AND WHERE TO FIND ONE. 281 



Even in South Carolina, where slavery was most 

 despotic, white superintendence over paid black 

 labor has yielded generous returns to northern capi 

 tal and enterprise. On thirteen estates at Beaufort, 

 four hundred blacks were employed, rating two 

 children as one hand, and the average wages paid 

 them was fifty-five cents per day. With this help 

 814 acres were planted with cotton, from which 

 72,000 pounds of sea-island were obtained, worth 

 $1.50 per pound, while the whole cost was only 

 thirty-eight cents. The poor blacks themselves, 

 when working their own little cotton fields, have 

 lived better than at any former period of their lives, 

 and saved money enough to purchase small farms. 

 When domestic traitors charged that government 

 was wasting millions of dollars in feeding what was 

 said to . be a lazy crowd of them at Port Royal, 

 Congress instituted an inquiry, and the Secretary of 

 the Treasury replied that there has been expended 

 for agricultural implements, *77,081 ; for the pur 

 chase of the schooner Flora, $31,350; for white 

 labor, s-i .71S; for colored labor, $34,527. Total 

 expenses, 225,705. From this expenditure has 

 been realized $726,984. Deducting the above ex 

 penses, there remained on hand from this fund 

 $501,279. The Secretary says that no expenditure 

 whatever has been made from the Treasury on ac 

 count of the cultivation of the plantations or the 

 collection of cotton, or the educational or benevo 

 lent care of the laborers. More than half a million 

 of dollars were saved by these operations. If the 

 uneducated negro, just liberated from bondage, can 



