"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. Our planters are already becoming farmers. Many who grew tobacco as their only staple, have already introduced, and commingled the wheat crop. They are already semi-farmers; and in the natural course of events, they must become more and more so.—As the greater quantity of rich western lands are appropriated to the production of the staple of our planters, that staple will become less profitable.—We shall gradually divert our lands from its production, until we shall become actual farmers.—Then will the necessity for slave labor diminish; then will the effectual demand diminish, and then will the quantity of slaves diminish, until they shall be adapted to the effectual demand.
"But gentlemen are alarmed lest the markets of other states be closed against the introduction of our slaves. Sir, the demand for slave labor MUST INCREASE through the South and West. It has been heretofore limited by the want of capital; but when emigrants shall be relieved from their embarrassments, contracted by the purchase of their lands, the annual profits of their estates, will constitute an accumulating capital, which they will seek to invest in labor. That the demand for labor must increase in proportion to the increase of capital, is one of the demonstrations of political economists; and I confess, that for the removal of slavery from Virginia, I look to the efficacy of that principle; together with the circumstance that our southern brethren are constrained to continue planters, by their position, soil and climate."
The following is from Niles' Weekly Register, published at Baltimore, Md. vol. 35, p. 4.
"Dealing in slaves 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 thumb-screws and gags, and ornamented with cow-skins and other whips oftentimes bloody."
R.S. FINLEY, Esq., late General Agent of the American Colonization Society, at a meeting in New York, 27th Feb. 1833, said:
"In Virginia and other grain-growing slave states, the blacks do not support themselves, and the only profit their masters derive from them is, repulsive as the idea may justly seem, in breeding them, like other live stock for the more southern states."
Rev. Dr. GRAHAM, of Fayetteville, N.C. at a Colonization Meeting, held in that place in the fall of 1837 said:
"He had resided for 15 years in one of the largest slaveholding counties in the state, had long and anxiously considered the subject, and still it was dark. There were nearly 7000 slaves offered in New Orleans market last winter. From Virginia alone 6000 were annually sent to the south; and from Virginia and N.C. there had gone, in the same direction, in the last twenty years, 300,000 slaves. While not 4000 had gone to Africa. What it portended, he could not predict, but he felt deeply, that we must awake in these states and consider the subject."
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.]"