted an impasse, and politics were at a loss to find a way out of it unless by the policy of drifting.

     In 1860, failing to solve its part of the world’s problem of equity in human relationships, the commonwealth clashed with the dominant idea of the period. In the championship of their system the planters and their neighbors were defeated, and their system was shattered as far as it could be by its victorious enemies encamped upon the field. But the pendulum swings again. Facts of human nature and the laws of civilized social welfare are too stubborn for the theories of negrophiles as well as of negrophobes. The slave labor problem has disappeared, but the negro problem remains.

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.