rding to
the ratio of the natural increase of population. But eight years later
a more decisive measure was taken, and it was enacted that all children
born of slave parents after July 4, 1799, should be free. No increase
could then take place, and although slaves still existed, slavery might
be said to be abolished.

From the time at which a Northern State prohibited the importation of
slaves, no slaves were brought from the South to be sold in its markets.
On the other hand, as the sale of slaves was forbidden in that State,
an owner was no longer able to get rid of his slave (who thus became a
burdensome possession) otherwise than by transporting him to the South.
But when a Northern State declared that the son of the slave should be
born free, the slave lost a large portion of his market value, since his
posterity was no longer included in the bargain, and the owner had then
a strong interest in transporting him to the South. Thus the same law
prevents the slaves of the South from coming to the Northern States, and
drives those of the North to the South.

The want of free hands is felt in a State in proportion as the number of
slaves decreases. But in proportion as labor is performed by free hands,
slave labor becomes less productive; and the slave is then a useless
or onerous possession, whom it is important to export to those Southern
States where the same competition is not to be feared. Thus the
abolition of slavery does not set the slave free, but it merely
transfers him from one master to another, and from the North to the
South.

The emancipated negroes, and those born after the abolition of slavery,
do not, indeed, migrate from the North to the South; but their situation
with regard to the Europeans is not unlike that of the aborigines of
America; they remain half civilized, and deprived of their rights in
the midst of a population which is far superior to them in wealth and in
knowledge; where they are exposed to the tyranny of the laws *m and the
intolerance of the people. On some accounts they are still more to be
pitied than the Indians, since they are haunted by the reminiscence of
slavery, and they cannot claim possession of a single portion of the
soil: many of them perish miserably, *n and the rest congregate in the
great towns, where they perform the meanest offices, and lead a wretched
and precarious existence.

[Footnote m: The States in which slavery is abolished usually do what
they can to