Note 5 — Chapter I · SOUTH-WESTERN LOUISIANA AND EASTERN TEXAS.

The following resolutions were proposed (I am not sure that they were adopted) in the Southern Commercial Convention, at New Orleans, in 1855:

“Resolved,—That this Convention strongly recommends the Chambers of Commerce and Commission Merchants of our Southern and South-western cities to adopt such a system of laws and regulations as will put a stop to the dangerous practice, heretofore existing, of making advances to planters, in anticipation of their crops—a practice entirely at variance with everything like safety in business transactions, and tending directly to establish the relations of master and slave between the merchant and planter, by bringing the latter into the most abject and servile bondage.

“Resolved,—That this Convention recommend, in the most urgent manner, that the planters of the Southern and South-western States patronize exclusively our home merchants, and that our Chambers of Commerce, and merchants generally, exert all their influence to exclude foreign agents from the purchase and sale of produce in any of our Southern and South-western cities.

“Resolved, further,—That this Convention recommend to the legislatures of the Southern and South-western States to pass laws, making it a penitentiary offence for the planters to ask of the merchants to make such pecuniary advances.”