The racial antipathy felt by the alien whites, along with
their cultural repugnance and economic apprehensions, intrenched the
negroes permanently in the situation. The most fertile Southern areas when
once converted into black belts tended, and still tend as strongly as ever,
to be tilled only by inert negroes, the majority of whom are as yet perhaps
less efficient in freedom than their forbears were as slaves.
The drain of funds involved in the purchase of slaves was impressive to
contemporaries. Thus Governor Spotswood wrote from Virginia to the British
authorities in 1711 explaining his assent to a L5 tax upon the importation
of slaves. The members of the legislature, said he, "urged what is really
true, that the country is already ruined by the great number of negros
imported of late years, that it will be impossible for them in many years
to discharge the debts already contracted for the purchase of those negroes
if fresh supplys be still poured upon them while their tobacco continues so
little valuable, but that the people will run more and more in debt."[87]
And in 1769 a Charleston correspondent wrote to a Boston journal: "A
calculation having been made of the amount of purchase money of slaves
effected here the present year, it is computed at L270,000 sterling, which
sum will by that means be drained off from this province.
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