spised, or,
if negro-traders excite more contempt than drovers, pedlars, and
day-laborers, it is because, they are, as a class more ignorant and
vulgar, men from low families and boors in their manners. Ridiculous
to suppose, that a people, who have, _by law_, made men articles of
trade equally with swine, should despise men-drovers and traders, more
than hog-drovers and traders. That they are not despised because it is
their business to trade in _human beings_ and bring them to market, is
plain from the fact that when some 'gentleman of property and
standing' and of a 'good family' embarks in a negro speculation, and
employs a dozen 'soul drivers' to traverse the upper country, and
drive to the south coffles of slaves, expending hundreds of thousands
in his wholesale purchases, he does not lose caste. It is known in
Alabama, that Mr. Erwin, son-in-law of the Hon. Henry Clay, and
brother of J.P. Erwin, formerly postmaster, and late mayor of the
city of Nashville, laid the foundation of a princely fortune in the
slave-trade, carried on from the Northern Slave States to the Planting
South; that the Hon. H. Hitchcock, brother-in-law of Mr. E., and since
one of the judges of the Supreme Court of Alabama, was interested with
him in the traffic; and that a late member of the Kentucky Senate
(Col. Wall) not only carried on the same business, a few years ago,
but accompanied his droves in person down the Mississippi. Not as the
_driver_, for that would be vulgar drudgery, beneath a gentleman, but
as a nabob in state, ordering his understrappers.

It is also well known that President Jackson was a 'soul driver,' and
that even so late as the year before the commencement of the last war,
he bought up a coffle of slaves and drove them down to Louisiana for
sale.

Thomas N. Gadsden, Esq. the principal slave auctioneer in Charleston,
S.C. is of one of the first families in the state, and moves in the
very highest class of society there. He is a descendant of the
distinguished General Gadsden of revolutionary memory, the most
prominent southern member in the Continental Congress of 1765, and
afterwards elected lieutenant governor and then governor of the state.
The Rev. Dr. Gadsden, rector of St. Phillip's Church, Charleston, and
the Rev. Phillip Gadsden, both prominent Episcopal clergymen in South
Carolina, and Colonel James Gadsden of the United States army, after
whom a county in Florida was recently named, are all brothers of th