Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Charles Carey

A chill hides in Carey's tidy accounting: human beings reduced to an export line item, their forced departure treated like a demographic lever. The sentence is built to sound inevitable. "Then it was that" signals a turning point as if history clicked into place on its own, while "so great that" turns mass displacement into a matter of scale, not cruelty. Even the grammatical slip - "exports ... was" - unintentionally reinforces the underlying logic: people become a singular commodity.

Carey is writing from a 19th-century economist's perch, when political economy liked to dress moral catastrophe in neutral vocabulary. The intent is diagnostic. He wants to explain why Virginia and the Carolinas didn't grow the way Northern states did: not because of soil or climate, but because the domestic slave trade bled population south-to-deeper-south, feeding the expanding cotton frontier. Stationary population becomes a symptom of an internal market in bodies.

The subtext is sharper than the surface. By focusing on "remained almost ... stationary", Carey implies an opportunity cost: slavery doesn't just brutalize the enslaved; it distorts regional development, drains labor, and converts households into collateral. That framing fits Carey's broader protectionist, nationalist economics: the South, in his view, is trapped in an extractive system that exports raw materials and, here, even exports the people who produce them.

The rhetorical move is quiet indictment by numbers. He doesn't need abolitionist thunder; he lets the ledger speak - and the ledger, in its coldness, becomes the accusation.