Xviii.
As in population, so also in the value of property, real and personal, do the Free States excel the Slave States. According to the census of 1850, the value of property in the Free States was $4,102,162,098, while in the Slave States it was $2,936,090,737; or, if we deduct the asserted property in human flesh, only $1,655,945,137,—showing an enormous difference of billions in favor of Freedom. In the Free States the valuation per acre was $10.46, in the Slave States only $3.04. This disproportion was still greater in 1855, when, according to the Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, the valuation of the Free States was $5, 7700,197,679, or $14.71 per acre; and of the Slave States, $3,977,354,046, or, if we deduct the asserted property in human flesh, $2,505, 186,446, or $4.59 per acre. Thus in five years from 1850 the valuation of property in the Free States received an increase of more than the whole accumulated valuation of the Slave States in 1850. Looking at details, we find the same disproportions. Arkansas and Michigan, nearly equal in territory, were organized as States by simultaneous Acts of Congress; and yet in 1855 the whole valuation of Arkansas, including its asserted property in human flesh, was only $64,240,726, while that of Michigan, without a single slave, was $116,593,580. The whole accumulated valuation of all the Slave States, deducting the asserted property in human flesh, in 1850, was only $1,655,945,-- [330] 137; but the valuation of New York alone, in 1855, reached the nearly equal sum of $1,401,285,279. The valuation of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas, altogether, in 1850, deducting human flesh, was $559,224,920, or simply $1.96 per acre,—being less than that of Massachusetts alone, which was $573,342,286, or $114.85 per acre.
