The Slave Trade, though nominally abolished, is actively pursued here, eighty-three slaves having been landed just before my arrival, and another cargo during my stay.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
From that date the abandonment of the older State proceeded with a rapidity never before known, and with it grew the domestic slave trade and the pro-slavery feeling.
Now I've been free, I know what a dreadful condition slavery is. I have seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who was willing to go back and be a slave.
Importing foreign labor has always been the American way, beginning with 4 million slaves from Africa. Later came the Jews and Poles, the Hungarians, Italians and Irish, the Chinese and Japanese - everything you learned in sixth grade social studies about the great American melting pot.
What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?
Then it was that the exports of slaves from Virginia and the Carolinas was so great that the population of those States remained almost, if not quite stationary.
By adopting the other trade, we place ourselves by the side of those whose measures tend not only to the improvement of their own subjects, but to the emancipation of the slave everywhere.
I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.
People can be slave-ships in shoes.
Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.
As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.