A SLAVE AUCTIONEER'S CONFESSION.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 6, Issue 1764, 18 August 1884, Page 2

A SLAVE AUCTIONEER'S CONFESSION.

—# "Mr John Campbell, who believes that he is now the sole surviver of the Amorican slave auctioneers, lud&ust published his confessions, might be expected, are singularly intoL, Kiting. He became a slave auctioneer in 1835, and carried on the business for nearly twenty-six years, during which period he sold no fewer than 15,000 human beings. The largest sum he ever obtained for a single slavo was 9,000d01, that price being paid by a Tennessee bachelor for a beautiful quadroon girl at Louisville in 1853. Other girls, ranging in color from light chocolate to white, brought from 3,000d0l to 6,000dol; and New Orleans. Louisville, Charleston, and Baltimore were at one time the best markets for such "goods." After-1859, however, the trade at Louisville and Baltimore, on account of the proximity of those cities to the North, rapidly declined, and no sales were affected there after the beginning of 1861. May traces of the old slavedealing days still remain. Beneath most of the Southern hotels that were built before the war there are cellars in which the servants of travellers used to be locked up for the night. Mr Campbell sold his kljft. slave in May, 1861; he was from St. Louis to New OrleaJpii board the Mississippi steamer Star of the South, and one of his fellow passengers (who was taking some negroes to a plantation in Arkansas) happened to lose all his ready money at poker. The man thereupon staked two of his male slaves, and lost them, rhey were at once put up at auction, but, owing to the bad times, sold for ' Jnly 1,600d0l the two. It is worC noticing that, in Mr Campbell's opinion/" the most'tyrannical slave-masters were ihe Northmen who had settled in the South. The true Southeners were, he lays, almost uniformly kind and conuderate in their treatment of their ■ mman chattels.