The Virginia Times (a weekly newspaper, published at Wheeling, Virginia) estimates, in 1836, the number of slaves exported for sale from that state alone, during “the twelve months preceding,” at forty thousand, the aggregate value of whom is computed at twenty-four millions of dollars.
Allowing for Virginia one-half of the whole exportation during the period in question, and we have the appalling sum total of eighty thousand slaves exported in a single year from the breeding states. We cannot decide with certainty what proportion of the above number was furnished by each of the breeding states, but Maryland ranks next to Virginia in point of numbers, North Carolina follows Maryland, Kentucky, North Carolina, then Tennessee and Delaware.
The Natchez (Mississippi) Courier says “that the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, imported two hundred and fifty thousand slaves from the more northern states in the year 1836.”
This seems absolutely incredible, but it probably includes all the slaves introduced by the immigration of their masters. The following, from the Virginia Times, confirms this supposition. In the same paragraph which is referred to under the second query, it is said:
“We have heard intelligent men estimate the number of slaves exported from Virginia, within the last twelve months, at a hundred and twenty thousand, each slave averaging at least six hundred dollars, making an aggregate of seventy-two million dollars. Of the number of slaves exported, not more than one-third have been sold; the others having been carried by their masters, who have removed.”
Assuming one-third to be the proportion of the sold, there are more than eighty thousand imported for sale into the four States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. Supposing one-half of eighty thousand to be sold into the other buying states,—S. Carolina, Georgia, and the territory of Florida,—and we are brought to the conclusion that more than a hundred and twenty thousand slaves were, for some years previous to the great pecuniary pressure in 1837, exported from the breeding to the consuming states.
The Baltimore American gives the following from a Mississippi paper of 1837:
“The report made by the committee of the citizens of Mobile, appointed at their meeting held on the 1st instant; on the subject of the existing pecuniary pressure, states that so large has been the return of slave labor, that purchases by Alabama of that species of property from other states, since 1833, have amounted to about ten million dollars annually.”
“Dealing in slaves,” says the Baltimore (Maryland) Register of 1829, “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 iron thumb-screws and gags, and ornamented with cowskins and other whips, oftentimes bloody.”
Professor Dew, now President of the University of William and Mary, in Virginia, in his review of the debate in the Virginia legislature in 1831–2, says (p. 120):