the negroes go through who are attached to one of these emigrant parties baffle description....  They trudge on foot all day through mud and thicket without rest or respite....  Thousands of miles are traversed by these weary wayfarers without their knowing or caring why, urged on by the whip and in the full assurance that no change of place can bring any change to them....  Hard work, coarse food, merciless floggings, are all that await them, and all that they can look to.  I have never passed them, staggering along in the rear of the wagons at the close of a long day’s march, the weakest furthest in the rear, the strongest already utterly spent, without wondering how Christendom, which eight centuries ago rose in arms for a sentiment, can look so calmly on at so foul and monstrous a wrong as this American slavery."[22] If instead of crossing the Mississippi bottoms and ascribing to slavery the hardships he observed, Godkin had been crossing the Nevada desert that year and had come upon, as many others did, a train of emigrants with its oxen dead, its women and children perishing of thirst, and its men with despairing eyes turned still toward the gold-fields of California, would he have inveighed against freedom as the cause?  Between Flint’s impression of pleasure and Godkin’s of gloom no choice need be made, for either description was often exemplified.  In general the slaves took the fatigues and the diversions of the route merely as the day’s work and the day’s play.

[Footnote 21:  Timothy Flint, History and Geography of the Western States (Cincinnati, 1828), p. 11.]

[Footnote 22:  Letter of E.L.  Godkin to the London News, reprinted in the North American Review, CLXXXV (1907), 46, 47.]

Many planters whose points of departure and of destination were accessible to deep water made their transit by sea.  Thus on the brig Calypso sailing from Norfolk to New Orleans in April, 1819, Benjamin Ballard and Samuel T. Barnes, both of Halifax County, North Carolina, carrying 30 and 196 slaves respectively, wrote on the margins of their manifests, the one “The owner of these slaves is moving to the parish of St. Landry near Opelousas where he has purchased land and intends settling, and is not a dealer in human flesh,” the other, “The owner of these slaves is moving to Louisiana to settle, and is not a dealer in human flesh.”  On the same voyage Augustin Pugh of the adjoining Bertie County carried seventy slaves whose manifest, though it bears no such asseveration, gives evidence that they likewise were not a trader’s lot; for some of the negroes were sixty years old, and there were as many children as adults in the parcel.  Lots of such sizes as these were of course exceptional.  In the packages of manifests now preserved in the Library of Congress the lists of from one to a dozen slaves outnumbered those of fifty or more by perhaps a hundred fold.