Although honest and honorable when they first go into the business, the natural result of their calling seems to corrupt them; for they usually have to deal with the most refractory and brutal of the slave population, since good and honest slaves are rarely permitted to fall into the unscrupulous clutches of the speculator.... [He] is outwardly a coarse, ill-bred person, provincial in speech and manners, with a cross-looking phiz, a whiskey-tinctured nose, cold hard-looking eyes, a dirty tobacco-stained mouth, and shabby dress....  He is not troubled evidently with a conscience, for although he habitually separates parent from child, brother from sister, and husband from wife, he is yet one of the jolliest dogs alive, and never evinces the least sign of remorse....  Almost every sentence he utters is accompanied by an oath....  Nearly nine tenths of the slaves he buys and sells are vicious ones sold for crimes and misdemeanors, or otherwise diseased ones sold because of their worthlessness as property.  These he purchases for about one half what healthy and honest slaves would cost him; but he sells them as both honest and healthy, mark you!  So soon as he has completed his ‘gang’ he dresses them up in good clothes, makes them comb their kinky heads into some appearance of neatness, rubs oil on their dusky faces to give them a sleek healthy color, gives them a dram occasionally to make them sprightly, and teaches each one the part he or she has to play; and then he sets out for the extreme South....  At every village of importance he sojourns for a day or two, each day ranging his ‘gang’ in a line on the most busy street, and whenever a customer makes his appearance the oily speculator button-holes him immediately and begins to descant in the most highfalutin fashion upon the virtuous lot of darkeys he has for sale.  Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom was not a circumstance to any one of the dozens he points out.  So honest! so truthful! so dear to the hearts of their former masters and mistresses!  Ah!  Messrs. stock-brokers of Wall Street—­you who are wont to cry up your rotten railroad, mining, steamboat and other worthless stocks[38]—­for ingenious lying you should take lessons from the Southern negro trader!” Some of the itinerant traders were said, however, and probably with truth, to have had silent partners among the most substantial capitalists in the Southern cities.[39]

[Footnote 38:  D.R.  Hundley, Social Relations in our Southern States (New York, 1860), pp. 139-142.]

[Footnote 39:  Ibid., p.145.]

The social stigma upon slave dealing doubtless enhanced the profits of the traders by diminishing the competition.  The difference in the scales of prices prevailing at any time in the cheapest and the dearest local markets was hardly ever less than thirty per cent.  From such a margin, however, there had to be deducted not only the cost of feeding, clothing, sheltering, guarding and transporting the slaves for the several months