It is noticeable in both schedules that the State of Louisiana is an exception. The proportion of children there was much less than in the other States. This is probably due to the strenuous work on sugar plantations. It is also noticeable that the Western States had the greatest proportional number of children, which is to be accounted for by the healthfulness of the climate and by its being a rich and prosperous farming section, where negroes were well fed and probably free from the malarial ailments of some other sections. The conditions, therefore, were very favorable to the prolific negro race. We think it would be only natural that one should expect to have found in Virginia and Maryland, which have had to bear the brunt of the accusation of breeding slaves, the greatest proportion of children; not only because of the reiterated accusations, but also on account of the exportation of adult slaves from these States, which had the tendency to heighten the proportion of children in these States and lessen it in the States to which slaves were carried. With regard to slave breeding, Shaffner, a native of Virginia, says: "From our own personal observation, since we were capable of studying the progress of human affairs, we are of opinion that there is less increase of the slaves of the so-called 'breeding States,' than of the more Southern of Gulf States.[206] "We doubt if there exists in America a slave owner that encourages the breeding of slaves for the purpose of selling them. Nor do we believe that any man would be permitted to live in any of the Southern States that did intentionally breed slaves with the object of selling them.[207] Southerners generally have denied the accusation. When Andrew Stevenson, of Virginia, was minister to England, he was, upon one occasion, taunted by Daniel O'Connell with belonging to a State that was noted for breeding slaves for the South. He indignantly denied the charge.[208] And in 1839 the editor of the "Cincinnati Gazette" was much abused for asserting that Virginia bred slaves as a matter of pecuniary gain.[209] Nehemiah Adams, a clergyman, went South in the early fifties biased against slavery, but says, "the charge of vilely multiplying negroes in Virginia is one of those exaggerations of which the subject is full, and is reduced to this: that Virginia being an old State fully stocked, the surplus black population naturally flows off where their numbers are less."[210] It would seem that these States are not only practically freed from the charge of multiplying slaves and raising them for market as a business, but that, as a rule, they did not sell their slaves unless compelled to do so by pecuniary or other embarrassments. Probably many planters were as conscientious about their slaves as Jefferson appears to have been. In a letter he says: