Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin
Page 49
Richmond.
Persons wishing to purchase would do well to give us a call before purchasing
elsewhere.
Nov. 20--6m. Matthews, Branton, & Co.
Robert S. Adams & Moses J. Wicks have this day associated themselves
under the name and style of Adams & Wicks, for the purpose of buying and
selling Negroes, in the city of Aberdeen, and elsewhere. They have an agent
who has been purchasing Negroes for them in the Old States for the last two
months. One of the firm, Robert S. Adams, leaves this day for North Carolina
and Virginia, and will buy a large number of negroes for this market. They will
keep at their depot in Aberdeen, during the coming fall and winter, a large lot of
choice Negroes, which they will sell low for cash, or for bills on Mobile.
Robert S. Adams.
Moses J. Wicks.
Aberdeen, Miss., May 7, 1852.
Fresh Arrivals Weekly.--Having established ourselves at the Forks of
the Road, near Natchez, for a term of years, we have now on hand, and intend to
keep throughout the entire year, a large and well selected stock of Negroes,
consisting of field-hands, house-servants, mechanics, cooks, seamstresses, washers,
ironers, etc., which we can sell, and will sell, as low or lower than any other house
here or in New Orleans.
Persons wishing to purchase would do well to call on us before making pur-
chases elsewhere, as our regular arrivals will keep us supplied with a good and
general assortment. Our terms are liberal. Give us a call.
Griffin & Pullum.
Natchez, Oct. 16, 1852.--6m
I have just returned to my stand, at the Forks of the Road, with fifty likely
young NEGROES for sale.
Sept. 22. R. II. Elam.
The undersigned would respectfully state to the public that he has leased the
stand in the Forks of the Road, near Natchez, for a term of years, and that he
intends to keep a large lot of NEGROES on hand during the year. He will sell
as low or lower than any other trader at this place or in New Orleans.
He has just arrived from Virginia, with a very likely lot of field men and women
and house-servants, three cooks, a carpenter, and a fine buggy horse, and a saddle-
horse and carryall. Call and see.
Thos. G. James.
Daily Orleanian, October 19, 1852:--
Constantly on hand, bought and sold on commission, at most reasonable
prices.--Field hands, cooks, washers and ironers, and general house-servants.
City references given, if required.
Oct. 14.
Wm. F. Tannehill & Co. ont constamment en mains un assortiment complet
d'esclaves bien choisis a Vendre. Aussi, vente et achat d'esclaves par commis-
sion.
Nous avons actuellement en mains un grand nombre de negres à louer aux
mois, parmi lesquels se trouvent des jeunes gargons, domestiques de maison, cuisi-
nières, blanchisseuses et repasseuses, nourices, etc.
references.
Wright, Williams, & Co.
Williams, Phillips, & Co.
Moses Greenwood.
Moon, Titus, & Co.
S. O. Nelson & Co.
E. W. Diggs. 3ms.
New Orleans Daily Crescent, October 21, 1852:--
James White, No. 73, Baronne-street, New Orleans, will give strict attention
to receiving, boarding, and selling SLAVES consigned to him. He will also buy
and sell on commission. References: Messrs. Robson & Allen, McRea, Coff-
man & Co., Pregram, Bryan & Co.
Sept. 23.
Fifteen or twenty good Negro Men wanted to go on a Plantation. The best of
wages will be given until the 1st of January, 1853.
Apply to
Thomas G. Mackey & Co.,
5, Canal-street, corner of Magazine, up stairs.
Sept. 11.
From another number of the Mississippi Free Trader is taken
the following:--
NEGROES.
The undersigned would respectfully state to the public that he has a lot of
about forty-five now on hand, having this day received a lot of twenty-five direct
from Virginia, two or three good cooks, a carriage driver, a good house boy, a
fiddler, a fine seamstress, and a likely lot of field men and women; all of whom
he will sell at a small profit. He wishes to close out and go on to Virginia
after a lot for the fall trade. Call and see.
Thomas G. James.
The slave-raising business of the Northern States has been
variously alluded to and recognised, both in the business statistics
of the States, and occasionally in the speeches of patriotic men,
who have justly mourned over it as a degradation to their
country. In 1841 the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society
addressed to the executive committee of the American Anti-
Slavery Society some inquiries on the internal American slave-
trade.
A laboured investigation was made at the time, the results of
which were published in London; and from that volume are
made the following extracts:--
The Virginia Times (a weekly newspaper, published at Wheeling, Virginia) esti-
mates, in 1836, the number of slaves exported for sale from that State alone, during
“the twelve months preceding,” at forty thousand, the aggregate value of whom is
computed at twenty-four millions of dollars.
Allowing for Virginia one-half of the whole exportation during the period in
question, and we have the appalling sum total of eighty thousand slaves exported
in a single year from the breeding States. We cannot decide with certainty what
proportion of the above number was furnished by each of the breeding States, but
Maryland ranks next to Virginia in point of numbers, North Carolina follows Mary-
land, Kentucky North Carolina, then Tennessee and Delaware.
The Natchez (Mississippi) Courier says, that “the States of Louisiana, Missis-
sippi, Alabama, and Arkansas imported two hundred and fifty thousand slaves from
the more Northern States in the year 1836.”
This seems absolutely incredible, but it probably includes all the slaves intro-
duced by the immigration of their masters. The following, from the Virginia
Times, confirms this supposition. In the same paragraph, which is referred to
under the second query, it is said--
“We have heard intelligent men estimate the number of slaves exported from
Virginia within the last twelve months at a hundred and twenty thousand, each
slave averaging at least six hundred dollars, making an aggregate of seventy-two
million dollars. Of the number of slaves exported not more than one-third have
been sold, the others having been carried by their masters, who have removed.
Assuming one-third to be the proportion of the 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--South 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:--
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 labour, 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 iroa 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 1831-32, 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 farnishes 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 States.”
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 labour must increase,” &c.
In the debates of the Virginia Convention, in 1829, Judge Upsher 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 the 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 colonisation 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 Colonisation Society,
in 1829, says--
“It is believed that nowhere in the farming portion of the United States would
slave labour be generally employed if the proprietor were not tempted to raise
slaves by the high price of the Southern market, 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 coeval 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 ex-
pense, 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 Virginian 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 laboured 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 gentlemen state the fact, which the history and present aspect of the com-
monwealth but too well sustain. What, sir! have you lived for two hundred
years without personal effort or productive industry, in extravagance and indolence,
sustained alone by the return from the sales of the increase of slaves, and retaining
merely such a number as your now impoverished lands can sustain as stock?”
Mr. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, in the Virginian legislature, used the following
language (“Liberty Bell,” p. 20):
“I agree with gentlemen in the necessity of arming the State for internal de-
fence. I will unite with them in any effort to restore confidence to the public
mind, and to conduce to the sense of the safety of our wives and our children.
Yet, Sir, I must ask upon whom is to fall the burden of this defence? Not upon
the lordly masters of their hundred slaves, who will never turn out except to retire
with their families when danger threatens. No, sir; it is to fall upon the less
wealthy class of our citizens, chiefly upon the non-slaveholder. I have known
patrols turned out where there was not a slaveholder among them; and this is
the practice of the country. I have slept in times of alarm quiet in bed, without
; having a thought of care, while these individuals, owning none of this property
themselves, were patrolling under a compulsory process, for a pittance of seventy-
five cents per twelve hours, the very curtilage of my house, and guarding that pro-
perty which was alike dangerous to them and myself. After all, this is but an
expedient. As this population becomes more numerous, it becomes less pro-
ductive. Your guard must be increased, until finally its profits will not pay for the
expense of its subjection. Slavery has the effect of lessening the free population
of a country.
“The gentleman has spoken of the increase of the female slaves being a part of
the profit. It is admitted; but no great evil can be averted, no good attained,
without some inconvenience. It may be questioned how far it is desirable to
foster and encourage this branch of profit. It is a practice, and an increasing
practice, in parts of Virginia, to rear slaves for market. How can an honourable
mind, a patriot, and a lover of his country, bear to see this Ancient Dominion,
rendered illustrious by the noble devotion and patriotism of her sons in the cause
of liberty, converted into one grand menagerie, where men are to be reared for
the market, like oxen for the shambles? Is it better, is it not worse, than the
slave-trade--that trade which enlisted the labour of the good and wise of every
creed, and every clime, to abolish it? The trader receives the slave, a stranger in
language, aspect, and manners, from the merchant who has brought him from the
interior. The ties of father, mother, husband, and child, have all been rent in
twain; before he receives him, his soul has become callous. But here, sir, indi-
viduals whom the master has known from infancy, whom he has seen sporting in
the innocent gambols of childhood who have been accustomed to look to him for
protection, he tears from the mother arms and sells into a strange country
among strange people, subject to cruel taskmasters.