The slave-owners know this, and it is
the cause of their fury. They know, as all know who have attended to
the subject, that confinement within existing limits is its
death-warrant. Slavery, under the conditions in which it exists in the
States, exhausts even the beneficent powers of nature. So incompatible
is it with any kind whatever of skilled labor, that it causes the
whole productive resources of the country to be concentrated on one or
two products, cotton being the chief, which require, to raise and
prepare them for the market, little besides brute animal force. The
cotton cultivation, in the opinion of all competent judges, alone
saves North American slavery; but cotton cultivation, exclusively
adhered to, exhausts in a moderate number of years all the soils which
are fit for it, and can only be kept up by travelling farther and
farther westward. Mr. Olmsted has given a vivid description of the
desolate state of parts of Georgia and the Carolinas, once among the
richest specimens of soil and cultivation in the world; and even the
more recently colonized Alabama, as he shows, is rapidly following in
the same downhill track.
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