supply themselves and their slaves with food; certainly not more than enough to do so, on an average. To this the Southern agricultural periodicals frequently testify. They generally raise nothing for sale, but cotton. And of cotton their sale, as has been shown, amounted in 1849—a favourable year—to less than the value of twenty-five dollars for each slave, young and old, which they had kept through the year.[1] Deducting those who hold slaves only as domestic servants from the whole number of slaveholders returned by the Census, more than half of all the slaveholders, and fully half of all the cotton-sellers, own each, not more than one family, on an average, of five slaves of all ages.[2] The ordinary total cash income, then, in time of peace, of fully half our cotton-planters, cannot be reckoned at more than one hundred and twenty-five dollars, or, in extraordinary years, like the last, at, say, one hundred and fifty dollars. From this they must purchase whatever clothing and other necessaries they require for the yearly supply of an average of more than ten persons (five whites and five slaves), as well as obtain tools, mechanics' work and materials, and whatever is necessary for carrying on the work of a plantation, usually of some hundred acres,[3] and must yet save enough to pay the fees of doctors, clergy, and lawyers, if they have had occasion to employ them, and their county and state taxes (we will say nothing of the education of their children, or of accumulations for the war expenses of the Confederation). My personal experience of the style of living of the greater number of cotton-planters
- ↑ There have been much larger aggregate crops since, and the price may be a cent more to the planter, but the number of slaves drawn to the larger plantations in the meantime has increased in quite equal proportion.
- ↑ Census Compend., p. 95.
- ↑ The average size of plantations in the South-west, including the farms and "patches" of the non-slaveholders, is 273 acres (p. 170, C. Compend.). Cotton plantations are not generally of less than 400 acres.
