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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
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.
Slavery existed before the formation of this Union. It derived from the Constitution that recognition which it would not have enjoyed without the confederation. If the States had not united together, there would have been no obligation on adjoining States to regard any species of property unknown to themselves.
If there is a State, then there is domination, and in turn, there is slavery.
In those days, slavery was not looked upon, even in Quaker Philadelphia, with the shudder and abhorrence one feels towards it now.
There is not only no free state which would now establish it, but there is no slave state, which, if it had had the free alternative as we now have, would have founded slavery.
When we acquired California and New- Mexico this party, scorning all compromises and all concessions, demanded that slavery should be forever excluded from them, and all other acquisitions of the Republic, either by purchase or conquest, forever.
The Free State men, myself among them, took it for granted that Missouri was a slave state.
This and many others only confirmed me in the opinion, planted when I saw the sale of Martha Ann, and growing steadily thereafter, that slavery was an accursed business, and that the sooner my people were relieved of it, the better.
As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.