The high prices which slaves commanded on the plantations of the far South and in the sparsely settled portions of the Southwest engendered the practice of buying slaves in Virginia and selling them for profit in those sections. Despite the opprobrium attached to this custom there were men willing to engage in the traffic and from choice or necessity there were slaveholders who supplied at least a portion of the demand. Hence, the fourth cause which contributed to the yearly deportation of slaves from Virginia.
Neither the United States census nor any other official data avail to fix the number of slaves which annually went from Virginia for each of the four several reasons above referred to. It is evident, however, that, as a rule, publicists not informed as to the conditions have combined these exportations and attributed them all to the custom of selling slaves. We are safe in concluding, therefore, that the number of slaves sold annually from Virginia has been grossly exaggerated; that the custom was revolting to the moral sense of her people and maintained against an outraged rather than a sympathetic public sentiment.
Most of the writers who have laid this damaging accusation at the door of the Virginia people have not attempted to fortify their position by authority or data of any kind. Others have and a careful analysis of the facts submitted will assist in determining the measure of truth contained in the original charge.
ESTIMATE OF WILLIAM HENRY SMITH
The recent work, A Political History of Slavery, by William Henry Smith, will serve to illustrate the character of publications last referred to. The author after pointing out that the Cotton and Rice Producing States looked to the older commonwealth for supplies of laborers, proceeds:
"Mr. Mercer, one of the ablest of the members of that remarkable Convention (the Virginia Convention of 1829-30) said that the tables of the natural growth of the slave population demonstrated ... that an annual revenue of not less than a million and a half of dollars had been derived from the exportation of a part of that increase. Seven years later the Virginia Times published an estimate of the money arising from the sale of slaves exported during the year 1836 making the aggregate $24,000,000.00, which showed the enormous profitableness of slave breeding."[[212]]
In support of this conclusion the author appends to his text three notes, as follows:
First: "The Times gave the whole number exported at 120,000 of whom 80,000 were taken out of the state by their owners who removed to new states and 40,000 were sold to dealers. The average price per head was $600." (Niles Register, Vol. LI, p. 83.)
Second: "In the Legislature of Virginia in 1832 Thomas Jefferson Randolph declared that Virginia had been converted into 'one grand menagerie where men are reared for the market like oxen for the shambles.' This was confirmed by Mr. Gholson, another member." (See Reports in the Richmond Whig, 1832.)
Third: "In Virginia and other grain-growing 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." (American Colonization Society, 1833.)