Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/296

258 by the people of the Old World and the New, whose ancestors first inflicted the great wrong against humanity.

The labor of the negro being more profitable in the mild climate, and on the more fertile and cheaper land of the South, his transference from the bleaker clime and less generous as well as higher priced soil of New England became commercially inevitable. The negro became unsalable where he was at first enslaved. He brought a good price south of 36° 30’, and hence by the course of interstate commerce many thousands (not all, but thousands) of this class of national property changed owners as well as States, the original masters taking the purchase money to reinvest in land, merchandise, factories, stocks and bonds or other prudent ventures, while the new master invested in the coerced labor which cut down his forests and tilled his soil, holding the laborer &quot;bound to service&quot; under the laws of his State made pursuant to the Constitution of the United States.

The same commercial considerations which induced the enslavement of the unfortunate African caused his sale and removal from those sections of the Union where his enslavement was found to be unprofitable and his presence at least a social inconvenience. Accordingly the steady deportation of the race southward began during the close of the eighteenth century and was accelerated through the early years of the nineteenth century. The slave market was opened in the city of Washington and other Southern cities. Traders bought in Northern markets and sold for profit in the Southern. The domestic slave trade was thus inaugurated to compete with the African slave trade then in full blast and which could not be suppressed by any Southern State until the year 1808. Now and then a Southern State endeavored to hinder the infamous traffic, but the ship owners and slave traders were shielded by the supreme law of the land. The United States government was meanwhile entitled to revenue at the rate of $10 for each imported