"
[Footnote 89: Sir Charles Lyell, _Second Visit to the United States_
(London, 1850), II, 35, 84, 85.]
The planters, who were the principal Southern capitalists, trod in a
vicious circle. They bought lands and slaves wherewith to grow cotton,
and with the proceeds ever bought more slaves to make more cotton; and
oftentimes they borrowed heavily on their lands and slaves as collateral in
order to enlarge their scale of production the more speedily. When slave
prices rose the possessors of those in the cotton belt seldom took profit
from the advance, for it was a rare planter who would voluntarily sell his
operating force. When crops failed or prices fell, however, the loans might
be called, the mortgages foreclosed, and the property sold out at panic
levels. Thus while the slaves had a guarantee of their sustenance, their
proprietors, themselves the guarantors, had a guarantee of nothing. By
virtue, or more properly by vice, of the heavy capitalization of the
control of labor which was a cardinal feature of the ante-bellum regime,
they were involved in excessive financial risks.
The slavery system has often been said to have put so great a stigma on
manual labor as to have paralyzed the physical energies of the Southern
white population.
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