Messrs. B. M. & W. L. Campbell, in the respectable old stand of Slatter. advertise as follows:
SLAVES WANTED.
We are at all times purchasing Slaves, paying the highest cash prices. Persons wishing to sell will please call at 242 Pratt St. (Slatter's old stand). Communications attended to.
In another column, however, Mr. John Denning has his season advertisement, in terms which border on the sublime:
5000 NEGROES WANTED.
I will pay the highest prices, in cash, for 5000 Negroes, with good titles, slaves for life or for a term of years, in large or small families, or single negroes. I will also purchase Negroes restricted to remain in the State, that sustain good characters. Families never separated. Persons having Slaves for sale will please call and see me, as I am always in the market with the cash. Communications promptly attended to, and liberal commissions paid, by John N. Denning, No. 18 S. Frederick street, between Baltimore and Second streets, Baltimore,JMaryland. Trees in front of the house.
Mr. John Denning, also, is a man of humanity. He never separates families. Don't you see it in his advertisement? If a man offers him a wife without her husband, Mr. John Denning won't buy her. O, no! His five thousand are all unbroken families; he never takes any other; and he transports them whole and entire. This is a comfort to reflect upon, certainly.
See, also, the Democrat, published in Cambridge, Maryland, Dec. 8, 1852. A gentleman gives this pictorial representation of himself, with the proclamation to the slave-holders of Dorchester and adjacent counties that he is again in the market:
NEGROES WANTED.
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Mr. Harker is very accommodating. He keeps himself informed as to the state of the southern market, and will give the very highest price that it will justify. Moreover, he will be on hand till July, and will answer any letters from the adjoining country on the subject. On one point he ought to be spoken to. He has not advertised that he does not separate families. It is a mere matter of taste, to be sure; but then some well-disposed people like to see it on a trader's card, thinking it has a more creditable appearance; and, probably, Mr. Harker, if he reflects a little, will put it in next time. It takes up very little room, and makes a good appearance.
We are occasionally reminded, by the advertisements for runaways, to how small an extent it is found possible to avoid the separation of families; as in the Richmond Whig of Nov. 5, 1852:
$10 REWARD.
We are requested by Henry P. Davis to offer a reward of $10 for the apprehension of a negro man named Henry, who ran away from the said Davis' farm near Petersburg, on Thursday, the 27th October. Said slave came from near Lynchburg, Va., purchased of ——— Cock, and has a wife in Halifax county, Va. He has recently been employed on the South Side Railroad. He may be in the neighborhood of his wife.
It seems to strike the advertiser as possible that Henry may be in the neighborhood of his wife. We should not at all wonder if he were.
The reader, by this time, is in possession of some of those statistics of which the South Carolinian speaks, when he says,
We feel confident, if statistics could be had, to throw light upon the subject, we should find that there is less separation of families among the negroes than occurs with almost any other class of persons.
In order to give some little further idea of the extent to which this kind of property is continually changing hands, see the following calculation, which has been made from sixty-four Southern newspapers, taken very much at random. The papers were all published in the last two weeks of the month of November, 1852.
The negroes are advertised sometimes by name, sometimes in definite numbers, and sometimes in "lots," "assortments," and other indefinite terms. We present the result of this estimate, far as it must fall from a fair representation of the facts, in a tabular form.
Here is recorded, in only eleven papers, the sale of eight hundred forty-nine slaves in two weeks in Virginia; the state where Mr. J. Thornton Randolph describes such an event as a separation of families being a thing that "we read of in novels sometimes."
