The Domestic Slave Trade
The New Hampshire–born self-educated newspaperman Horace Greeley (1811–1872) achieved his greatest fame as the founder of the highly influential New York Tribune, which he edited from 1841 to 1872. From the 1840s on, Greeley maintained a steadily antislavery stance in the Tribune. The piece reprinted here consists of an exchange of letters with a southern slaveholder. Along with his ready wit, it conveys Greeley’s deep indignation at the self-serving rationalizations proffered by apologists for slavery. When Lincoln was elected in 1860, Greeley was ambivalent about secession, but once the Civil War began he pushed hard for Union victory.
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WARREN Co., (Miss.) Sept. 28, 1854.
Hon. HORACE GREELEY, New York City:
My object in addressing you these lines is this: I own a negro girl named Catharine, a bright mulatto, aged between 28 and 30 years, who is intelligent and beautiful. The girl wishes to obtain her freedom and reside in either Ohio or New York State; and, to gratify her desire, I am willing to take the sum of $1,000, which the friends of Liberty will no doubt make up. Catharine, as she tells me, was born near Savanna, Ga., and was a daughter of a Judge Hopkins, and at the age of 7 years, accompanied her young mistress (who was a legitimate daughter of the Judge’s) on a visit to New Orleans, where she (the legitimate) died.—Catharine was then seized and sold by the Sheriff of New Orleans, under attachment, to pay the debts contracted in the city by her young mistress, and was purchased by a Dutchman named Shinoski. Shinoski, being pleased with the young girl’s looks, placed her in a quadroon school and gave her a good education. The girl can read and write as well or better than myself, and speaks the Dutch and French languages almost to perfection. When the girl attained the age of 18, Shinoski died, and she was again sold, and fell into a trader’s hands, by the name of John Valentine, a native of your State. Valentine brought her up to Warrenton, where I purchased her, in 1844, for the sum of $1,150. Catharine is considered the best seamstress and cook in this county, (Warren,) and I could to-morrow sell her for $1,600, but I prefer letting her go for $1,000, so that she may obtain her freedom. She has had opportunities to get to a free State and obtain her freedom, but she says that she will never run away to do it. Her father she says promised to free her, and so did Shinoski. If I was able, I would free her without any compensation, but losing $15,000 on the last Presidential election has taken very near my all.
Mr. Geo. D. Prentice, editor of the Louisville (Ky.) Journal, knows me very well by character, to whom (if you wish to make any inquiries regarding this matter) you are at liberty to refer.
If you should make any publication in your paper in relation to this matter, you will please NOT mention my name in connexion with it, nor the place whence this letter was written. Catharine is honest; and, for the ten years that I have owned her, I never struck her a lick, about her work or anything else.
If it was not that I intend to emigrate to California, money could not buy her.
I have given you a complete and accurate statement concerning this girl, and am willing that she shall be examined here or in Louisville, Ky., before the bargain is closed.
Very respectfully,
THOS. K. KNOWLAND
Post-Office, Warrenton, Miss.
Reply.
Mr. K. I have carried your letter of the 28th ult. in my hat for several days, awaiting an opportunity to answer it. I now seize the first opportune moment, and, as yours is one of a class with which I am frequently favored, I will send you my reply through THE TRIBUNE, wishing it regarded as a general answer to all such applications.
Let me begin by frankly stating that I am not engaged in the Slave Trade, and do not now contemplate embarking in that business; but no man can say confidently what he may or may not become; and, if I ever should engage in the traffic you suggest, it will be but fair to remember you as among my prompters to undertake it. Yet even then I must decline any such examination as you proffer of the property you wish to dispose of. Your biography is so full and precise, so frank and straight forward, that I prefer to rest satisfied with your assurance in the premises.
You will see that I have disregarded your request that your name and residence should be suppressed by me. That request seems to me inspired by a modesty and self-sacrifice unsuited to the Age of Brass we live in. Are you not seeking to do a humane and generous act? Are you not proposing to tax yourself $600 in order to raise an intelligent, capable, deserving woman from Slavery to Freedom? Are you not proposing to do this in a manner perfectly lawful and unobjectionable, involving no surrender or compromise of “Southern Rights?” My dear Sir! such virtue must not be allowed to “blush unseen.” Our age needs the inspiration of heroic examples, and those who would “do good by stealth, and blush to find it Fame,” must—by gentle violence, if need be—stand revealed to an amazed, admiring world.—True, it might (and might not) have been still more astounding but for your unlucky gambling on the last Presidential Election, wherein it is hard to tell whether you who lost your money or those who won their President were most unfortunate. I affectionately advise you both never to do so again.
—And now as to this daughter of the late Judge Hopkins of Savannah, Ga., whom you propose to sell me:
I cannot now remember that I have ever heard Slavery justified on any ground which did not assert or imply that it is the best condition for the negro. The blacks you are daily told cannot take care of themselves, but sink into idleness, debauchery, squalid poverty and utter brutality, the moment the master’s sustaining rule and care are withdrawn. If this is true, how dare you turn this poor dependent, for whose well-being you are responsible, over to me, who neither would nor could exert a master’s control over her? If this slave ought not to be set at liberty, why do you ask me to bribe you with $1,000 to do her that wrong? If she ought to be, why should I pay you $1,000 for doing your duty in the premises? You hold a peculiar and responsible relation to her, through your own voluntary act, but I am only related to her through Adam, the same as to every Esquemux, Patagonian or New Zelander. Whatever may be your duty in the premises, why should I be called on to help you discharge it?
Full as your account of this girl is, you say nothing of her children, though such she undoubtedly has, whether they be also those of her several masters, as she was, or their fathers were her fellow-slaves. If she is liberated and comes North, what is to become of them? How is she to be reconciled to leaving them in slavery? How can we be assured that the masters who own or to whom you will sell them before leaving for California, will prove as humane and liberal as you are?
You inform me that “the friends of Liberty” in New-York or hereabout, “will no doubt make up” the $1,000 you demand, in order to give this daughter of a Georgia Judge her freedom. I think and trust you misapprehend them. For though they have, to my certain knowledge, under the impulse of special appeals to their sympathies and in view of peculiar dangers or hardships, paid a great deal more money than they could comfortably spare (few of them being rich) to buy individual slaves out of bondage, yet their judgement has never approved such payments of tribute to man-thieves, and every day’s earnest consideration causes it to be regarded with less and less favor. For it is not the snatching of here and there a person from Slavery, at the possible rate of one for every thousand increase of our slave population, that they desire, but the overthrow and extermination of the slaveholding system; and this end, they realize, is rather hindered than helped by their buying here and there a slave into freedom. If by so buying ten thousand a year, at cost of Ten Millions of Dollars, they should confirm you and other slaveholders in the misconception that Slavery is regarded without abhorrence by intelligent Christian freemen at the North, they would be doing great harm to their cause and injury to their fellow-Christians in bondage. You may have heard, perhaps, of the sentiment proclaimed by Decatur to the Slaveholders of the Barbary Coast—“Millions for defense—not a cent for ‘tribute!’”—and perhaps also of its counterpart in the Scotch ballad—
“Instead of broad pieces, we’ll pay them broadswords”—
but “the friends of Liberty” in this quarter will fight her battle neither with lead nor steel—much less with gold. Their trust is in the might of Opinion—in the resistless power of Truth where Discussion is untrammeled and Commercial Intercourse constant—in the growing Humanity of our age—in the deepening sense of Common Brotherhood—in the swelling hiss of Christendom and the just benignity of God. In the earnest faith that these must soon eradicate a wrong so gigantic and so palpable as Christian Slavery, they serenely await the auspicious hour which must surely come.
Requesting you, Mr. K., not to suppress my name in case you see fit to reply to this, and to be assured that I write no letter that I am ashamed of, I remain,
Yours, so-so,
HORACE GREELEY.
Mr. T. K. Knowland, Warrenton, Miss.