The domestic slave-trade began now to be one of the chief sources of the wealth of Maryland and Virginia especially. Those who participated in this traffic justified it by the claim that it was better for the slaves themselves to be removed to new homes, where they could be better supported, than to be kept in their old homes and suffer for the want of the necessaries of life, and that the distribution of the slave { 58} population over a larger area would make future emancipation easier, and less dangerous to the supremacy of the white race. There was a certain force in this reasoning. The mass of the slave-holders seem to have been fully convinced of its soundness, although it did not entirely quiet the consciences of the best men among them to the many painful incidents connected with the separation of the slaves, made subject to this traffic, from their old homes and associations.
It is easy to see, however, that the raising of negro slaves, having become a most profitable industry in the older Commonwealths, acted as a vast bribe upon the ideas of men in regard to the questions of the perpetuation and extension of slavery, and beclouded their consciences in respect thereto.
[Sidenote: The relation of slavery to the diplomacy of the United States.]
Finally, the capture and abduction of negro slaves by the British forces during the War of 1812, and the demand of the slave-holders that the United States Government should secure the restitution of their slaves, or compensation for the loss of them, from the British Government, moved the United States Government to assume its attitude toward slavery in the administration of the international affairs of the country. The cardinal political principle of the slave-holding statesmen, at that period, was that slavery was a "State" matter with which the United States Government had no concern, and in regard to which it had no powers. This appeal to the Government to voice and enforce their demands against Great Britain in respect to their slave property has seemed, therefore, to some of the later and more radical critics of American history to have been a gross inconsistency, and they have represented it as a proof of the insincerity of the slave-holders wherever their pecuniary interests were involved.