sold, there are more than eighty thousand imported for sale into the four States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. Supposing one-half of eighty thousand to be sold into the other buying states,—S. Carolina, Georgia, and the territory of Florida,—and we are brought to the conclusion that more than a hundred and twenty thousand slaves were, for some years previous to the great pecuniary pressure in 1837, exported from the breeding to the consuming states.
The Baltimore American gives the following from a Mississippi paper of 1837:
"The report made by the committee of the citizens of Mobile, appointed at their meeting held on the 1st instant; on the subject of the existing pecuniary pressure, states that so large has been the return of slave labor, that purchases by Alabama of that species of property from other states, since 1833, have amounted to about ten million dollars annually."
"Dealing in slaves," says the Baltimore (Maryland) Register of 1829, has become a large business; establishments are made in several places in Maryland and Virginia, at which they are sold like cattle. These places of deposit are strongly built, and well supplied with iron thumbscrews and gags, and ornamented with cowskins and other whips, oftentimes bloody."
Professor Dew, now President of the University of William and Mary, in Virginia, in his review of the debate in the Virginia legislature in 1831—2, says (p. 120):
"A full equivalent being left in the place of the slave (the purchase-money), this emigration becomes an advantage to the state, and does not check the black population as much as at first view we might imagine; because it furnishes every inducement to the master to attend to the negroes, to encourage breeding, and to cause the greatest number possible to be raised." Again: "Virginia is, in fact, a negro-raising state for the other slates."
Mr. Goode,of Virginia, in his speech before the Virginia legislature, in January, 1832, said:
"The superior usefulness of the slaves in the South will constitute an effectual demand, which will remove them from our limits. We shall send them from our state, because it will be our interest to do so. But gentlemen are alarmed lest the markets of other states be closed against the introduction of our slaves. Sir, the demand for slave labor must increase," &c.
In the debates of the Virginia Convention, in 1829, Judge Upshur said:
"The value of slaves as an article of property depends much on the state of the market abroad. In this view, it is the value of land abroad, and not of land here, which furnishes the ratio. Nothing is more fluctuating than the value of slaves. A late law of Louisiana reduced their value twenty-five per cent, in two hours after its passage was known. If it should be our lot, as I trust it will be, to acquire the country of Texas, their price will rise again."
Hon. Philip Doddridge, of Virginia, in his speech in the Virginia Convention, in 1829 (Debates p. 89), said:
"The acquisition of Texas will greatly enhance the value of the property in question (Virginia slaves)."
Rev. Dr. Graham, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, at a Colonization meeting held at that place in the fall of 1837, said:
"There were nearly seven thousand slaves offered in New Orleans market, last winter. From Virginia alone six thousand were annually sent to the South, and from Virginia and North Carolina there had gone to the South, in the last twenty years, three hundred thousand slaves."
Hon. Henry Clay, of Kentucky, in his speech before the Colonization Society, in 1829, says:
"It is believed that nowhere in the farming portion of the United States would slave labor be generally employed, if the proprietor were not tempted to raise slaves by the high price of the southern markets, which keeps it up in his own."
The New York Journal of Commerce of October 12th, 1835, contains a letter from a Virginian, whom the editor calls "a very good and sensible man," asserting that twenty thousand slaves had been driven to the South from Virginia that year, but little more than three-fourths of which had then elapsed.
Mr. Gholson, of Virginia, in his speech in the legislature of that state, January 18, 1831 (see Richmond Whig), says:
"It has always (perhaps erroneously) been considered, by steady and old-fashioned people, that the owner of land had a reasonable right to its annual profits; the owner of orchards to their annual fruits; the owner of brood mares to their product; and the owner of female slaves to their increase. We have not the fine-spun intelligence nor legal acumen to discover the technical distinctions drawn by gentlemen (that is, the distinction between female slaves and brood mares). The legal maxim of partus sequitur ventrem is coëval with the existence of the right of property itself, and is founded in wisdom and justice. It is on the justice and inviolability of this maxim that the master foregoes the service of the female slave, has her nursed and attended during the period of her gestation, and raises the helpless infant offspring. The value of the property justifies the expense, and I do not hesitate to say that in its increase consists much of our wealth."
Can any comment on the state of public sentiment produced by slavery equal the simple reading of this extract, if we remember that it was spoken in the Virginia legislature? One would think the cold cheek of Washington would redden in its grave for shame, that his native state had sunk so low. That there were Virginian hearts to feel this disgrace is evident from the following reply of Mr. Faulkner to Mr. Gholson, in the Virginia House of Delegates, 1832. See Richmond Whig:
"But he (Mr. Gholson) has labored to show that the abolition of slavery would be impolitic, because your slaves constitute the entire wealth of the state, all the productive capacity Virginia possesses; and, sir, as things are, I believe he is correct. He says that the slaves constitute the entire available wealth of Eastern Virginia. Is it true that for two hundred years the only increase in the wealth and resources of Virginia has been a remnant of the natural increase of this miserable race? Can it be that on this increase she places her sole dependence? Until I heard these declarations, I had not fully conceived the horrible extent of this evil. These gen-
