24 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



become identified with the prosperity of every Free State in the 

 Union. 



If now we turn to the Plantation States, as they are called, 

 what do we find the condition of things to be in all those 

 respects to which I have confined myself in speaking of the 

 North ? 



At first, at least, they were content with the Union and the 

 Constitution. We arc told from high authority that they then 

 contemplated the time as not far distant when slavery would 

 give place to voluntary, free labor. The staples of the two 

 regions were, in some respects, different, depending upon 

 climate and soil, but it occasioned no jealousy between them, 

 and the agricultural economy of each, especially so far as any 

 great and general monopoly of lands by a few producers was 

 concerned, was substantially the same. The passion for large 

 proprietorships which has lately manifested itself so strongly, 

 may be traced, it is believed, to the introduction of the cotton 

 culture near the close of the last century. It became an object, 

 at once, with the cotton planter to buy more slaves and to 

 extend his plantation. The number of his hands and of his 

 acres necessarily bore certain proportions to each other, and the 

 wealth and influence of the planter began to be measured and 

 graduated by the slaves he worked and the numl>er of bales he 

 gathered from his cotton fields. As the old fields wore out, 

 new ones must be acquired, till an eagerness for new territory 

 began to infuse itself into the policy of the government itself, 

 and to bring with it mischiefs which the constitution never 

 contemplated. 



But what bears more immediately upon our subject, this 

 concentration of the wealth of districts into a few hands, in the 

 form of landed estates, requiring to be worked by slave labor, 

 led almost necessarily to a division of its population^ into three 

 classes — the planter, the slave, and that other class containing 

 the nondescript species of humanity called the " poor white 

 man," which I place last as being the least fortunate of either 

 in the scale of social comfort or independence. Labor, of 

 course, is degraded to the standard of those by whom it is per- 

 formed, and in a community where one great leading staple of 

 agricultural produce engrosses the attention as well as the fixed 

 capital of every man of enterprise, few interests like those of 



