THE CUSTOM OF BUYING AND SELLING SLAVES—
VIRGINIA'S ATTITUDE
But it is charged that while slavery was unprofitable in Virginia, as
a system of labor, yet the state had become a "breeding ground" where
slaves were reared and sold for profit and that the advantages
accruing from this traffic had destroyed all sentiment in favor of
emancipation, and so lowered the moral standards of the people that,
in 1861, they stood ready to fight for the maintenance of slavery and
the inter-state slave trade.
Mr. Fiske says:
"The life of the anti-slavery party in Virginia was short. After the
abolition of the African slave trade in 1808 had increased the
demand for Virginia-bred slaves in the states farther south, the
very idea of emancipation faded out of memory."[197]
The biographers of Lincoln, Nicolay and Hay, say:
"The condition of Virginia had become anomalous; it was little
understood by the North and still less by her own citizens.... She
still deemed she was the mother of Presidents: whereas she had
degenerated into being like other Border States, the mother of slave
breeders and of an annual crop of black-skinned chattels to be sold
to the cotton, rice, and sugar planters of her neighboring
commonwealths.... However counterfeit logic or mental reservations
concealed it, the underlying feeling was to fight, no matter whom,
and little matter how, for the protection of slavery and slave
property."[198]