]
About the same time Dr. Thomas Cooper, president of South Carolina College,
wrote: "Slave labour is undoubtedly the dearest kind of labour; it is all
forced, and forced too from a class of human beings who have the least
propensity to voluntary labour even when it is to benefit themselves
alone." The cost of rearing a slave to the age of self support, he
reckoned, including insurance, at forty dollars a year for fifteen years.
The usual work of a slave field hand, he thought, was barely two-thirds of
what a white laborer at usual wages would perform, and from his earnings
about forty dollars a year must be deducted for his maintenance. When
interest on the investment and a proportion of an overseer's wages were
deducted in addition, he thought the prevalent rate, six to eight dollars
a month and board valued at forty or fifty dollars a year, for free white
farm hands in the Northern states gave a decisive advantage to those who
hired laborers over those who owned them. "Nothing will justify slave
labour in point of economy," he concluded, "but the nature of the soil and
climate which incapacitates a white man from labouring in the summer time,
as on the rich lands in Carolina and Georgia extending one hundred miles
from the seaboard.
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