left to itself, keep up its
numbers, there were, in 1830, one hundred and seven thousand slaves; in
1840, one hundred and seventy thousand. In Alabama, the slave population
during those ten years much more than doubled; it rose from one hundred
and seventeen thousand to two hundred and fifty-three thousand. In
Mississippi it actually tripled. It rose from sixty-five thousand to one
hundred and ninety-five thousand. So much for the extent of this slave
trade. And as to its nature, ask any Englishman who has ever travelled
in the Southern States. Jobbers go about from plantation to plantation
looking out for proprietors who are not easy in their circumstances,
and who are likely to sell cheap. A black boy is picked up here; a black
girl there. The dearest ties of nature and of marriage are torn asunder
as rudely as they were ever torn asunder by any slave captain on the
coast of Guinea. A gang of three or four hundred negroes is made up;
and then these wretches, handcuffed, fettered, guarded by armed men,
are driven southward, as you would drive,--or rather as you would not
drive,--a herd of oxen to Smithfield, that they may undergo the deadly
labour of the sugar mill near the mouth of the Mississippi. A very
few years of that labour in that climate suffice to send the stoutest
African to his grave. But he can well be spared. While he is fast
sinking into premature old age, negro boys in Virginia are growing up as
fast into vigorous manhood to supply the void which cruelty is making in
Louisiana. God forbid that I should extenuate the horrors of the slave
trade in any form! But I do think this its worst form. Bad enough is it
that civilised men should sail to an uncivilised quarter of the world
where slavery exists, should there buy wretched barbarians, and should
carry them away to labour in a distant land: bad enough! But that a
civilised man, a baptized man, a man proud of being a citizen of a free
state, a man frequenting a Christian church, should breed slaves for
exportation, and, if the whole horrible truth must be told, should even
beget slaves for exportation, should see children, sometimes his own
children, gambolling around him from infancy, should watch their growth,
should become familiar with their faces, and should then sell them for
four or five hundred dollars a head, and send them to lead in a remote
country a life which is a lingering death, a life about which the best
thing that can be said is that it i