A Defence of Virginia: And Through Her, of the South, in Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional PartyDabney, Robert Lewis
History
A Defence of Virginia: And Through Her, of the South, in Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional Party
Dabney, Robert Lewis
Slavery -- Justification; Slavery -- United States; Slavery -- United States -- History; Slavery -- Virginia
But the agency of New England in that increase was still more active
and direct. As though to "make hay while the sun shone," the people of
that section renewed their activity on the African coast, with a
diligence continually increasing up to 1808. Carey, in his work upon
the slave trade, estimates the importations into the thirteen colonies
between 1771 and 1790, (nineteen years,) at thirty-four thousand; but
that between the institution of the federal government and 1808, he
places at seventy thousand. His estimate here is unquestionably far
too low; because forty thousand were introduced at the port of
Charleston, South Carolina, alone, the last four years;[41] and within
the years 1806 and 1807, there were six hundred arrivals of New
England slavers at that place.[42] The latter fact shows that those
States must have possessed nearly the whole traffick. And the former
bears out Mr. De Bow, in enlarging the total of importations under
the federal government to one hundred and twenty-five thousand, at
least. For the average at one port was ten thousand per year. In 1860,
there were ten-fold as many Africans in the United States as had been
originally brought thither from Africa. But as many of these had been
multiplying for four, or even five generations, this rate of increase
is too large to assume for the importations of 1800, whose descendants
had only come to the third generation. Assuming the half as nearly
correct, which seems a moderate estimate, we find their increase
five-fold. So that there were, in 1860, six hundred and twenty-five
thousand more slaves in the United States than would have been found
here, had not New England's cruelty and avarice assisted to prolong
the slave trade nineteen years after Virginia and the federal
government would otherwise have arrested it.
[Footnote 41: De Bow, Compend. of Census, 1850, pp. 83, 84.]
[Footnote 42: Com. Boutwell.]
After the British, and even after the other governments of Europe, had
abolished the trade in name, it continued with a vast volume. Whereas
at the time of the abolition, in 1808, eighty-five thousand slaves
were taken from Africa annually, nearly fifty thousand annually were
still carried, as late as 1847, to Brazil and the Spanish Indies.[43]
In this illicit trade, no Virginian (and, indeed, no Southern) ship or
shipmaster has ever been in a single case implicated, although our
State had meantime begun no inconsiderable career of maritime
adventure. But adventurers from New England ports and New York were
continually found sharing the lion's portion of the foul spoils. And
to the latest reclamations of the British Government upon the Brazilian,
for violations of the treaties and laws against the slave trade upon the
extended shores of that empire, the answer of its noble Emperor has
still been, that if Britain would find the real culprits, she must go to
the ports of Boston and New York to seek them.[44]
[Footnote 43: De Bow, p. 84.]
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