  The Custom of Buying and Selling Slaves— Virginia's Attitude But it is charged that while slavery was unprofitable in Virginia, as a system of labor, yet the state had become a "breeding ground" where slaves were reared and sold for profit and that the advantages accruing from this traffic had destroyed all sentiment in favor of emancipation, and so lowered the moral standards of the people that, in 1861, they stood ready to fight for the maintenance of slavery and the inter-state slave trade. Mr. Fiske says: "The life of the anti-slavery party in Virginia was short. After the abolition of the African slave trade in 1808 had increased the demand for Virginia-bred slaves in the states farther south, the very idea of emancipation faded out of memory." The biographers of Lincoln, Nicolay and Hay, say: "The condition of Virginia had become anomalous; it was little understood by the North and still less by her own citizens.... She still deemed she was the mother of Presidents: whereas she had degenerated into being like other Border States, the mother of slave breeders and of an annual crop of black-skinned chattels to be sold to the cotton, rice, and sugar planters of her neighboring commonwealths.... However counterfeit logic or mental reservations concealed it, the underlying feeling was to fight, no CHARACTER OF VIRGINIANS, 1860 Let us apply to these charges what in lieu of a better term we will call the law of probabilities. Is it probable that the anti-slavery sentiments alluded to as being so strong in Virginia immediately succeeding the Revolution would have perished as early as 1808, simply because slaves had appreciated in value? While Washington and Henry and Mason died prior to 1808, yet their great compatriots Jefferson, Marshall, Madison and Monroe lived to dates long subsequent, filling the highest positions in the gift of the state and nation. Will it be seriously urged that these men and others, of only less prominence, lost their influence with their countrymen because of the debasing influences of the domestic slave trade? Again, it may be questioned whether between the date indicated, and the outbreak of the Civil War, the Virginians had so further degenerated as to stand ready to fight for slavery and property in slaves. While Virginia, in the period of the Civil War, presented no statesmen comparable to those of the Revolution, yet in all the elements of inspiring manhood, valor, sacrifice and devotion, her people were not one whit behind their ancestors. The debasing effects of "slave breeding" had not corrupted the great body of her people: if so, how can we account for the bearing of Virginians at Gettysburg, and on other fields of test only less heroic? Speaking of their part in that historic battle, Charles Francis Adams says: "If in all recorded warfare there is a deed of arms, the CHARACTER OF LEE AND HIS SOLDIERS What of the Cadets at the Battle of New Market? Were those young heroes the sons of "slave breeders" and nurtured in homes darkened by such a debasing practice? What of the spirit and bearing of the great body of Virginia soldiers who followed Lee, and what place shall they and their commander take in the estimation of the world's best thought and conscience? President Roosevelt says: "The world has never seen better soldiers than those who followed Lee, and their leader will undoubtedly rank as, without any exception, the very greatest of all the great captains that the English-speaking peoples have brought forth." What of Lee's character as a man, aside from his genius as a soldier? Lord Wolseley says: "I have met many of the great men of my time, but Lee alone impressed me with the feeling that I was in the presence of a man who was cast in a grander mould, and made of different and of finer metal than all other men. He is stamped upon my memory as a being apart and superior to all others in every way; a man with whom none I ever knew, and very few of whom I have read, are worthy to be classed. I have met but two men who realized my ideas of what a true hero should be; my friend, Charles Gordon was one, General Lee was the other." James Ford Rhodes says: "A careful survey of his (Lee's) character and life must lead the student of men and affairs to see that the course he took was, from his point of view, and judged by his inexorable and pure conscience, the path of duty to which a high sense of honor called him. Could we share the thoughts of that high-minded man as he paced the broad pillared veranda of his stately Arlington house, his eyes glancing across the river at the flag of his country waving over the dome of the capitol, and then resting on the soil of his native Virginia, we should be willing now to recognize in him one of the finest products of American Life." If such were the character of the Virginians of the Civil War period, is it reasonable to speak of their "degeneracy" under the debasing influence of "slave breeding" and "the slave trade?" "Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?" Again, how was it possible that this system of breeding slaves for market could have so established itself in Virginia, and inspired the great body of her citizenship with a willingness to fight for its maintenance, in view of the existence of a public opinion which pursued with relentless ostracism the men who engaged in the traffic? For no offense was the public opinion of Virginia so merciless as for that of buying and selling slaves. More than for any other crime, the disgrace of its guilt passed beyond the offender to his innocent offspring. The existence of this public sentiment is an historic fact of unquestioned verity. HOSTILITY TO NEGRO-TRADERS Writing in 1854, Reverend Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, who visited Virginia in that year, says: "Negro traders are Abraham Lincoln, speaking on the 16th of October, 1854, at Peoria, Illinois, says: "Again, you have among you a sneaking individual of the class of native tyrants known as a slave-dealer. He watches your necessities and crawls up to buy your slaves at a speculative price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him, but if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly; you do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children.... If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family." It would seem impossible to reconcile the existence of this public sentiment with the idea that the state had degenerated into "the mother of slave breeders," and that her people, enamored of the profits, were given over to the work of rearing and selling slaves. ANTI-SLAVERY SENTIMENT, 1832 Against the charge, however, that the abolition of the foreign slave trade in 1808 and the contemporaneous invention of the cotton gin so enhanced the market value of slaves as to destroy the sentiment previously existing in Virginia for their emancipation, we place the well-attested fact that anti-slavery sentiment did not die at the time and for the causes specified. The truth is just to the contrary. Anti-slavery sentiments among the people grew George Ticknor Curtis, of Boston, writing a half century later, says: "It may be asserted as positively as anything in history that in the year 1832 there was nowhere in the world a more enlightened sense of the wrong and evil of slavery than there was among the public men and people of Virginia." Was the anti-slavery sentiment of 1833 a reminiscence or a growth? Had it simply survived with diminishing strength the fervor of the Revolution or was it an increasing power which had its origin at that period? The Rev. Dr. Philip Slaughter writes: "That (1831) was the culminating point—the flood-tide of anti-slavery feeling which had been gradually rising for more than a century in Virginia." Thomas Jefferson Randolph in his speech before the Legislature of 1832 deplored the fact that Mr. Jefferson had not lived: "to see the revolution of the public mind of Virginia. He has not lived to see a majority of the House of Delegates in favor of abolition in the abstract." Washington and Jefferson have both left on record the The constitutions of the ante and post-Revolutionary periods in Virginia all required property qualification as a prerequisite to the suffrage, and apportioned representation in the General Assembly to the several cities and counties on the basis of property and white population, rather than on the latter alone. Under this system, the slaves being taxed as property, the slaveholders and their counties exercised a power far in excess of that enjoyed by their brethren in the non-slaveholding sections. The General Assembly elected every state official, including the Governor and the judges of the higher courts, and thus in the hands of that body was lodged complete control of every department of the state government. GROWING POWER OF NON-SLAVEHOLDERS The constitution of 1830 admitted to the suffrage, in addition to property-owners, only the citizen "who for twelve months next preceding (the election) has been a housekeeper and head of a family ... and shall have been assessed with a part of the revenue of the commonwealth within the preceding year and actually paid the same." But this constitution retained in the hands of the General Assembly the election of all the state officials, including the Governor, and continued in force the "mixed basis" in apportioning representatives among the several cities and counties.
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