THE NEGRO-TRADERS AS POLITICIANS. 69 suit of wealth by means of cotton- | sipated, easy-going Virginians looked planting and subsidiary callings; and for extrication, at the last gasp, from each became a purchaser of slaves to their constantly recurring pecuniary the full extent of his means. To clear embarrassments; while, on the other more land and grow more cotton, hand, a majority of the South-Westwherewith to buy more negroes, was ern planters were eager to buy of him the general and absorbing aspiration at large prices, provided he would -the more negroes to be employed sell on one or two years' credit. He in clearing still more land and grow- patronized hotels and railroads; he ing still more cotton. Under this often chartered vessels for the transdispensation, the price of slaves ne- portation of his human merchandise; cessarily and rapidly advanced, until he was necessarily shrewd, keen, and it was roughly computed that each intelligent, and frequently acquired, average field-hand was worth so many or at least wielded, so much wealth hundred dollars as cotton commanded and influence as to become almost cents per pound: That is, when cot- respectable. Quite usually, he was ton was worth ten cents per pound, an active politician, almost uniformly field-hands were worth a thousand of the most ultra Pro-Slavery type, dollars each; with cotton at twelve and naturally attached to the Democents, they were worth twelve hun- cratic party. Traveling extensively dred; and when it rose, as it some- and almost constantly, his informatimes did even in later days, to fifteen tion and volubility rendered him cents per pound for a fair article of mail and telegraph, newspaper and middling Orleans, a stout negro, from stump orator, to those comparatively seventeen to thirty years old, with no ignorant and secluded planters whom particular skill but that necessarily he visited twice or more per year, as acquired in the rude experience of buyer or seller, or collector of his farm labor anywhere, would often dues for slaves already sold; while bring fifteen hundred dollars on a his power as profitable customer on New Orleans auction-block. Hence the one hand, or lenient creditor on the business of negro-trading, or the the other, was by no means inconsidsystematic buying of slaves to sell erable. It was this power, in conagain, though never quite reputable, nection with that of the strongly and, down to the last thirty or forty sympathizing and closely affiliated years, very generally regarded with class of gamblers and blacklegs, by abhorrence became a highly impor- which Van Buren's renomination for tant and influential, as well as gain- the Presidency was defeated in the ful, occupation. The negro-trader, Baltimore Convention of 1844, and often picking up bargains at execu- the Democratic party committed, tors' or assignees' sales in the older through the nomination of Polk and States, or when a sudden shift must its accessories, to the policy of anbe made to save a merchant from nexing Texas, thus securing a fresh bankruptcy or a farm from the sher- and boundless expansion to Slavery. iff, controlled large sums of money, When that Annexation was suddenly, often in good part his own. He was and to most unexpectedly, achieved, the Providence to whom indolent, dis- at the close of John Tyler's adminis tration, relays of horses, prearranged 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. the African Slave-Trade, coinciding 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 number of births in his slave-cabins ; and few evinced scruples as to the means whereby this result was attained. The chastity of female slaves was never esteemed of much account, even where they were white; and, now that it had become an impediment to the increase of their masters' wealth, it was wholly disregarded. No slave-girl, however young, was valued lower for having become a mother, without waiting to be first made a wife; nor were many masters likely to rebuke this as a fault, or brand it as a shame. Women were publicly advertised by sellers as ex Slave-breeding for gain, deliberately purposed and systematically pursued, appears to be among the latest devices and illustrations of human depravity. Neither Cowper, nor Wesley, nor Jonathan Edwards, nor Granville Sharp, nor Clarkson, nor any of the philanthropists or divines who, in the last century, bore fearless and emphatic testimony to the flagrant iniquity of slave-making, slave-holding, and slave-selling, seem to have had any clear conception of it. For the infant slave of past ages was rather an incumbrance and a burden than a valued addition to his master's stock. To raise him, how-traordinary breeders, and commanded ever roughly, must cost all he would ultimately be worth. That it was cheaper to buy slaves than to rear them, was quite generally regarded as self-evident. But the suppression of 9 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 a higher price on that account.' Wives, sold into separation from their husbands, were imperatively required to accept new partners, in order that the fruitfulness of the 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. 71 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 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 The idea of coundetermined war. teracting, and ultimately suppressing, | on it early in the following year. the Slave-Trade, through a systematic colonization of the western coast of Africa with emancipated blacks from America, was matured and suggested by him to others, even before the outbreak of the Revolutionary war; and its realization, interrupted by that struggle, was resumed by him directly after it had been closed. This was anterior to the British settlement of Sierra Leone, and preceded the appearance of Clarkson's prize essay, commanding public attention to the horrors of the Slave-Trade. Among Dr. Hopkins's European correspondents were Granville Sharp and Zachary Macaulay, who were among the earliest and least compromising of British abolitionists. Through his influence and efforts, three colored youth were educated in New England, toward the close of the last century, with express reference to missionary labor in Africa in connection with the Colonization movement. Two of these ultimately, though at a mature age, migrated to Liberia, where they died soon after. Thirty-eight American blacks emigrated to Sierra Leone in 1815, under the auspices and in the vessel of one of their own number. The initial organization of the American Colonization Society took place at Princeton, N. J., in the autumn of 1816; and that Society was formally organized at Washington, by the choice of officers, on the 1st of January, 1817. Its first attempt at practical colonization was made in 1820 on Sherbro Island, which proved an unfortunate location; its present position on the main land, at Cape Mesurado, was purchased December 15, 1821, and some colonists landed About one thousand emigrants were dispatched thither in the course of the following seven years, including a small church of colored persons which migrated from Boston in 1826. The additional number dispatched during the succeeding thirty years was not far from eight thousand. The city founded by the original emigrants received the name of Monrovia, and in 1847 the colony declared itself an independent republic under the name of Liberia. That republic still exists, enjoying a moderate and equable prosperity, in spite of its unhealthiness for whites, and for all but duly acclimated blacks, on account of its tropical and humid location. has But the Colonization movement, though bountifully lauded and glorified by the eminent in Church and State, and though the Society numbered among its Presidents Bushrod Washington, Charles Carroll, James Madison, and Henry Clay, has not achieved a decided success, and for the last twenty years has steadily and stubbornly declined in importance and consideration. It ceased to command or deserve the sympathy of abolitionists, without achieving the hearty confidence, though it has been blessed or cursed with the abundant verbal commendations, of their antagonists. It was soon discovered that, while it was presented to the former class as a safe and unobjectionable device for mitigating the evils, while gradually undermining the existence, of human bondage in our country, it was, at the same time, commended to the favor and patronage of slaveholders as a means of relieving the South of its dangerous free-negro element, and EMANCIPATION DISCARDED. 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 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,10 moral culture, and social well-beingthe 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 73 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 negroes generally escaped; but, if any 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 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 else-ing the race of the slave, in all respects." where, 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. 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, includ 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 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 established 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." |