Excerpt from The Progress of Slavery in the United States
The design of this volume, as indicated by its title, is to describe the past progress of slavery in the United States, and to consider the circumstances which will probably control its movement hereafter. The economy, morals, and effects of slavery, are discussed only incidentally, and so far as such discussion was unavoidable; it having been the main purpose of the author to deal with the progress of slavery as a matter of fact, accomplished in the past, and to be discerned in the future by the aid of such lights as experience and reason may afford.
In the discussion in this volume of the increase of slaves between 1840 and 1850, the census of 1850 is assumed to be correct. If it did not considerably exaggerate the number of slaves, the increase since 1850 must have been small, and especially if the census of Georgia and Alabama in 1855 is to be relied upon.
It is not possible that the increase in Georgia, during this period, was really less than in Virginia and Kentucky.
The augmentation of the number of slaves in many of the States may be calculated from year to year, from the annual enumerations of certain descriptions of slaves for the purposes of taxation. On the basis of comparisons of this kind, with even large allowances for deficiencies in the census of 1855 in Georgia and Alabama, the prediction may be ventured, that the census of 1860, if honestly taken, will show either a very low rate of increase of slaves between 1850 and 1860, or a serious exaggeration of their number in 1850.
In so much of this work as relates to the laws of population, it has not been the ambition of the author to develop any new theory. The admirable sagacity of Dr. Franklin exhausted that subject more than a century ago.
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