The exporting of labor, at whatever price it might be sold, he
likened to a farmer's conversion of his plow teams into cash instead of
using them in his work. According to these views, he concluded, "the
highest prices yet obtained from the foreign purchasers of our slaves have
never left a profit to the state or produced pecuniary benefit to general
interests. And even if prices should continue to increase, as there is good
reason to expect and to dread, until they reach $2000 or more for the best
laborers, or $1200 for the general average of ages and sexes, these prices,
though necessarily operating to remove every slave from Virginia, will
still cause loss to agricultural and general interests in every particular
sale, and finally render the state a desert and a ruin."[78]
[Footnote 78: Edmund Ruffin, "The Effects of High Prices of Slaves," in
_DeBow's Review_, XXVI, 647-657 (June, 1859).]
At Charleston a similar plaint was voiced by L.W. Spratt. In early years
when the African trade was open and slaves were cheap, said he, in the
Carolina lowlands "enterprise found a profitable field, and necessarily
therefore the fortunes of the country bloomed and brightened.
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