- ceivable how little labour a slave, or a company of slaves, will accomplish
in a given time. Their awkwardness, their slowness, the utter absence of all skill and ingenuity in accomplishing the work before them, are absolutely painful to one who has been accustomed to seeing work done with any sort of spirit and life. Often they spend hours in doing what, with a little thought, might be despatched in a few moments, or perhaps avoided altogether. This is a necessary result of employing labour which is without intelligence and without motive. I have often thought of a remark made to me by a planter, in New Kent County, Virginia. We were riding past a field where some of his hands were making a sort of wicker-work fence, peculiar to Eastern Virginia. 'There,' said he, in a decidedly fretted tone, 'those "boys" have beendays in making that piece of fence.' I expressed my astonishment that they could have spent so much time, and yet have accomplished so very little. He assured me it was so—and after a slight pause, the tones of his voice entirely changed, said: 'Well, I believe they have done as well as I would in their circumstances!' And so it is. The slave is without motive, without inducement to exertion. His food, his clothing, and all his wants are supplied as they are, without care on his part, and when these are supplied he has nothing more to hope for. He can make no provision for old age, he can lay up nothing for his children, he has no voice at all in the disposal of the results of his earnings. What cares he whether his labour is productive or unproductive. His principal care seems to be to accomplish just as little as possible. I have said that the slaves were without ingenuity—I must qualify that remark. I have been amused and astonished at their exceeding ingenuity in avoiding and slighting the work that was required of them. It has often seemed to me that their principal mental efforts were in this direction, and I think your correspondent will find universal testimony that they have decided talent in this line.
"H. W. P."
In a volume entitled "Notes on Uncle Tom's Cabin; being
a Logical Answer to its Allegations and Inferences against
Slavery as an Institution," by the Rev. E. J. Stearns, of Maryland
(much the most thorough review of that work made from
the Southern stand-point), the author, who is a New-Englander
by birth, shows, by an elaborate calculation, that in Maryland,
the cost of a negro, at twenty-one years of age, has been, to the
man who raised him, eight hundred dollars. Six per cent.
interest on this cost, with one and three-quarters per cent. for
