In my last, it was made to appear that the cost of employing Slave labor in Virginia over free labor in New-York, was equal to an addition of one dollar to every dollar now expended for labor. This loss, be it remembered, is not a loss merely to the employer, but is a loss to the whole body politic—an abstraction from the general wealth of Virginia, of the United States, and of the world.

And it by no means follows, that, by disposing of his slaves, as things are at present, and hiring free laborers, any farmer in Virginia can make a saving of 100 per cent. The principle of demand and supply here comes in. The laborer that, in New-York, gives a certain amount of exertion for a certain price, soon finds that for that price here a less amount of work is customarily expected. He adopts slave habits of labor—he suits his wares to the market. He sees that the capitalists of Virginia give a high price for a poor article—he furnishes the poor article. But there are also other laws, besides this of demand and supply, that affect this matter.

“Man is a social being.” The large amount of labor performed in Virginia is and long has been done by negroes. The negroes are a degraded people; degraded not merely by position, but actually immoral, low-lived; without healthy ambition, but little influenced by high moral considerations, and in regard to labor not [at] all affected by regard for duty. This is always recognized, and debasing fear, not cheering hope, is in general allowed to be the only stimulant to exertion. A capitalist was having a building erected in Petersburg, and his slaves were employed in carrying up the brick and mortar for the masons on their heads; a Northern man standing near remarked to him that they moved so indolently it seemed as if they were trying to see how long they could be in mounting the ladder without actually stopping. The builder started to reprove them, but after moving a step turned back and said, “It would only make them move more slowly still when I am not looking at them, if I should hurry them now—and what motive have they to do better? It’s no concern of theirs how long the masons wait. I am sure if I was in their place I shouldn’t move as fast as they do.”

Now let the white laborer come here from the North or from Europe; his nature demands a social life; shall he associate with the poor, slavish, degraded, low-lived, despised, unambitious negro, with whom labor and punishment are almost synonymous, or shall he be the friend and companion of the white man in whose mind labor is associated with no ideas of duty, responsibility, comfort, luxury, cultivation or elevation and expansion either of mind or estate—as it is, where the ordinary laborer is a free man, free to use his labor as a means of obtaining all these and all else that is to be respected, honored or envied in the world?

Associating with either or both is it possible that he will not be demoralized, hate labor, give as little of it for his hire as he can, become base, cowardly, faithless-“worse than a nigger.”

I ask you, Virginians, if this is not so—if you do not know it to be so? Is [117] not this a simple, reasonable, satisfactory explanation of those failures in the substitution of free laborers for slaves to which you are in the habit of referring as settling this question?

See you not that it is Slavery still, that, like the ship-worm, is noiselessly and imperceptibly ever opening the leaks by which your state, the greatest of all, the vanguard of the fleet, rolls helplessly water-logged far astern of all?

Nine out of ten of the thinking men of Virginia are so convinced, and whisper among themselves, what is to be done? And the rest of the crew double-shot the starboard battery, and loudly threaten what they will do if we of the North don’t mind our business, and quit advising and pitying them, and send back the rats that swim away from them.

Well, it’s all very true that we can’t help them, and that our attempts to do so only embarrass them, and that we have among us plenty of bad and more weak and foolish people that would do better to mind their own business and leave them to their fate; that we have beams enough in our own eyes; that the condition of some of our laborers is bad, as bad as theirs, worse than theirs; that this shows a rottenness in the planks of our system which we would do well to probe and study to mend. I am convinced of it all—the more so, the more sadly and earnestly so, for what I see here. There is wrong in both systems. Too much competition and self-seeking in our labor as there is too little in theirs. They prove it to me; I thank them for it; they cannot object if I, with no unkind or invidious purpose, frankly describe the nature of the evils they themselves have to deal with.

And they must understand that we have an interest and a certain responsibility in whatever of evil belongs to them, as we have in all that concerns the human family. That with a fair understanding of the nature of this evil, and of all its relations, we shall find that we have little or nothing to do about it ourselves, but to quietly wait and pray, for them in wisdom to move, is not improbable; and I hope and believe, that what I shall have occasion to write in regard to it, will favor such an understanding.

A proper appreciation of the difficulties that embarrass the people of the South in connection with the subject of Slavery, that lie in the way of any action favorable to even the amelioration of the condition of the slave by the action of law, would do more to restore friendly feeling and confidence between the two great sections of our country, than all the compromise measures that could be contrived, however strictly and conscientiously carried out. Only let it be known at the North in addition to a slight appreciation of these difficulties, that there was a general disposition to boldly, manfully, look them in the face, and to deal with them in a broad, Statesmanlike and Christian like spirit, and the fanaticism of Abolition is dead and buried.

Only let the North show a disposition in future to regard the subject of Slavery as one over which she has no control, let indignation be quieted and turned to the injustice, and barbarism in her midst, let fierce denunciation and [118] exciting appeals and even senselessly unpractical counsels be silenced, and I rejoice to state my conviction that in Virginia at least, hosts of great, good, and talented men, are all ready and earnestly purposed to give themselves with all their energies to the mighty task.

Even the men who have no concern above dollars and cents are well convinced this day, and it is commonly calculated among them, that if the Slaves could be quietly removed from their limits, the State would fill up so rapidly with free-men, and its sources of wealth would be so much more speedily and economically developed, that in five years’ time the increase in the value of all real estate would more than pay for the value that the Slaves are now reckoned by their masters to be worth.

I am ready to give it as my present opinion, after what I have seen already of Slavery, that the African race whether it has been elevated or degraded by subjection to the whites of the South, is in many respects, and shows itself in the majority of instances to be, happier, intellectually, morally and physically, in Slavery than in what passes at the South under the name of Freedom, and that almost is the only freedom that it is practicable at present to be permitted to it.

Slavery in Virginia, up to the present time, however it has improved the general character and circumstances of the race of miserable black barbarians that several generations since were introduced here, has done nothing to prepare it, and is yet doing nothing to prepare it, for the free and enlightened exercise of individual independence and responsibility. THEREFORE, is Slavery the greatest sin and shame upon any nation or people on God’s earth. The slaveholders say that we and others, by our impracticable interference, are responsible for this sin and shame. Let God judge, and let us keep silence.

I wish now to give you some idea of the condition of the freed blacks at the South; in Virginia. I shall incidentally refer to the condition of those at the North.

In one county of Virginia, a few years ago, an inventory and estimate of the value of the property of all the free blacks was made by order of the magistracy. With one exception the highest value placed upon the property of an individual was two dollars and a half ($2.50.) The person excepted owned one hundred and fifty acres of land, a cabin upon it, a mule and some implements. He had a family, including only his wife and children, of nine. Of provisions for their support, there were in the house, at the time of the visit of the appraisers, a peck and a half of Indian meal and part of a herring. The man was then absent to purchase some more meal, but had no money, and was to give his promise to pay in wood, which he was to cut from his farm. And this was in Winter.

This shows their general poverty. That this poverty is not the result of want of facilities or security for accumulating property, is proved by the exceptional instances of considerable wealth existing among them. An account of the [119] death of a free colored man who devised by will property to the amount of thirty thousand dollars, has been lately in the newspapers. I have ascertained the general accuracy of the narration though one somewhat important circumstance was omitted. It was stated that the man preferred that his children should continue in the condition of slaves, and gave his property to a man who was to be their master. He gave as a reason for this that he had personally examined the condition of the free blacks in Philadelphia and Boston, as well as in Virginia, and he preferred that his children should remain slaves, knowing that their master would take better care of them than they were capable of exercising for themselves. This was substantially correct, and I have conversed with a gentleman who tried to persuade him to act otherwise, to whom he gave these reasons. He had been, however, for a long time before his death, in a low state of health, and I know not how sound, or uninfluenced by others, his mind might have been. The circumstance omitted was, that these were illegitimate children, by a slave woman, although he had a wife that was a free woman, and had had a child by her—which, however, died young. It is a general custom of white people here to leave their illegitimate children, by slaves (and they are very common) in slavery. The man was himself a mulatto. I know of a very respectable and very wealthy man who sold his own half-brother to the traders to go South, because he attempted to run away.

I have heard of another case of a free negro in Virginia, supposed to be worth at least $5,000.

At the present rate of wages, any free colored man can accumulate property more rapidly in Virginia than almost any man, depending solely on his labor, can at the North. In the tobacco factories in Richmond and Petersburg slaves are at this time in great demand, and are paid one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars, and all expenses, for a year. These slaves are expected to work only to a certain extent for their employers; it having been found that they could not be “driven” to do a fair day’s work so easily as they could be stimulated to it by the offer of a bonus for all they would manufacture above a certain number of pounds. This quantity is so easily exceeded that the slaves earn for themselves from five to twenty dollars a month. Freemen are paid for all they do at rates which make their labor equally profitable, and can earn, if they give but moderate attention and diligence to the labor, very large sums. The barber under the Bollingbroke Hotel has a younger brother, who works in a tobacco factory, whose wages last year amounted to over nine hundred dollars. Of this he has laid up not one cent, and such is the case with nearly all the hands so employed in the town; they spend their wages as do the slaves their “over money,” almost as rapidly as they receive it, and as foolishly and as much to their own injury as do sailors, or the manufacturing workmen in England. Of the truth of this, I have assurances from every quarter, and from men of all opinions.

Formerly, I am told, the slaves were accustomed to recreate themselves in the evening and on holidays a great deal in dancing, and that they took [120] great enjoyment in this exercise. It was at length, however, preached against, and the “professors” so generally induced to use their influence against it as an immoral practice, that it has greatly gone “out of fashion,” and in place of it the young ones have got into the habit of gambling, and worse occupations, for the pastime of their holidays and leisure hours. I have not seen any dancing during these holidays, nor any amusement engaged in by the blacks that was not essentially gross, dissipating or wasteful, unless I except firing of crackers.

Improvidence is generally considered here a natural trait of African character; and by none is it more so than by the negroes themselves. I think it is a mistake. Negroes, as far as I have observed at the North, although suffering from the contamination of habits acquired by themselves or their fathers in Slavery, unless they are intemperate, are more provident than whites of equal educational advantages. Much more so than the newly-arrived Irish, though the Irish are soon infected with the desire of accumulating wealth and acquiring permanent means of comfort. This opinion is confirmed by the experience of the City Missionaries—one of whom has informed me that where the very poorest classes of New-York reside, black and white in the same house, the rooms occupied by the blacks are generally much less bare of furniture and the means of subsistence than those of the whites.

I observed that the negroes themselves follow the notion of the whites here, and look upon the people of their race as naturally unfitted to provide for themselves far ahead. Accustomed like children to have all their necessary wants provided for. their whole energies and powers of mind are habitually given to obtaining the means of temporary ease and enjoyment. Their masters and the poor or “mean” whites acquire somewhat of the same habits from early association with them, calculate on it in them, do not wish to cure it, and by constant practices encourage it. The negroes depend much for the means of enjoying themselves on presents. Their good-natured masters (and their masters are very good-natured. though capricious and quick-tempered) like to gratify them, and are ashamed to disappoint them—to be thought mean. So it follows that with the free negroes, habit is upon them; the habits of their associates, slaves. make the custom of society—that strongest of agents upon weak minds. The whites think improvidence a natural defect of character with them, expect it of them as they grow old, or as they lose easy means of gaining a livelihood, charitably furnish it to them; expect them to pilfer; do not look upon it as a crime; if they do, at least, consider them but slightly to blame, as, indeed, they are; and so every influence of association is unfavorable to providence, forethought, economy. I shall continue this subject in my next.