e from North Carolina had been marched back for want of buyers.[40]
But losses of this sort were more than offset in the long run by the upward
trend of prices which was in effect throughout the most of the ante-bellum
period. The Southern planters sometimes cut into the business of the
traders by going to the border states to buy and bring home in person the
slaves they needed.[41] The building of railways speeded the journeys and
correspondingly reduced the costs. The Central of Georgia Railroad
improved its service in 1858 by instituting a negro sleeping car [42]--an
accommodation which apparently no railroad has furnished in the post-bellum
decades.

[Footnote 40: _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Dec. 31, 1844.]

[Footnote 41: Andrews, _Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade_, p.171.]

While the traders were held in common contempt, the incidents and effects
of their traffic were viewed with mixed emotions. Its employment of
shackles was excused only on the ground of necessary precaution. Its
breaking up of families was generally deplored, although it was apologized
for by thick-and-thin champions of everything Southern with arguments that
negro domestic ties were weak at best and that the separations were no more
frequent than those suffered by free laborers at the North under the stress
of economic necessity. Its drain of money from the districts importing the
slaves was regretted as a financial disadvantage. On the other hand, the
citizens of the exporting states were disposed to rejoice doubly at being
saved from loss by the depreciation of property on their hands [43] and at
seeing the negro element in their population begin to dwindle;[44] but even
these considerations were in some degree offset, in Virginia at least,
by thoughts that the shrinkage of the blacks was not enough to lessen
materially the problem of racial adjustments, that it was prime young
workmen and women rather than culls who were being sold South, that white
immigration was not filling their gaps, and that accordingly land prices
were falling as slave prices rose.[45]

[Footnote 42: Central of Georgia Railroad Company _Report_ for 1859.]

[Footnote 43: _National Intelligencer_ (Washington, D.C.), Jan. 19, 1833.]

[Footnote 44: R.R. Howison, _History of Virginia_ (Richmond, Va.,
1846-1848), II. 519, 520.]

[Footnote 45: Edmund Ruffin, "The Effects of High Prices of Slaves," in
_DeBow's Review_, XXVI, 647-657 (June, 1859).]

Delawar