easy.  More commonly the sellers offered the slaves in family groups outright.  By whatever method the sales were made, the slaves of both sexes were subjected to such examination of teeth and limbs as might be desired.[36] Those on the block oftentimes praised their own strength and talents, for it was a matter of pride to fetch high prices.  On the other hand if a slave should bear a grudge against his seller, or should hope to be bought only by someone who would expect but light service, he might pretend a disability though he had it not.  The purchasers were commonly too shrewd to be deceived in either way; yet they necessarily took risks in every purchase they made.  If horse trading is notoriously fertile in deception, slave trading gave opportunity for it in as much greater degree as human nature is more complex and uncertain than equine and harder to fathom from surface indications.

[Footnote 35:  Johann David Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 1783-1784, A.J.  Morrison tr. (Philadelphia, 1911), I, 148.]

[Footnote 36:  The proceedings at typical slave auctions are narrated by Basil Hall, Travels in North America (Edinburgh, 1829), III, 143-145; and by William Chambers, Things as they are in America (2d edition, London, 1857), pp. 273-284.]

There was also some risk of loss from defects of title.  The negroes offered might prove to be kidnapped freemen, or stolen slaves, or to have been illegally sold by their former owners in defraud of mortgagees.  The last of these considerations was particularly disquieting in times of financial stress, for suspicion of wholesale frauds then became rife.  At the beginning of 1840, for example, the offerings of slaves from Mississippi in large numbers and at bargain prices in the New Orleans market prompted a local editor to warn the citizens against buying cheap slaves who might shortly be seized by the federal marshal at the suit of citizens in other states.  A few days afterward the same journal printed in its local news the following:  “Many slaves were put up this day at the St. Louis exchange.  Few if any were sold.  It is very difficult now to find persons willing to buy slaves from Mississippi or Alabama on account of the fears entertained that such property may be already mortgaged to the banks of the above named states.  Our moneyed men and speculators are now wide awake.  It will take a pretty cunning child to cheat them."[37]

[Footnote 37:  Louisiana Courier, Feb. 12 and 15, 1840.]

The disesteem in which the slavetraders were held was so great and general in the Southern community as to produce a social ostracism.  The prevailing sentiment was expressed, with perhaps a little exaggeration, by D.R.  Hundley of Alabama in his analysis of Southern social types:  “Preeminent in villainy and a greedy love of filthy lucre stands the hard-hearted negro trader....  Some of them, we do not doubt, are conscientious men, but the number is few.