previous next


[for the Richmond Dispatch.]
Yankees selling Virginia negroes.

It is said that two hundred and forty negroes have been sent from Fortress Monroe to Cuba. This is moreover, but carrying out the act of the Yankee Congress for the confiscation of the negroes belonging to Southerners. In the present bankruptcy of their Government, we see no resource they have, except to pay themselves by the capture and sale of our slaves.

It may be easy for us to prove what number may have been stolen at this or that farm, or sent off and sold from this or that fort. It is not so easy, however, to identify what particular negroes were stolen by what particular Yankee. In enforcing reparation for our stolen property, the evidence as to the above most important points may be difficult to obtain — It is feared almost impossible.

It seems that enactments might be so framed as to allow our negroes to bear witness in the cases above referred to. Laws for admitting their evidence might be so guarded as to be in no way prejudicial to us, while our property would be so much better protected. We should have no compunction as to enabling Old Virginia negroes to tell what they know about Yankee thieves who have desolated our borders, and to whom our negroes are far superior, morally. Northerners should have no reason to complain of our negroes appearing against them, when they have admitted the evidence of Yankee free negroes against our Virginia citizens, when endeavoring to secure the property secured to us by our former Constitution. R.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Fortress Monroe (Virginia, United States) (1)
Cuba (Cuba) (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: