Slave market

“ Cheap food enables the farmer of Virginia to raise cheap labour for the slave market. Raise the price of food, and the profit of that species of manufacture would diminish. Raise it still higher, and the profit would disappear ”

“ It is, however, a notable fact, that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans, upon those engaged in the foreign slave trade, the men engaged in the slave trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.
Behold the practical operation of this internal slave trade—the American slave trade sustained by American politics and American religion! Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our southern states. ”

“ Supposing them in the first year to fail in their endeavours to obtain a share of the Slaves allowed to be imported, they may hope to be more fortunate in the second. Meanwhile the hope of a resource in the Slave market will prevent their exerting themselves in earnest in establishing the system by which they might secure an internal increase; and thus they might be drawn on from year to year to their own ruin, to the public injury, and to the misery of their unhappy Negroes. ”

“ Purchasers usually took care to have them stripped naked, for slave-dealers had recourse to as many tricks to conceal personal defects as the horse-jockeys of modern times: sometimes purchasers called in the advice of medical men. Newly imported slaves had their feet whitened with chalk, and those that came from the East had their ears bored, which we know was a sign of slavery among many eastern nations. The slave-market, like all other markets, was under the jurisdiction of the aediles, who made many regulations by edicts respecting the sale of slaves. ”

“ If it is, let him next determine if the tendency of the system is not that of enslaving the producers of cotton, white, brown, and black, and compelling them to carry all their wool to a single market, in which one set of masters dictates the price at which they must sell the raw material and must buy the manufactured one. ”

“ But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour, &c., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c. Hence the negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. ”

“ A very large number of planters have ceased to raise crops with the expectation of profit. They endeavor to make the produce of their lands pay their current expenses; but all their hopes of gain are confined to' the business of raising slaves for the southern market; and that market is as regularly supplied with slaves from Virginia, as with mules and horses from Kentucky.
But the slave-trade in America, as well as in Africa, carries with it the curse of depopulation ”

“ It is believed that nowhere in the farming portion of the United States would slave labor be generally employed, if the proprietor were not tempted to raise slaves by the high price of the Southern market, which keeps it up in his own. ”

“ Exclusively of the fluctuations caused by the variations in the supply and demand, the market price of slaves was affected by their age, health, strength, beauty, natural abilities, mechanical ingenuity, and moral qualities. The meanest and cheapest class were those who worked in the mills, where mere bodily strength was required. A low value was set upon slaves who worked in the mines — a sum equal to about eight dollars. In the age of Demosthenes, ordinary house slaves, male or female, were valued at about the same price. ”

“ In proportion as the demand for free labor products increases, the supply will increase, and the greater the quantity of such articles which is thrown into the market, the more their price will lessen. Besides "allowing the labor of a slave for six [pg 19] years, to produce all the various slave-grown products which anyone may use during the course of his life, would not he who was so occupied be in effect the slave of such an one during the time he was thus employed?" ”

“ Farmers, who make a business of raising slaves for the market, were there, and slave-traders, who make a business of buying human beings in the slave-raising States and taking them to the far South, were also in attendance. Men and women, too, who wished to purchase for their own use, had found their way to the slave sale. ”

“ Extremes thus always meet. The more splendid the palace of the trader, whether in cloth, cotton, negroes, or Hindoos, the more squalid will be the poverty of the labourer, his wife and children,—and the more numerous the diamonds on the coat of Prince Esterhazy, the more ragged will be his serfs. The more that local places of exchange are closed, the greater will be the tendency to the exhaustion and abandonment of the land, and the more flourishing will be the slave trade, North and South,—and the greater will be the growth of pro-slavery at the South, and anti-slavery at the North. ”

“ As all sagacious observers of the operation of the system of slavery have demonstrated, the profitable employment of slave-labor is inconsistent with the development of agricultural science, and demands a continual supply of new and unexhausted soil. The slaveholder, investing his capital in the purchase of the laborers themselves, and not merely in soil and machines, paying his free laborers out of the profit, must depend for his continued and progressive prosperity upon the cheapness and facility with which he can transfer his slaves to fresh and fertile lands. ”

“ Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me, citizens, where, under the sun, can you witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave trade, as it exists at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States. ”

“ Indeed a very brief glance will show that slavery is inconsistent with economy, whether domestic or political.
The slave is bought, sometimes at a very high price; in free labor there is no such investment of capital. ”

“ Can there be any other reason shewn why the same measures which are now in force for the extirpation of the slave trade should not have been adopted thirty years ago? The trade was then equally cruel and barbarous, equally disgraceful to man, and detestable in the sight of Heaven, as it is now rightly considered; but the merchant, the planter, and the factor, have been enriched by this lucrative commerce in their fellow-creatures, and they have received that patronage and countenance, which wealth, however obtained or employed, is seldom denied. ”

“ It was not altogether a mistaken judgment that led the constitutional fathers to consider the slave-trade as the backbone of slavery. An economic system based on slave labor will find, sooner or later, that the demand for the cheapest slave labor cannot long be withstood. Once degrade the laborer so that he cannot assert his own rights, and there is but one limit below which his price cannot be reduced. ”

“ Now, my own feelings on that subject are not quite so hopeless as here expressed, and it seems to me that you are not aware of the extent to which free labor may come into competition with slave labor. I know several instances, in the most slaveholding states, in which slave labor has been displaced, and free labor substituted in its stead. The weakness of slavery consists in the expense of the slaves, the great capital to be invested in their purchase before any work can be performed, and the constant danger of loss by death or escape. ”

“ I do not question but humanity may have had a considerable influence in abolishing slavery in her West India possessions, aided, indeed, by the fallacious calculation that the labor of the negroes would be at least as profitable, if not more so, in consequence of the measure. She acted on the principle that tropical products can be produced cheaper by free African labor and East India labor, than by slave labor. She knew full well the value of such products to her commerce, navigation, navy, manufactures, revenue, and power. ”

“ When, after 1850, the price of slaves had risen to a monopoly height, the leaders of the plantation system, brought to the edge of bankruptcy by the crude and reckless farming necessary under a slave régime, and baffled, at least temporarily, in their quest of new rich land to exploit, began instinctively to feel that the only salvation of American slavery lay in the reopening 169of the African slave-trade. ”

“ Employers, it is true, might buy slaves for temporary employment and sell them when the need for their labor was ended; but the fluctuations of slave prices and of the local opportunity to sell those on hand would involve such persons in slave trading risks on a scale eclipsing that of their industrial earnings. ”

“ The high price of cotton, and the great profit attached to its cultivation, have no doubt furnished the greatest stimulant to an increase of that part of the population. In the competition for more labor, the price of slaves was enormously increased. Some years ago the price of a slave was about £100; now they are worth from £200 to £400. But what must be the tendency of this fearful competition for a limited supply of human labor—limited as long as the slave trade is prohibited—unlimited as soon as the slave trade is legalized? ”

“ The social stigma upon slave dealing doubtless enhanced the profits of the traders by diminishing the competition. The difference in the scales of prices prevailing at any time in the cheapest and the dearest local markets was hardly ever less than thirty per cent. From such a margin, however, there had to be deducted not only the cost of feeding, clothing, sheltering, guarding and transporting the slaves for the several months commonly elapsing between purchase and sale in the trade, but also allowances for such loss as might occur in transit by death, illness, accident or escape. ”

“ Suppose there is a man with no property, except fifteen or twenty negro men, whom he can sell, each one for two hundred pounds, cash; and he has as many negro women, whom he can sell for one hundred and fifty pounds, cash, and the children for one hundred pounds each: here is a temptation to avarice; and it is calculated to silence the voice of conscience; and it is the expansion of the slave territory, and the immense mercantile value of the cotton, that has brought so powerful an influence to bear on the United States in favor of slavery. ”

“ If a demand for slaves arose, a supply was forced in one way or other; and it was in vain, overpowered as we then were with positive evidence, as well as the reasonableness of the supposition, to deny that by the Slave-trade we occasioned all the enormities which had been alleged against it. ”

“ Every one, if he stirred from home, felt himself obliged to be armed.
Such was the nature of the slave-trade. It had unfortunately obtained the name of a trade, and many had been deceived by the appellation. But it was war and not trade. It was a mass of crimes, and not commerce. It was that which prevented the introduction of a trade in Africa; for it was only by clearing and cultivating the lands, that the climate could be made healthy for settlements; but this wicked traffic, by dispersing the inhabitants, and causing the lands to remain uncultivated, made the coast unhealthy to Europeans. ”

“ But gentlemen are alarmed lest the markets of other states be closed against the introduction of our slaves. Sir, the demand for slave labor MUST INCREASE through the South and West. It has been heretofore limited by the want of capital; but when emigrants shall be relieved from their embarrassments, contracted by the purchase of their lands, the annual profits of their estates, will constitute an accumulating capital, which they will seek to invest in labor. That the demand for labor must increase in proportion to the increase of capital, is one of the demonstrations of political economists ”

“ Again, while the price of cotton is fixed in England, there, too, is fixed the price of cloth, and such is the case with the sugar and the indigo to the production of which these poor people are forced to devote themselves; and thus are they rendered the mere slaves of distant men, who determine what they shall receive for all they have to sell, and what they shall pay for all they require to purchase. Centralization and slavery go thus always hand in hand with each other. ”

“ Especially must this law operate with irresistible force in this country, where the number of slaves is limited, and cannot be increased by importation, where many millions of acres of sugar and cotton lands are still uncultivated, and, from the ever-augmenting demand, exceeding the supply, the price of those great staples has nearly doubled, demanding vastly more slave labor for their production. ”

“ Undoubtedly there were in the United States many people who were opposed to the trade because of principle. But the student cannot overlook the fact that the feeling against the trade was able to make headway because there was no financial interest in slaves or slavers at the North, outside of a few ports, and at the South there were increasing numbers of slave-owners who had slaves to sell through the natural increase of their holdings. ”