Men are demented upon the subject. A reverse will surely
come."[29]
[Footnote 29: _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Jan. 17, 1860,
reprinted with endorsement in the _Southern Banner_ (Athens, Ga.), Jan. 26,
1860, and reprinted in _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 73, 74.]
The fever was likewise raging in the western South,[30] and it persisted
until the end of 1860. Indeed the peak of this price movement was evidently
cut off by the intervention of war. How great an altitude it might have
reached, and what shape its downward slope would have taken had peace
continued, it is idle to conjecture. But that a crash must have come is
beyond a reasonable doubt.
[Footnote 30: Prices at Lebanon, Tenn., and Franklin, Ky., are given in
_Hunt's Merchants' Magazine_, XI, 774 (Dec., 1859).]
The Charleston _Mercury_[31] attributed the advance of slave prices in the
fifties mainly to the demand of the railroads for labor. This was borne
out in some degree by the transactions of the railroad companies whose
headquarters were in that city. The president of the Charleston and
Savannah Railroad Company, endorsing the arguments which had been advanced
by a writer in _DeBows Review_,[32] recommended in his first annual report,
1855, an extensive purchase of slaves for the company's construction gangs,
reckoning that at the price of $1,000, with interest at 7 per cent.
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