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HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

FROM THE COMPROMISE OF 1850

VOL. I

 

 

 

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

 

CHAPTER I

 

My design is to write the history of the United States from the introduction of the compromise measures of 1850 down to the final restoration of home rule in the South twenty-seven years later. This period, less than a generation, was an era big with fate for our country, and for the American must remain fraught with the same interest that the war of the Peloponnesus had for the ancient Greek, or the struggle between the Cavalier and the Puritan has for their descendants. It ranks next in importance to the formative period—to the declaration and conquest of independence and the adoption of the Constitution; and Lincoln and his age are as closely identified with the preservation of the Union as Washington and the events which he more than any other man controlled are associated with the establishment of the nation. The civil war, described by the great German historian whose genius has illuminated the history of Rome as " the mightiest struggle and most glorious victory as yet recorded in human annals,"1 is one of

___________

1 History of Rome, Mommsen, vol. iv. p. 558. 

 

those gigantic events whose causes, action, and sequences will be of perennial concern to him who seeks the wisdom underlying the march of history. While we now clearly see that the conflict between two opposing principles causing the struggle that led to the Missouri Compromise, and renewed from time to time after that settlement, was destined to result in the overthrow of one or the other, yet it was not until the eleven years preceding the appeal to arms that the question of negro slavery engrossed the whole attention of the country. It then became the absorbing controversy in Congress, and dominated all political contests; the issue came home to every thinking citizen, and grew to be the paramount political topic discussed in the city mart, the village store, and the artisan's workshop. It was less than three years before the secession of South Carolina that Seward described our condition as "an irrepressible conflict," and Lincoln likened it to a house divided against itself that could not stand. It is not difficult to trace the different manifestations of the opposing principles in these years. The signs of the times are so plain that he who runs may read them.

 

It will be my aim to recount the causes of the triumph of the Republican party in the presidential election of 1860, and to make clear how the revolution in public opinion was brought about that led to this result. Under a constitutional government, the history of political parties is the civil history of the country. I shall have to relate the downfall of the Whig party, the formation of the Republican, and the disruption of the Democratic party, that, with brief intermissions, had conducted the affairs of the government from the election of Jefferson, its founder and first President. A significant incident of this defeat was that Lincoln, the elected President, received not a single vote in ten Southern States, owing his success entirely to the North. These ten States and one more, Virginia,1 would not submit to a sectional President and seceded from the Union. Then ensued

_____________

1 Lincoln received 1929 votes in Virginia.

 

the civil war, the central event of my history. From 1850 to 1861 the antecedents of this terrible conflict engross the attention of every student of the period; after 1865,the consequences. The withdrawal of the United States troops from South Carolina and Louisiana by President Hayes in 1877, constituting the final restoration of home rule to the South, is a fitting episode with which to close this narrative. For then, the Southern question gave way to other political issues.

 

The compromise measures of 1850 were a compromise with slavery and the last of those settlements that well-meaning and patriotic men from both sides of Mason and Dixon's line were wont to devise when the slavery question made unwelcome intrusion. To know the reason of these enactments and to understand their scope and purpose, a retrospect is necessary of so much of the history of our country as relates to the slavery question in politics.

 

Negro slaves, as is generally known, were brought to Virginia in the infancy of the colony. Fifty years after the landing of the first cargo at Jamestown, the blacks were only five per cent of the population.1 But America had large new tracts of land and few agricultural settlers; and these economical conditions and the moral attitude of Christendom being given, slavery was in the natural course of things certain to be extended.2 At first the rigor of the law was aimed at the restraint of intermarriage and of illicit intercourse between the races: public whipping, and admonition in the church, were visited upon the guilty white man.3 But towards the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the laws

__________

1 Governor Berkeley's report, Hart's American History told by Contemporaries, vol. i. p. 239.

2 Economic History of Virginia, Bruce, vol. ii. p. 67.

3 Short History of English Colonies, Lodge, p. 67; History of United States, Hildreth, vol. i. p. 521; vol. ii. pp. 178, 429; Hening, The Statutes at Large. Being a Collection of the Laws of Virginia from 1619-1792. Vol. i. pp. 146, 662; vol. ii. p. 170; Bruce, vol. ii. pp. 67-130.

 

of the colonies began to be stringent, foreshadowing in their severity the inhuman slave codes of the Southern States under the Union; yet while the Virginia slave legislation was ferocious, the custom was more lenient than the law.1 In South Carolina, however, the advantage of negro labor might be seen at its best, for it had a climate better suited to the African than the northern colonies, and it was, moreover, essentially a planting state. The rice plant had at an early period been introduced from Madagascar, and the rice of Carolina was soon esteemed the best in the world. The cultivation of rice and indigo was unhealthy but highly remunerative labor, and it became the great object of the emigrant " to buy negro slaves, without which," the Secretary to the proprietors of Carolina wrote, "a planter can never do any great matter." 2 In less than a century after the settlement of South Carolina, capital invested in planting could easily be doubled in three or four years. The mechanic left his trade and the merchant his business to devote themselves to agriculture.3 Slaves could be bought for about forty pounds each, and as they produced in twelve months more than enough rice and indigo to pay their entire cost, they were a profitable investment, and the temptation was great to work them beyond their physical endurance. The planters lived in fear of a rising and massacre, and the legislation regarding the slaves was harsh and cruel. The degradation of the negroes was great; dispensing for the most part with the ceremony of marriage, their sexual relations were loose and irregular.4

 

In the neighboring colony of Georgia, the last of the thirteen

_________________

1 Lodge, p. 69.

2 An Account of the Province of Carolina, London, 1682, cited from the Historical Collections of South Carolina, by B. R. Carroll, vol. ii. p. 33. 

3 Bancroft, vol. ii. p. 392. The edition used is that of Appleton & Co., 1887, having the author's last revision. South Carolina was settled in

4 Lodge, p. 182.

 

to be settled, the introduction of slaves was prohibited. Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony, said: "Slavery is against the Gospel as well as the fundamental law of England. We refused, as trustees, to make a law permitting such a horrid crime."1 But the promised lucrative returns from negro labor were more powerful than respect for the law, and the Georgia planters began to hire slaves from Carolina. It was not long before slaves direct from Africa were landed at Savannah, while the laws against their introduction ceased to be observed. Whitefield, believing slavery an ordinance of God, designed for the eventual good of the African, and also having an eye to its present advantage to the colonist, argued earnestly for the introduction of slaves into Georgia and his practice conformed to his doctrine, for he bought a plantation on which, at the time of his death, there were seventy-five slaves; these he bequeathed to a lady whom he called one of the " elect."2 The Methodist evangelist acted in consistency with the age, and so did his contemporary, Jonathan Edwards, the exponent of Calvinism in New England, who left, among other property, a negro boy. Nor did the pure life and liberal opinions of Bishop Berkeley lead him to a position on slavery in advance

______________

1 Bancroft, vol. ii. p. 287.

2 Ibid., p. 299.

3 Life and Times of John Wesley, Tyerman. In this work a curious letter from Whitefield in 1751 is printed, from which I make the following extracts: "As for the lawfulness of keeping slaves I have no doubt. It is plain hot countries cannot be cultivated without negroes. What a flourishing country Georgia might have been, had the use of them been permitted years ago. . . . Though it is true they are brought in a wrong way from their own country, and it is a trade not to be approved of, yet as it will be carried on whether we will or not, I should think myself highly favored if I could purchase a good number of them in order to make their lives comfortable, and lay a foundation for breeding up their posterity in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. I had no hand in bringing them into Georgia, though my judgment was for it. ... It rejoiced my soul to hear that one of my poor negroes in Carolina was made a brother in Christ."

 

of his time. He conformed to the practice of the best people and held slaves.1

 

Farther northward, slavery appeared stripped of some of its evils. The treatment of the negroes was more humane, and legislation secured them a greater degree of personal protection. In the colonies that afterwards became the Middle States they were rarely worked as field hands, and though sometimes employed in the iron furnaces and forges of Pennsylvania,2 their chief use was as domestic servants. In New York it was deemed a mitigation of punishment that refractory slaves, instead of being whipped, were sold for the West Indian market. In New England slavery was not a prominent feature except in Rhode Island, where Newport was largely engaged in the slave-trade; and at the outbreak of the Revolution, when one in fifty of the population of New England were slaves, the general tendency of public opinion was against the institution. The laws in regard to the slaves were mild, and limited their punishment; they were invariably employed as house-servants, and were taught to read the Bible.3

 

In the colonies where moral feeling was not stifled by golden returns from the culture of rice and tobacco by slave labor, and where slaves were rather a domestic convenience than a planter's necessity, the notion that the practice was an evil began to make itself manifest. The legislators of the Providence Colony, in the middle of the seventeenth century, enacted that no negro should be held to perpetual service, but that all slaves should be set free at the end of ten years; yet the law was not enforced, for it was far in advance of public sentiment.4 William Penn made earnest though unavailing efforts to improve the mental and moral condition of the negroes and to secure a decent respect for

______________

1 History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Lecky, vol. ii. p. 17. 2 Iron in all Ages, Swank, p. 143.

3 Lodge, p. 442; Hildreth, vol. ii. p. 419.

4 Bancroft, vol. i. p. 293.

Formatted with hard line breaks:

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
FROM THE COMPROMISE OF 1850
VOL. I



HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

CHAPTER I

My design is to write the history of the United States from the introduction of the compromise measures of 1850 down to the final restoration of home rule in the South twenty-seven years later. This period, less than a generation, was an era big with fate for our country, and for the American must remain fraught with the same interest that the war of the Peloponnesus had for the ancient Greek, or the struggle between the Cavalier and the Puritan has for their descendants. It ranks next in importance to the formative period—to the declaration and conquest of independence and the adoption of the Constitution; and Lincoln and his age are as closely identified with the preservation of the Union as Washington and the events which he more than any other man controlled are associated with the establishment of the nation. The civil war, described by the great German historian whose genius has illuminated the history of Rome as " the mightiest struggle and most glorious victory as yet recorded in human annals,"1 is one of

___________
1 History of Rome, Mommsen, vol. iv. p. 558.


those gigantic events whose causes, action, and sequences will be of perennial concern to him who seeks the wisdom underlying the march of history. While we now clearly see that the conflict between two opposing principles causing the struggle that led to the Missouri Compromise, and renewed from time to time after that settlement, was destined to result in the overthrow of one or the other, yet it was not until the eleven years preceding the appeal to arms that the question of negro slavery engrossed the whole attention of the country. It then became the absorbing controversy in Congress, and dominated all political contests; the issue came home to every thinking citizen, and grew to be the paramount political topic discussed in the city mart, the village store, and the artisan's workshop. It was less than three years before the secession of South Carolina that Seward described our condition as "an irrepressible conflict," and Lincoln likened it to a house divided against itself that could not stand. It is not difficult to trace the different manifestations of the opposing principles in these years. The signs of the times are so plain that he who runs may read them.

It will be my aim to recount the causes of the triumph of the Republican party in the presidential election of 1860, and to make clear how the revolution in public opinion was brought about that led to this result. Under a constitutional government, the history of political parties is the civil history of the country. I shall have to relate the downfall of the Whig party, the formation of the Republican, and the disruption of the Democratic party, that, with brief intermissions, had conducted the affairs of the government from the election of Jefferson, its founder and first President. A significant incident of this defeat was that Lincoln, the elected President, received not a single vote in ten Southern States, owing his success entirely to the North. These ten States and one more, Virginia,1 would not submit to a sectional President and seceded from the Union. Then ensued

_____________
1 Lincoln received 1929 votes in Virginia.


the civil war, the central event of my history. From 1850 to 1861 the antecedents of this terrible conflict engross the attention of every student of the period; after 1865,the consequences. The withdrawal of the United States troops from South Carolina and Louisiana by President Hayes in 1877, constituting the final restoration of home rule to the South, is a fitting episode with which to close this narrative. For then, the Southern question gave way to other political issues.

The compromise measures of 1850 were a compromise with slavery and the last of those settlements that well-meaning and patriotic men from both sides of Mason and Dixon's line were wont to devise when the slavery question made unwelcome intrusion. To know the reason of these enactments and to understand their scope and purpose, a retrospect is necessary of so much of the history of our country as relates to the slavery question in politics.

Negro slaves, as is generally known, were brought to Virginia in the infancy of the colony. Fifty years after the landing of the first cargo at Jamestown, the blacks were only five per cent of the population.1 But America had large new tracts of land and few agricultural settlers; and these economical conditions and the moral attitude of Christendom being given, slavery was in the natural course of things certain to be extended.2 At first the rigor of the law was aimed at the restraint of intermarriage and of illicit intercourse between the races: public whipping, and admonition in the church, were visited upon the guilty white man.3 But towards the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the laws
__________
1 Governor Berkeley's report, Hart's American History told by Contemporaries, vol. i. p. 239.
2 Economic History of Virginia, Bruce, vol. ii. p. 67.
3 Short History of English Colonies, Lodge, p. 67; History of United States, Hildreth, vol. i. p. 521; vol. ii. pp. 178, 429; Hening, The Statutes at Large. Being a Collection of the Laws of Virginia from 1619-1792. Vol. i. pp. 146, 662; vol. ii. p. 170; Bruce, vol. ii. pp. 67-130.

of the colonies began to be stringent, foreshadowing in their severity the inhuman slave codes of the Southern States under the Union; yet while the Virginia slave legislation was ferocious, the custom was more lenient than the law.1 In South Carolina, however, the advantage of negro labor might be seen at its best, for it had a climate better suited to the African than the northern colonies, and it was, moreover, essentially a planting state. The rice plant had at an early period been introduced from Madagascar, and the rice of Carolina was soon esteemed the best in the world. The cultivation of rice and indigo was unhealthy but highly remunerative labor, and it became the great object of the emigrant " to buy negro slaves, without which," the Secretary to the proprietors of Carolina wrote, "a planter can never do any great matter." 2 In less than a century after the settlement of South Carolina, capital invested in planting could easily be doubled in three or four years. The mechanic left his trade and the merchant his business to devote themselves to agriculture.3 Slaves could be bought for about forty pounds each, and as they produced in twelve months more than enough rice and indigo to pay their entire cost, they were a profitable investment, and the temptation was great to work them beyond their physical endurance. The planters lived in fear of a rising and massacre, and the legislation regarding the slaves was harsh and cruel. The degradation of the negroes was great; dispensing for the most part with the ceremony of marriage, their sexual relations were loose and irregular.4

In the neighboring colony of Georgia, the last of the thirteen
_________________
1 Lodge, p. 69.
2 An Account of the Province of Carolina, London, 1682, cited from the Historical Collections of South Carolina, by B. R. Carroll, vol. ii. p. 33.
3 Bancroft, vol. ii. p. 392. The edition used is that of Appleton & Co., 1887, having the author's last revision. South Carolina was settled in
4 Lodge, p. 182.

to be settled, the introduction of slaves was prohibited. Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony, said: "Slavery is against the Gospel as well as the fundamental law of England. We refused, as trustees, to make a law permitting such a horrid crime."1 But the promised lucrative returns from negro labor were more powerful than respect for the law, and the Georgia planters began to hire slaves from Carolina. It was not long before slaves direct from Africa were landed at Savannah, while the laws against their introduction ceased to be observed. Whitefield, believing slavery an ordinance of God, designed for the eventual good of the African, and also having an eye to its present advantage to the colonist, argued earnestly for the introduction of slaves into Georgia and his practice conformed to his doctrine, for he bought a plantation on which, at the time of his death, there were seventy-five slaves; these he bequeathed to a lady whom he called one of the " elect."2 The Methodist evangelist acted in consistency with the age, and so did his contemporary, Jonathan Edwards, the exponent of Calvinism in New England, who left, among other property, a negro boy. Nor did the pure life and liberal opinions of Bishop Berkeley lead him to a position on slavery in advance
______________
1 Bancroft, vol. ii. p. 287.
2 Ibid., p. 299.
3 Life and Times of John Wesley, Tyerman. In this work a curious letter from Whitefield in 1751 is printed, from which I make the following extracts: "As for the lawfulness of keeping slaves I have no doubt. It is plain hot countries cannot be cultivated without negroes. What a flourishing country Georgia might have been, had the use of them been permitted years ago. . . . Though it is true they are brought in a wrong way from their own country, and it is a trade not to be approved of, yet as it will be carried on whether we will or not, I should think myself highly favored if I could purchase a good number of them in order to make their lives comfortable, and lay a foundation for breeding up their posterity in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. I had no hand in bringing them into Georgia, though my judgment was for it. ... It rejoiced my soul to hear that one of my poor negroes in Carolina was made a brother in Christ."

of his time. He conformed to the practice of the best people and held slaves.1

Farther northward, slavery appeared stripped of some of its evils. The treatment of the negroes was more humane, and legislation secured them a greater degree of personal protection. In the colonies that afterwards became the Middle States they were rarely worked as field hands, and though sometimes employed in the iron furnaces and forges of Pennsylvania,2 their chief use was as domestic servants. In New York it was deemed a mitigation of punishment that refractory slaves, instead of being whipped, were sold for the West Indian market. In New England slavery was not a prominent feature except in Rhode Island, where Newport was largely engaged in the slave-trade; and at the outbreak of the Revolution, when one in fifty of the population of New England were slaves, the general tendency of public opinion was against the institution. The laws in regard to the slaves were mild, and limited their punishment; they were invariably employed as house-servants, and were taught to read the Bible.3

In the colonies where moral feeling was not stifled by golden returns from the culture of rice and tobacco by slave labor, and where slaves were rather a domestic convenience than a planter's necessity, the notion that the practice was an evil began to make itself manifest. The legislators of the Providence Colony, in the middle of the seventeenth century, enacted that no negro should be held to perpetual service, but that all slaves should be set free at the end of ten years; yet the law was not enforced, for it was far in advance of public sentiment.4 William Penn made earnest though unavailing efforts to improve the mental and moral condition of the negroes and to secure a decent respect for
______________
1 History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Lecky, vol. ii. p. 17. 2 Iron in all Ages, Swank, p. 143.
3 Lodge, p. 442; Hildreth, vol. ii. p. 419.
4 Bancroft, vol. i. p. 293.

their family relations; in his last will he directed that his own slaves should be given their freedom. In 1688 a society of German Friends, who had left the country of the Rhine to enjoy the freedom of their religion under the Quaker law-giver, passed a solemn resolution declaring that it was not lawful for Christians to buy or hold negro slaves.1

Yet these did little to stem the current of opinion that, sustained by official and royal favor, rated the negro simply at his money-value as merchandise. William III., though establishing religious liberty and a constitutional government in England, was not in advance of his age in his views of the slave-trade. One of the early royal instructions issued in the name of William and Mary enjoined the colonial governors to keep open the market for salable negroes, and in the same reign an act of Parliament declared that "the trade is highly beneficial and advantageous to the kingdom and colonies."2 Before and during the war of the Spanish Succession, with which the eighteenth century begins, the English government did its best for the protection of the negro traffic; it issued mandates to the Governor of New York and other governors to provide "a constant and sufficient supply of merchantable negroes." 3 Of the utmost significance was the treaty of Utrecht (1713), made at the close of this war. By compact with Spain, it provided that England should have the monopoly of supplying negro slaves to the Spanish-American provinces. The company formed to carry out the contract promised such enormous profits that Queen Anne reserved for herself one-quarter of the common stock; and it is noteworthy that almost the only feature of the treaty that gave general satisfaction in England was the article that encouraged the "kidnapping of tens of thousands of negroes, and their consignment to the most miserable slavery."4 But all of the best minds of England
_________________
1 Bancroft, vol. i. p. 572.
2 Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 77, 278.
3 Ibid., p. 209,
4 Lecky's England, vol. i. p. 138.

were not of this way of thinking. Baxter, the Christian patriot, had in the previous century reminded the slaveholder that the slave "was of as good a kind as himself, born to as much liberty, by nature his equal;" and it is a grateful remembrance to lovers of English literature that Addison and Steele protested against the inhumanity of holding in bondage the African.1

Virginia for many years took a creditable attitude towards the question of slavery, although it is probable that before the Revolution negro labor was for her an instrument of wealth. By the middle of the eighteenth century a large number in this colony favored the prohibition of the slave-trade;2 and this opinion, which with some undoubtedly had a moral prompting, was fostered by alarm at the growing number of blacks, excited especially during the French and Indian War. "The negro slaves have been very audacious on the news of the defeat on the Ohio," wrote Governor Dinwiddie to the home administration after Braddock's defeat in 1755. "These poor creatures imagine the French will give them their freedom. We have too many here."' Six years later the Virginia Assembly imposed a high duty on imported slaves, which it was hoped would be prohibitory, but this act was vetoed by England;4 and in 1770 King George III. instructed the Governor of Virginia, "upon the pain of the highest displeasure, to assent to no law by which the importation of slaves should be in any respect prohibited or obstructed.'5 At this time Virginia, Maryland, and the Northern colonies favored strongly putting a stop to the foreign slave-trade; and this feeling showed itself in Virginia by a strong and respectful remonstrance against the royal instructions, in which she had the sympathy
_______________
1 Bancroft, vol. ii. p. 277.
2 Ibid., vol. ii. p. 394.
3 Montcalm and Wolfe, Parkman, vol. i. p. 229.
4 Bancroft, vol. ii. p. 550; see Hildreth, vol. ii. p. 494.
5 Bancroft, vol. iii. p. 410; Order in council of December 9th, 1770.

of almost all of her sister colonies.1 But while the people of the Old Dominion were willing to prohibit the traffic in human beings from Africa, to give their own negroes freedom was a different matter, and, while assenting without dispute to the doctrine that slavery in the abstract was wrong, they held that any question of its abolition should be postponed to a more convenient season. By no one is this contradiction between speculation and practice more frankly and clearly stated than by Patrick Henry in the oft-quoted letter written two years before his memorable oration.2

When the question of freedom and slavery was at issue, the English judiciary had early been on the side of freedom. Chief Justice Holt had, in 1697, affirmed that "as soon as a negro comes into England he is free;" and, in 1702, that "in England there is no such thing as a slave."' But public sentiment lagged behind the law, and later received the seal of an extra-judicial opinion, which in practice permitted American planters to bring their negroes to England and hold them there as slaves.4 The Sommersett case, in which the question of such a right was involved, came before the Court of King's Bench in 1772, and Lord Mansfield delivered the opinion. He declared that slavery was of such a nature that it could only be presumed to exist in a country where it took its rise from positive law, and consequently it was a state contrary to law in England.5 This decision, crystallizing
_______________
1 Bancroft, vol. iii. p. 410; Calendar of Home Office Papers, 1770-1772, p. 600.
2 See Bancroft, vol. iii. p. 412; Life of Henry Clay, Schurz, vol. i. p. 29; Hildreth, vol. iii. p. 393.
3 Holt's Reports, 495; Campbell's Lives of the Chief Justices, vol. ii. pp. 138, 139; see also Hildreth, vol. ii. pp. 125, 214.
4 Hildreth, vol. ii. p. 426. 5 Constitutional History of England, May, vol. ii. p. 273. He remarks:
"It was a righteous judgment; but scarcely worthy of the extravagant commendation bestowed upon it at that time and since. This boasted law, as declared by Lord Mansfield, was already recognized in France,

a sentiment of humanity, was destined always to remain an honor to the great judge and his country's jurisprudence. It was a decision of prime importance to the English-speaking communities, who are more influenced by the dicta of high courts than by the assertion, however eloquent, of general ideas of abstract justice. There had been incomplete and unenforced legislation favoring the slave and judicial decisions unrespected, but no authority of such weight as Chief Justice Mansfield and his court had pronounced in terms which could not be misunderstood that henceforward, in one country governed by English law, freedom should be the invariable rule.

While Whitefield was conducting his Georgia plantation in the fashion of the time, John Wesley, having pondered deeply on the cruelty of slavery as he had seen it in America, characterized the slave-trade as " that execrable sum of all villainies;" and in his " Thoughts on Slavery " denounced the practice in unmeasured terms. At the same time, Jefferson, holding opinions that would have made him an abolitionist had he lived in 1860, gave expression to them in his draft of instructions for Virginia's delegates to the first Congress of the Colonies, which was called to meet at Philadelphia in 1774. The abolition of slavery, he wrote, is the great object of desire in the colonies. "But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude any further importations from Africa." To that end the repeated endeavors of Virginia had been directed; but every such law had been vetoed by the king himself, who thus preferred the advantage of " a few British corsairs to the lasting interest of the American States and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice"1 Washington shared the ideas of Jefferson. He presided at the Fairfax County Convention, and took part in framing the
__________
Holland, and some other European countries; and as yet England had shown no symptoms of compassion for the negro beyond her own shores."
1 Life of Jefferson, Parton, p. 138; Jefferson's Works, vol. i. p. 135.

resolves then adopted, one of which declared " that no slaves ought to be imported into any of the British colonies," and expressed "the most earnest wishes to see an entire stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade."1 Franklin, as wise as he was humane, boldly argued in the Congress of 1776 that "slaves rather weaken than strengthen the state;" 2 and that memorable body resolved " that no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen United Colonies." * The evil was appreciated, and the large majority of delegates felt that slavery ought to be restricted. It is estimated that already there had been brought into the colonies 300,000 slaves, and the blacks constituted one-fifth of the total population,4 a larger proportion than has obtained at any subsequent period.* Yet these figures do not measure the extent of the slave-trade. For the century previous to 1776 English and colonial ships had carried to the West Indies and the English continental colonies nearly three million negroes. A quarter of a million more had been bought in Africa, had died of cruel treatment during the passage, and had been thrown into the Atlantic'

Burke boldly stated in the House of Commons that the refusal of America to deal any more in the inhuman traffic of negro slaves was one of the causes of her quarrel with Great Britain.7 In the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson gave expression to the same idea. One of his articles of indictment against George III. was: "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself,
________________
1 Life and Writings of Washington, Sparks, vol. ii. p. 494.
2 Life of Franklin, Parton, vol. ii. p. 130.
3 Bancroft, vol. iv. p. 338.
4 Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 274, 390. See also Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America.
5 This is based on the figures of 1770; see Bancroft; also F. A. Walker's article in The Forum for July, 1891.
6 Bancroft, vol. ii. p. 277.
7 Cited in Hodgson's North America, vol. i. p. 57. Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America. Burke's Works, London edition of 1815, vol. iii. pp. 67, 68.