UNPRECEDENTED STAMPEDE OF SLAVES.
The Argus of Thursday last, learns that a party of about eighteens laves, of both sexes, left Norfolk and Portsmouth last week for some northern port.
About a dozen are owned in Norfolk, and the balance on the other side of the river. They are mostly young, and some of them valuable mechanics valued at from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars each. As to color and quality, they comprise almost every shade, from the brightest and politest mulatto to the real native, greasy African black, with his thick, red lips, white teeth, flat nose and long heels. It is supposed they left in some oyster vessel, loading, perhaps in Tanner's Creek, and bound to New York or some other port north of Mason & Dixon's line.
Several of those who have left good masters, comfortable homes, and a plenty to eat and wear, are young and inexperienced, though industrious and useful, and when left in a strange place to work or starve, and take care of themselves, they will degenerate into vagrancy, pauperism and roguery.
There are some circumstances connected with the condition and subsequent desertion of several of the runaways alluded to above that render their conduct specially treacherous, ungrateful and villainous.––The keen eye of some of the losers in this game of negro plunder is turned, perhaps, in the proper direction, and their attention is drawn to certain influences that are not considered very well calculated to strengthen the ties existing between the master and his slaves.
Valuable and well behaved servants are constantly leaving those who have raised them from infancy, treated them kindly in sickness and in health, and it is time now that diligent and prompt efforts should be made to put a stop to the system of theft and rascality as injurious to the slave as it is unjust to the owner.
"Unprecedented Stampede of Slaves," Wilmington (NC) Tri-Weekly Commercial, November 27, 1855, p. 4