who are able to live on smaller profits, and to give their blasted fields some rest, are thus pushing off the many, who are merely independent.
"Of the twenty millions of dollars annually realized from the sales of the cotton crop of Alabama, nearly all not expended in supporting the producers is reinvested in land and negroes. Thus the white population has decreased, and the slave increased, almost pari passu in several counties of our State. In 1825, Madison county cast about 3,000 votes; now she cannot cast exceeding 2,300. In traversing that county one will discover numerous farm-*houses, once the abode of industrious and intelligent freemen, now occupied by slaves, or tenantless, deserted, and dilapidated; he will observe fields, once fertile, now unfenced, abandoned, and covered with those evil harbingers—fox-tail and broom-sedge; he will see the moss growing on the mouldering walls of once thrifty villages: and will find 'one only master grasps the whole domain' that once furnished happy homes for a dozen white families. Indeed, a country in its infancy, where, fifty years ago, scarce a forest tree had been felled by the axe of the pioneer is already exhibiting the painful signs of senility and decay apparent in Virginia and the Carolinas; the freshness of its agricultural glory is gone; the vigour of its youth is extinct, and the spirit of desolation seems brooding over it."
What inducement has capital in railroads or shops or books
or tools to move into districts like this, or which are to become
like this? Why, rather, I shall be asked, does it not withdraw
more completely? Why do not all, who are able,
remove from a region so desolate? Why was not its impoverishment
more complete, more simultaneous? How is it
that any slaveholders yet remain? The "venerable Edmund
Ruffin," president of the Virginia State Agricultural Society,
shall answer:[1]
"The causes are not all in action at once, and in equal progress. The
labours of exhausting culture, also, are necessarily suspended as each of the
cultivators' fields is successively worn out. And when tillage so ceases,
and any space is thus left at rest, nature immediately goes to work to
recruit and replace as much as possible of the wasted fertility, until another
destroyer, after many years, shall return, again to waste, and in much
shorter time than before, the smaller stock of fertility so renewed. Thus
the whole territory, so scourged, is not destroyed at one operation. But
though these changes and partial recoveries are continually, to some extent
- ↑ Address before the South Carolina Institute.
