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slaves of the south from coming to the northern states, and drives those of the north to the south.
The want of free hands is felt in a state in proportion as the number of slaves decreases. But in proportion as labour is performed by free hands, slave-labour becomes less productive; and the slave is then a useless or an onerous possession, whom it is important to export to those southern states where the same competition is not to be feared. Thus the abolition of slavery does not set the slave free, but it merely transfers him from one master to another, and from the north to the south.
The emancipated negroes, and those born after the abolition of slavery, do not, indeed, migrate from the north to the south; but their situation with regard to the Europeans is not unlike that of the aborigines of America; they remain half civilized, and deprived of their rights in the midst of a population which is far superior to them in wealth and in knowledge; where they are exposed to the tyranny of the laws,[1] and the intolerance of the people. On some accounts they are still more to be pitied than the Indians, since they are haunted by the reminiscence of slavery, and they cannot claim possession of a single portion of the soil: many of them perish miserably,[2] and the rest congregate in the great towns, where they perform the meanest offices, and lead a wretched and precarious existence.
But even if the number of negroes continued to increase as rapidly as when they were still in a state of slavery, as the number of whites augments with twofold rapidity since the abolition of slavery, the blacks would soon be, as it were, lost in the midst of a strange population.
A district which is cultivated by slaves is in general more scantily peopled than a district cultivated by free labour: moreover, America is still a new country, and a state is therefore not half peopled
- ↑ The states in which slavery is abolished usually do what they can to render their territory disagreeable to the negroes as a place of residence, and as a kind of emulation exists between the different states in this respect, the unhappy blacks can only choose the least of the evils which beset them.
- ↑ There is a very great difference between the mortality of the blacks and of the whites in the states in which slavery is abolished; from 1820 to 1831 only one out of forty-two individuals of the white population died in Philadelphia; but one negro out of twenty-one individuals of the black population died in the same space of time. The mortality is by no means so great among the negroes who are still slaves. (See Emmerson's Medical Statistics, p. 28.)
