A White Lady Writes

A white woman writes to tell how the most horrid part of the slave trade was the transportation, and says, "never can so much misery be found."

She Tells of the Horrors of the Slave Trade.
A Touching Plea
A Race’s Brutality- Horrible Cruelty- God’s Wrath and the Future.
Editor Planet:
As I looked over your paper this morning I was particularly interested in the letter of Mrs E. V. Harrod. My eyes filled with tears as I read it for my heart was filled with sorrow and shame for what my race has done and is still doing to oppress and degrade a harmless race, a race that never did us harm. Yes, Mr. Editor, “the time has come for an honest statement of facts from the Negro’s side of the question.” Let us look at some of the facts. Moet gladly would I draw a veil over the past while I hide my face in shame, but I dare not.
Historical writers tell us that forty millions of the inhabitants of Africa have been torn from their native land and made slaves on American soil. They also tell us that these forty millions which remained alive and were sold into slavery were but three-tenths of the original number seized or destroyed. The seven-tenths perished.
NOTHING MORE HORRIBLE
The mind can hardly conceive of anything more horrible than the means used to capture the Negroes to supply the slave trade. Property was taken, men, women and children were butched, towns destroyed, and every species of violence resorted to for the attainment of the object. In one instance twenty thousand were killed for sixteen thousand carried away.
Sometimes as many as sixty thousand were killed in one “skirmish” for slaves. One well informed writer tells of a whole tribe of agricultural trading people of most inoffensive character having been annihilated in a single night. “Every adult was murdered, every hut fired, the boys and girls alone being reserved for the slave trader. He says, “Similar events took place perhaps every month in the year.”
Many slaves perished on their way to the coast. They were heavily ironed- the irons something wearing to the bone, causing sores which never healed. “The females were almost universally the victims of the drivers.” Sometimes half of the number of slaves perished before reaching the coast. On their arrival all those unfit for shipping were killed or turned loose to perish from hunger.
The Most Wretched Part
Mr. Wilberforce said in the House of Commons, “The transportation of slaves is the most wretched part of the business. Never can so much misery be found in so small a space as in a slave-ship during the middle passage.”
Commander Andrew H. Foote of the U.S. Navy said in his book entitled ‘Africa and the American Flag.’ “If ever there were anything on earth which for revolting, filthy, heartless cruelty might make the devil wonder and hell recognize its okay likeness then it was on the decks of an old slaver.” He represented the scene as one of “unparalleled wretchedness.”
In 1807 Congress passed a law prohibiting the fitting out of any vessel for the slave trade and forbid the importation of any slaves. The slave traffic continued and in 1820 Congress declared that every person found guilty should suffer death.
Not until Lincoln came into power was the law carried out, and, despite all protestations against it, a slave trader was hung in the Tombs in New York. Until then our government permitted slave trading vessels to be secretly fitted out in our ports and to carry our flag and then by prohibiting other nations interfering with them, really protracted the traffic so that some of our citizens engaged in it with greater eagerness than before, and furnished slave ships for other countries as well as our own.

“A White Lady Writes,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed January 18, 2026, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/1749.