what is to be their future condition, unless some mode of employment be devised to improve it? A noble race of people! reduced to a condition but little above the wild Indian of the forest, or the European gipsy, without education, and, in many instances, unable to procure the food necessary to develop the natural man. They seem to be the only class of people in our State who are not disposed to emigrate to other countries, while our wealthy and intelligent citizens are leaving us by scores, taking with them the treasures which have been accumulated by mercantile thrift, as well as by the growth of cotton and the consequent exhaustion of the soil."
Says Governor Hammond, also of South Carolina, in an
address before the South Carolina Institute:—
"According to the best calculations which, in the absence of statistic
facts, can be made, it is believed that, of the 300,000 white inhabitants of
South Carolina, there are not less than 50,000, whose industry, such as it
is, and compensated as it is, is not, in the present condition of things, and
does not promise, hereafter, to be, adequate to procure them, honestly,
such a support as every white person in this country is and feels himself
entitled to.
"Some cannot be said to work at all. They obtain a precarious subsistence by occasional jobs, by hunting, by fishing, sometimes by plundering fields or folds, and, too often, by what is, in its effects, far worse—trading with slaves, and seducing them to plunder for their benefit."
In another part of the same address, Governor Hammond
says, that "$18 or, at the most $19, will cover the whole
necessary annual cost of a full supply of wholesome and
palatable food, purchased in the market;" meaning, generally,
in South Carolina. From a comparison of these two extracts,
it will be evident that $19 per annum is high wages for the
labour of one-sixth of all the white population of South
Carolina—and that one-sixth exclusive of the classes not
obliged to labour for their living.
South Carolina affords the fairest example of the tendency of the Southern policy, because it is the oldest cotton State, and because slavery has been longest and most strongly and completely established there. But the same laws are seen in
