[Footnote 13:  Edmund Ruffin, The Political Economy of Slavery ([Richmond, 1857]).]

About the same time a writer in DeBow’s Review elaborated the theme that the comparative advantages of slavery and freedom depended wholly upon the attainments of the laboring population concerned.  “Both are necessarily recurring types of social organization, and each suited to its peculiar phase of society.”  “When a nation or society is in a condition unfit for self-government, ... often the circumstance of contact with or subjection by more enlightened nations has been the means of transition to a higher development.”  “All that is now needed for the defence of United States negro slavery and its entire exoneration from reproach is a thorough investigation of fact; ... and political economy ... must ... pronounce our system ... no disease, but the normal and healthy condition of a society formed of such mixed material as ours.”  “The strong race and the weak, the civilized and the savage,” the one by nature master, the other slave, “are here not only cast together, but have been born together, grown together, lived together, worked together, each in his separate sphere striving for the good of each....  These two races of men are mutually assistant to each other and are contributing in the largest possible degree consistent with their mutual powers to the good of each other and mankind.”  A general emancipation therefore could bring nothing but a detriment.[14]

[Footnote 14:  DeBow’s Review, XXI, 331-349, 443-467 (October and November, 1856).]

What proved to be the last work in the premises before the overthrow of slavery in the United States was The Slave Power, its Character, Career and Probable Designs, by J.E.  Cairnes, professor of political economy in the University of Dublin and in Queen’s College, Galway.  It was published in 1862 and reissued with appendices in the following year.  Cairnes at the outset scouted the factors of climate and negro racial traits.  The sole economic advantage of slavery, said he, consists in its facilitation of control in large units; its defects lay in its causing reluctance, unskilfulness and lack of versatility.  The reason for its prevalence in the South he found in the high fertility and the immense abundance of soil on the one hand, and on the other the intensiveness of staple cultivation.  A single operative, said he, citing as authority Robert Russell’s erroneous assertion, “might cultivate twenty acres in wheat or Indian corn, but could not manage more than two in tobacco or three in cotton; therefore the supervision of a considerable squad is economically feasible in these though it would not be so in the cereals.”  These conditions might once have made slave labor profitable, he conceded; but such possibility was now doubtless a thing of the distant past.  The persistence of the system did not argue to the contrary, for it would by force of inertia persist as long as it continued to be self-supporting.