The Impending Crisis of the South; How to Meet It

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1857 edition. Excerpt: ...and break down New-York, Philadelphia and Boston! Again they resolve and reresolve, and yet there is not a single ton more shipped and not a single article added to the wealth of the South. But, gentlemen, "they never invite such men as I am to attend their Conventions. They know that I would tell them that slavery is the cause of their poverty, and that I will tell them that what they are aiming at is the dissolution of the Union--that they may be prepared to strike for that whenever the nation rises. They well know that by slave labor the very propositions which they make can never be realized; yet when we show these things, they cry out, ' Oh, Cotton is King!' But when we look at the statistics, we find that so far from Cotton being King, Grass is King. There are nine articles'of staple productions which are larger than that of cotton in this country." " I suppose it does not follow because slavery is endeavoring to modify the great dicta of our fathers, that cotton and free labor are incompatible. In the extreme South, at New Orleans, the laboring men--the stevedores and hackmen on the levee, where the heat is intensified by the proximity of the red brick buildings, are all white men, and they are in the full enjoyment of health. But how about cotton 1 I am informed by a friend of mine--himself a slaveholder, and therefore good authority--that in Northwestern Texas, among the German settlements, who, true to their national instincts, will not employ the labor of a slave--they produce more cotton to the acre, and of a better quality, and selling at prices from a cent to a cent and a half a pound higher than that produced by slave labor. This is an experiment that illustrates what I have always held, that whatever is...