,779,000; making our grocery
account, with domestic slavery, foot up to the sum of $50,449,000. Our
whole indebtedness, then, to slavery, foreign and domestic, for these
four commodities, after deducting two millions of re-exports amounts to
$82,607,000.

The exports of tobacco are on the increase, as appears from Table VIII
of Appendix, showing an extension of its cultivation; but the exports of
rice are not on the increase, from which it would appear that its
production remains stationary.

By adding the value of the foreign and domestic cotton fabrics,
consumed annually in the United States, to the yearly cost of the
groceries which the country uses, our total indebtedness, for articles
of slave labor origin, will be found swelling up to the enormous sum of
$162,185,240.[30]

We have now seen the channels through which our cotton passes off into
the great sea of commerce, to furnish the world its clothing. We have
seen the origin and value of our provisions, and to whom they are sold.
We have seen the sources whence our groceries are derived, and the
millions of money they cost. To ascertain how far these several
interests are sustained by one another, will be to determine how far any
one of them becomes an element of expansion to the others. To decide a
question of this nature with precision is impracticable. The statistics
are not attainable. It may be illustrated, however, in various ways, so
as to obtain a conclusion proximately accurate. Suppose, for example,
that the supplies of food from the North were cut off, the manufactories
left in their present condition, and the planters forced to raise their
provisions and draught animals: in such circumstances, the export of
cotton must cease, as the lands of these States could not be made to
yield more than would subsist their own population, and supply the
cotton demanded by the Northern States. Now, if this be true of the
agricultural resources of the cotton States--and it is believed to be
nearly the full extent of their capacity--then the surplus of cotton, to
the value of more than a hundred millions of dollars, now annually sent
abroad, stands as the representative of the yearly supplies which the
cotton planters receive from the farmers north of the cotton line. This,
therefore, as will afterward more fully appear, may be taken as the
probable extent to which the supplies from the North serve as an element
of slavery expansion in the article of cotton alone