Writing in 1854, Reverend Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, who visited
Virginia in that year, says: "Negro traders are the abhorrence of all
flesh. Even their descendants where they are known, and the property
acquired in the traffic, have a blot upon them."[203]
Abraham Lincoln, speaking on the 16th of October, 1854, at Peoria,
Illinois, says:
"Again, you have among you a sneaking individual of the class of
native tyrants known as a slave-dealer. He watches your necessities
and crawls up to buy your slaves at a speculative price. If you
cannot help it, you sell to him, but if you can help it, you drive
him from your door. You despise him utterly; you do not recognize
him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not
play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but
not with the slave-dealer's children.... If he grows rich and
retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the
ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family."[204]
It would seem impossible to reconcile the existence of this public
sentiment with the idea that the state had degenerated into "the
mother of slave breeders," and that her people, enamored of the
profits, were given over to the work of rearing and selling slaves.