st to treat cruelly _the great body_ of their slaves.
These causes are, the nature of certain kinds of products, the kind of
labor required in cultivating and preparing them for market, the best
times for such labor, the state of the market, fluctuations in prices,
facilities for transportation, the weather, seasons, &c. &c. Some of
the causes which operate to produce this are--

1. _The early market_. If the planter can get his crop into market
early, he may save thousands which might be lost if it arrived later.

2. _Changes in the market_. A sudden rise in the market with the
probability that it will be short, or a gradual fall with a
probability that it will be long, is a strong temptation to the master
to push his slaves to the utmost, that he may in the one case make all
he can, by taking the tide at the flood, and in the other lose as
little as may be, by taking it as early as possible in the ebb.

3. _High prices_. Whenever the slave-grown staples bring a high price,
as is now the case with cotton, every slaveholder is tempted to
overwork his slaves. By forcing them to do double work for a few weeks
or months, while the price is up, he can _afford_ to lose a number of
them and to lessen the value of all by over-driving. A cotton planter
with a hundred vigorous slaves, would have made a profitable
speculation, if, during the years '34, 5, and 6, when the average
price of cotton was 17 cents a pound, he had so overworked his slaves
that half of them died upon his hands in '37, when cotton had fallen
to six and eight cents. No wonder that the poor slaves pray that cotton
and sugar may be cheap. The writer has frequently heard it declared by
planters in the lower country, that, it is more profitable to drive
the slaves to such over exertion as to _use them up_, in seven or
eight years, than to give them only ordinary tasks and protract their
lives to the ordinary period.[26]

[Footnote 26: The reader is referred to a variety of facts and
testimony on this point on the 39th page of this work.]

4. _Untimely seasons_. When the winter encroaches on the spring, and
makes late seed time, the first favorable weather is a temptation to
overwork the slaves, too strong to be resisted by those who hold men
as mere working animals. So when frosts set in early, and a great
amount of work is to be done in a little time, or great loss suffered.
So also after a long storm either in seed or crop time, when the
weather become