Had the African source been kept freely
open, the bringing of great numbers to meet the demand in prosperous times
would quite possibly have so burdened the country with surplus slaves in
subsequent periods of severe depression that slave prices would have fallen
virtually to zero, and the slaveholding community would have been driven
to emancipate them wholesale as a means of relieving the masters from the
burden of the slaves' support. The foes of slavery had long reckoned that
the abolition of the foreign trade would be a fatal blow to slavery
itself. The event exposed their fallacy. Thomas Clarkson expressed the
disappointment of the English abolitionists in a letter of 1830: "We
certainly have been deceived in our first expectations relative to the
fruit of our exertions. We supposed that when by the abolition of the slave
trade the planters could get no more slaves, they would not only treat
better those whom they then had in their power, but that they would
gradually find it to their advantage to emancipate them. A part of our
expectations have been realized; ... but, alas! where the heart has been
desperately wicked, we have found no change. We did not sufficiently take
into account the effect of unlimited power on the human mind.
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