Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/59

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LETTER ON SLAVERY.
47


has the advantage of raising tropical productions, which cannot be grown in Europe. The agricultural products of the South which find their way to foreign lands, are mainly cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. The entire value of these articles raised in the fifteen slave States in that year, was $74,866,310; while the agricultural productions, the single State of New York amounted in the year to $108,275,281.

The value of articles manufactured in the South was $42,178,184; in the free States $197,658,040. In the slave States there were, in various manufactories, 246,601 spindles; in Rhode Island, the smallest of the free States, 518,817. The aggregate annual earnings of all the slave States was $ 403,429,718 ; of the free, $ 658,705,108. The annual earnings of six slave States—North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, amount to $ 189,321,719; those of the State of New York to $ 193,806,433, more than $ 4,000,000 above the income of six famous States. The annual earnings of Massachusetts alone are more than $9,000,000 greater than the united earnings of three slave States,—South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. The earnings of South Carolina, with her population of 594,398, about equals that of the county of Essex, in Massachusetts, with less than 95,000. In 1839, in the South there were built houses to the value of $ 14,421,441; and in the North, to the value of $27,496,560. The ships built by the South that year were valued at $ 704,289 ; by the North, at $ 6,301,805. In 1846, the absolute debt of aU the free States was $ 109,176,527. The actual productive State-property of those States, including the school fund, was $ 96,630,285,—leaving the actual indebtedness above their State-property only $10,546,242. The absolute debt of the slave States was $ 55,948,373 ; their productive State-property, including their school funds, $ 30,294,428—leaving their actual indebtedness above their State-property $ 25,653,945, more than twice the corresponding indebtedness of the North.

Besides this, it must be remembered that in the free States there are 45,569 men engaged in the learned professions, while in the slave States there are but 20,292. In addition to that, in all the free States there are many em-