Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/111

 Brothers & Co had the free use of the city prison; but this was not large enough for the scale on which they carried on operations; so they had built a prison of their own. It was under the management of a regular jailer, and was very much like any other jail. The slaves were allowed the liberty of the yard during the day time; but at sunset, they were all locked up promiscuously in the prison. . This was small and ill-ventilated; and the number that was forced: into it, was sometimes very great. While I was confined there, the heat and stench were often intolerable; and many a morning, I came out of it, with a burning thirst and a high fever.

The states of Maryland and Virginia claim the honor of having exerted themselves for the abolition of the African slave-trade. It is true they were favorable to that measure, — and they had good reasons of their own for being so. They gained the credit of humanity, by the same vote that secured them the monopoly of a domestic trade in slaves, which bids fair to rival any traffic ever prosecuted on the coast of Africa. The African traffic, they have declared to be piracy, while the domestic slave-trade flourishes in the heart of their own territories, a just, legal and honorable commerce!

The District of Columbia, which includes the city of Washington, and which is situated between the two states above mentioned, has become, from the convenience of its situation, and other circumstances, the centre of these slave-trading operations, — an honor which it shares however, with Richmond and Baltimore, the chief towns of Virginia and Maryland. The lands of these two states have been exhausted by a miserable and inefficient system of cultivation, such as ever prevails where farms are large, and the laborers enslaved. Their produce is the same with the productions of several of the free states north and west of them; and they are every day, sinking faster and faster, under the competition of free labor to which they are exposed.

Many a Virginian planter can only bring his revenue even with his expenditures, by selling every year, a slave or two. This practice, jocularly, but at the same, time significantly known, as ‘eating a negro' — a phrase worthy