By comparing the average decennial ratio of slave increase in all the States with the difference in the number of the actual slave-population of the slave-breeding States, as ascertained by the Census, it is apparent that the number of slaves exported to the cotton States is considerably more than twenty thousand a year.[1]
While calling on a gentleman occupying an honourable official position at Richmond, I noticed upon his table a copy of Professor Johnson's Agricultural Tour in the United States. Referring to a paragraph in it, where some statistics of the value of the slaves raised and annually exported from Virginia were given, I asked if he knew how these had been obtained, and whether they were authentic. "No," he replied, "I don't know anything about it; but if they are anything unfavourable to the institution of slavery, you may be sure they are false." This is but an illustration, in extreme, of the manner in which I find a desire to obtain more correct but definite information, on the subject of slavery, is usually met, by gentlemen otherwise of enlarged mind and generous qualities.
A gentleman, who was a member of the "Union Safety Committee" of New York, during the excitement which attended the discussion of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, told me that, as he was passing through Virginia this winter, a man entered the car in which he was seated, leading in a negro girl, whose manner and expression of face indicated dread and grief. Thinking she was a criminal, he asked the man what she had done.
- [Footnote: South, we raise them both for use and for market. Planters command their girls
and women (married or unmarried) to have children; and I have known a great many negro girls to be sold off, because they did not have children. A breeding woman is worth from one-sixth to one-fourth more than one that does not breed."]
- ↑ Mr. Ellison, in his work, 'Slavery and Secession,' gives the annual importation of negroes, for the ten years ending 1860, into seven of the Southern Slave States, from the Slave-breeding States, as 26·301.
