He was now married to Miss Henrietta F. Edwards, daughter of the Hon. Pierpont Edwards, United States District Judge for Connecticut; and four children, a son and three daughters, were born to him in the next five years. In September, 1822, he was attacked by a dangerous and painful disease, which, with alternations of terrible suffering and comparative ease, preyed upon him until January 8, 1826, when he died, not quite sixty years of age."

The African Slave-Trade, so far as it had any legal or tolerated existence, was peremptorily closed, as we have seen, on the 1st day of January, 1808. This was the period from which, according to the fond antici

In 1798, Mr. Whitney, despairing of ever achieving a competence from the proceeds of his cottongin, engaged in the manufacture of arms, near New Haven; and his rare capacity for this or any similar undertaking, joined with his invincible perseverance and energy, was finally rewarded with success. He was a most indefatigable worker; one of the first in his manufactory in the morning, and the last to leave it at night; able to make any imple-pations of optimists and quietists, ment or machine he required, or to invent a new one when that might be needed; and he ultimately achieved a competency. He made great improvements in the manufacture of firearms-improvements that have since been continued and perfected, until the American rifled musket of our day, made at the National Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, is doubtless the most effective and perfect weapon known to mankind. In 1817, Mr. Whitney, now fifty-two years old, found himself fully relieved from pecuniary embarrassments and the harassing anxieties resulting therefrom.

The inventor of the cotton-gin is not deemed worthy of even the slightest distinct biographical notice in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The only, and not very accurate, allusion to him that I have been able to find in that immense work, is as follows:

"The Upland Cotton is a different species from the Sea Island, and is separated with such difficulty from the seed, that the expense of cleaning the wool must have put a stop to its further cultivation, had not a machine, by which

Slavery in our country should have
commenced its decadence, and thence
gone steadily and surely forward to its
ultimate and early extinction. And
these sanguine hopes were measura-
bly justified by the teachings of his-
tory. In all former ages, in all other
countries, Slavery, so long as it ex-
isted and flourished, was kept alive
by a constant or frequent enslave-
ment of captives, or by importations of
bondmen.
bondmen. Whenever that enslave-
ment, that importation, ceased, Sla-
very began to decline. The grati-
tude of masters to faithful, devoted
servants, who had nursed them in ill-

the operation of cleaning is easily and success-
fully accomplished, been invented. This ma-
chine was invented in 1795, by Mr. Eli Whitney,
of Massachusetts. There are two qualities of
this cotton, the one termed Upland Georgia,
grown in the States of Georgia and South Car-
olina, and the other of superior quality, raised
upon the banks of the Mississippi, and dis-
tinguished in the market by the name of New
Orleans cotton," &c., &c.-Encyclopædia Britan-
nica, Eighth (last) Edition, vol. vii., p. 447.

Truly, the world knows little of its greatest men.

THE RENAISSANCE OF SLAVERY.

67

masters; but when children who had grown up together—sprung, indeed, from different castes, but still members of the same household-familiar from infancy, and to some extent playmates, came to hold the relation, respectively, of master and slave, it was inevitable that kindly feelings should frequently be reciprocated between them, leading often to devotion on the one hand and emancipation on the other. It was not without reason, therefore, that the founders of our Republic and the framers of our Constitution supposed they had provided for the gradual but certain disappearance of Slavery, by limiting its area on the one hand, and providing for an early inhibition of the SlaveTrade on the other.

ness, or adhered to them in times of peril or calamity, or who had simply given the best years of their lives to the enlargement of their wealth, had been effectual in reducing, by manumission, the aggregate number of slaves much faster than it was increased by the preponderance of births over deaths. The chances of war, of invasion, and still more of insurrection and civil convulsion, had operated from time to time still further to reduce the number of slaves. Even the licentious and immoral connections between masters and their bondwomen, so inseparable from the existence of Slavery, tended strongly toward a like result; since it was seldom or never reputable, save in slaveholding America-if even there for a master to send his own children to the auction-block and consign them to eternal bondage among strangers.' Quite often, the slave-mother, as well as her child or children, owed her emancipation to the affection, the remorse, or the shame, of her master and paramour. So long as slaves were mainly foreigners and barbarians, often public enemies, of fierce, strange aspect and unintelligible speech, there would naturally be lit-ple far more remunerative to its protle sympathy betwixt them and their

"That the practice of buying and selling servants, thus early begun amongst the patriarchs, descended to their posterity, is known to every attentive reader of the Bible. It was expressly authorized by the Jewish law, in which were many directions how such servants were to be treated. They were to be bought only of the heathen; for, if an Israelite grew poor and sold himself, either to discharge a debt or to procure the means of subsistence, he was to be treated, not as a slave, but as a hired servant, and restored to freedom at the year of Jubilee. Unlimited as the power thus given to the Hebrews over their bondservants of heathen extraction appears to have been, they were strictly prohibited from acquiring such property by any other means than fair purchase. 'He that stealeth a man and selleth him,' said

But the unexpected results of the purchase of Louisiana and the invention of the Cotton-Gin were such as to set at naught all these calculations. The former opened to slaveholding settlement and culture a vast domain of the richest soil on earth, in a region peculiarly adapted to the now rapidly and profitably expanding production of Cotton; for Whitney's invention had rendered this sta

ducer than any rival which the South

their great Lawgiver, 'shall surely be put to death."-Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. xx., p.

319.

The above passage seems scarcely just to the Law given by Moses. The true object and purpose of that Law, so far as bondage is concerned, was rather a mitigation of the harsher features of an existing institution than the creation of a new one. Moses, for the hardness of your hearts,' says Jesus, allowed or tolerated some things which 'from the beginning were not so.' How any one can quote the Law of Moses as a warrant for Slavery, yet not admit it as a justification of free-and-easy Divorce, is not apparent.

THE NEGRO-TRADERS AS POLITICIANS.

69

suit of wealth by means of cotton- | sipated, easy-going Virginians looked planting and subsidiary callings; and each became a purchaser of slaves to the full extent of his means. To clear more land and grow more cotton, wherewith to buy more negroes, was the general and absorbing aspiration -the more negroes to be employed in clearing still more land and growing still more cotton. Under this dispensation, the price of slaves necessarily and rapidly advanced, until it was roughly computed that each average field-hand was worth so many hundred dollars as cotton commanded cents per pound: That is, when cotton was worth ten cents per pound, field-hands were worth a thousand dollars each; with cotton at twelve cents, they were worth twelve hundred; and when it rose, as it sometimes did even in later days, to fifteen cents per pound for a fair article of middling Orleans, a stout negro, from seventeen to thirty years old, with no particular skill but that necessarily acquired in the rude experience of farm labor anywhere, would often bring fifteen hundred dollars on a New Orleans auction-block. Hence the business of negro-trading, or the systematic buying of slaves to sell again, though never quite reputable, and, down to the last thirty or forty years, very generally regarded with abhorrence--became a highly important and influential, as well as gainful, occupation. The negro-trader, often picking up bargains at executors' or assignees' sales in the older States, or when a sudden shift must be made to save a merchant from bankruptcy or a farm from the sheriff, controlled large sums of money, often in good part his own. He was the Providence to whom indolent, dis

for extrication, at the last gasp, from their constantly recurring pecuniary embarrassments; while, on the other hand, a majority of the South-Western planters were eager to buy of him at large prices, provided he would sell on one or two years' credit. He patronized hotels and railroads; he often chartered vessels for the transportation of his human merchandise; he was necessarily shrewd, keen, and intelligent, and frequently acquired, or at least wielded, so much wealth and influence as to become almost respectable. Quite usually, he was an active politician, almost uniformly of the most ultra Pro-Slavery type, and naturally attached to the Democratic party. Traveling extensively and almost constantly, his information and volubility rendered him mail and telegraph, newspaper and stump orator, to those comparatively ignorant and secluded planters whom he visited twice or more per year, as buyer or seller, or collector of his dues for slaves already sold; while his power as profitable customer on the one hand, or lenient creditor on the other, was by no means inconsiderable. It was this power, in connection with that of the strongly sympathizing and closely affiliated class of gamblers and blacklegs, by which Van Buren's renomination for the Presidency was defeated in the Baltimore Convention of 1844, and the Democratic party committed, through the nomination of Polk and its accessories, to the policy of annexing Texas, thus securing a fresh and boundless expansion to Slavery. When that Annexation was suddenly, and to most unexpectedly, achieved, at the close of John Tyler's adminis

tration, relays of horses, prearranged the African Slave-Trade, coinciding

in the absence of telegraphs, conveyed from the deeply interested negro-traders, who were watching the doings of Congress at the national metropolis, to their confederates and agents in the slave-selling districts of the neighboring States, the joyful tidings which insured an advance of twelve to fifteen per cent. in the market value of human flesh, and enabled the exclusive possessors of the intelligence to make it the basis of extensive and lucrative speculations.

with the rapid settlement of the Louisiana purchase and the triumph of the Cotton-Gin, wrought here an entire transformation. When fieldhands brought from ten to fifteen hundred dollars, and young negroes were held at about ten dollars per pound, the newly born infant, if wellformed, healthy, and likely to live, was deemed an addition to his master's wealth of not less than one hundred dollars, even in Virginia or Maryland. It had now become the interest of the master to increase the number of births in his slave-cabins ; and few evinced scruples as to the means whereby this result was attained. The chastity of female slaves was never esteemed of much account, even where they were white; and, now that it had become an impediment to the increase of their masters' wealth, it was wholly disregarded. No slave-girl, however young, was valued lower for having become a mother, without waiting to be first made a wife; nor were many masters likely to rebuke this as a fault, or brand it as a shame. Women were publicly advertised by sellers as ex

Slave-breeding for gain, deliberately purposed and systematically pursued, appears to be among the latest devices and illustrations of human depravity. Neither Cowper, nor Wesley, nor Jonathan Edwards, nor Granville Sharp, nor Clarkson, nor any of the philanthropists or divines who, in the last century, bore fearless and emphatic testimony to the flagrant iniquity of slave-making, slave-holding, and slave-selling, seem to have had any clear conception of it. For the infant slave of past ages was rather an incumbrance and a burden than a valued addition to his master's stock. To raise him, how-traordinary breeders, and commanded ever roughly, must cost all he would ultimately be worth. That it was cheaper to buy slaves than to rear them, was quite generally regarded as self-evident. But the suppression of

Mr. Edward Yates, a zealous and active friend of the Union cause, in "A letter to the Women of England, on Slavery in the Southern States of America," founded on personal observation in 1855, gives revolting instances of the brutal handling of delicate and beautiful women, apparently white, by slave-dealers and their customers, in Southern sale-rooms. He adds:

"At Richmond and New Orleans, I was present at slave-auctions, and did not see one instance

a higher price on that account.' Wives, sold into separation from their husbands, were imperatively required to accept new partners, in order that the fruitfulness of the

of a married pair being sold together, but, without exception, so far as I was able to learn from the negroes sold by the auctioneers, every grown-up man left a wife and every grown-up woman a husband.

* I saw Mr. Pulliam (of Richmond) sell, to different buyers, two daughters away from their mother, who was also to be sold. This unfortunate woman was a quadroon; and I shall not soon forget the large tears that started to her eyes as she saw her two children sold away from her."

Testimony like this is abundant.