Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/367

 The Secession of Virginia. 361

one half) was Virginia's. It was called the 'vigintal crop,' as the blacks were ready for market and at their highest value about the age of twenty. As it was an ordinary business of bargain and sale, no statistics were kept ; but the lowest estimate of the annual value of the trade in the Old Dominion placed it in the tens of millions of dol- lars. After Sumter had been fired on and the Confederate Congress had forbidden this traffic to outsiders, the Virginia Convention again took up the ordinance of secession (April 17th) and passed it in secret session by a vote of 88 to 65." Now, I have to say in reply to this :

1. The Confederate Congress a.\. Mont^ovaery passed no such act "forbidding the importation of slaves from States outside of the Confederacy, and absolutely nothing of this character whatever. I have before me an official copy of The Statutes at Large of the Confederate States of America — a book, by the way, which I res- pectfully commend to Mr. Johnson for his careful study — and it con- tains no such act or resolution.

2. Even if such an act had been passed, it would not have had the slightest effect upon the action of Virginia, for it is a slander alike upon the character of her people and the motives which impelled her to secede and join the Confederacy, to represent her as a cold, calculating, negro-trader, only influenced by the hope of gain in rais- ing negroes for the Southern market. It is not true that "raising slaves for the cotton States" was an "ordinary business of bargain and sale," worth annually " tens of millions of dollars to Virginia." The truth is that the average Virginia planter would mortgage his plantation and well nigh ruin his estate to support his negroes in comparative idleness before he would sell them ; that very few ne- groes were ever sold except under the sternest necessity ; that the negro trader was considered a disreputable member of society ; and that " raising slaves for the market" is a romance of Abolition in- vention which fully served its purpose in the bitter controversies of the slavery agitation, but which an intelligent writer should now be ashamed to drag forth again. When Robert E. Lee said, " If the millions of slaves at the South were mine I would free thetn 7vith a stroke of the pen to avert this war,'^ he but voiced the sentiments of nine-tenths of the people in Virginia. The truth is that our grand old Commonwealth has a record on this question of which she need not be ashamed. The first slaves introduced in Virginia were brought and forced upon her colonists against their protests — and from that day all that were brought to her soil came in ships of Old or