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Chapter 01
The Value of Freedom

image of obsolete currency

A Nation Bound by Slavery

A hundred thousand new-born babes are annually added to the victims of slavery . . . instead of listening to the cry of agony, they [men] listen to the ring of dollars and stoop to pick up the coin.

$2,500,000: Amount of slave-based bonds purchased by European investors

1828

$25,700,000: Amount of bank credit issued from mortgaging of enslaved African Americans in Louisiana

1859

Once a mortgage, always a mortgage, a maxim which in its operation as applied to female slaves, has often been attended with disastrous consequences to the mortgagees.
When the price [of cotton] rises in the English market, the poor slaves immediately feel the effects, for they are harder driven, and the whip is more constantly going.

$29,376,000: Value of cotton produced by enslaved African Americans

1832

45,000,000 feet: Amount of “negro cloth” produced in northern mills for the southern market

1832

I speak [of] . . . an unhallowed union . . . between the cotton-planters and flesh-mongers of Louisiana and Mississippi and the cotton-spinners and traffickers of New England,—between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.
The planters care for nothing but 'to buy Negroes to raise cotton & raise cotton to buy Negroes.'

$250,000,000: Value of cotton produced by enslaved African Americans

1861

$3,059,000,000: Value assigned to enslaved African Americans

1860