he gate of hell, ain't it?' ... The hardships the
negroes go through who are attached to one of these emigrant parties baffle
description.... They trudge on foot all day through mud and thicket without
rest or respite.... Thousands of miles are traversed by these weary
wayfarers without their knowing or caring why, urged on by the whip and in
the full assurance that no change of place can bring any change to them....
Hard work, coarse food, merciless floggings, are all that await them, and
all that they can look to. I have never passed them, staggering along in
the rear of the wagons at the close of a long day's march, the weakest
furthest in the rear, the strongest already utterly spent, without
wondering how Christendom, which eight centuries ago rose in arms for a
sentiment, can look so calmly on at so foul and monstrous a wrong as this
American slavery."[22] If instead of crossing the Mississippi bottoms and
ascribing to slavery the hardships he observed, Godkin had been crossing
the Nevada desert that year and had come upon, as many others did, a train
of emigrants with its oxen dead, its women and children perishing
of thirst, and its men with despairing eyes turned still toward the
gold-fields of California, would he have inveighed against freedom as the
cause? Between Flint's impression of pleasure and Godkin's of gloom no
choice need be made, for either description was often exemplified. In
general the slaves took the fatigues and the diversions of the route merely
as the day's work and the day's play.

[Footnote 21: Timothy Flint, _History and Geography of the Western States_
(Cincinnati, 1828), p. 11.]

[Footnote 22: Letter of E.L. Godkin to the _London News_, reprinted in the
_North American Review_, CLXXXV (1907), 46, 47.]

Many planters whose points of departure and of destination were accessible
to deep water made their transit by sea. Thus on the brig _Calypso_ sailing
from Norfolk to New Orleans in April, 1819, Benjamin Ballard and Samuel T.
Barnes, both of Halifax County, North Carolina, carrying 30 and 196 slaves
respectively, wrote on the margins of their manifests, the one "The owner
of these slaves is moving to the parish of St. Landry near Opelousas where
he has purchased land and intends settling, and is not a dealer in human
flesh," the other, "The owner of these slaves is moving to Louisiana to
settle, and is not a dealer in human flesh." On the same voyage Augustin
Pugh of the adjoining Berti