The slave State which has increased most rapidly to the square mile of all of them from 1790 to 1860, has had a smaller augmentation per square mile than that free State which has increased most slowly per square mile during the same time of all the free States, and the result is the same as to wealth and education also. Under the best circumstances for the slave States, and the worst for the free States, this result proves the uniformity of the rule (like the great law of gravitation), knowing no exception to the effect of slavery, in depressing the progress of States in population, wealth, and education. Would we then in all these advance more rapidly, we must remove slavery and negroism, the retarding cause. I know it is asked, how shall we then cultivate the cotton lands of the South without slaves? This does not apply to the border States; but before closing these letters, I will prove conclusively, by the census and other statistics, what, from long residence in the South, and from having traversed every Southern State, I know to be true, that cotton is now raised there most extensively and profitably by non-slaveholders, and upon farms using exclusively white labor. Indeed the cotton raised on small farms in the South where there are no slaves and exclusively by free white labor, commands a price from five to ten per cent. greater than the slave grown cotton. In Texas, especially, it is a great truth, that skilled, educated, persevering, and energetic free labor, engaged voluntarily for wages or its own use, would, in time, when aided by improved culture and machinery, produce much larger crops and better cotton than now raised by the forced and ignorant labor of slaves, and at a much cheaper rate, at a far greater profit, than any crop now produced in the North, and in a more salubrious climate. In western Texas, counties on the same parallel with New Orleans, and a little north and south, cultivated mainly by Germans without slaves, produced large quantities of the best cotton, and the supply with augmented labor might be increased almost indefinitely. Having thrice visited Texas, and traversed nearly the whole State, north, south, east, and west, I speak from personal knowledge. In one county, I observed first rate wheat, cotton, and sugar cane growing in adjacent fields, and the soil and climate well adapted for all three crops. In Texas, the product of wheat has increased from 41.79 bushels in 1850, to 1,464,273 bushels in 1860, and the number of bales of cotton from 58,072 in 1850, to 405,100 bales in 1860, far exceeding the rate of increase in any other State. (See table of Census, No. 36, pp. 200, 210.) Having very nearly six times the area of New York, Texas, when cultivated by free labor, can produce cotton enough to clothe the people of the world, and supply all Europe with wheat also. The rapid colonization of Texas by freemen ought to add to our wealth, in this decade, a sum equal to the present debt of the United States, and terminate in our favor the effort to supplant us in the supply of cotton for the world.
The isothermals of the great Humboldt (differing so widely from parallels), which trace the lines of temperature on the earth's surface, prove, as to heat, the climate of the South (running a line from Charleston to Vicksburg) to be substantially the same as that of Greece and Italy—each, in its turn, the mistress of the world. I know, when, the term isothermal was used in my inaugural as Governor of Kansas, it was represented by some of our present rebel leaders, to the masses of the South, as some terrible monster, perhaps the Yankee sea serpent; but I now use the term again in no offence, from its important application to the present case, and knowing that what I now advise would produce incalculable benefits to the whole country, but especially to the South. Indeed, if Texas, with her 274,356 square miles of area, with her salubrious climate, and fertile soil, already worked to a great extent by free labor, were a free State, she would, in time, contain a larger population than any State of the Union. Texas has much more than five times the area of England proper, and, with the same population to the square mile, would contain more than one hundred millions of people. Having, in 1837, offered in the Senate of the United States, and carried, the resolution, recognizing the independence of Texas, first proposing in my letter of the 8th January, 1844, the mode, by compact (alone practicable), by which, on my motion, Texas was admitted into the Union, distinctly advocating, in this letter, the reannexation of Texas, with, a view to secure the ultimate disappearance of slavery and negroism from the whole country, in opposition to the object officially avowed by Mr. Calhoun, to annex Texas for the purpose of perpetuating slavery, I shall, in a future letter, discuss this subject, involving not only our furnishing a certain abundant supply of cheap cotton, but securing the real monopoly of this great product, due to our peculiar soil and climate, and thus ultimately increasing our products and manufactures thousands of millions of dollars, and giving us the control of the commerce of the world.
If Maryland would only initiate this policy, and come now to the rescue of the Union from rebellion and foreign intervention, she would inscribe her name first of all the States on the page of history and in the gratitude of our country and mankind. The position of Maryland upon the Chesapeake, the Potomac, the Susquehanna, and Atlantic, is most commanding. She surrounds the Capitol. It was her own noble donation, and she is its natural guardian and sentinel. Her waters, cutting the Blue mountains and the Alleghany, flow into the Atlantic and Mississippi, thus making her an eastern and a western State. Throughout all her borders, not a citizen would lose anything by the change proposed, but all would be enriched. Take down the barriers of slavery, and a new and unprecedented current of population and capital would flow into the State. Property would rise immensely in value, the price of her lands would soon reach those of Pennsylvania, new towns and cities would spring into life, Cumberland would soon equal the great manufacturing sites of the North, and the railroad to Pittsburg would soon be completed. Baltimore would fulfil her mighty destiny, and the present canal up the Susquehanna, easily enlarged, so as to equal the grand work of New York, would connect her with Lakes Erie and Ontario. That canal already unites the Susquehanna from the Chesapeake with the lakes by the Seneca route (as it should by the Chenango also), and only requires to be enlarged to the extent of the Erie Canal, and the locks also, as wisely proposed in regard to that great work. This would at once develop the great iron and coal mines of the Susquehanna (anthracite and bituminous), supply western and central New York, and the great region of the lakes, and the Chesapeake with these articles, so essential in war and peace. Let the locks of the Erie Canal be enlarged as proposed, and the ship canal from the Illinois river to Chicago constructed; but in justice to Pennsylvania and Maryland, as vastly important for commerce and revenue, and as a war measure for the cheap construction of iron-clad gunboats in the great coal and iron region, and the defence of the lakes, the Chesapeake, the Delaware, the Albemarle, and of the capital of the Union, let this canal be enlarged also.
While this system of gradual emancipation would greatly promote the material interests of Maryland, and of all the border States, the President does not overstate its influence in crushing the rebellion and restoring peace.
Maryland, the border States, and the South would then indeed commence a new career of progress, by removing slavery and negroism; and their augmented wealth, and that of the whole country, would soon return to the Government, in increased revenue, a sum far exceeding the cost of gradual emancipation and colonization. Indeed, if, as a mere financial question, I was devising the most effective plan for liquidating the national debt and reducing our taxes, it would be thus vastly to augment our wealth and population by adopting this system.
The census of 1860 exhibits our increase of population from 1790 to 1860 at 35.59 per cent., and of our wealth 126.45. Now, if we would increase the wealth of the country only one tenth in the next ten years, by the gradual disappearance of slavery and negroism (far below the results of the census), then, our wealth being now $16,159,616,068, the effect of such increase would be to make our wealth in 1870, instead of $36,593,450,585, more than sixteen hundred millions greater, being more than three times our present debt, and in 1880, instead of $82,865,868,849, over three billions six hundred millions more, or more than seven times our present debt.
Before the close of this letter, it will be shown that the difference, per capita, of the annual products of Massachusetts and Maryland exceeds $120. As to the other Southern States, the excess is much greater. Now, if the annual products of the South were increased $120 each per capita (still far below Massachusetts) by the exclusion of slavery, then multiplying the total population of the South, 12,229,727, by 120, the result would be an addition to the annual value of the products of the South of $1,467,567,240, and in the decade, $14,675,672,400; the first amount being three times our debt on the 1st July, 1862, and the last sum thirty times our debt on that day. This change would not be immediate, but there can be no doubt that, with the vastly greater natural advantages of the South, the superiority of free to slave labor, the immense immigration, especially from Europe to the South, aided by the Homestead bill, and the conversion of large plantations into small farms, an addition of at least one billion of dollars would be made, by the exclusion of slavery, to the value of the products of the South, in the ten years from 1870 to 1880, which sum is more than double our public debt on the 1st July last.
Having considered the relative progress in population of Massachusetts and Maryland, I will now examine their advance in wealth.
By tables 33 and 36, census of 1860, the value of the products of Massachusetts that year was $283,000,000; and of Maryland, $65,583,000. Table 33 included domestic manufactures, mines, and fisheries (p. 59); and table 36, agricultural products. Dividing these several aggregates by the total population of each State, the value of that year's product of Massachusetts was $229.88 per capita, and of Maryland, $95.45, making the average annual value of the labor of each person in the former greatly more than double that of the latter, and the gross product more than quadruple. This is an amazing result, but it is far below the reality. The earnings of commerce and navigation are omitted in the census, which includes only the products of agriculture, manufactures, the mines, and fisheries. This was a most unfortunate omission, attributable to the secession leaders, who wished to confine the census to a mere enumeration of population, and thus obliterate all the other great decennial monuments which mark the nation's progress in the pathway of empire.
Some of these tables are given as follows:
First, as to Railroads.—The number of miles in Massachusetts in 1860 (including city roads) was 1,340, and the cost of construction $61,857,203 (table 38, pp. 230, 231). The value of the freight of these roads in 1860 was $500,524,201 (p. 105). The number of miles of railroad in Maryland at the same time was 380, the cost of construction $21,387,157, and the value of the freight (at the same average rate) $141,111,348, and the difference in favor of Massachusetts $359,412,883. The difference must have been much greater, because a much larger portion of the freight in Massachusetts consisted of domestic manufactures, worth $250 per ton, which is $100 a ton above the average value.
The passengers' account, not given, would vastly swell the difference in favor of Massachusetts.
The tonnage of vessels built in Massachusetts in 1860 was 34,460 tons, and in Maryland, 7,798 tons (p. 107).
The number of banks in Massachusetts in 1860 was 174; capital, $64,519,200; loans, $107,417,323. In Maryland, the number was 31; capital, $12,568,962; loans, $20,898,762 (table 34, p. 193).
The number of insurance companies in Massachusetts 117; risks, $450,896,263. No statement given for Maryland, but comparatively very small, as the risks in Massachusetts were nearly one sixth of all in the Union.
Our exports abroad, from Massachusetts, for the fiscal year ending 30th June, 1860, were of the value of $17,003,277, and the foreign imports $41,187,539; total of imports and exports, $58,190,816; the clearances 746,909 tons, the entries 849,449; total entered and cleared, 1,596,458 tons. In Maryland, exports $9,001,600, foreign imports $9,784,773; total imports and exports, $18,786,323; clearances, 174,000 tons; entries, 186,417; total of entries and clearances, 360,417 (table 14, Register of Treasury). Thus, the foreign imports and exports abroad, of Massachusetts, were much more than triple those of Maryland, and the entries and clearances very largely more than quadruple. The coastwise and internal trade are not given, as recommended by me when Secretary of the Treasury, but the tables of the railroad traffic indicate in part the immense superiority of Massachusetts.
These statistics, however, prove that, if the earnings of commerce and navigation were added, the annual value of the products of Massachusetts per capita would be at least $300, and three times that of Maryland. In estimating values per capita, we must find the earnings of commerce very large, as a single merchant, in his counting house, engaged in an immense trade, and employing only a few clerks, may earn as much as a great manufacturing corporation, employing hundreds of hands. Including commerce, the value per capita of the products and earnings of Massachusetts exceeds not only those of any State in our Union, BUT OF THE WORLD; and would, at the same rate, make the value of its annual products three hundred millions of dollars; and of our own country, upward of nine billions of dollars per annum. Such, under great natural disadvantages, is the grand result achieved in Massachusetts, by education, science, industry, free schools, free soil, free speech, free labor, free press, and free government. The facts prove that freedom is progress, that 'knowledge is power,' and that the best way to appreciate the value of property and augment wealth most rapidly, is to invest a large portion of it in schools, high schools, academies, colleges, universities, books, libraries, and the press, so as to make labor more productive, because more skilled, educated, and better directed. Massachusetts has achieved much in this respect; but when she shall have made high schools as free and universal as common schools, and the attendance on both compulsory, so as to qualify every voter for governing a State or nation, she will have made a still grander step in material and intellectual progress, and the results would be still more astounding. She can thus still more clearly prove the fact, establish the law, and give us the formula demonstrating that taxes for the increase and diffusion of knowledge are the best investment for the increase of national, state, and individual wealth. Then all would acknowledge the harmony of labor and capital, their ultimate association in profits for mutual benefit. This social as well as political union, together with the specializing and differentiation of pursuits, and observing duties as rights, would falsify the gloomy dogma of Malthus, founded on the doctrine of the eternal and ever-augmenting antagonism of wages and money, and solve, in favor of humanity, the great problem of the grand and glorious destiny of the masses of mankind. The law of humanity is progress, onward and upward, and will, in time, crush all opposing obstacles. If all—all were fully educated, what miracles would be accomplished, how great the increase of important inventions and discoveries, and how many new and sublime truths in science, sociology, and government would be developed! Would not the progress of the State or nation approximate, then, a ratio depending on its numbers? If all the States had contributed as much as Massachusetts to the treasury and diffusion of knowledge, our whole country, North and South, would have been advanced a century, and this rebellion, based upon the ignorance, imperfect civilization, and semibarbarism produced by slavery, could never have occurred.
By table 35 of the census, p. 195, the whole value of all the property, real and personal, of Massachusetts, in 1860, was $815,237,433, and of Maryland, $376,919,944. We have seen that the value of the products that year in Massachusetts was $283,000,000 (exclusive of commerce), and of Maryland, $65,583,000. As a question, then, of profit on capital, that of Massachusetts was 34 per cent., and of Maryland 17 per cent. Such is the progressive advance (two to one) of free as compared with slave labor. The same law obtains in comparing all the free with all the slave States. But the proof is still more complete. Thus, Delaware and Missouri (alone of all the slave States) were ahead of Maryland in this rate of profit, because both had comparatively fewer slaves; and all the other slave States, whose servile population was relatively larger than that of Maryland, were below her in the rate of profit. The law extends to counties, those having comparatively fewest slaves increasing far more rapidly in wealth and population. This, then, is the formula as to the rate of profit on capital. First, the free States; next the States and counties of the same State having the fewest relative number of slaves. The census, then, is an evangel against slavery, and its tables are revelations proclaiming laws as divine as those written by the finger of God at Mount Sinai on the tables of stone.
For seventy years we have had these census tables, announcing these great truths more and more clearly at each decade. They are the records of the nation's movement and condition, the decennial monuments marking her steps in the path of empire, the oracles of her destiny. They are prophecies, for each decade fulfils the predictions of its predecessor. They announce laws, not made by man, but the irrevocable ordinances of the Almighty. We cannot, with impunity, refuse to obey these laws. For every violation, they enforce their own penalties. From these there is no escape in the present or the past, nor for the future, except in conformity to their demands. These laws condemn slavery; and the punishment for disobedience is recorded in the result of every census, and finally culminated in the rebellion. Slavery and freedom are antagonistic and discordant elements: the conflict between them is upon us; it admits of no neutrality or compromise, and one or the other system must perish.
We have seen that slavery is hostile to the progress of wealth and population: let us now ascertain its influence on moral and intellectual development.
By table 15 of the census of 1860, the result for that year was as follows: In Massachusetts, value of books printed, $397,500; jobs, 529,347; newspapers, $1,979,069; total, $2,905,916. Same year in Maryland, books printed, $58,000; jobs, $122,000; newspapers, $169,000; total, $350,155. By table 37, census of 1860, Massachusetts had 222 newspapers and periodicals, of which 112 were political, 31 religious, 51 literary, miscellaneous, 28. Maryland had only 57, all political. The whole number of copies issued in Massachusetts in 1860 was 102,000,760, and in Maryland, 20,721,472. Of periodicals, Massachusetts has monthly, 1 political, 10 religious, 18 literary, 7 miscellaneous; quarterly, religious 3, literary 2, miscellaneous 1, and 1 annual. Maryland had none. Not a religious, literary, scientific, or miscellaneous periodical or journal in the State! What terrible truths are unfolded in these statistics! None but a political party press in Maryland, all devoted, in 1860, to the maintenance, extension, and perpetuity of slavery, which had 57 advocates, and not one for science, religion, or literature.
We have seen that the circulation in 1860 of the press in Massachusetts exceeded that of Maryland by more than eighty-one millions of copies. These facts all prove that slavery is hostile to knowledge and its diffusion, to science, literature, and religion, to the press, and to free government.
For schools, colleges, libraries, and churches, I must take the tables of the census of 1850, those of 1860 not being yet published. There were in 1850, in Massachusetts, 3,679 public schools, 4,443 teachers, 176,475 pupils; native adults who cannot read or write, 1,861. In Maryland, 907 public schools, 1,005 teachers, 33,254 pupils; native adults who cannot read or write, 38,426, excluding slaves, to teach whom is criminal.
Thus, then, slavery is hostile to schools, withholding instruction from the children of the poor.
The number of public libraries in Massachusetts was 1,462, volumes 684,015. In Maryland, 124, and 125,042 volumes. Value of churches in Massachusetts, $10,206,000. In Maryland, $3,947,884, of which $2,541,240 is in Baltimore (which has very few slaves), and the remainder is mainly in the seven counties (from which slavery has nearly disappeared) adjoining Pennsylvania.
As to schools, colleges, books, libraries, churches, newspapers, and periodicals, it thus appears that Massachusetts is greatly in advance of Maryland.
Now then, let us contrast loyal Maryland with rebel South Carolina, the author of secession, and assuming for many years to instruct the nation. By the census of 1860, she had a population of 703,708, of whom 402,406 were slaves; and Maryland, numbering 687,049, had 87,189 slaves. Now, by the census of 1860, South Carolina had 45 journals and periodicals, and her annual circulation was 3,654,840 copies. The circulation therefore of Massachusetts exceeded that of South Carolina more than ninety-eight millions of copies, while Maryland exceeded South Carolina more than seventeen millions of copies. So much for South Carolina as a great political teacher. As to schools in 1850: South Carolina had 724 public schools, 739 teachers, 17,838 pupils. Massachusetts, then, had 158,637 more pupils at public schools than South Carolina, and Maryland 15,416 more pupils at public schools than South Carolina.
The press of Massachusetts, we have seen, circulated in 1860 upward of one hundred and two millions of copies, equal to 279,454 per day, including journals and periodicals, each read, on an average, by at least two persons. This is independent of books and pamphlets, and of the very large circulation of papers from other States and from Europe. What a flood of light is thus shed daily and hourly upon the people of Massachusetts! This intellectual effulgence radiates by day and night. It is the sun in its meridian splendor, and the stars in an ever unclouded firmament. It has a centre and a circumference, but knows no darkness. Ignorance vanishes before it; wealth follows in its train; labor rejoices in its association, and finds its products more than doubled; freedom hails its presence, and religion gives it a cordial welcome; churches, schools, academies, colleges, and universities acknowledge its mighty influence. Science penetrates the secrets of nature, and unfolds each new discovery for the benefit of man. Coal, the offspring of the sun, develops its latent energy, and water contributes its untiring hydraulic power. Machinery takes more and more the place of nerves and muscles, cheapens clothing and subsistence and all the necessaries of life, and opens new fields of industry, and more profitable employment for labor. Steam and lightning become the slave of man. He performs the journey of a day in an hour, and converses in minutes around the globe. The strength of man may not have been much increased, but his power is augmented a thousand-fold. His life may not have been materially lengthened, but, in the march of knowledge, a year now is as a century, compared with man's progress in the darkness of the middle ages. The eternal advance toward omniscience goes on, but is like that of the infinite approach of the asymptote, which never reaches the hyperbolic curve. The onward march of science is in a geometrical ratio, so that in time, the intellectual progress of a day in the future, must exceed that of a century in the past. Knowledge is enthroned as a king, and grand truths and new ideas are his ministers. Science takes the diameter of the earth's orbit as a base line and unit of measurement, and with it spans infinity, and triangulates the nebulous systems amid the shadowy verges of receding space. Its researches are cosmical upon the earth and the heavens, and all the elements minister to its progress. Sink to the lowest mine, or fathom the ocean's depth, or climb the loftiest mountains, or career through the heavens on silken wings, and it is there also. On—on—on; nearer—nearer—still nearer it moves forever and forever, with accelerated speed, toward the infinite eternal. Such are the triumphs of knowledge; and he who diffuses it among our race, or discovers and disseminates new truths, advances man nearer to his Creator. He exalts the whole race; he elevates it in the scale of being, and raises it into higher and still higher spheres.
It is science that marks the speed of sound and light and lightning, calculates the eclipses, catalogues the stars, maps the heavens, and follows, for centuries of the past and the future, the comet's course. It explores the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. With geology, it notes the earthquake, upheaval of mountains, and, with mineralogy, the laws of crystallization. With chemistry, it analyzes, decomposes, and compounds the elements. If, like Canute, it cannot arrest the tidal wave, it is subjecting it to laws and formulas. Taking the sunbeam for its pencil, it pictures man's own image, and the scenery of the earth and the heavens. Has science any limits or horizon? Can it ever penetrate the soul of man, and reveal the mystery of his existence and destiny? It is certainly exploring the facts of sociology, arranging and generalizing them, and deducing laws. It regards man in his social relations, in families, tribes, and governments, savage, semi-barbarous, and civilized; beginning with the most simple, advancing to the chief, the patriarch, the king, the feudal military, the regal aristocratic, the pure democracy by popular assemblages, as in Athens and the school towns of Massachusetts, rising higher to the central representative, and to the highest, although necessarily more complex, the federal constitutional representative, carrying out the organic division, and the subdivision of legislative and administrative action—regarding the state, the national, and international policy, and, in the lapse of centuries, the confederacy, fusion, and unification of nations. The constitution of empires, with the legislative, judicial, and executive functions, furnish some of the elements of sociology. But we must take the history of man, past, present, and future, note and arrange and generalize the facts, and thence deduce laws and formulas. Sociology is not a mere accidental and disconnected series of facts, but it has laws, although far less known than those appertaining to the physical sciences. The work is commenced, and progresses here and in Europe. But, at this moment, at least in administrative action, Massachusetts is ahead of all the world in the science of sociology.
Man, elevated by knowledge in the scale of being, controls the forces of nature with greater power and grander results, and accumulates wealth more rapidly. The educated free labor of Massachusetts, we have seen, triples the products of toil, per capita, as compared with Maryland, and quintuples them (as the census shows) compared with South Carolina. One day's labor of a man in Massachusetts is equal to three in Maryland, and five in South Carolina. So, if we take our savage tribes, with their huts and tents, their rude agriculture, their furs, their few and simple household manufactures, their hunting and fishing, the average product of their annual labor, at four cents a day each, would be $14.60 a year, or more than a fourth of that of South Carolina (56.91). So that Massachusetts, in material progress, is farther in advance of South Carolina than that State is of the savage Indians. Thus, we have the successive steps and gradations of man: Massachusetts, with free labor and free schools, having reached the highest point of civilization; South Carolina, with slavery and ignorance (except the few), in a semi-barbarous stage; and the lowest savage condition, called barbarous, but nearer to South Carolina than that State to Massachusetts.
Slavery, then, the census proves, is hostile to the progress of wealth and population, to science, literature, and education, to schools, colleges, and universities, to books and libraries, to churches and religion, to the press, and therefore to free government; hostile to the poor, keeping them in want and ignorance; hostile to labor, reducing it to servitude, and decreasing two thirds the value of its products; hostile to morals, repudiating among slaves the marital and parental condition, classifying them by law as chattels, darkening the immortal soul, and making it a crime to teach millions of human beings to read or write. And shall labor and education, literature and science, religion and the press, sustain an institution which is their deadly foe?
But slavery is the enemy of free government. It has commenced and now wages an unholy war against this Union, and thus assails the liberty of our country and of mankind. It has framed a government based on the eternity of chattel slavery, and demands in its name to rule the larger portion of the Union. It seeks to sever the lakes from the gulf, and the mighty Mississippi and its vast arterial tributary system. It asks to be let alone in the commission of all these heaven-daring crimes. In the name of my bleeding country, of the millions whom it has doomed to death, or wounds, or chains, or misery; in the name of the widows and orphans it has made, whose bitter tears and agonizing sighs now fill our land with sorrow; in the name of the free and blessed government it seeks to overthrow, and the glorious Union it strives to dissolve; in the name of God and man, of religion and liberty, the world arraigns the criminal at the bar of justice. Now is the day of trial: humanity hopes and fears, mankind await the verdict. It is rendered: Guilty upon every charge of the indictment; and heaven records the righteous sentence—Slavery must die, that the Union and liberty may live forever!