Part 15 (1/2)
[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 gra.s.s 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 mult.i.tudes 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 40 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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: Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society _Proceedings_, XXIV, 335, 336.]
[Footnote 2: Reprinted in Joshua Coffin, _An Account of Some of the Princ.i.p.al 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 const.i.tute 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.]