Slave trade

“ As to the slave-trade itself, there could not be two opinions about it where men were not interested. A trade, begun in savage war, prosecuted with unheard of barbarity, continued during the transportation with the most loathsome imprisonment, and ending in perpetual exile and slavery, was a trade so horrid in all its circumstances that it was impossible to produce a single argument in its favor. ”

“ Said an eloquent coast chief when the English began to negotiate with him for the abolition of the slave traffic:
"I and my army are ready, at all times, to fight the enemies of England, and do anything the English may ask of me, except to give up the slave-trade. No other trade is known to my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. ”

“ I cannot say all that is in my thought, but it is a fact that the slave trade and the plantations might have been carried on profitably without any cruelty whatever to the slave. It is a matter of knowledge among people now living that many planters promoted the physical comforts and added to the mental pleasures of their slaves, while here and there a ship was found to make the middle passage without losing a life. The horrors of the trade that cried aloud to heaven for more than three hundred years were merely the grosser natural outgrowths of the root evil in it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The question of the suppression of the slave-trade is so intimately connected with the questions as to its rise, the system of American slavery, and the whole colonial policy of the eighteenth century, that it is difficult to isolate it, and at the same time to avoid superficiality on the one hand, and unscientific narrowness of view on the other. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus according to this construction, we have here an institution of a universal slave trade, by which every man may not only become a merchant, but may rightfully become the merchandize itself of this trade, and be bought and sold like a beast. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The proposition to revive, or more properly to reopen, the slave trade is as yet but imperfectly understood, in its intentions and probable results, by the people of the South, and but little appreciated by them. ”

“ Perhaps what I have said of myself may be applicable to the nation at large. The Slave Trade was always unjustifiable; but inattention and interest prevented, for a time, the evil from being perceived. It is otherwise at present; the mischiefs and evils, connected with it, have been, of late years, represented with such undeniable evidence, and are now, so generally known, that I suppose there is hardly an objection can be made, to the wish of thousands, perhaps of millions, for the suppression of this Trade, but upon the ground of political expedience. ”

“ He trusted we should not think ourselves too liberal, if, by abolishing the Slave-trade, we gave them the same common chance of civilization with other parts of the world. If we listened to the voice of reason and duty this night, some of us might live to see a reverse of that picture, from which we now turned our eyes with shame. We might live to behold the natives engaged in the calm occupations of industry, and in the pursuit of a just commerce. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was a speech no less remarkable for splendid eloquence, than for solid sense and convincing reason; supported by calculations founded on facts, and conclusions drawn from premises, as correctly as if they had been mathematical propositions; all tending to prove that, instead of the West Indian plantations suffering an injury, they would derive a material benefit by the abolition of the Slave Trade. ”

“ But the internal traffic was still lawful, and the breeding States soon reconciled themselves to a prohibition which gave them the monopoly of the interdicted trade, and they joined the full chorus of reprobation, to punish with death the slave-trader from Africa, while they cherished and shielded and enjoyed the precious profits of the American slave-trade exclusively to themselves. ”

“ I afterwards learned from my master, that this man had formerly been engaged in the African slave-trade, which he had given up some years before, for the safer and less arduous business of buying negroes in the north, and bringing them to the south, as articles of merchandise, in which he had acquired a very respectable fortune—had lately married in a wealthy family, in this part of the country, and was a great planter. ”

“ The cruelties of the African slave trade have never been written, — can not be written. No pen can describe them; and yet, how many American citizens, whose feelings will revolt at these details of suffering, will hear with comparative indifference of the revival of the iniquity in our land! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That the slave trade then, either by diminishing the proper encouragement to the natives, or endangering their persons, or by doing both, is the real cause why they do not or cannot exert their industry in cultivating the various articles, which their country has been proved to produce, can be ascertained from facts ”

“ If there be still a sceptic who hesitates to approve of the abolition of the slave trade, let him visit one of these African slave-yards, a short time before a cargo of these wretched beings is exported, and if he have a spark of humanity left it will surely strike conviction to his mind. ”

“ The Negro slave trade was the first step in modern world commerce, followed by the modern theory of colonial expansion. Slaves as an article of commerce were shipped as long as the traffic paid. ”

“ Thus, out of every lot of one hundred shipped from Africa, seventeen died in about nine weeks, and not more than fifty lived to become efficient laborers in our islands.
Having advanced thus far in his investigation, he felt, he said, the wickedness of the slave-trade to be so enormous, so dreadful, and irremediable, that he could stop at no alternative short of its abolition. A trade founded on iniquity, and carried on with such circumstances of horror, must be abolished, let the policy of it be what it might ”

“ Thus the evils which the interior countries suffer from the Slave Trade, are great and many; but their effects are not, as they commonly are on the coast, such as to break up the very foundations of society, and destroy the cohesion of its elementary parts. In the interior, the Slave Trade exercises powers of destruction which justly entitle it to the character of one of the greatest scourges of the human race. ”

“ No other trade ever had such an exalted origin, and yet the cruelties and horrors of it far surpass those described in any other branch of history. The soldiers who have looted cities, the pirates who have made passengers and sailors walk the plank, and the religious zealots who have burned their opponents at the stake, were more merciful than the slave-traders. ”

“ But may we not be allowed to assume a higher tone, and to ask, if this practice, though by a strange perversion of words it is called the Slave Trade, ought indisputably to be considered as a most enormous crime, rather than a commerce, is it not clearly our own duty to abstain from it, and to prohibit and to punish the perpetration of it by our own subjects, however it may still prevail in other countries? ”

“ But if the planters were thus to get their labourers from the births on their own estates, then the Slave Trade would in time be no longer necessary to them, and it would die away as an useless and a noxious plant. ”

“ These communities of small farmers and traders derived whatever opposition they had to the slave-trade from three sorts of motives,—economic, political, and moral. First, the importation of slaves did not pay, except to supply a moderate demand for household servants. Secondly, these colonies, as well as those in the South, had a wholesome political fear of a large servile population. ”

“ Whether, if trade was carried on with them for a series of years, as it has been with most other savage countries, and the Europeans gave no incouragement whatever to the Slave Trade, those cruel wars among the Blacks would not cease, and a fair and honourable Commerce in time take place throughout the whole country? ”

“ It is calculated that 30,000 Slaves, or more, are bought and sold annually; tens of thousands of poor Slaves are torn from their husbands, wives, and children, precipitated upon the Cotton-growing States, swelling in many localities an already over-crowded population. On many a Plantation, and in many a Slave-coffle, there is heard "a voice of lamentation and weeping, and great mournng; Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not." I have no doubt but the Foreign Slave Trade is quietly in operation in the United States ”

“ What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The increase of the domestic slave-trade from the northern belt of slaveholding states to the extreme South, due to the profitableness of cotton-raising, and stimulated by the prohibition of the foreign slave-trade in 1807, aroused slaves to flight in order to avoid being sold to unknown masters in remote regions. ”

“ Still all slavers were greedy, more or less, and an immediate effect of the laws was to reduce the price of the slaves on the coast of Africa. Slavers, when the trade was lawful, had often paid as high as $100 for a good negro in Africa. ”

“ When first the Abolition of the Slave-Trade was agitated in England, the friends of humanity endeavoured by two means to accomplish it—To destroy the Trade immediately by the interference of Government ”

“ In the first place, it is a part of the system; for if there were no slaves, there could be no slave-trade; and while there are slaves, the slave-trade will continue. In the next place, the trade is still briskly carried on in Africa, and slaves are smuggled into these States through the Spanish colonies. In the third place, a very extensive internal slave-trade is carried on in this [Pg 33] country. The breeding of negro-cattle for the foreign markets, (of Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Missouri,) is a very lucrative branch of business. ”