THE TRANSPLANTATION OF A RACE. 517 



Southern and Western slave States had been met. For a while 

 there was some surreptitious importation, which in a small way 

 continued down to the middle of this century, but this smuggling 

 was quite insufficient to supply the market of the new States with 

 slaves. The result was that the border slaveholding States be- 

 came to a considerable extent the breeding grounds for men and 

 women who were to be at maturity exported to the great planta- 

 tions of Alabama and Mississippi, there to be herded by overseers 

 in gangs of hundreds, with no hope of ever returning to their kin- 

 dred. With this interdiction of the foreign slave trade the evils 

 of the former situation became magnified into horrors. The folk 

 who were brought from Africa came from a state of savagery to 

 one of relative comfort. When once adjusted to their new condi- 

 tions, their lot was on the whole greatly bettered. But their de- 

 scendants, who had become attached to the places where they were 

 born with the peculiar affection the better of them had for their 

 homes, being accustomed to masters who on the whole were gentle, 

 were now to undergo a worse deportation than that which made 

 them slaves. It is not too much to say that the deeper evils of 

 the system to the slaves themselves, as well as to their masters, 

 began with this miserable slave trade that went on within the 

 limits of this country, and was about at its height when the civil 

 war began. 



It can not be denied that even in the best stages of slavehold- 

 ing there had been a good deal of commerce in slaves where the 

 feelings of these chattels were in no wise regarded. Still, there 

 was a prevailing sentiment among all the slaveholders of the gen- 

 tler sort that it was in a way disgraceful to part families. I dis- 

 tinctly recall, when I was a lad, some years before the civil war, 

 my maternal grandfather often charged me to remember that 

 I came of a people who had never bought or sold a slave except 

 to keep families together. I know that this was a common feel- 

 ing among the better men of Kentucky and Virginia, and that the 

 practice of rearing negroes for the Southern market filled them 

 with sorrow and indignation. Yet the change was the inevitable 

 result of the system and of the advancing commercialism which 

 separated the plantation life more and more from that of the 

 owner's household. At the time when the civil war began the 

 institution of slavery was, from the commercial point of view, emi- 

 nently successful. Notwithstanding the occasional appearance of 

 the spendthrift slave owner in iJ^orthern pleasure resorts or in 

 Europe, the great plantations were generally in charge of able 

 business men, who won a large interest on their investments and 

 who were developing the system of planting in a way which, though 



