On the record
Has it ever happened that the mass of any people were rich enough to keep, for their own convenience, such expensive laborers--as southern slaves?
Said by
Lewis Tappan
Source
gutenberg.orgLewis Tappan: “Has it ever happened that the mass of any people were rich enough to keep, for their own convenience, such expensive…”
Editor's note · Context
In this rhetorical question, Tappan prompts readers to consider the economic realities that would prevent the majority of people from affording slaves.
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More from Lewis Tappan
Hence multitudes will be without regular and profitable employment, and be condemned to poverty and numberless privations.
Hence the insane efforts constantly made to expurgate the literature of the world of all recognition of the rights of black men.
When an infant will bring one hundred, and a man from four hundred to a thousand dollars in the market, slaves are not commodities to be found in the cabins of the poor.
You are told, much of the wealth is invested in negroes--yet it obviously is a wealth that impoverishes; and no stronger evidence of the truth of this assertion is needed, than the comparative price of land in the free and slave States.