232 SLAVE STEALER. [CHAP. XVII. 



brought them by railway from Augusta to Charleston. I hope 

 to dispose of them at Savannah, but if not, I shall take them to 

 Texas, where I may sell them, or perhaps keep them as laborers 

 and settle there myself.&quot; He then told me he had fought in the 

 wars for the independence of Texas, which I afterward found was 

 quite true, and, after telling me some of his adventures, he said, 

 &quot; I will take 450 dollars for the girl, and 600 for the boy ; they 

 are both of pure blood, would stand a hot climate well ; they can 

 not read, but can count up to a thousand.&quot; By all these quali- 

 ities, negative and positive, he evidently expected to enhance in 

 my eyes the value of the article which he meant me to buy ; and 

 no sooner did he suspect, by one of my questions, that I was a 

 foreigner traveling for my amusement, than he was off the sub 

 ject, and I attempted in vain to bring him back to it and to learn 

 why the power of counting was so useful, while that of reading 

 was undesirable. About three weeks after this incident, when 

 we were at Macon in Georgia, there was a rme and cry after a 

 thief who had stolen five negroes near Augusta, and had taken 

 them to Savannah, in the General Clinch, where he had sold one 

 of them, a girl, for 450 dollars. From Savannah he had been 

 traced with the remaining four, by railway, to Macon, whence it 

 was supposed he had gone south. The description of the delin 

 quent left me no doubt that he was my former fellow-traveler, 

 and I now learnt that he was of a respectable family in Georgia, 

 the spoiled child of a widowed mother, self-willed and unmanage 

 able from his boyhood, and who had gone off against the wishes 

 of his relations to fight in Texas. I recollected that when we 

 were at Beaufort, none of his negroes had gone ashore, and that 

 he had kept his eye always anxiously on them during our stay 

 there. I also remarked, that the planters on board, who, for the 

 most part, were gentlemanlike in their manners, shunned all in 

 tercourse with this dealer, as if they regarded his business as 

 scarcely respectable. A vast majority of the slave-owners acqui 

 esced originally in the propriety of abolishing the external slave- 

 trade ; but the internal one can not, they say, be done away 

 with, without interfering with the free circulation of labor from 

 fin overpeopled district to another where hands are scarce. To 



