American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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An Alabama spokesman rejoiced in the manual industry of the white people in
his state, and said if the negroes were only thinned off it would become a
great and prosperous commonwealth.[28] But another Alabamian, A.B. Meek,
found reason to eulogize both emigration and slavery. He said the
roughness of manners prevalent in the haphazard western aggregation of
New Englanders, Virginians, Carolinians and Georgians would prove but
a temporary phase. Slavery would be of benefit through its tendency to
stratify society, ennoble the upper classes, and give even the poorer
whites a stimulating pride of race. "In a few years," said he, "owing to
the operation of this institution upon our unparalleled natural advantages,
we shall be the richest people beneath the bend of the rainbow; and then
the arts and the sciences, which always follow in the train of wealth, will
flourish to an extent hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic." [29]

[Footnote 28: Portland, Ala., _Evening Advertiser_, April 12, 1833.]

[Footnote 29: _Southern Ladies' Book_ (Macon, Ga.), April, 1840.]

As a practical measure to relieve the stress of the older districts a
beginning was made in seed selection, manuring and crop rotation to
enhance the harvests; horses were largely replaced by mules, whose earlier
maturity, greater hardihood and longer lives made their use more economical
for plow and wagon work;[30] the straight furrows of earlier times gave
place in the Piedmont to curving ones which followed the hill contours
and when supplemented with occasional grass balks and ditches checked the
scouring of the rains and conserved in some degree the thin soils of the
region; a few textile factories were built to better the local market for
cotton and lower the cost of cloth as well as to yield profits to their
proprietors; the home production of grain and meat supplies was in some
measure increased; and river and highway improvements and railroad
construction were undertaken to lessen the expenses of distant
marketing.[31] Some of these recourses were promptly adopted in the newer
settlements also; and others proved of little avail for the time being. The
net effect of the betterments, however, was an appreciable offsetting
of the western advantage; and this, when added to the love of home, the
disrelish of primitive travel and pioneer life, and the dread of the costs
and risks involved in removal, dissuaded multitudes from the project of
migration. The actual depopulation of the Atlantic states was less than the
plaints of the time would suggest. The volume of emigration was undoubtedly
great, and few newcomers came in to fill the gaps. But the birth rate alone
in those generations of ample families more than replaced the losses year
by year in most localities. The sense of loss was in general the product
not of actual depletion but of disappointment in the expectation of
increase.

[Footnote 30: H.T. Cook, _The Life and Legacy of David R. Williams_ (New
York, 1916), pp. 166-168.]

[Footnote 31: U.B. Phillips, _History of Transportation in the Eastern
Cotton Belt to 1860_.]

The non-slaveholding backwoodsmen formed the vanguard of settlement on
each frontier in turn; the small slaveholders followed on their heels and
crowded each fertile district until the men who lived by hunting as well as
by farming had to push further westward; finally the larger planters with
their crowded carriages, their lumbering wagons and their trudging slaves
arrived to consolidate the fields of such earlier settlers as would sell.
It often seemed to the wayfarer that all the world was on the move. But in
the districts of durable soil thousands of men, clinging to their homes,
repelled every attack of the western fever.

CHAPTER XI

THE DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE

In the New England town of Plymouth in November, 1729, a certain Thompson
Phillips who was about to sail for Jamaica exchanged a half interest in his
one-legged negro man for a similar share in Isaac Lathrop's negro boy who
was to sail with Phillips and be sold on the voyage. Lathrop was meanwhile
to teach the man the trade of cordwaining, and was to resell his share
to Phillips at the end of a year at a price of L40 sterling.[1] This
transaction, which was duly concluded in the following year, suggests the
existence of a trade in slaves on a small scale from north to south in
colonial times. Another item in the same connection is an advertisement in
the _Boston Gazette_ of August 17, 1761, offering for sale young slaves
just from Africa and proposing to take in exchange "any negro men, strong
and hearty though not of the best moral character, which are proper
subjects of transportation";[2] and a third instance appears in a letter of
James Habersham of Georgia in 1764 telling of his purchase of a parcel
of negroes at New York for work on his rice plantation.[3] That the
disestablishment of slavery in the North during and after the American
Revolution enhanced the exportation of negroes was recited in a Vermont
statute of 1787,[4] and is shown by occasional items in Southern archives.
One of these is the registry at Savannah of a bill of sale made at New
London in 1787 for a mulatto boy "as a servant for the term of ten years
only, at the expiration of which time he is to be free."[5] Another is a
report from an official at Norfolk to the Governor of Virginia, in 1795,
relating that the captain of a sloop from Boston with three negroes on
board pleaded ignorance of the Virginia law against the bringing in of
slaves.[6]

[Footnote 1: Massachusetts Historical Society _Proceedings_, XXIV, 335,
336.]

[Footnote 2: Reprinted in Joshua Coffin, _An Account of Some of the
Principal Slave Insurrections_ (New York, 1860), p. 15.]

[Footnote 3: "The Letters of James Habersham," in the Georgia Historical
Society _Collections_, VI, 22, 23.]

[Footnote 4: _New England Register_, XXIX, 248, citing Vermont _Statutes_,
1787, p. 105.]

[Footnote 5: U.B. Phillips, "Racial Problems, Adjustments and Disturbances
in the Ante-bellum South," in _The South in the Building of the Nation_,
IV, 218.]

[Footnote 6: _Calendar of Virginia State Papers_, VIII, 255.]

The federal census returns show that from 1790 onward the decline in the
number of slaves in the Northern states was more than counterbalanced by
the increase of their free negroes. This means either that the selling of
slaves to the southward was very slight, or that the statistical effect
of it was canceled by the northward flight of fugitive slaves and the
migration of negroes legally free. There seems to be no evidence that the
traffic across Mason and Dixon's line was ever of large dimensions, the
following curious item from a New Orleans newspaper in 1818 to the contrary
notwithstanding: "Jersey negroes appear to be peculiarly adapted to this
market--especially those that bear the mark of Judge Van Winkle, as it is
understood that they offer the best opportunity for speculation. We have
the right to calculate on large importations in future, from the success
which hitherto attended the sale."[7]

[Footnote 7: Augusta, Ga., _Chronicle_, Aug. 22, 1818, quoting the New
Orleans _Chronicle_, July 14, 1818.]

The internal trade at the South began to be noticeable about the end of the
eighteenth century. A man at Knoxville, Tennessee, in December, 1795, sent
notice to a correspondent in Kentucky that he was about to set out with
slaves for delivery as agreed upon, and would carry additional ones on
speculation; and he concluded by saying "I intend carrying on the business
extensively."[8] In 1797 La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt met a "drove of
negroes" about one hundred in number,[9] whose owner had abandoned the
planting business in the South Carolina uplands and was apparently carrying
them to Charleston for sale. In 1799 there was discovered in the Georgia
treasury a shortage of some ten thousand dollars which a contemporary news
item explained as follows: Mr. Sims, a member of the legislature, having
borrowed the money from the treasurer, entrusted it to a certain Speers for
the purchase of slaves in Virginia. "Speers accordingly went and purchased
a considerable number of negroes; and on his way returning to this state
the negroes rose and cut the throats of Speers and another man who
accompanied him. The slaves fled, and about ten of them, I think, were
killed. In consequence of this misfortune Mr. Sims was rendered unable to
raise the money at the time the legislature met."[10] Another transaction
achieved record because of a literary effusion which it prompted. Charles
Mott Lide of South Carolina, having inherited a fortune, went to Virginia
early in 1802 to buy slaves, and began to establish a sea-island cotton
plantation in Georgia. But misfortune in other investments forced him next
year to sell his land, slaves and crops to two immigrants from the Bahama
Islands. Thereupon, wrote he, "I composed the following valedictory, which
breathes something of the tenderness of Ossian."[11] Callous history is not
concerned in the farewell to his "sweet asylum," but only in the fact that
he bought slaves in Virginia and carried them to Georgia. A grand jury
at Alexandria presented as a grievance in 1802, "the practice of persons
coming from distant parts of the United States into this district for the
purpose of purchasing slaves."[12] Such fugitive items as these make up the
whole record of the trade in its early years, and indeed constitute the
main body of data upon its career from first to last.

[Footnote 8: Unsigned MS. draft in the Wisconsin Historical Society, Draper
collection, printed in _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 55, 56.]

[Footnote 9: La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, _Travels in the United States_, p.
592.]

[Footnote 10: Charleston, S.C., _City Gazette_, Dec. 21, 1799.]

[Footnote 11: Alexander Gregg, _History of the Old Cheraws_ (New York,
1877), pp. 480-482.]

[Footnote 12: Quoted in a speech in Congress in 1829, _Register of
Debates_, V, 177.]

As soon as the African trade was closed, the interstate traffic began to
assume the aspect of a regular business though for some years it not only
continued to be of small scale but was oftentimes merely incidental in
character. That is to say, migrating planters and farmers would in some
cases carry extra slaves bought with a view to reselling them at western
prices and applying the proceeds toward the expense of their new
homesteads. The following advertisement by William Rochel at Natchez in
1810 gives an example of this: "I have upwards of twenty likely Virginia
born slaves now in a flat bottomed boat lying in the river at Natchez, for
sale cheaper than has been sold here in years.[13] Part of said negroes
I wish to barter for a small farm. My boat may be known by a large cane
standing on deck."

[Footnote 13: Natchez, Miss., _Weekly Chronicle_, April 2, 1810.]

The heyday of the trade fell in the piping times of peace and migration
from 1815 to 1860. Its greatest activity was just prior to the panic of
1837, for thereafter the flow was held somewhat in check, first by the
hard times in the cotton belt and then by an agricultural renaissance in
Virginia. A Richmond newspaper reported in the fall of 1836 that estimates
by intelligent men placed Virginia's export in the preceding year at
120,000 slaves, of whom at least two thirds had been carried by emigrating
owners, and the rest by dealers.[14] This was probably an exaggeration
for even the greatest year of the exodus. What the common volume of the
commercial transport was can hardly be ascertained from the available data.

[Footnote 14: _Niles' Register_, LI, 83 (Oct. 8, 1836), quoting the
_Virginia Times_.]

The slave trade was partly systematic, partly casual. For local sales every
public auctioneer handled slaves along with other property, and in each
city there were brokers buying them to sell again or handling them on
commission. One of these at New Orleans in 1854 was Thomas Foster who
advertised that he would pay the highest prices for sound negroes as
well as sell those whom merchants or private citizens might consign him.
Expecting to receive negroes throughout the season, he said, he would have
a constant stock of mechanics, domestics and field hands; and in addition
he would house as many as three hundred slaves at a time, for such as
were importing them from other states.[16] Similarly Clark and Grubb, of
Whitehall Street in Atlanta, when advertising their business as wholesale
grocers, commission merchants and negro brokers, announced that they kept
slaves of all classes constantly on hand and were paying the highest market
prices for all that might be offered.[16] At Nashville, William L. Boyd,
Jr., and R.W. Porter advertised as rival slave dealers in 1854;[17] and in
the directory of that city for 1860 E.S. Hawkins, G.H. Hitchings, and Webb,
Merrill and Company were also listed in this traffic. At St. Louis in 1859
Corbin Thompson and Bernard M. Lynch were the principal slave dealers. The
rates of the latter, according to his placard, were 37-1/2 cents per day
for board and 2-1/2 per cent, commission on sales; and all slaves entrusted
to his care were to be held at their owners' risk.[18]

[Footnote 15: _Southern Business Directory_ (Charleston, 1854), I, 163.]

[Footnote 16: Atlanta _Intelligencer_, Mch. 7, 1860.]

[Footnote 17: _Southern Business Directory_, II, 131.]

[Footnote 18: H.A. Trexler, _Slavery in Missouri, 1804-1865_ (Baltimore,
1914), p. 49.]

On the other hand a rural owner disposed to sell a slave locally would
commonly pass the word round among his neighbors or publish a notice in the
county newspaper. To this would sometimes be appended a statement that the
slave was not to be sent out of the state, or that no dealers need apply.
The following is one of many such Maryland items: "Will be sold for cash or
good paper, a negro woman, 22 years old, and her two female children. She
is sold for want of employment, and will not be sent out of the state.
Apply to the editor."[19] In some cases, whether rural or urban, the slave
was sent about to find his or her purchaser. In the city of Washington
in 1854, for example, a woman, whose husband had been sold South, was
furnished with the following document: "The bearer, Mary Jane, and her two
daughters, are for sale. They are sold for no earthly fault whatever. She
is one of the most ladylike and trustworthy servants I ever knew. She is
a first rate parlour servant; can arrange and set out a dinner or party
supper with as much taste as the most of white ladies. She is a pretty good
mantua maker; can cut out and make vests and pantaloons and roundabouts
and joseys for little boys in a first rate manner. Her daughters' ages are
eleven and thirteen years, brought up exclusively as house servants. The
eldest can sew neatly, both can knit stockings; and all are accustomed to
all kinds of house work. They would not be sold to speculators or traders
for any price whatever." The price for the three was fixed at $1800, but a
memorandum stated that a purchaser taking the daughters at $1000 might have
the mother on a month's trial. The girls were duly bought by Dr. Edward
Maynard, who we may hope took the mother also at the end of the stipulated
month.[20] In the cities a few slaves were sold by lottery. One Boulmay,
for example, advertised at New Orleans in 1819 that he would sell fifty
tickets at twenty dollars each, the lucky drawer to receive his girl
Amelia, thirteen years old.[21]

[Footnote 19: Charleston, Md., _Telegraph_, Nov. 7, 1828.]

[Footnote 20: MSS. in the New York Public Library, MSS. division, filed
under "slavery."]

[Footnote 21: _Louisiana Courier_ (New Orleans), Aug. 17, 1819.]

The long distance trade, though open to any who would engage in it, appears
to have been conducted mainly by firms plying it steadily. Each of these
would have an assembling headquarters with field agents collecting slaves
for it, one or more vessels perhaps for the coastwise traffic, and a
selling agency at one of the centers of slave demand. The methods followed
by some of the purchasing agents, and the local esteem in which they were
held, may be gathered by an item written in 1818 at Winchester in the
Shenandoah Valley: "Several wretches, whose hearts must be as black as the
skins of the unfortunate beings who constitute their inhuman traffic, have
for several days been impudently prowling about the streets of this place
with labels on their hats exhibiting in conspicuous characters the words
'Cash for negroes,'"[22] That this repugnance was genuine enough to cause
local sellers to make large concessions in price in order to keep faithful
servants out of the hands of the long-distance traders is evidenced by
the following report in 1824 from Hillsborough on the eastern shore of
Maryland: "Slaves in this county, and I believe generally on this shore,
have always had two prices, viz. a neighbourhood or domestic and a foreign
or Southern price. The domestic price has generally been about a third less
than the foreign, and sometimes the difference amounts to one half."[23]

[Footnote 22: _Virginia Northwestern Gazette_, Aug. 15, 1818.]

[Footnote 23: _American Historical Review_, XIX, 818.]

The slaves of whom their masters were most eager to be rid were the
indolent, the unruly, and those under suspicion. A Creole settler at Mobile
wrote in 1748, for example, to a friend living on the Mississippi: "I am
sending you l'Eveille and his wife, whom I beg you to sell for me at the
best price to be had. If however they will not bring 1,500 francs each,
please keep them on your land and make them work. What makes me sell them
is that l'Eveille is accused of being the head of a plot of some thirty
Mobile slaves to run away. He stoutly denies this; but since there is
rarely smoke without fire I think it well to take the precaution."[24] The
converse of this is a laconic advertisement at Charleston in 1800:
"Wanted to purchase one or two negro men whose characters will not be
required."[25] It is probable that offers were not lacking in response.

[Footnote 24: MS. in private possession, here translated from the French.]

[Footnote 25: Charleston _City Gazette_, Jan. 8, 1800.]

Some of the slaves dealt in were actually convicted felons sold by the
states in which their crimes had been committed. The purchasers of these
were generally required to give bond to transport them beyond the limits
of the United States; but some of the traders broke their pledges on the
chance that their breaches would not be discovered. One of these, a certain
W.H. Williams, when found offering his outlawed merchandize of twenty-four
convict slaves at New Orleans in 1841, was prosecuted and convicted. His
penalty included the forfeiture of the twenty-four slaves, a fine of $500
to the state of Louisiana for each of the felons introduced, and the
forfeiture to the state of Virginia of his bond in the amount of $1,000 per
slave. The total was reckoned at $48,000.[26]

[Footnote 26: _Niles' Register_, LX, 189, quoting the New Orleans
_Picayune_, May 2, 1841.]

The slaves whom the dealers preferred to buy for distant sale were "likely
negroes from ten to thirty years old."[27] Faithfulness and skill in
husbandry were of minor importance, for the trader could give little proof
of them to his patrons. Demonstrable talents in artisanry would of course
enhance a man's value; and unusual good looks on the part of a young woman
might stimulate the bidding of men interested in concubinage. Episodes of
the latter sort were occasionally reported; but in at least one instance
inquiry on the spot showed that sex was not involved. This was the case of
the girl Sarah, who was sold to the highest bidder on the auction block in
the rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel at New Orleans in 1841 at a price of
eight thousand dollars. The onlookers were set agog, but a newspaper man
promptly found that the sale had been made as a mere form in the course of
litigation and that the bidding bore no relation to the money which was to
change hands.[28] Among the thousands of bills of sale which the present
writer has scanned, in every quarter of the South, many have borne record
of exceptional prices for men, mostly artisans and "drivers"; but the few
women who brought unusually high prices were described in virtually every
case as fine seamstresses, parlor maids, laundresses, hotel cooks, and
the like. Another indication against the multiplicity of purchases for
concubinage is that the great majority of the women listed in these records
were bought in family groups. Concubinage itself was fairly frequent,
particularly in southern Louisiana; but no frequency of purchases for it as
a predominant purpose can be demonstrated from authentic records.

[Footnote 27: Advertisement in the _Western Carolinian_ (Salisbury, N. C),
July 12, 1834.]

[Footnote 28: New Orleans _Bee_, Oct. 16, 1841.]

Some of the dealers used public jails, taverns and warehouses for the
assembling of their slaves, while others had stockades of their own. That
of Franklin and Armfield at Alexandria, managed by the junior member of
the firm, was described by a visitor in July, 1835. In addition to a brick
residence and office, it comprised two courts, for the men and women
respectively, each with whitewashed walls, padlocked gates, cleanly
barracks and eating sheds, and a hospital which at this time had no
occupants. In the men's yards "the slaves, fifty or sixty in number, were
standing or moving about in groups, some amusing themselves with rude
sports, and others engaged in conversation which was often interrupted
by loud laughter in all the varied tones peculiar to negroes." They were
mostly young men, but comprised a few boys of from ten to fifteen years
old. In the women's yard the ages ranged similarly, and but one woman had a
young child. The slaves were neatly dressed in clothes from a tailor shop
within the walls, and additional clothing was already stored ready to be
sent with the coffle and issued to its members at the end of the southward
journey. In a yard behind the stockade there were wagons and tents made
ready for the departure. Shipments were commonly made by the firm once
every two months in a vessel for New Orleans, but the present lot was to
march overland. Whether by land or sea, the destination was Natchez, where
the senior partner managed the selling end of the business. Armfield
himself was "a man of fine personal appearance, and of engaging and
graceful manners"; and his firm was said to have gained the confidence of
all the countryside by its honorable dealings and by its resolute efforts
to discourage kidnapping. It was said to be highly esteemed even among the
negroes.[29]

[Footnote 29: E.A. Andrews, _Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade in the
United States_ (Boston, 1836), pp. 135, 143, 150.]

Soon afterward this traveler made a short voyage on the Potomac with a
trader of a much more vulgar type who was carrying about fifty slaves,
mostly women with their children, to Fredericksburg and thence across the
Carolinas. Overland, the trader said, he was accustomed to cover some
twenty-five miles a day, with the able-bodied slaves on foot and the
children in wagons. The former he had found could cover these marches,
after the first few days, without much fatigue. His firm, he continued, had
formerly sent most of its slaves by sea, but one of the vessels carrying
them had been driven to Bermuda, where all the negroes had escaped to land
and obtained their freedom under the British flag.[30]

[Footnote 30: _Ibid_., pp. 145-149.]

The scale of the coasting transit of slaves may be ascertained from the
ship manifests made under the requirements of the congressional act of
1808 and now preserved in large numbers in the manuscripts division of the
Library of Congress. Its volume appears to have ranged commonly, between
1815 and 1860, at from two to five thousand slaves a year. Several score of
these, or perhaps a few hundred, annually were carried as body servants by
their owners when making visits whether to southern cities or to New York
or Philadelphia. Of the rest about half were sent or carried without intent
of sale. Thus in 1831 James L. Pettigru and Langdon Cheves sent from
Charleston to Savannah 85 and 64 slaves respectively of ages ranging from
ninety and seventy years to infancy, with obvious purpose to develop newly
acquired plantations in Georgia. Most of the non-commercial shipments,
however, were in lots of from one to a dozen slaves each. The traders'
lots, on the other hand, which were commonly of considerable dimensions,
may be somewhat safely distinguished by the range of the negroes' ages,
with heavy preponderance of those between ten and thirty years, and by the
recurrence of shippers' and consignees' names. The Chesapeake ports were
the chief points of departure, and New Orleans the great port of entry.
Thus in 1819 Abner Robinson at Baltimore shipped a cargo of 99 slaves to
William Kenner and Co. at New Orleans, whereas by 1832 Robinson had himself
removed to the latter place and was receiving shipments from Henry King
at Norfolk. In the latter year Franklin and Armfield sent from Alexandria
_via_ New Orleans to Isaac Franklin at Natchez three cargoes of 109, 117
and 134 slaves, mainly of course within the traders' ages; R.C. Ballard and
Co. sent batches from Norfolk to Franklin at Natchez and to John Hogan and
Co. at New Orleans; and William T. Foster, associated with William Rollins
who was master of the brig _Ajax_, consigned numerous parcels to various
New Orleans correspondents. About 1850 the chief shippers were Joseph
Donovan of Baltimore, B.M. and M.L. Campbell of the same place, David
Currie of Richmond and G.W. Apperson of Norfolk, each of whom sent each
year several shipments of several score slaves to New Orleans. The
principal recipients there were Thomas Boudar, John Hogan, W.F. Talbott,
Buchanan, Carroll and Co., Masi and Bourk, and Sherman Johnson. The outward
manifests from New Orleans show in turn a large maritime distribution from
that port, mainly to Galveston and Matagorda Bay. The chief bulk of this
was obviously migrant, not commercial; but a considerable dependence of all
the smaller Gulf ports and even of Montgomery upon the New Orleans labor
market is indicated by occasional manifests bulking heavily in the traders'
ages. In 1850 and thereabouts, it is curious to note, there were manifests
for perhaps a hundred slaves a year bound for Chagres _en route_ for San
Francisco. They were for the most part young men carried singly, and were
obviously intended to share their masters' adventures in the California
gold fields.