CHEAP COTTON BY FREE LABOR. By a Cotton Manufacturer. Second
edition. Boston: A. Williams & Company, 100 Washington Street.
1861. Price 12 cents.
It seldom happens that we find so many weighty facts within so short a
compass as are given in this pamphlet. For many years the assertion that
only the negro, and the negro as a slave, could be profitably employed
in raising cotton in America, has been accepted most implicitly by the
whole country, and this has been the great basis of pro-slavery
argument. But of late years, doubt has been thrown, from time to time,
on this assumption, and in the little work before us there is given an
array of concise statements, which, until their absolute falsehood is
proved, must be regarded as conclusive of the fact, that the white man
is _better_ adapted than the negro to labor at the cultivation of
cotton.
Our 'cotton manufacturer' begins properly by bursting the enormous
bubble of the failure of free labor in the British West Indies; showing,
what is too little known, that the decrease in the export of sugar from
Jamaica began and rapidly continued for thirty years before the
emancipation of slaves, but has _since_ been well-nigh arrested.
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