TALES OF THE COASTWISE SLAVE-SHIPS
183
and there was at least, on the average, a vessel a week from that port the year round. Norfolk was a port about as lively, and Baltimore and Richmond were not far behind. Apparently two hundred vessels carried a hundred slaves each to a Southern market every year from the waters of Virginia.
In the "Democratic Review", of New York, for July, 1858, in an article entitled "Visitation and Search of Vessels." wherein an argument is made in favor of reopening the over-sea slave-trade, the editor says of the over-sea and the coast trades:
"We aver that if one is wrong, then both are wrong; "that if one is right, then both are right". We enter protest against such absurd definitions and distinctions as have been made by Congress."
