THE NEGRO-TRADERS AS POLITICIANS.

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suit of wealth by means of cotton- | sipated, easy-going Virginians looked planting and subsidiary callings; and each became a purchaser of slaves to the full extent of his means. To clear more land and grow more cotton, wherewith to buy more negroes, was the general and absorbing aspiration -the more negroes to be employed in clearing still more land and growing still more cotton. Under this dispensation, the price of slaves necessarily and rapidly advanced, until it was roughly computed that each average field-hand was worth so many hundred dollars as cotton commanded cents per pound: That is, when cotton was worth ten cents per pound, field-hands were worth a thousand dollars each; with cotton at twelve cents, they were worth twelve hundred; and when it rose, as it sometimes did even in later days, to fifteen cents per pound for a fair article of middling Orleans, a stout negro, from seventeen to thirty years old, with no particular skill but that necessarily acquired in the rude experience of farm labor anywhere, would often bring fifteen hundred dollars on a New Orleans auction-block. Hence the business of negro-trading, or the systematic buying of slaves to sell again, though never quite reputable, and, down to the last thirty or forty years, very generally regarded with abhorrence—became a highly important and influential, as well as gainful, occupation. The negro-trader, often picking up bargains at executors' or assignees' sales in the older States, or when a sudden shift must be made to save a merchant from bankruptcy or a farm from the sheriff, controlled large sums of money, often in good part his own. He was the Providence to whom indolent, dis

for extrication, at the last gasp, from their constantly recurring pecuniary embarrassments; while, on the other hand, a majority of the South-Western planters were eager to buy of him at large prices, provided he would sell on one or two years' credit. He patronized hotels and railroads; he often chartered vessels for the transportation of his human merchandise; he was necessarily shrewd, keen, and intelligent, and frequently acquired, or at least wielded, so much wealth and influence as to become almost respectable. Quite usually, he was an active politician, almost uniformly of the most ultra Pro-Slavery type, and naturally attached to the Democratic party. Traveling extensively and almost constantly, his information and volubility rendered him mail and telegraph, newspaper and stump orator, to those comparatively ignorant and secluded planters whom he visited twice or more per year, as buyer or seller, or collector of his dues for slaves already sold; while his power as profitable customer on the one hand, or lenient creditor on the other, was by no means inconsiderable. It was this power, in connection with that of the strongly sympathizing and closely affiliated class of gamblers and blacklegs, by which Van Buren's renomination for the Presidency was defeated in the Baltimore Convention of 1844, and the Democratic party committed, through the nomination of Polk and its accessories, to the policy of annexing Texas, thus securing a fresh and boundless expansion to Slavery. When that Annexation was suddenly, and to most unexpectedly, achieved, at the close of John Tyler's adminis

tration, relays of horses, prëarranged the African Slave-Trade, coinciding

in the absence of telegraphs, conveyed from the deeply interested negro-traders, who were watching the doings of Congress at the national metropolis, to their confederates and agents in the slave-selling districts of the neighboring States, the joyful tidings which insured an advance of twelve to fifteen per cent. in the market value of human flesh, and enabled the exclusive possessors of the intelligence to make it the basis of extensive and lucrative speculations.

with the rapid settlement of the Louisiana purchase and the triumph of the Cotton-Gin, wrought here an entire transformation. When fieldhands brought from ten to fifteen hundred dollars, and young negroes were held at about ten dollars per pound, the newly born infant, if wellformed, healthy, and likely to live, was deemed an addition to his master's wealth of not less than one hundred dollars, even in Virginia or Maryland. It had now become the interest of the master to increase the Slave-breeding for gain, deliber- number of births in his slave-cabins; ately purposed and systematically and few evinced scruples as to the pursued, appears to be among the means whereby this result was atlatest devices and illustrations of tained. The chastity of female slaves human depravity. Neither Cowper, was never esteemed of much account, nor Wesley, nor Jonathan Edwards, even where they were white; and, nor Granville Sharp, nor Clarkson, now that it had become an impedinor any of the philanthropists or ment to the increase of their masters' divines who, in the last century, bore wealth, it was wholly disregarded. fearless and emphatic testimony to No slave-girl, however young, was the flagrant iniquity of slave-making, valued lower for having become a slave-holding, and slave-selling, seem mother, without waiting to be first to have had any clear conception of made a wife; nor were many masters it. For the infant slave of past ages likely to rebuke this as a fault, or was rather an incumbrance and a brand it as a shame. Women were burden than a valued addition to his publicly advertised by sellers as exmaster's stock. To raise him, how-traordinary breeders, and commanded ever roughly, must cost all he would a higher price on that account.' ultimately be worth. That it was Wives, sold into separation from cheaper to buy slaves than to rear their husbands, were imperatively them, was quite generally regarded as required to accept new partners, in self-evident. But the suppression of order that the fruitfulness of the

'Mr. Edward Yates, a zealous and active friend of the Union cause, in "A letter to the Women of England, on Slavery in the Southern States of America," founded on personal observation in 1855, gives revolting instances of the brutal handling of delicate and beautiful women, apparently white, by slave-dealers and their customers, in Southern sale-rooms. He adds:

"At Richmond and New Orleans, I was present at slave-auctions, and did not see one instance

of a married pair being sold together, but, without exception, so far as I was able to learn from the negroes sold by the auctioneers, every grown-up man left a wife and every grown-up woman a husband. * * * I saw Mr. Pulliam (of Richmond) sell, to different buyers, two daughters away from their mother, who was also to be sold. This unfortunate woman was a quadroon; and I shall not soon forget the large tears that started to her eyes as she saw her two children sold away from her."

Testimony like this is abundant.

SLAVE-BREEDING-COLONIZATION.

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plantation might not suffer. We hers must share her own bitter and hopeless degradation. It was long ago observed that American Slavery, with its habitual and life-long separations of husband from wife, of parent from child, its exile of perhaps the larger portion of its victims from the humble but cherished homes of their childhood to the strange and repulsive swamps and forests of the far South-West, is harsher and viler than any other system of bondage on which the sun ever shone. And when we add that it has been carefully computed that the State of Virginia, since the date of the purchase of Louisiana, had received more money for her own flesh and blood, regularly sold and exported, than her soil and all that was upon it would have sold for on the day when she seceded from the Union, we need adduce no more of the million facts which unite to prove every wrong a blunder as well as a crime-that God has implanted in every evil the seeds of its overthrow and ultimate de

need not dwell on this new phase of Slavery, its revolting features, and still more revolting consequences. The simple and notorious fact that clergymen, marrying slaves, were accustomed to require of them fidelity in their marital relation, until separated by death, or by inexorable necessity, suffices of itself to stamp the social condition thus photographed with the indignant reprobation of mankind. And when we add that slave-girls were not only daily sold on the auction-blocks of New Orleans, and constantly advertised in her journals, as very nearly white, well-educated, and possessed of the rarest personal attractions, and that they commanded double and treble prices on this account, we leave nothing to be added to complete the outlines of a system of legalized and priest-sanctioned iniquity, more gigantic and infernal than heathenism and barbarism ever devised. For the Circassian beauty, whose charms seek and find a market at Constanti-struction. nople, is sent thither by her parents, and is herself a willing party to the speculation. She hopefully bids a last adieu to the home of her infancy, to find another in the harem of some wealthy and powerful Turk, where she will achieve the life of luxury and idleness she covets. But the American-born woman, consigned by the laws of her country and the fiat of her owner to the absolute possession of whomsoever bids most for her, neither consents to the transfer, nor is at all consulted as to the person to whom she is helplessly consigned. The Circassian knows that her children will be free and honored. The American is keenly aware that

The conflicting currents of American thought and action with regard to Slavery-that which was cherished by the Revolutionary patriots, and gradually died with them, and that by which the former was imperceptibly supplanted are strikingly exhibited in the history and progress of the movement for African Colonization. Its originator was the Rev. Samuel Hopkins, D. D., who was settled as a clergyman at Newport, R. I., in 1770, and found that thriving sea-port a focus of Slavery and the Slave-Trade, upon both of which he soon commenced an active and determined war. The idea of coun

teracting, and ultimately suppressing, on it early in the following year.

EMANCIPATION DISCARDED.

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a follower of Garrison and Wendell Phillips. The constantly and widely diverging currents of American opinion soon left the Colonization movement hopelessly stranded. The teachings of the new Southern school tended palpably toward the extirpation from the South of the free-negro anomaly, through reënslavement rather than exile. Legislative efforts to decree a general sale of free negroes into absolute slavery were made in several States, barely defeated in two or three, and fully successful in one. Arkansas, in 1858-9, enacted the enslavement of all free colored persons within her limits, who should not remove beyond them before the ensuing 4th of July, and this atrocious edict was actually enforced by her authorities. The ne

thus augmenting the security and insuring the perpetuity of their beloved institution. Moreover, as the enhanced and constantly increasing market value of slaves obstructed and diminished manumissions with a view to colonization, the class of subjects for deportation to Africa steadily fell off in numbers, and in the quality of those composing it. When, at When, at last, the South, under the lead of Mr. Calhoun, quite generally adopted the novel and extraordinary doctrine of the essential righteousness and signal beneficence of Slavery-when the relation of life-long servitude and utter subjugation to the will of a master was declared the true, natural, and most enviable condition of the laboring class anywhere-the condition most conducive to their happiness," moral culture, and social well-being-groes generally escaped; but, if any the idea of liberating individuals or families from this subjugation, and sending them from peaceful, plentiful, and prosperous America to benighted, barbarous, and inhospitable Africa, became, in this view, a transparent absurdity. No disciple of Calhoun could be a logical, consistent colonizationist, any more than

In

10"What disposition God, in His providence, will eventually make of these blacks, cannot be foretold; but it is our duty to provide for our own happiness and theirs as long as we can. dealing with this question, it will not do to be guided by abstract notions of liberty and slavery. We can only judge the future by the past; and, as experience proves that the negro is better off in slavery at the South than in freedom elsewhere, it is the part of philanthropy to keep him here, as we keep our children in subjection for their own good."-De Bow's Review, vol. ii., p. 310.

Mr. Chestnut of S. C., in a long pro-slavery speech in the U. S. Senate, April 9, 1860, presented his views of the inherent excellence of human bondage, as regards the slaves themselves, as follows:

"But you say, 'I leave out of the consideration the happiness of the race enslaved.' By no means. It is an important element of the moral

remained, they did so in view of the fact that the first sheriff who could lay hands on them would hurry them to the auction-block, and sell them to the highest bidder. And this was but a foretaste of the fate to which the new Southern dogma was morally certain, in a few years, to consign the whole free colored population of the

argument. *** In the general march of human progress, there is no one interest of humanity which has advanced more rapidly than the institution of African Slavery as it is in the Southern States. It has stood the test of every trial. Its mission is to subdue the unbroken regions of the warm and fertile South, and its end is the happiness and civilization of the human race, including the race of the slave, in all respects."

Said Mr. Jas. M. Mason, of Va., in the debate of the following day:

"As to the slave population, I agree with the Senator from South Carolina. if a problem, it has worked itself out; the thing is settled here, so far as the South is concerned, or the opinions and purposes of the South, or their ability to make their opinions and purposes good. It will become, as it has already begun to be, the estab lished policy of the South to have no more emancipation. Let them continue in bondage as they now exist, as the best condition of both races."