Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Charles Carey

Carey’s line reads like a clinical diagnosis of a society that has discovered it can outsource its conscience. “From that date” is doing quiet but heavy lifting: it points to a hinge moment when economic choices stopped being local adjustments and became a structural pivot. The “abandonment of the older State” isn’t mere migration or regional decline; it’s an accusation that political community is being treated as expendable capital, stripped and left behind once profits shift elsewhere.

What makes the sentence bite is its causal chain. Carey doesn’t frame slavery as a timeless Southern “culture” but as an industry that expands when the national economy reorients. “Proceeded with a rapidity never before known” has the chill of a market report, and that’s the point: modern speed, modern logistics, modern finance. The domestic slave trade “grew” alongside abandonment, as if it were a companion crop. Carey’s subtext is that slavery isn’t an archaic holdover doomed by progress; it is progress, at least the kind measured in mobility, speculation, and scale.

His phrase “pro-slavery feeling” is equally sharp. It suggests ideology as a secondary product, a mood that follows the money and then hardens into politics. In Carey’s 19th-century context - an economist arguing about national development, industrialization, and sectional power - the quote functions as a warning: when economic policy rewards extraction and relocation, it doesn’t just move people and capital. It manufactures moral permission slips, turning human trafficking into a rationalized domestic system with a growing constituency invested in defending it.