[Footnote A:  “Human flesh is now the great staple of Virginia, In the legislature of this State, in 1833, Thomas Jefferson Randolph declared that Virginia had been converted into ’one grand menagerie, where men are reared for the market, like oxen for the shambles.’  This same gentleman thus compared the foreign with the domestic traffic:  ’The trader (African) receives the slave, a stranger in aspect, language and manner, from the merchant who brought him from the interior.  But here, sir, individuals whom the master has known from infancy,—­whom he has seen sporting in the innocent gambols of childhood,—­who have been accustomed to look to him for protection,—­he tears from the mother’s arms, exiles into a foreign country, among a strange people, subject to cruel task-masters.  In my opinion, it is much worse.’—­Mr. Gholson, of Virginia, in his speech in the legislature of that State, January 18, 1831, says:  ’The master forgoes the service of the female slave, has her nursed and attended during the period of her gestation, and raises the helpless and infant offspring.  The value of the property justifies the expense; and I do not hesitate to say, that in its increase consists much of our wealth.’—­Professor Dew, now President of the College of William and Mary, Virginia, in his review of the debate in the Virginia legislature, 1831-3, speaking of the revenue arising from the trade, says:  ’A full equivalent being thus left in the place of the slave, this emigration becomes an advantage to the State, and does not check the black population as much as at first view we might imagine; because it furnishes every inducement to the master to attend to the negroes, to encourage breeding, and to cause the greatest number possible to be raised.  Virginia is, in fact, a negro-raising State, for other States.’—­Mr. C.F.  Mercer asserted, in the Virginia Convention of 1829, ’The tables of the natural growth of the slave population demonstrate; when compared with the increase of its numbers in the commonwealth for twenty years past, that an annual revenue of not less than a million and a half of dollars is derived from the exportation of a part of this population.’”—­Judge Jay’s View, pages 88, 89.]

Very soon after our arrival, we proceeded to the House of Representatives, then sitting, and were favored, by introductions from a member, with seats behind the Speaker’s chair.  The subject before the House was, of course, peculiarly interesting to me, being the proposed re-enactment of the “gag;” a rule of the House, by which petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, are laid upon the table, without being read or referred, and thus are virtually rejected.  One of the speakers, William Slade, of Vermont, who was opposed to the “gag,” told the pro-slavery members that they were greatly mistaken in supposing that such a measure would suppress the anti-slavery feeling of the country.  They might, for a time, block up