The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Richmond.

  Persons wishing to purchase would do well to give us a call before purchasing

  elsewhere.

  Nov. 20--6m. Matthews, Branton, & Co.

  Robert S. Adams & Moses J. Wicks have this day associated themselves

  under the name and style of Adams & Wicks, for the purpose of buying and

  selling Negroes, in the city of Aberdeen, and elsewhere. They have an agent

  who has been purchasing Negroes for them in the Old States for the last two

  months. One of the firm, Robert S. Adams, leaves this day for North Carolina

  and Virginia, and will buy a large number of negroes for this market. They will

  keep at their depot in Aberdeen, during the coming fall and winter, a large lot of

  choice Negroes, which they will sell low for cash, or for bills on Mobile.

  Robert S. Adams.

  Moses J. Wicks.

  Aberdeen, Miss., May 7, 1852.

  Fresh Arrivals Weekly.--Having established ourselves at the Forks of

  the Road, near Natchez, for a term of years, we have now on hand, and intend to

  keep throughout the entire year, a large and well selected stock of Negroes,

  consisting of field-hands, house-servants, mechanics, cooks, seamstresses, washers,

  ironers, etc., which we can sell, and will sell, as low or lower than any other house

  here or in New Orleans.

  Persons wishing to purchase would do well to call on us before making pur-

  chases elsewhere, as our regular arrivals will keep us supplied with a good and

  general assortment. Our terms are liberal. Give us a call.

  Griffin & Pullum.

  Natchez, Oct. 16, 1852.--6m

  I have just returned to my stand, at the Forks of the Road, with fifty likely

  young NEGROES for sale.

  Sept. 22. R. II. Elam.

  The undersigned would respectfully state to the public that he has leased the

  stand in the Forks of the Road, near Natchez, for a term of years, and that he

  intends to keep a large lot of NEGROES on hand during the year. He will sell

  as low or lower than any other trader at this place or in New Orleans.

  He has just arrived from Virginia, with a very likely lot of field men and women

  and house-servants, three cooks, a carpenter, and a fine buggy horse, and a saddle-

  horse and carryall. Call and see.

  Thos. G. James.

  Daily Orleanian, October 19, 1852:--

  Constantly on hand, bought and sold on commission, at most reasonable

  prices.--Field hands, cooks, washers and ironers, and general house-servants.

  City references given, if required.

  Oct. 14.

  Wm. F. Tannehill & Co. ont constamment en mains un assortiment complet

  d'esclaves bien choisis a Vendre. Aussi, vente et achat d'esclaves par commis-

  sion.

  Nous avons actuellement en mains un grand nombre de negres à louer aux

  mois, parmi lesquels se trouvent des jeunes gargons, domestiques de maison, cuisi-

  nières, blanchisseuses et repasseuses, nourices, etc.

  references.

  Wright, Williams, & Co.

  Williams, Phillips, & Co.

  Moses Greenwood.

  Moon, Titus, & Co.

  S. O. Nelson & Co.

  E. W. Diggs. 3ms.

  New Orleans Daily Crescent, October 21, 1852:--

  James White, No. 73, Baronne-street, New Orleans, will give strict attention

  to receiving, boarding, and selling SLAVES consigned to him. He will also buy

  and sell on commission. References: Messrs. Robson & Allen, McRea, Coff-

  man & Co., Pregram, Bryan & Co.

  Sept. 23.

  Fifteen or twenty good Negro Men wanted to go on a Plantation. The best of

  wages will be given until the 1st of January, 1853.

  Apply to

  Thomas G. Mackey & Co.,

  5, Canal-street, corner of Magazine, up stairs.

  Sept. 11.

  From another number of the Mississippi Free Trader is taken

  the following:--

  NEGROES.

  The undersigned would respectfully state to the public that he has a lot of

  about forty-five now on hand, having this day received a lot of twenty-five direct

  from Virginia, two or three good cooks, a carriage driver, a good house boy, a

  fiddler, a fine seamstress, and a likely lot of field men and women; all of whom

  he will sell at a small profit. He wishes to close out and go on to Virginia

  after a lot for the fall trade. Call and see.

  Thomas G. James.

  The slave-raising business of the Northern States has been

  variously alluded to and recognised, both in the business statistics

  of the States, and occasionally in the speeches of patriotic men,

  who have justly mourned over it as a degradation to their

  country. In 1841 the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society

  addressed to the executive committee of the American Anti-

  Slavery Society some inquiries on the internal American slave-

  trade.

  A laboured investigation was made at the time, the results of

  which were published in London; and from that volume are

  made the following extracts:--

  The Virginia Times (a weekly newspaper, published at Wheeling, Virginia) esti-

  mates, in 1836, the number of slaves exported for sale from that State alone, during

  “the twelve months preceding,” at forty thousand, the aggregate value of whom is

  computed at twenty-four millions of dollars.

  Allowing for Virginia one-half of the whole exportation during the period in

  question, and we have the appalling sum total of eighty thousand slaves exported

  in a single year from the breeding States. We cannot decide with certainty what

  proportion of the above number was furnished by each of the breeding States, but

  Maryland ranks next to Virginia in point of numbers, North Carolina follows Mary-

  land, Kentucky North Carolina, then Tennessee and Delaware.

  The Natchez (Mississippi) Courier says, that “the States of Louisiana, Missis-

  sippi, Alabama, and Arkansas imported two hundred and fifty thousand slaves from

  the more Northern States in the year 1836.”

  This seems absolutely incredible, but it probably includes all the slaves intro-

  duced by the immigration of their masters. The following, from the Virginia

  Times, confirms this supposition. In the same paragraph, which is referred to

  under the second query, it is said--

  “We have heard intelligent men estimate the number of slaves exported from

  Virginia within the last twelve months at a hundred and twenty thousand, each

  slave averaging at least six hundred dollars, making an aggregate of seventy-two

  million dollars. Of the number of slaves exported not more than one-third have

  been sold, the others having been carried by their masters, who have removed.

  Assuming one-third to be the proportion of the sold, there are more than eighty

  thousand imported for sale into the four States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama,

  and Arkansas. Supposing one-half of eighty thousand to be sold into the other

  buying States--South Carolina, Georgia, and the territory of Florida--and we are

  brought to the conclusion that more than a hundred and twenty thousand slaves

  were, for some years previous to the great pecuniary pressure in 1837, exported

  from the breeding to the consuming States.

  The Baltimore American gives the following from a Mississippi pape
r of 1837:--

  “The report made by the Committee of the citizens of Mobile, appointed at

  their meeting held on the 1st instant, on the subject of the existing pecuniary

  pressure, states, that so large has been the return of slave labour, that purchases

  by Alabama of that species of property from other States, since 1833, have

  amounted to about ten million dollars annually.”

  “Dealing in slaves,” says the Baltimore (Maryland) Register, of 1829, “has

  become a large business; establishments are made in several places in Maryland

  and Virginia, at which they are sold like cattle. These places of deposit are

  strongly built, and well supplied with iroa thumbscrews and gags, and ornamented

  with cowskins and other whips, oftentimes bloody.”

  Professor Dew, now President of the University of William and Mary, in

  Virginia, in his review of the debate in the Virginia Legislature, in 1831-32, says

  (p. 120):--

  “A full equivalent being left in the place of the slave (the purchase-money),

  this emigration becomes an advantage to the State, and does not check the black

  population as much as at first view we might imagine, because it farnishes every

  inducement to the master to attend to the negroes, to encourage, breeding, and to

  cause the greatest number possible to be raised.” Again, “Virginia is, in fact,

  a negro-raising State for the other States.”

  Mr. Goode, of Virginia, in his speech before the Virginia Legislature, in

  January, 1832, said--

  “The superior usefulness of the slaves in the South will constitute an effectual

  demand, which will remove them from our limits. We shall send them from our

  State, because it will be our interest to do so; but gentlemen are alarmed lest the

  markets of other States be closed against the introduction of our slaves. Sir, the

  demand for slave labour must increase,” &c.

  In the debates of the Virginia Convention, in 1829, Judge Upsher said--

  “The value of slaves, as an article of property, depends much on the state of the

  market abroad. In this view it is the value of the land abroad; and not of land

  here, which furnishes the ratio. Nothing is more fluctuating than the value of

  slaves. A late law of Louisiana reduced their value twenty-five per cent, in two

  hours after its passage was known. If it should be our lot, as I trust it will be,

  to acquire the country of Texas, their price will rise again.”

  Hon. Philip Doddridge, of Virginia, in his speech in the Virginia Convention,

  in 1829 (Debates, p. 89), said--

  “The acquisition of Texas will greatly enhance the value of the property in

  question (Virginia slaves).”

  Rev. Dr. Graham, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, at a colonisation meeting

  held at that place in the fall of 1837, said--

  “There were nearly seven thousand slaves offered in New Orleans market last

  winter. From Virginia alone six thousand were annually sent to the South, and

  from Virginia and North Carolina there had gone to the South, in the last twenty

  years, three hundred thousand slaves.”

  Hon. Henry Clay, of Kentucky, in his speech before the Colonisation Society,

  in 1829, says--

  “It is believed that nowhere in the farming portion of the United States would

  slave labour 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.”

  The New York Journal of Commerce, of October 12th, 1835, contains a letter from

  a Virginian, whom the editor calls “a very good and sensible man;” asserting that

  twenty thousand slaves had been driven to the South from Virginia that year, but

  little more than three-fourths of which had then elapsed.

  Mr. Gholson, of Virginia, in his speech in the legislature of that State,

  January 18, 1831 (see Richmond Whig), says--

  “It has always (perhaps erroneously) been considered, by steady and old-

  fashioned people, that the owner of land had a reasonable right to its annual

  profits; the owner of orchards to their annual fruits; the owner of brood mares

  to their product, and the owner of female slaves to their increase. We have not

  the fine-spun intelligence nor legal acumen to discover the technical distinctions

  drawn by gentlemen (that is, the distinction between female slaves and brood

  mares). The legal maxim of partus sequitur ventrem is coeval with the existence

  of the right of property itself, and is founded in wisdom and justice. It is on the

  justice and inviolability of this maxim that the master foregoes the service of the

  female slave, has her nursed and attended during the period of her gestation, and

  raises the helpless infant offspring. The value of the property justifies the ex-

  pense, and I do not hesitate to say that in its increase consists much of our

  wealth.”

  Can any comment on the state of public sentiment produced by

  slavery equal the simple reading of this extract, if we remember

  that it was spoken in the Virginian legislature? One would

  think the cold cheek of Washington would redden in its grave

  for shame, that his native State had sunk so low. That there

  were Virginian hearts to feel this disgrace is evident from the

  following reply of Mr. Faulkner to Mr. Gholson, in the Virginia

  House of Delegates, 1832. See Richmond Whig:--

  “But he (Mr. Gholson) has laboured to show that the abolition of slavery

  would be impolitic, because your slaves constitute the entire wealth of the State,

  all the productive capacity Virginia possesses; and, sir, as things are, I believe he

  is correct. He says that the slaves constitute the entire available wealth of Eastern

  Virginia. Is it true that for two hundred years the only increase in the wealth and

  resources of Virginia has been a remnant of the natural increase of this miserable

  race? Can it be that on this increase she places her sole dependence? Until I

  heard these declarations, I had not fully conceived the horrible extent of this evil.

  These gentlemen state the fact, which the history and present aspect of the com-

  monwealth but too well sustain. What, sir! have you lived for two hundred

  years without personal effort or productive industry, in extravagance and indolence,

  sustained alone by the return from the sales of the increase of slaves, and retaining

  merely such a number as your now impoverished lands can sustain as stock?”

  Mr. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, in the Virginian legislature, used the following

  language (“Liberty Bell,” p. 20):

  “I agree with gentlemen in the necessity of arming the State for internal de-

  fence. I will unite with them in any effort to restore confidence to the public

  mind, and to conduce to the sense of the safety of our wives and our children.

  Yet, Sir, I must ask upon whom is to fall the burden of this defence? Not upon

  the lordly masters of their hundred slaves, who will never turn out except to retire

  with their families when danger threatens. No, sir; it is to fall upon the less

  wealthy class of our citizens, chiefly upon the non-slaveholder. I have known

  patrols turned out where there was not a slaveholder among them; and this is

  the practice of the country. I have slept in times of alarm quiet in bed, witho
ut

  having a thought of care, while these individuals, owning none of this property

  themselves, were patrolling under a compulsory process, for a pittance of seventy-

  five cents per twelve hours, the very curtilage of my house, and guarding that pro-

  perty which was alike dangerous to them and myself. After all, this is but an

  expedient. As this population becomes more numerous, it becomes less pro-

  ductive. Your guard must be increased, until finally its profits will not pay for the

  expense of its subjection. Slavery has the effect of lessening the free population

  of a country.

  “The gentleman has spoken of the increase of the female slaves being a part of

  the profit. It is admitted; but no great evil can be averted, no good attained,

  without some inconvenience. It may be questioned how far it is desirable to

  foster and encourage this branch of profit. It is a practice, and an increasing

  practice, in parts of Virginia, to rear slaves for market. How can an honourable

  mind, a patriot, and a lover of his country, bear to see this Ancient Dominion,

  rendered illustrious by the noble devotion and patriotism of her sons in the cause

  of liberty, converted into one grand menagerie, where men are to be reared for

  the market, like oxen for the shambles? Is it better, is it not worse, than the

  slave-trade--that trade which enlisted the labour of the good and wise of every

  creed, and every clime, to abolish it? The trader receives the slave, a stranger in

  language, aspect, and manners, from the merchant who has brought him from the

  interior. The ties of father, mother, husband, and child, have all been rent in

  twain; before he receives him, his soul has become callous. But here, sir, indi-

  viduals whom the master has known from infancy, whom he has seen sporting in

  the innocent gambols of childhood who have been accustomed to look to him for

  protection, he tears from the mother arms and sells into a strange country

  among strange people, subject to cruel taskmasters.