d
make a clear profit of from $30,000 to $100,000 in a single voyage. Some
of them made as many as five voyages before they became so foul that
they had to be abandoned.[21] While some voyages were less profitable
than others, there was no avenue of international trade that offered
more alluring possibilities.

Sanctioned by potentates, blessed by the church, and surrounded with the
garments of respectability, the slave trade grew, until, in the words of
Samuel Hopkins (1787), "The trade in human species has been the first
wheel of commerce in Newport, on which every other movement in business
has depended.... By it the inhabitants have gotten most of their wealth
and riches." (Spears, p. 20.) After the vigorous measures taken by the
British Government for its suppression, the slave trade was carried on
chiefly in American-built ships; officered by American citizens; backed
by American capital, and under the American flag.

The slave trade was the business of the North as slavery was the
business of the South. Both flourished until the Proclamation of
Emancipation in 1863.

4. _Slavery in the United States_

Slavery and the slave trade date from the earliest colonial times. The
first slaves in the English colonies were brought to Jamestown in 1619
by a Dutch ship. The first American-built slave ship was the _Desire_,
launched at Marblehead in 1636. There were Negro slaves in New York as
early as 1626, although there were only a few hundred slaves in the
colonies prior to 1650.

Since slave labor is economical only where the slaves can be worked
together in gangs, there was never much slavery among the farmers and
small business men of the North. On the other hand, in the South, the
developing plantation system made it possible for the owner to use large
gangs of slaves in the clearing of new land; in the raising of tobacco,
and in caring for rice and cotton. The plantation system of agriculture
and the cotton gin made slavery the success that it was in the United
States. "The characteristic American slave, indeed, was not only a
Negro, but a plantation workman."[22]

The opening years of the nineteenth century found slavery intrenched
over the whole territory of the United States that lay South of the
Mason and Dixon line. In that territory slave trading and slave owning
were just as much a matter of course as horse trading and horse owning
were a matter of course in the North. "Every public auctioneer handled