silv Libtatv

YALE UNIV^ERSITY
LIBRARY

ANTI- SLAVERY TRACTS. No. 5.

THE INTER-STATE SLAVE TRADE.
BY JOHN. G. PALFKEY.
It is only about seventy years since Glarkson, Wilberforce, and
their philanthropic associates began to move the British legislature
for the abolition of the African slave trade. Every obstacle which
the basest cupidity could contrive was placed in their way. The
West India interest worked upon the commercial interest, and both
together upon the manufacturing interest, and all three upon the
landed interest, and the united four upon the ministry and Parlia
ment. Liverpool and Bristol, with millions invested in the nefari
ous business, raised as holy a howl as New York did four years ago
when the Union was in danger. In hisplace in the House of Lords,
a prince of the blood presumed to stigmatize Wilberforce and his^
friends as "either fanatics or hypocrites." He lived to.iset'Kis name
as king to the immortal act which abolished slavery from- the Brit
ish dominions. His throne might have beem oversetby this time
if he had stuck to the doctrines of his misguided youth.
In monarchical England there was a pow^ too strong for princes
or ministers, planters or spinners,. merchants or landed gentlemen,
or all of them together. It was a plain common sense, informed by
a moral and religious sense, iii the minds and hearts of the British
people. By dint of industrious writing and talking through some
five and twenty years, that sentiment got its peremptory voice heard
in Parliament; and. then omnipotent Parliament made known to
Liverpool and Bristol merchant that, if he did not want to go to
Botany Bay for fourteen years, he must let alone dealing in dark-
colored men — an alternative of which it changed the terms a little, a
few y«ars afterwards, by substituting hanging for transportation. And
so a hitherto creditable business fell into great disesteem, in which
condition it has remained in England to this day. Not a decent
man is known to have been hung under that law. The decent men
took notfe of' it, and mended their manners in time.
Pleniy of foitunes have been made in America in the same way ;
' (1)

4, ANTI-SLAVEBY TRACTS.
and seventy years ago the men who made them held up their heads
as high as their neighbors on exchanges and in drawing rooms.
The carriages which had been set up by owners and masters of
slave ships might be seen quite lately. Horrible traditions, of no
ancient date, are still current at Bristol and Newport. But the
thing has had its d^y. Since 1820, if a man be caught at this busi
ness, he must end his days on the gallows in America as surely as
in England. And so wholeseme is' the provision, liat a person' sus
pected of dealing in Guinea slaves is now taboo among people who
are choice as to their company ; and such is the further effect of
this social frown, that whoever means to make money, and at the
same time keep on fair terms with the circles, finds it indispensable
to pursue the former object by some other use of his talents than
that of trading in his Maker's image in ebony.
So far, so good. But what remains to be wondered at and grieved
over is, that the law should make such a parade of its own incon
sistency. According to;4he law, it is not the act that makes the crime,
but the place where the act is committed. If an American deals
in slaves on the Guinea Coast, and we can lay hands on him, we
hang him, not only witheut scruple, but with uncom-mon satisfac
tion. But nobody has a right to touch a hair of his head for carry
ing on the same business in Virginia. The slaves may be his own
children, and still the business is perfectly legal, and, according to
the local opinion, not disreputable. Judge Washington, at bis slave
barrack overlooking the Potomac, may do just what Mongo John does
at his barracoon on the Rio Pongo, and yet continue to be a m.uch-
considered judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, and to
have as good estimation with his neighbors as Mongo John with his.
If Judge Washington had conducted himself in this manner on the
Rio Pongo, and Mongo John at Mount Vernon, the law would have
noosed Judge Washington, while John's fellow-citizens might have
seated him in Congress or on.th« bench, of the Supreme Court.
Importation from abroad being a hanging business, the domestic
trade thrives in the absence of competition. Guinea proper being
driven out of the market, the northern slave States,, and especially
Virginia, become the American Slave Coast. Virginia, breeds men
for exportation as Vermont breeds horses. The thing is no secret,
and the breeders, on their own ground, take no shame to themselves,
though our late minister, Mr. Stevenson, was annoyed by the charge
in England, and denied it. " The six thousand slaves whichs Vir
ginia annually sends- off to the south are a source of wealth to Vii>
a : '

THE INTER-STATE SLAVE TKADE. S
ginia." So wrote., in 1S3.2, Professor Dew, of the College of William
and Mary, in that StEfte. " Virginia," he continued, "is in fact a
negro-raising State for other States.'' " Negroes,'' said the Virginia
Enquirer eight years ago, " have become the only reliable staple of
the tobacco-growing sections of Virginia — the only reliable means
of liquidating debts, foreign and domestic."
The African slave trade was made a felony in England and the
United States because hamanity in those nations cried out against
it as an intolerable .abomination. Hew much less detestable an
abomination is^the Virginian slave trade '!
In some respects it is iess herrible, in others it is more so.
The sufferings of slaves in the "middle passage," or sea voyage,
ate prebably not quite paralleled in their transfer from one slave
State to another. The poor -creatares, in the latter case, are not so
crowded together, nor put to such distress for want of food, water,
and air as when stowed in bulk between the decks ef a Captain
Canot's little slave soh-oosier ; though amy one whK) has seen a cofHe
of them on their journey, the men in pairs, handcuffed and chained
to the opposite sides of an iron bar, and the women and children,
tied to each other, driven behind them by armed brutes on horse
back, will be apt to think that it is only by comparison with some
thing still more wretched if their misery is not to be called e.vtreme.
Here is a picture drawn by a gentleman, since Secretary of the Navy,
who, when he came to covet office, was fain to eat his words.
" The sun was shining out very hot, and in turning an angle of
die^road, we encountered the following group i first a little cart
drrawa by one horse, in which fiv« or six naked black children were
tumbled like pigs together. The<;art had no covering, and they
seemed to have been actually broiled to sleep. Behind the cart
marched three black women, with head, neck, and breasts uncov
ered, aad without shoes or stockings. N«xt came three men bare-
beaded, half naked, and chained together with an ex chain. Last
of all came a white man on horseback, carrying pistols in his belt,
and who, as we passed him, had the impudence to look us in the
face without blushing. I should lik« .to see him hunted by blood-
kouads,'' The original of this sketch, on a much larger scale, is a familiar
sight, in the proper season, in the transit states.
Nor as to mere loss of life is the excess of the African slave
trade, s.s compared with the American, so large as is commonly sup-
posedi" The rice^ cotton^ and sugar regipns ai:^ notoriously un-

4 ANTI-SLAVERY TRACTS.
healthy. Persons not natives do not pass their summers in those re-
.gions if they can help it, lest their first summer should be their
ilast. To an immigrant, spending his first summer under the scorch
ing sun in a rice ditch or a cane field, a black skin is insufficient
protection. Accordingly, acclimation is one of the most familiar
elements of a bargain in the article. The advertisements of prime
negroes in the more southerly slave States constantly describe them
as acclimated. Why ? Of course with a view to a better price.
And why a better price 1 Of course because slaves not acclimated
are more likely to die on the buyer's hands. In what proportion
more likely to die ? A writer in the New Orleans Argus, on the cul
tivation of sugar, says, " The loss by death in bringing slaves from
a northern climate, which our planters are under the necessity of
doing, is not less than twenty-five per cent." It is likely he ia
not far from right. He wrote on the spot ; there was no occasion
for overstatement ; and such results of experience, affecting the
prices current of a great article of merchandise, are just as accu
rately noted and determined as the facts that fix our rates of marine
and life insurance are noted and ciphered out by us. But if twen
ty-five ^er cent, is the actual ratio of loss of life in the internal slave
trade, it is very little, if at all, less than that of the African slave
trade used to be, the horrors of " the middle passage " included.
Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton computed that proportion to be nearly
one third. Newton placed it at one quarter.
But supposing a less amount of mortality and of physical suffer
ing, in the process of sending to market the home-made commodity
of white Colonel Horseracer, of Albemarle, than takes place among
the prisoners shipped by black Prince Bumbo in the Bight of Be
nin, other circumstances tend to throw the balance of agony on the
other side. Compared with the Guinea negro, his brother in Vir
ginia is a civilized and cultivated person. He has much more of
local attachment, of love for wife, children, and friends, to make
him wretched when he is torn away from them, or they from him,
never to see or hear from one another more. Comparatively he has
sensibility, reflection, and forethought ; he can look backward and
forward, and each view brings aggravations to his woe. Between
the two sufferers there is all the difference as to mental distress that
there is difference in the respective capacities of suffering between
a human being scarcely raised above brute life and another of some
culture of the mind and affections. Accordingly a person who will
De at the pains may collect any number of perfectly well-autiienti-

THE INTER-STATE SLAVE TRADE. 5
cafed instances of suicides committed under these circumstances,
with occasional killing of children by their parents to save them
from the dreaded doom. The same Secretary of the Navy before
quoted from had some account from one of the dealers of a bad
speculation of this kind in a young mulatto girl.
" I swore most bitterly I was only to take her to her mother's at
 , and she went with me, though she seemed to doubt me.
But when she discovered that we were out of the State, I thought
she would go mad ; and in fact the next night she drowned herself
in the river close by. I lost a good five hundred dollars." *
The weak attempt to qualify the indignation of humanity and
Christianity at such proceedings by a denial that separations of
families are an incident of slave sales is too preposterous upon its
face to require any refutation. How likely is it that of people who
can make up their minds to buy and sell wives and husbands,
parents and children, brothers, sisters, and so on, any considerable
number will be so scrupulous as to lose a good bargain rather than
hurt the feelings of the article bought and the article rejected ? But
if any one is doubtful on this point, let him step into the nearest
leading room and look at the first column that comes in his way of
the advertisements daily issued in the southern newspapers. Or, if
more convenient, he may find ample specimens of them in various
books which are easily accessible ; for instance, in that unanswered
and unanswerable treatise, Mrs. Beecher Stowe's " Key to Uncle
Tom's Cabin." Mes.srs. Mayhew, Bliss, & Co., of New Orleans,
advertise negroes "to be sold separately or together as desired."
Mr. Benjamin Davis, of Hamburg, South Carolina, will sell '''small
* Extracts from a letter to the ivriter from a gentleman in "Washington : —
" "Williams & Co., of this city, sold a woman and two children to a slave-
dealing house in Alexandria. While they were imprisoned, she murdered
the children, and the purchaser sued the vender for selling him a vicious
slave." '* Williams & Co., (I think — perhaps their predecessors) of this city, bought
a mother and two children near Kockville, Maryland, brought them here, and
put them in their o'vvn prison on Seventh Street and Maryland Avenue. The
mother murdered her two children, and then took her own life. My authority
was a dark intimation in the National Intelligencer that a horrid deed had
occurred in the city; and this was explained to me b^^ the people here as re
ferring to this murder and suicide. No one here ever doubted the facts, so far
as I have information, though I had no o,ther proof than that stated."
** Another was that of a young woman who threw herself from the long
bridge. The story has been poetically told by Grace Greenwood. Another
was the case of a young man employed in a restaurant in one of the lower
rooms cf the Capitol. He learned that his master had sold him ; he fled, was
overtaken, and while his captors were preparing the irons, he took a knife from
Jiis jiocket and cut his throat. This occurred some two years since,"

€ ANTI-SLAVERY TRACTS.
girls, suitable for nurses, and several small boys, without their
mothers," Mr, Benjamin Little, of Memphis, Tennessee, has for
sale " likely young negroes." Mr. T. B. McClendon, " having lo
cated in Lynchburg, (Virginia,) is giving the highest cash prices for
negroes between the ages of ten and thirty years," Mr. Seth Wood-
roof " continues in market for negroes of both sexes, betsveen the
ages of ten and thirty years." Mr. A. A. McLean, General Agent,
Cherry Street, Nashville, "wants to purchase immediately twenty-
five likely negroes, male and female, between the ages of fifteen
and twenty years." Mr, S. N. Brown, of Montgomery, Alabama,
"has now on band, of his own selection and purchasing, a lot of
likely young negroes, consisting of men, boys, and women, field
hands, and superior house servants," &c. Messrs, Sanders & Fos
ter, of the same place, '' intend to keep constantly on hand a large
assortment of negroes, comprising every description." And so on,
to any extent to which the inquirer may incline to go. How are
these " selections " and " assortments " made ? Nature does not
make them. She puts young and old, coachmen and housemaids,
children and their mothers, together in one group, and binds them
so with strong ties, and when they are assorted into different lots, it
is not without much laceration of heartstrings, nor "without great
violence to nature, and impious defiance of nature's God. The
friends so separated — separated by force, or what may be even
more cruel, treacherously, and without the chance of a word of fare
well — are parted never to see each other more on earth — the one
never to hear of the others more unless by some rare accident,
never to know where they live or when they die. The Presbyterian
synod of the slave Slate of Kentucky, in an address to the churches
under its care, before synods and other such bodies got silenced,
thus condensed its observations on this .subject : —
" Brolhjers and sisters, parents and children, husbands and wives,
are torn asunder, and permitted to see each other no more. These
acts are daily occurring in the midst of us. The shrieks and the
agony often witnessed on such occasions proclaim, with a trumpet
tongue, the iniquity of our system. There is not a neighborhood
where these heart-rending scenes are not displayed .; there is not a
village or road that does not behold the sad procession of manacled
outcast.?, whose mournful countenances tell that they are exiled by
force from all that their hearts hold dear.''
It would be very interesting to know by "what figure we are to
Biultiply the bitter distress of each single doom of .this kind, ijj

THE INTER-STATE SLAVE TRADE. 7
order to get at the sum total of woe ; in other words, to know what
number of persons are subjects of the inter-state slave trade. It has
been estimated as higb as an average of forty thousand annually ;
and there appears no room to doubt that in some years, as in 1835
and 1836, this estimate was below the reality. An easy computation
from the census tables (which, u"afortunately, in such matters can
by no means be relied upon as telling the whole truth) indicates
the number to be, on an average, something over twenty thonsand a
year. The decennial ratio of increase in slaves in the LTnited States
for fifty years preceding 1840 (and of course preceding the admis
sion of Texas) was as follows, viz.: between 17&0 and 1800, 27.9',
between 1800 and 1810, 33.4; between 1810 and 1820, 29.1 ; be
tween 1820 and 1830, 30,61; between 1830 and 1840, 23.8. (See
" Report of the Superintendent of the Census for December 1,
1852," p. 153.) The average of these decennial ratios is 28. 9().
Apply it to the slave-exporting States ; viz.. Delaware, Maryland,
Virginia, the two Carolinas, Kentucky, and Tennessee, with the
District of Columbia, (for we will leave out of the account the large
number of transfers which undoubtedly takes place between states
classed respectively as exporting and impoYting. as from Virginia to
South Carolina, and from Missouri to Mississippi.) In 1840 the
States and Territory just named held 1,484,195 slaves. Increasing in
the ratio of 28.96 per cent, in ten years, they should have had, in
1850, 1.914.017. In fact, according to the census, they had only
1,703,936, leaving a difference of 210,081, or something more than
21,000 a year, to be accounted for by emigration. On the other hand,
the number of slaves in the slave-importing States — viz., Georgia,
Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri
— in 1840 was 1,002,031. Increasing in the ratio of 28.96 per cent.
in ten years, their number in 1850 should have been 1,292,219 ; the
census of that year, however, ascertained it to be 1,429.544. In
other words, they had received 137,325, or 13,732 each year, by im
portation. But the exporting States had sent out 21,008 each year.
"What became of the residue of 72,756 — the annual residue of
7,275 — more than one third of the number sold out of the northern
slave States ? Some of them went to Texas ; by no means the
larger part, however ; for Texas, with all its various sources of sup
ply, importations before the annexation, importations from the neigh
boring and from more northerly States, and from natural increase, had
only 5 a, 3.46. slaves- in 1850. To. say that Texas received one third
of the residue in question would be to allow an excessive propor-

8 ANTI-SLAVEKY TRACTS.
tion. Account in this way for an annual average of 2,276 in the ten
years from 1840 to 1850, (during only one third of which time Texas
was in our possession,) it follows that an annual average of 5,000,
or close upon one quarter of the whole number annually exported
from the slave-raising States, are lost sight of after the time of ex
portation. In other words, they perish in the miseries of the land
"middle passage," and the " acclimation."
Such, very imperfectly sketched, and with a total omission of
some material views, are the nature and extent of the inter-state
slave trade. Whatever may be other political relations of slavery,
the remedy for the unutterable wickedness of this traffic is in the
hands of that Congress of the United States to which the free States
send a majority of members. '¦ Congress," says the Federal Con
stitution, (Art. 1, sec. 8,) "shall have power to regulate commerce
with foreign nations, and among the several States." Under the au
thority given in the former clause. Congress made the African slave
trade a felony ; the latter clause gives Congress the same power to
deal in the same way with the American slave trade. It has
actually legislated under the authority of this latter clause. The
act of March 2, 1807, prohibits the transportation of slaves from one
State to another in vessels of less than forty tons burden. An ex- •
tension of the provisions of this act to vessels of any tonnage what
ever would put a stop to this business as part of the coasting trade.
The constitution further provides (Art. 1, sec. 9) that "the migration
or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing
shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress
prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight." To pro
vide that importation should not be prohibited before 1808 was to
provide by implication tliat it might be prohibited after that year ;
and accordingly the federal legislature has in fact prohibited it
since 1808 by lavr. The constitutional provision respecting migro-
tion is precisely the same. Ever since 1808 the legislature has had
the constitutional power to prohibit the migration of slaves — a
power which would long ago have been put into beneficent exer
cise if the spirit of the fathers had not long ago died out.

Published for gratuitous distribution, at the Office of the Amp: ri can
Anti-Slavery Society, No. 138 Nassau Street, New Yori.'j Also
to be had at the Anti-Slavery Offices, No. 21 Cornhill, Bosto^, and
No.. 31 North Fifth Street, Philadelphia.

3 9002 00775 1853