At this time I engaged a gardener, who had been boarding for a month or two in New York, and paying for his board and lodging $3 a week. I saw him at the dinner-table of his boarding house, and I knew that the table was better supplied with a variety of wholesome food, and was more attractive, than that of the majority of slaveowners with whom I have dined.
Amasa Walker, formerly Secretary of State in Massachusetts, is the authority for the following table, showing the average wages of a common (field-hand) labourer in Boston (where immigrants are constantly arriving, and where, consequently, there is often a necessity, from their ignorance and accidents, of charity, to provide for able bodied persons), and the prices of ten different articles of sustenance, at three different periods:—
Wages of Labour and Food at Boston.
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| 1836. | 1840. | 1843.
| Wages. | Wages. | Wages.
|$1.25 per day.|$1 per day.|$1 per day.
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| Dollars. | Dollars. | Dollars.
1 barrel flour | 9.50 | 5.50 | 4.75
25 lbs. sugar, at 9c. | 2.25 | 2.00 | 1.62
10 gals. molasses, 42-1/2c.| 4.25 | 2.70 | 1.80
100 lbs. pork | 4.50 | 8.50 | 5.00
14 lbs. coffee, 12-1/2c. | 1.75 | 1.50 | 5.00
28 lbs. rice | 1.25 | 1.00 | 75
1 bushel corn meal | 96 | 65 | 62
1 do rye meal | 1.08 | 83 | 73
30 lbs. butter, 22c. | 6.60 | 4.80 | 4.20
20 lbs. cheese, 10c. | 2.00 | 1.60 | 1.40
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| 44.00 | 28.98 | 22.00
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This shows that in 1836 it required the labour of thirty-four and a half days to pay for the commodities mentioned; while in 1840 it required only the labour of twenty-nine days, and in 1843 that of only twenty-three and a half days to pay
