Ten days after the proving of the bill of sale, the innocent Lola died of a broken heart, and was interred in the negro burial ground, with not a white face to follow the corpse to its last resting-place. Such is American race prejudice.
CHAPTER XI.
The invention of the Whitney cotton gin, nearly fifty years ago, created a wonderful rise in the price of slaves in the cotton States. The value of able-bodied men, fit for field-hands, advanced from five hundred to twelve hundred dollars, in the short space of five years. In 1850, a prime field-hand was worth two thousand dollars. The price of women rose in proportion; they being valued at about three hundred dollars less each than the men. This change in the price of slaves caused a lucrative business to spring up, both in the breeding of slaves and the sending of them to the States needing their services. Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and North Carolina became the slave-raising sections; Virginia, however, was always considered the banner State. To the traffic in human beings, more than to any other of its evils, is the institution indebted for its overthrow.
From the picture on the heading of The Liberator, down to the smallest tract printed against slavery, the separation of families was the chief object of those exposing the great American sin. The tearing asunder of husbands and wives, of parents and children, and the gangs of men and women chained together, en route for the New-Orleans’ market, furnished newspaper correspondents with items that never wanted readers. These newspaper paragraphs were not unfrequently made stronger by the fact that many of the slaves were as white as those who offered them for sale, and the close resemblance of the victim to the trader, often reminded the purchaser that the same blood coursed through the veins of both.
The removal of Dr. Gaines from “Poplar Farm” to St. Louis, gave me an opportunity of seeing the worst features of the internal slave-trade. For many years Missouri drove a brisk business in the selling of her sons and daughters, the greater number of whom passed through the city of St. Louis. For a long time, James Walker was the principal speculator in this species of property. The early life of this man had been spent as a drayman, first working for others, then for himself, and eventually purchasing men who worked with him. At last, disposing of his horses and drays, he took his faithful men to the Louisiana market and sold them. This was the commencement of a career of cruelty, that, in all probability, had no equal in the annals of the American slave trade.
A more repulsive-looking person could scarcely be found in any community of bad-looking men than Walker. Tall, lean, and lank, with high cheek-bones, face much pitted with the small-pox, gray eyes, with red eyebrows, and sandy whiskers, he indeed stood alone without mate or fellow in looks. He prided himself upon what he called his goodness of heart, and was always speaking of his humanity.
Walker often boasted that he never separated families if he could “persuade the purchaser to take the whole lot.” He would always advertise in the New Orleans’ papers that he would be there with a prime lot of able-bodied slaves, men and women, fit for field-service, with a few extra ones calculated for house servants,—all between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five years; but like most men who make a business of speculating in human beings, he often bought many who were far advanced in years, and would try to pass them off for five or six years younger than they were. Few persons can arrive at anything approaching the real age of the negro, by mere observation, unless they are well acquainted with the race. Therefore, the slave-trader frequently carried out the deception with perfect impunity.
As soon as the steamer would leave the wharf, and was fairly on the bosom of the broad Mississippi, the speculator would call his servant Pompey to him, and instruct him as to getting the slaves ready for the market. If any of the blacks looked as if they were older than they were advertised to be, it was Pompey’s business to fit them for the day of sale.
Pomp, as he was usually called by the trader, was of real negro blood, and would often say, when alluding to himself, “Dis nigger am no counterfeit, he is de ginuine artikle. Dis chile is none of your haf-and-haf, dere is no bogus about him.”