was expressed, it was that I had under-estimated the superior economy of free-labour. As affording evidence more valuable than my own on this important point, from the better opportunities of forming sound judgment, which a residence at different times, in both Virginia and a Free State had given the writers, I have reprinted, in an Appendix, two of these letters, together with a quantity of other testimony from Southern witnesses on this subject, which I beg the reader, who has any doubt of the correctness of my information, not to neglect.
"Driving."—On mentioning to a gentleman in Virginia
(who believed that slave-labour was better and cheaper than
free-labour), Mr. Griscom's observation, he replied: that with-*out
doubting the correctness of the statement of that particular
instance, he was sure that if four men did not harvest more
than an acre of wheat a day, they could not have been well
"driven." He knew that, if properly driven, threatened with
punishment, and punished if necessary, negroes would do as
much work as it was possible for any white man to do. The
same gentleman, however, at another time, told me that
negroes were seldom punished; not oftener, he presumed, than
apprentices were, at the North; that the driving of them was
generally left to overseers, who were the laziest and most
worthless dogs in the world, frequently not demanding higher
wages for their services than one of the negroes whom they
were given to manage might be hired for. Another gentleman
told me that he would rather, if the law would permit it,
have some of his negroes for overseers, than any white man
he had ever been able to obtain in that capacity.
Another planter, whom I requested to examine a letter on the subject, that I had prepared for the Times, that he might, if he could, refute my calculations, or give me any facts of an opposite character, after reading it said: "The truth is, that,
