rd more
precisions than would have sufficed for my family under the management
and supervision of an economical white woman.

It is a notorious fact, well known to every one who has had
opportunities of making observations, that in those parts of the
United States where the operations of farming have been confided
mostly to slaves, the lands are exhausted of their fertility and have
become barren and unproductive. Some lands are now in this condition,
which were originally the finest in the United States. Eastern
Virginia is a good sample of the effects of slave labor on the
fertility of lands. This all results from the ignorance, carelessness
and inattention of those to whom the operations of farming are
confided. All soils are capable of improvement by judicious culture,
and the interests of farmers, individually and collectively, as well
as the interest of every American citizen, requires at their hands to
so cultivate their lands as to augment their fertility; and not solely
with a view to their present productiveness. It is a duty incumbent on
them as good citizens; a duty they owe to themselves; to their
posterity; to the nation; to the world.

CHAPTER VI.

There is yet another evil growing out of slavery which I must notice
before I bring my remarks to a close on this topic. I allude to the
degraded condition of a portion of the white population in the slave
States. There are, throughout the slave States, a class of the white
population who are so debased by ignorance and vice, that the slaves
are in many respects their superiors. They are about on a par with the
free negroes. About the larger cities in the North, a similar class
may be found, a majority of whom are free negroes and foreigners. The
poverty, vice, ignorance and degradation of this class of persons, in
the South, is a sore evil, and demands the attention of every
Christian philanthropist in the Southern States. This, I conceive, has
originated partly from the competition of slave and free labor, but
mainly, I presume, from the association of this class with the African
population. There are other agencies, no doubt, which have contributed
to debase and brutalize this class of the white population, but I
judge, that the causes above indicated, are the principal ones. Some
will, no doubt, attribute this in part to the disparity between the
lower classes in the South, and what they choose to term the
slaveholding aristocracy. They will con