Again, how was it possible that this system of breeding slaves for market could have so established itself in Virginia, and inspired the great body of her citizenship with a willingness to fight for its maintenance, in view of the existence of a public opinion which pursued with relentless ostracism the men who engaged in the traffic? For no offense was the public opinion of Virginia so merciless as for that of buying and selling slaves. More than for any other crime, the disgrace of its guilt passed beyond the offender to his innocent offspring. The existence of this public sentiment is an historic fact of unquestioned verity.
HOSTILITY TO NEGRO-TRADERS
Writing in 1854, Reverend Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, who visited Virginia in that year, says: "Negro traders are the abhorrence of all flesh. Even their descendants where they are known, and the property acquired in the traffic, have a blot upon them."[[203]]
Abraham Lincoln, speaking on the 16th of October, 1854, at Peoria, Illinois, says:
"Again, you have among you a sneaking individual of the class of native tyrants known as a slave-dealer. He watches your necessities and crawls up to buy your slaves at a speculative price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him, but if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly; you do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children.... If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family."[[204]]
It would seem impossible to reconcile the existence of this public sentiment with the idea that the state had degenerated into "the mother of slave breeders," and that her people, enamored of the profits, were given over to the work of rearing and selling slaves.
ANTI-SLAVERY SENTIMENT, 1832
Against the charge, however, that the abolition of the foreign slave trade in 1808 and the contemporaneous invention of the cotton gin so enhanced the market value of slaves as to destroy the sentiment previously existing in Virginia for their emancipation, we place the well-attested fact that anti-slavery sentiment did not die at the time and for the causes specified. The truth is just to the contrary. Anti-slavery sentiments among the people grew steadily during the next quarter of a century. The setback which occurred in 1832-33 arose, as we have seen, from other causes. The existence of the strongest anti-slavery sentiment at the latter date cannot be questioned. Said Charles James Faulkner in the great debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1832: "Sir, I am gratified to perceive that no gentleman has yet arisen in this hall, the avowed advocate of slavery. The day has gone by when such a voice could be listened to with patience or even forbearance."[[205]]
George Ticknor Curtis, of Boston, writing a half century later, says: "It may be asserted as positively as anything in history that in the year 1832 there was nowhere in the world a more enlightened sense of the wrong and evil of slavery than there was among the public men and people of Virginia."[[206]]
Was the anti-slavery sentiment of 1833 a reminiscence or a growth? Had it simply survived with diminishing strength the fervor of the Revolution or was it an increasing power which had its origin at that period? The Rev. Dr. Philip Slaughter writes: "That (1831) was the culminating point—the flood-tide of anti-slavery feeling which had been gradually rising for more than a century in Virginia."[[207]]