Anti-Slavery History

Rev. William GoodellWelcome to the 1852 book, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A History of the Great Struggle In Both Hemispheres; With A View of The Slavery Question In The United States, by Rev. William Goodell (1792-1878).
Prior to the 1861-1865 War, there were a number of abolitionists who opposed slavery. Nowadays, their reasons for doing so are generally unknown.
This series of websites under construction plans to educate by making the text of major abolitionist writings (1700-1860) accessible.
Examples of such writers include Samuel Sewall (1700), L. C. J. Mansfield (1772), S. G. Tucker (1795), Bishop Samuel Horsley (1806), Rev. John Rankin (1823), Salmon P. Chase (1837), Gerrit Smith (1839), George Mellen (1841), Alvan Stewart (1845), Lysander Spooner (1845), Benjamin Shaw (1846), Rev. William Patton (1846), Horace Mann (1849), Joel Tiffany (1849), Rev. John G. Fee (1851), Harriet B. Stowe (1853), Abraham Lincoln (1854), Edward C. Rogers (1855), Rev. George B. Cheever (1857), Frederick Douglass (March 1860), and Charles Sumner (June 1860).
Whether or not you agree with their legal and moral position, it is at least a good idea to know what their views were!
Goodell has an overview of the 'slavery is unconstitutional' analyses at pp 475-477.
Goodell discusses, in slavery context, many aspects of U.S. history, as impacted by slavery:
This site in the series reprints an 1852 book by Rev. William Goodell (1792-1878), pastor of a congregation at Honeoye, New York, and Liberty Party candidate for President.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A History of the
Great Struggle In Both Hemispheres;
With A View of The Slavery Question
In The United States
by
Rev. William Goodell
(New York: William Harned Pub, 1852)

CONTENTS

      CHAPTER
     OBJECT AND PLAN OF THIS BOOKviii
I. Magnitude and necessity of the struggle   1
II. Origin of the modern Slave Trade and Slavery   4
III. Slavery and the Slave Trade in the British Colonies
in North America, now the United States
 10
IV. Early testimonies against Slavery and the Slave Trade 27
V. Action of religious bodies against the Slave Trade and Slavery,
commencing before the American Revolution, and the results
32
VI. Of Slavery and its abolition in England44
VII. Of efforts for abolishing the African Slave Trade53
VIII. Period of the American Revolution,
and the establishment of an independent Government
69
IX. Era of forming the Federal Constitution 81

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X. Of direct anti-Slavery efforts, including ecclesiastical action, from the
period of the Revolution to the close of the last century; and
the abolition of Slavery in the Northern States
91
XI. Decline of the spirit of Liberty, and growth of Slavery, since the
Revolution; their causes and early manifestations
118
XII. Position of the American Churches respecting Slavery, during the first
half of the Nineteenth Century.—I. Methodist Episcopal Church
143
XIII. Position of the American Churches, &c. (continued)
—II. The Presbyterian Church
151
XIV. Position of the American Churches, &c. (continued).—
III. Congregationalists
163
             
XV. Position of the American Churches, &c. (continued).—IV. Baptists183
XVI. Position of the American Churches, &c. (continued).
—V. The Protestant Episcopal Church
191
XVII. Position of the American Churches, &c. (continued).
—VI. Other Sects—General View
195
XVIII. Position of the American Churches, &c. (continued)—
VII. Voluntary Associations connected with Several Sects—Conclusion
202
XIX. Action of the Federal Government, to the close
of the first Presidential Administration
220
XX. Subsequent action of the Federal Government—Colored people
—Slave territory—New Slave States—Federal District
237
XXI. Further action of the Federal Government—
American Slave Trade—African Slave Trade
247

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XXII. Further action of the Federal Government—
Continued subserviency of the national diplomacy
to the demands of the Slaveholders
263
XXIII. Further action of the Federal Government—
Hayti—Florida—Seminole War
268
XXIV. Further action of the Federal Government—
Acquisition of Texas
272
XXV. Conspiracy for the conquest of Mexico, and the
disrupture of the Federal Union in 1806—Controlling
power of the Conspirators over the Federal Judiciary
280
XXVI. Further action of the Federal Government—The war with
Mexico—Acquisition of California, New Mexico, and Utah
287
XXVII. Further action of the Federal Government—
Result of the Conquest of California—
Its admission as a Free State—"The Compromise"
306
XVIII. Further action of the Federal Government—General
policy, and political economy, controlled by Slavery
319
XXIX. Colonization Society341
XXX. Abolition of Slavery in the British Colonies353
XXXI. Distinctive features of American Slavery377
XXXII. The present Anti-Slavery Agitation in America—
Its causes, origin, and character
382
XXXIII. Opposition to Abolitionists—Its elements—
Its nature and methods
400
XXXIV. Attempts to silence the discussion by authority—
State Legislatures—Federal Executive—U. S. Mails—
"Gag" Rules in Congress—Right of petition
408

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XXXV. Opposition from leading Clergy and Ecclesiastical bodies425
XXXVI. Persecutions of Abolitionists434
XXXVII. Of the elements and occasions of division among Abolitionists447
XXXVIII. Divisions in 1839-40457
XXXIX. Organized political action—Liberty party—
Liberty League—Free Soil Party		468
XL. Anti-Slavery Church agitation—New
Anti-Slavery Churches and Missionary bodies
487
XLI. The Anti-Slavery Societies—
Their relation to political and Church action
509
XLII. The American Anti-Slavery Society—
Its further course on political action
517
XLIII. Second revolution in the position and policy of
the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1844
526
XLIV. Further difficulties in the American Anti-Slavery Society529
XLV. Political course of the American Anti-Slavery Society,
since its revolution of 1844
532
XLVI. Course of Mr. Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery
Society and its members, since the division of 1840,
in respect to Anti-Slavery Church action
541
XLVII. General estimate of the American Anti-Slavery
Society and its labors, since 1840
555

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XLVIII. Review of these divisions and their results. 559
XLIX. Different views of the Constitution and of the legality of Slavery563
L. The Slavery question in America—and the Crisis—What shall be done?583

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OBJECT AND PLAN OF THIS BOOK.

THE chief design of this publication is to furnish, in one volume, an abstract, for convenient reference, of a great mass of historical information concerning slavery and the struggle against it (in this country and Great Britain), that is now to be found only by looking over several volumes, numerous pamphlets, and the newspapers and scattered documents of the last twenty years. This abstract, at the same time, was intended to have a bearing on the now-pending slave question in the United States, and to be so selected and arranged, as to facilitate a presentation of that question towards the close of the volume. It was designed to be as documentary in its character as the nature of an abstract would permit. Hence, it consists much in extracts, quotations, and abbreviated paragraphs, preserving as much as possible the significant portions, without giving the documents entire, which would have required volumes.

The writer was aware that the attempt to cover so much ground in one volume, was a hazardous one. It could not be a small volume; and most readers, as well as some critics, will instantly pronounce a work "too diffuse" that exceeds three or four hundred pages, without stopping to consider whether or no it presents the substance of several such volumes on distinct points of history. They would find no fault with one book of that size that should only tell the story of the abolition of the African slave trade, nor with another that should only relate the measures that led to the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, and the results of those labors; nor with another that should contain the story of Texas and the Mexican war. But if a writer should present the substance of all three of these histories, and five or six more in addition, of equal magnitude and importance, in a volume of six hundred pages, they would think him unpardonably diffuse; and the farther this condensing process was carried, in one volume, the more would he fall under censure for diffuseness.

The

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difficulty would not end here. The same readers, or others, on referring to the parts of the history that most interested them, would fail of obtaining all the minute information they expected, or would wonder at the omission of many things that they considered important. Whether, on the whole, the work will be found too much or too little condensed, is uncertain. If the latter, we may hereafter furnish a cheaper abridgment of it: if the former, the present edition may hereafter take the name of an abridgment to the more copious work that may be written, and for which there are ample materials at hand.

The writer has not wholly excluded from this volume all notice of the principles that underlie history, nor of the workings of moral cause and effect. Nor has he suppressed his own sentiments, through fear of giving offense. He hopes he has not been uncandid or discourteous to others.

No reasonable pains have been spared to secure accuracy in dates and facts; and yet it is quite impossible to be certain of freedom from errors. In some cases, the best authorities disagree. Apparent or real discrepancies and mistakes are incident to all histories. Biblical critics are not always agreed in respect to the true solution of apparent discrepancies in the inspired writers of history. In preparing this book, several instances have occurred in which good authorities have seemed to make irreconcilable statements, but which have, nevertheless, with much labor, been reconciled. Few of the books or pamphlets used by us have been free from real or apparent mistakes that have perplexed us. We hope we shall not be accounted careless of our facts, if some of them should be found inaccurate, or should be, by somebody, considered so. We trust the book is as free from mistakes as most other works of the kind. We are certain of having laboriously collected and carefully examined the statements presented, but, like others who compile histories, we cannot be held responsible for the mistakes of the best authorities extant.

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SLAVERY AND FREEDOM.

CHAPTER I.

MAGNITUDE AND NECESSITY OF THE STRUGGLE.

A World's Question—The Problem of the Present Age.

THE slave question in America is only one phase of the more comprehensive question of human freedom that now begins to agitate the civilized world, and that presents the grand problem of the present age.

Such a question must be met, must be discussed, must be decided, and decided correctly, before the nations of the earth can be enfranchised, and before this anomalous republic can either secure her own liberties, or find permanent repose.

In a nation whose declaration of self-evident and inalienable human rights has been hailed as the watchword for an universal struggle against despotic governments;—a nation whose support of human chattelhood has armed the world's despots with their most plausible pleas against republican institutions, it is in vain to expect that the discussion of such incongruities can be smothered, or the adjustment of them much longer postponed. In any age of the world, such expectations would be disappointed—in the present age, the indulgence of them can be little short of insanity—must be consummate folly. The question whether such a nation, at such a period of the world's progress, shall continue to tolerate human chattelhood, becomes, of necessity, a world's question. Universal human nature is knocking vehemently at our doors, and cannot be silenced. As well might we attempt to hush the thun-

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ders of our own Niagara, or annul the laws by which the elements are governed.

Is this the language of enthusiasm? Ask counsel of existing facts. When a few voices were raised on this subject nof many years since, the whole community, with few exceptions, north and south, demanded that the agitation should cease. But has it ceased? Or can it be made to cease? Most forward and even clamorous in the discussion, are those who, even now, have scarcely ceased to proscribe discussion! Our halls of legislation, that were to have been sealed against the discussion, nevertheless ring with it, to the exclusion of the most favorite topics! And those who were determined that the public mails should not transmit the agitating debate, are now gorging those mails to the full with their own eager debates! Not an important public measure can be proposed that is not found to involve, in some way, the much dreaded but ever present question. Can we not see the hand of an all-controlling Providence in all this? Can we not hear in it the voice of Nature and of Nature's God, demanding and ordaining a discussion of the slave question?

The history of Christian civilization is marked with successive eras of advancement, each one of which is distinguished by some particular phase or feature of human progress, and commonly involves the agitation of some great practical problem, the solution of which occupies the minds of thinking men until it is definitely settled. This is seldom effected without long and earnest discussions, sometimes protracted during one or two entire generations, and not completed until more enlarged views have displaced the prejudices and corrected the errors that preceded them. The responsibilities, as well as the dangers and the privileges of living in such an age of the world—stormy, perhaps, yet progressive—are not commonly appreciated as they should be. Not to have understood, correctly, the wants, and especially the grand problem of such an age, of the age one lives in, not to have taken the position, and to have exerted the influence demanded by the crisis, were equivalent to having wasted, or worse than wasted,

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one's probationary existence, so far as its bearing on general human progress is concerned; and this, too, at a time when one life is to be reckoned of more weight and significance than, perhaps, many lives, dreamed away in any of those dead calms in this world's history, in which little or nothing is done or devised for the elevation of the species.

Such an age of agitation and of corresponding responsibility is the present. The grand problem of the age is that of a more extended and better defined freedom, especially for the very lowest and most degraded portion of the species. Ours is an advanced period, in the struggle for human freedom. It is not to the contest of the barons against an unlimited autocrat that we are summoned—nor to the struggle of the middle classes against the barons; nor to the question of taxation without representation; nor to the question of religious liberty, for those who are regarded as human beings.

The demands of liberty strike deeper, now, and reach the ground tier of humanity, hid under the rubbish of centuries of degradation—classes who have scarcely been thought of, as human, and. to whom no Magna Charta of Runny Meade, no organization of a House of Commons, no Declaration of Independence, have brought even a tithe or a foretaste of their promised blessings. The houseless, the landless, the homeless—the operatives of Manchester and Birmingham, the tenantry of Ireland, the Russian serfs,— above all, the North American Slaves—what have Christian civilization and democratic liberty and equality in reserve for these? And what are the responsibilities of Christians, of philanthropists, of statesmen, and of republican citizens, in respect to them? These questions to be properly decided, must be studied, must be understood.

We single out, for present inquiry, the North American slave. Who is he? What is his condition? How came he there? Who is responsible for his continuance in his present condition? What has been done, and what remains to be done in respect to him?

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CHAPTER II.

ORIGIN OF THE MODERN SLAVE TRADE AND SLAVERY.

The Portuguese—The Spaniards—Charles V.—Ferdinand V.—The Hollanders, the Danes, the French, the English—Queen Elizabeth, John Hawkins, Louis XIII. of France—Act of George II.—Prohibition of Violence—Barbarity of the Traffic—Statistics—Imports into Jamaica.

"In the year 1442, while the Portuguese, under the encouragement of their celebrated Prince Henry, were exploring the coast of Africa, Anthony Gonzalez, who, two years before, had seized some Moors, near Cape Badajor, was, by that prince, ordered to carry his prisoners back to Africa. He landed them at Rio del Oro, and received from the Moors in exchange, ten blacks and a quantity of gold dust, with which he returned to Lisbon."—Edwards' History of the West Indies, Vol. II., p. 37.

"This new kind of commerce, appearing to be a profitable speculation, others, of the same nation, soon embarked in it."—Godwin's Lectures on Slavery, p. 184. (American Edition.)

THE Spaniards, on taking possession of the West India islands, compelled the native Charibs (or Caribs,) to work the mines of Hispaniola.

Ed. Note: See analysis of this situation by a historian in Seville, Spain, Consuelo Varela, La Caida de Cristobal Colon (The Fall of Christopher Columbus), cited by Graham Keeley, "Columbus exposed as iron-fisted tyrant who tortured his slaves" (The Independent, 21 July 2006). See also Varela's Brevisima Relacion De La Destruicion De Las Indias, with Bartolome De Las Casas (January 1999).

In these and other exhausting labors, that feeble race became well nigh extinct,* and their place was supplied by importations of a hardier race from Africa. The infamy of having first projected this expedient has commonly rested on [Bartolomé de] Las Casas [1474-1566], a priest much hated among the colonists for his uncompromising opposition to the ill treatment of the Charibs, "whom he is represented as seeking to
____________
*"Down to the dust the Charib people passed,
Like autumn foliage withering in the blast;
A whole race sunk beneath the oppressor's rod,
And left a blank among the works of God."
                                                  Montgomery's West Indies.

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relieve at the expense of the Africans.* With more probability, the crime has been charged on Chievres and the Flemish nobility, who obtained a monopoly of the traffic from [Emperor] Charles V., and sold it for 25,000 ducats to some Genoese merchants, who first commenced, in a regular form, the commerce in slaves that, with little intermission, has been continued ever since.

"As early as 1503," according to [Thomas] Clarkson, "a few slaves were sent by the Portuguese to the Spanish colonies."

In 1511, Ferdinand V. of Spain, is said to have permitted an importation of Negroes into the colonies. But while Cardinal Ximenes held the reins of government, and until the accession of Charles V. of Spain, he steadily refused to allow such a detestable commerce. Vide Godwin, p. 184.

It was in 1517 that Charles V. (who was sovereign of Germany, and of the Netherlands) granted the exclusive patent before mentioned, to one or more of the Flemish nobility, to import four thousand Africans annually, for the supply of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Porto Eico.
"This great prince was not, in all probability, aware of the dreadful evils attending this horrible traffic, nor of the crying injustice of permitting it; for in 1542, when he made a code of laws for his Indian subjects, he liberated all the Negroes, and by a word put an end to their slavery. When, however, he resigned his crown and retired into a monastery, and his minister of mercy, Pedro de la Gasca, returned to Spain, the imperious tyrants of these new dominions returned to their former practices, and fastened the yoke on the suffering and unresisting Negroes."—Godwin, p. 185. See also Clarkson's History, pp. 28, 29.

Ed. Note: Full Citation: Clarkson, Thomas [1760-1846], The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (New York: J.S. Taylor, 1836; and London: J.W. Parker, 1839).

The slave trade was prosecuted by the Portuguese, the
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*Robertson, in his History of America, takes up and somewhat exaggerates this statement, on the authority of Herrero, an enemy of Las Casas, whose charge was first published 35 years after the philanthropist's decease. The previous writers make no mention of Las Casas in such a connection, though avowedly his enemies. The writings of Las Casas abound in denunciations against slavery; and from the language of Herrera himself, it would not conclusively appear that Las Casas designed, to have the Africans imported by compulsion, or held as slaves.—Vide the Abbé Grégoire's Defence of Las CasasThe West Indies." See also Stuart's Memoir of Sharp, page 29; and preface to Clarkson's Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species.

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Spaniards, the Hollanders, the Danes, the French, the British, the Anglo-Americans, including the colonists of New England.

BEGINNING OF THE SLAVE TRADE BY THE ENGLISH.
"The first importation of Slaves from Africa by Englishmen was in the reign of Elizabeth, in the year 1562. This great princess seems, on the very commencement of the trade, to have questioned its lawfulness. She seems to have entertained a religious scruple concerning it, and, indeed, to have revolted at the very thought of it. She seems to have been aware of the evils to which its continuance might lead, or that, if it were sanctioned, the most unjustifable means might be made use of, to procure the persons of the natives of Africa.

And in what light she would have viewed any acts of this kind, had they taken place, we may conjecture from this fact; that when Captain (afterwards Sir John) Hawkins [1532-1595] returned from his first voyage to Africa and Hispaniola, whither he had carried slaves, she sent for him, and, as we learn from Hill's Naval History, expressed her concern lest any of the Africans should be carried off without their free consent, declaring that 'it would be detestable, and call down Heaven's vengeance upon the undertakers.' Captain Hawkins promised to comply with the injunctions of Elizabeth in this respect.

But he did not keep his word [Details], for when he went to Africa again, he seized many of the inhabitants, and carried them off as slaves, which occasioned Hill, in the account he gives of his second voyage, to use these remarkable words:

'Here began the horrid practice of forcing the Africans into slavery, an injustice and barbarity which, so sure as there is vengeance in heaven for the worst of crimes, will sometime be the destruction of all who encourage it.'

That the trade should have been suffered to continue under such a princess [Queen Elizabeth], and after such solemn expressions as those which she has been described to have uttered, can only be attributed to the pains taken by those concerned to keep her ignorant of the truth."—Clarkson, p. 30.

It may be proper to notice the view taken of this beginning of the slave trade and slavery in the British dominions by a writer decidedly averse to the abolition of the slave trade:

"In regard to Hawkins, himself, he was, I admit, a murderer and a robber. His avowed purpose, in sailing to Guinea, was to take, by stratagem or force, and carry away the unsuspecting natives, in the view of selling them as slaves to the people of Hispaniola. In this pursuit, his object was present profit, and his employment and pastime devastation and murder."—Edwards' History of the West Indies, Vol. II., pp. 43-4.

Ed. Note: See analysis of this situation by Lewis Tappan, et al., Proceedings of Convention (New York, 1855), pp 13-14.

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This authentic account of the origin of British Colonial slavery is worthy of profound study, and, in connection with other facts that may be presented, suggests thoughts that may have a decisive bearing upon the now pending slave question in America, in more aspects than one.

It is common to caste all the odium of slavery upon our fathers, and upon the governments that first permitted the slave trade. Could the dead rise up and plead their own cause, they might perhaps retort that they had no idea of lending their sanction to the system of American slavery, as now practiced. Queen Elizabeth permitted the Africans to be carried into the colonies with their own consent, but they were taken and are held by force. Louis XIII. of France was very uneasy, when about to sanction the importation of Africans into his colonies; until assured that they were to be educated in the Christian religion.* What would he say to the laws that forbid their Christian education? And what would he think of the statement that the colored people of America "must be colonized back to Africa" (a country they never saw), before they can be christianized?

If one monarch who authorized the importation of Africans into his American Colonies directed the liberation of the victims when he learned by what means and for what purposes they were imported—if another consented to the importation only on condition that they should be educated in the Christian religion—and if another only permitted their importation with their own free consent, (involving, by fair implication, the condition of their voluntary and compensated labor,) the question may arise whether the importation originally authorized was indeed that African slave trade that actually took place, and which history describes. And this may suggest the question how far the usages of slavery, as they now exist, can be said to have been authorized or legalized by the permission of such importations as were contemplated by those monarchs. Mr. [Thomas] Clarkson, who seems to have devoted much attention to the details of this history, considers them of the
____________
*Vide Clarkson.
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utmost importance to a right understanding of the question respecting the legality of the slave trade as it existed while he was laboring for its suppression. He demands whether "the African slave trade ever would have been permitted to exist, but for the ignorance of those in authority concerning it." And he affirms that the "trade began in piracy, and was continued upon the principles of force." (Pg. 81.)

The connivance, rather than the "ignorance of those in authority," appears to have sheltered this execrable traffic, after the times of Elizabeth. Even then it was rather tolerated than directly authorized. It would be difficult, perhaps, to find any act of the British Parliament by which the slave trade was explicitly legalized. The enactments seem to insinuate, or faintly imply, that the negroes imported are property, yet they studiously avoid to acknowledge them distinctly, or even by necessary implication, as such. In the act of 10 William III., chap. 26, entitled an "Act to settle the trade to Africa," the negroes are not called slaves. In the act of 23 George II, chap. 81 (1749-50), entitled "An Act for extending and improving the trade to Africa," it was provided (sect. 29) that "no commander or master of any ship trading to Africa shall by fraud, force, or violence, or by any other indirect practice whatsoever, take on board, or carry away from the coast of Africa, any negro or native of the said country, or commit, or suffer to be committed, any violence on the natives, to the prejudice of said trade."*

The 28th section of the same act did indeed recognize the holding of "slaves" at the station of the Trading Company in Africa, yet it gave no authority to transport slaves to America or elsewhere. Undoubtedly the secret design was to stimulate the slave trade. But a sense of shame, and a consciousness of wrong-doing, prevented the Parliament from employing the terms which, upon a strict legal construction, could give to that feature of the African trade the shelter of valid law. [Vide Spooner, pp. 29-35.]
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*Mr. Pitt's view of this statute, and of the legality of the slave trade, will be presented in the proper place.

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Thus stealthily and almost imperceptibly was the idea of legalized human chattelhood introduced. Thus ambiguous and tortuous were the enactments under cover of which the slave traffic was prosecuted.

A graphic and truthful description of that traffic [the slave trade] we present in the language of Hon. Horace Mann, of Massachusetts.*
"One wants the plain, sinewy, Saxon tongue, to tell of deeds that should have shamed devils. Great Britain was the mother. Her American Colonies were the daughter. The mother lusted for gold. To get it, she made partnership with robbery and death. Shackles, chains, and weapons for human butchery, were her outfit in trade. She made Africa her hunting ground. She made its people her prey, and the unwilling colonies her market-place. She broke into the Ethiop's home, as a wolf into a sheep-fold at midnight. She set the continent aflame, that she might seize the affrighted inhabitants as they ran shrieking from their blazing hamlets. The aged and the infant she left to the vultures, but the strong men and the strong women she drove, scourged and bleeding, to the shore. Packed and stowed like merchandise between unventilated decks, so close that the tempest without could not ruffle the pestilential air within, the voyage was begun.

"Once a day the hatches were opened, to receive food and disgorge the dead. Thousands and thousands of corpses which she plunged into the ocean from the decks of her slave ships, she counted only as the tare of her commerce. The blue monsters of the deep became familiar with her pathway; and, not more remorseless than she, they shared her plunder. At length the accursed vessel reached the foreign shore. And there, the monsters of the land, fiercer and feller than any that roam the watery plains, rewarded the robber by purchasing his spoils. For more than a century did the madness of this traffic rage.† During all those years the clock of eternity never counted out a minute that did not witness the cruel death by treachery or violence of some father or mother of Africa."

"Mr. Edwards says that from 1700 to 1786, the number imported into Jamaica was 610,000. ' I say this,' he observes, 'on sufficient evidence, having in my possession lists of all the entries.' 'The total import into all the British Colonies from 1680 to 1786 may be put down at 2,130,000.' In 1771, which he considers the most flourishing period of the trade, there sailed from England to the coast of Africa, one hundred and ninety-two ships, provided for the importation of 47,146 negroes. 'And now,' he observes, (1793) 'the whole number annually exported from Africa by all the European powers, is 74,000, of which 38,000 are imported by the British."—Godwin, page 187.

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*Speech in the House of Representatives of the U. S., June 30, 1848.

†It has not ceased. It rages with violence still, as will be shown in another chapter.

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CHAPTER III.

SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE IN THE BRITISH COLONIES
IN NORTH AMERICA, NOW THE UNITED STATES.

Slavers from New England—Slavery in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island,
Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas—Condition of the Slaves—Testimony of
Wesley and Whiteneld—Inquiry into the legal foundation of Colonial Slavery—
Complaints of the Colonies against the King of Great Britain, for favoring the
traffic—Paradoxes—Absence of English Statutes legalizing Slavery—
Common Law—Lord Mansfield—Colonial Charters—Slavery introduced in
absence of Colonial enactments—Date and circumstances of introduction of
Slavery into Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia—Prohibition of Slavery
in Georgia, (Gen.Ogelthorpe)—Dates of early enactments concerning
Slavery in Virginia, N. Carolina, S. Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland—
Loose and vague character of these enactments.

SOON after the settlement of the British North American Colonies, Africans were imported into them, and sold and held as slaves. Of the extent of these importations we have met with no authenticated statistics. The whole number of slaves in these states, by the first census under the present Constitution, 1790, was 697,697.

The colonies now known as the Southern or slave states, on the Atlantic coast, received the principal share of these importations. The middle and eastern colonies received comparatively few, and these chiefly for domestic servants in the cities, and in the families of professional gentlemen in the interior. As the soil was not adapted to slave culture, and was owned in small farms by a hardy race of agriculturists, inured to habits of labor, the process of cultivation by slaves never obtained, particularly in New England, except to a very limited extent. In New York, first settled by the Dutch, in New Jersey, aud perhaps in some portions of Pennsyl-

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vania, the labor of slaves was introduced to a greater extent than further east. But in the importation of slaves for the southern colonies, the merchants of the New England seaports competed with those of New York and the South. They appear, indeed, to have outstripped them, and to have almost monopolized, at one time, the immense profits of that lucrative but detestable trade. Boston, Salem, and Newburyport, in Massachusetts, and Newport and Bristol in Rhode Island, amassed, in the persons of a few of their citizens, vast sums of this rapidly acquired and ill gotten wealth, which, in many instances, quite as rapidly and very remarkably, took to itself wings and flew away. In some cases, however, it remained, and formed the basis of the capital of some prominent mercantile houses, almost or quite down to the present time.

Citizens, honored with high posts of office in the State and Federal Governments, have owed their rank in society, and their political elevation, to the wealth thus acquired, sometimes thus acquired by themselves, since the colonies became states, and while the traffic was tolerated as it was, till the year 1808. Among these was a late Senator in Congress, from Rhode Island, James D'Wolf, who, at the time, was reputed to be the owner of a large slave plantation in Cuba. Such incidents may convey some idea of the influence of the traffic in New England, even to the present day. The former seats of the traffic are still the centers of influences hostile to the agitation of the slave question.

The servitude of domestic slaves, in families, is known to be less intolerable than that of slaves on plantations. From this consideration, and from the limited extent of slavery in the northern and eastern colonies, it may be inferred that the slavery of that region was of a comparatively mild type. And yet we find sufficient evidence of its affinity, in many respects, with the present American slave system. Not even in Connecticut was there any recognition of the legality and validity of a slave's marriage.*   A master's inadvertent con-
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* According to Judge Reeve, however, as quoted, by Stroud, the murder of a slave was held in Connecticut, to be the same as the murder of a freeman. The

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sent to the marriage of his female slave to a free colored man, was held to be equivalent to her manumission, because
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master could be sued by the slave for immoderate chastisement; the slave could hold property, in the character of a devisee or legatee, and the master could not take away such property, or might be sued for it on behalf of the slave by his next friend.—Reeve's Law of Baron and Femme, &c., 340-1; Stroud, p. 24.

In Massachusetts, too, "if the master was guilty of a cruel or unreasonable castigation of the slave, he was liable to be punished for a breach of the peace, and, I believe, the slave was allowed to demand sureties of the peace against a violent and barbarous master."—Opinion of Chief Justice Parsons, case of Winchendon vs. Hatfield, Mass Rep., 127-8, cited by Stroud, p. 23.

In Massachusetts colony, in 1641, the following law was enacted: "It is ordered by this court and the authority thereof, that there shall never be any bond slavery, villeinage, or captivity among us, unless it be lawful captives taken in just war, (such) as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us, and such shall have the liberties and Christian usage which the law of GOD established in Israel concerning such persons doth morally require."—See General Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts Bay, chap. 12, sect. 2; Stroud, p. 23.

Whether this act prohibited, or whether it authorized such slavery as afterwards actually existed in the colony of Massachusetts, might not be very difficult to determine. It certainly prohibited such slavery as now exists at the South.

There is little doubt that slavery was introduced into Boston, by one Maverick, previous to its settlement by George Winthrop and others, in 1630. There is no evidence that Maverick was a Puritan. The Boston colonists, generally, were not Puritans, and ought never to have been confounded with them by historians. The Puritans, with all their defects and errors on this and other subjects, "made a wide distinction between those who were stolen and seized by the violence of the slavers, and those who" (as they supposed) "had been made captives in a lawful war, or were reduced to servitude for their crimes by a judicial sentence."

This sentiment became current in the New England colonies. "An express law was made, prohibiting the buying and selling of the former, while the latter were to have the same privileges as were allowed by the laws of Moses." "In November, 1646, the General Court of Massachusetts passed a law against man-stealing, making it a capital crime. They also ordered that two Africans, forcibly brought into the colony, should be sent home at the public expense.—[Felt's Annals of Salem.] The other colonies soon passed a law similar to that of Massachusetts. The Connecticut Code, prepared in 1650, has the following section: 'If any man stealeth man or mankinde, he shall be put to death.' The New Haven Code, printed in London in 1656, contains a similar article: 'If any person steale a man, or mankind, that person shall surely be put to death.' The Plymouth laws probably made manstealing a capital offence."—[See first Annual Report of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society, penned by the late John Farmer, Esq., and published in the the "Monthly Emancipator'' for August, 1835.]

In all this we see the stealthy and deceptive introduction of chattel slavery. The early laws did not authorize, but prohibited such slavery as was actually introduced! The sin, the shame, and the curse would have been excluded, had it been clearly understood that slavery is malum in se.

The action of the colony of RHODE ISLAND and PROVIDENCE Plantations, eleven years later than that in Massachusetts, was more direct and explicit. The following

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a slave could not be married, and because a husband could claim the assistance of his wife.

A still more discreditable illustration was previously furnished by a rural pastor in the same colony, the owner of a male and female slave. Having admitted them both to the communion of his church (Congregational) as members, and having himself officially pronounced them husband and wife, he afterwards separated them forever by the sale of the wife to a distant purchaser, in despite of the entreaties of both wife and husband. And no court of law, no church, no ecclesiastical body interposed, or even censured.

In Massachusetts, another Congregational pastor, of high reputation, is said to have reared up a female slave in his family in a state of almost absolute heathenism, and never attempted to teach her the alphabet.

When it is remembered that a large portion of the ministers of religion in New England were among the slave
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document is said to be the first act of any government designed to prevent enslaving the negroes. It is copied from the records of the colony:

" At a general court held at Warwick, the 13th of May, 1652.
"Whereas, there ia a common course practised among Englishmen, to buy negroes to that end they may have them for service or slaves forever; for the preventing of such practices among us, let it be ordered., That no black mankind or white being shall be forced, by covenant, bond, or otherwise, to serve any man or his assignees longer than ten years, or until they come to be twenty-four years of ago, if they be taken in under fourteen, from the time of their coming within the liberties of this colony; at the end or term of ten years to set them free, as the manner is with the English servants. And that man that will not let them go free or shall sell them away elsewhere, to that end they may be enslaved to othere for a longer time, he or they shall forfeit to the colony forty pounds."

To the credit of the members that enacted this law, we subjoin their names from the record:
"The general officers were, John Smith, president; Thomas OIney, general assistant, from Providence; Samuel Gorton, from Warwick; John Green, general recorder; Randal Holden, treasurer; Hugh Bewett, general sergeant.

"The commissioners were from Providence—Robert Williams, Gregory Dexter, Richard Waterman, Thomas Harris, William Wickenden, and Hugh Bewett; from Warwick—Samuel Gorton, John "Wickes, John Smith, Randal Holden, John Green, jr., and Ezekiel Holliman."

The prevalence of slavery and the briskness of the slave trade in Rhode Island, long after the enactment of this law (which does not appear to have ever been repealed), furnishes another illustration of the fact that slavery grew up in the colonies in violation of law.

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holding class of the community during the colonial state of the country, and many of them still later, that this was within fifty or sixty years of the beginning of the anti-slavery agitation in 1832, and that many of the present ministers of New England are the sons and most of them the successors, of slave holding ministers, it cannot reasonably be doubted that that untoward circumstance has had a bearing upon the position of the present generation of ministers in New England, in respect to the agitation of the subject, and especially in respect to the doctrine of the inherent sinfulness of slave holding.

A similar remark might be made, with perhaps greater force, in respect to New Jersey, and, to a greater or less extent, in respect to a great part of the middle states. The beginning of the present agitation, in fact, found slavery existing, to a considerable extent, in New Jersey, and the influence of that fact has been seen and felt, wherever the slave question has been discussed, in this country.*

Slavery in the now Atlantic slave states received, substantially, its present complexion during the colonial period. The most important enactments on the subject bear date previous to the Declaration of Independence.

John Wesley [1703-1791], who visited this country during this period, characterizes "American slavery" as "the vilest that ever saw the sun."

Ed. Note: See also
  • John Wesley, Thoughts Upon Slavery, 3rd ed (London: R. Hawkes, 1774)
  • Prof. Warren Thomas Smith, John Wesley and Slavery (Nashville: Abingdon
    Press, 1986) (details Wesley's "systematic investigation of and
    condemnation of the slave trade . . . to end one form of human
    suffering"; reprints Wesley's book at pp 121-148).

    • George Whitefield, who travelled and preached extensively in the colonies, has drawn a vivid picture of the treatment of slaves at that period. This testimony, it should be remembered, is that of a devout man, whose type of piety is not exposed to the suspicion of tending to magnify, unduly, (as some are supposed to do) the physical privations and sufferings of slaves. Nor was he misled into any exaggeration by having imbibed the sentiment of the inherent and necessary criminality of slaveholding. Such a testimony is too important
    ____________
    *The Biblical defences of slaveholding, sent forth from the seat of the Theological Seminary at Princeton, took the lead of any thing of that description originating farther South.

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    to be omitted in this place. In a "Letter to the inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina," in 1739, he writes as follows:

    "As I lately passed through your provinces on my way hither, I was sensibly touched with a fellow-feeling for the miseries of the poor negroes. Whether it be lawful for Christians to buy slaves, and thereby encourage the nations from whom they are bought to be at perpetual war with each other, I shall not take upon me to determine.

    "Sure I am it is sinful, when they have bought them, to use them as bad as though they were brutes, nay worse; and whatever particular exceptions there may be (as I would charitably hope there are some), I fear the generality of you, who own negroes, are liable to such a charge; for your slaves, I believe, work as hard, if not harder, than the horses whereon you ride.

    "These, after they have done their work, are fed, and taken proper care of; but many negroes, when wearied with labor in your plantations, have been obliged to grind their corn, after their return home. Your dogs are caressed and fondled at your table, but your slaves, who are frequently styled dogs or beasts, have not an equal privilege. They are scarce permitted to pick up the crumbs which fall from their masters table.

    "Not to mention what numbers have been given up to the inhuman usage of task-masters, who, by their unrelenting scourges, have plowed their backs, and made long furrows, and, at length, brought them even unto death.

    "When passing along, I have viewed your plantations cleared and cultivated, many spacious houses built, and the owners of them faring sumptuously every day, my blood has frequently almost run cold within me, to consider how many of your slaves had neither convenient food to eat, nor proper raiment to put on, notwithstanding most of the comforts you enjoy were solely owing to their indefatigable labors."

    In tracing the origin, progress, and history of American slavery, now claiming the high sanction and sacred guaranties of our Constitution and laws, and wielding both state and national governments for its support, it is important to note down with distinctness and precision all those facts of the history that may servo to throw any light upon the rise and growth of those high claims, and the methods that have been employed to swell them into their present magnitude, to give them their present hold upon the public mind, and upon the politics, the legislation, and the jurisprudence of the country.

    Equally interesting will it be to trace, if we can, the process by which the murderous and piratical depredations of John

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    Hawkins, upon the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, scarcely three centuries ago, have been made to give not only legal validity, but biblical authority and sanction to the imbruting of three millions of native-born Americans, of all hues, the descendants of all the nations of Europe, as well as of the African tribes.

    We pause, therefore, to inquire on what authority, divine or human, the North American colonies of Great Britain were inundated with a population of slaves? Was it the precedent of Gonzalez, the alleged recommendation of Las Casas, the importunate rapacity of Chievres, the permission of Ferdinand, the patent of Charles V., that gave legality to these proceedings? Was it the guarded and hesitant assent of Queen Elizabeth? Was it the treachery and perjury of Hawkins? Was it the ambiguity of the Act of Parliament "for extending and improving the trade to Africa," but forbidding "any violence to the natives," and imposing a petty fine upon any commander who, "by fraud, force, or violence, or any other indirect practice whatsoever," should "take on board or carry away from the coast of Africa, any Negro, or native of said country?"

    And what was done by the colonial authorities to authorize the traffic?
    "The New England colonies, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, presented to the throne the most humble and suppliant petitions, praying for the abolition of the trade. The colonial legislatures passed laws against it. But their petitions were spurned from the throne. Their laws were vetoed by their Governors."-Hon. Horace Mann. Speech in Congress, June 30, 1848.

    In the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, by Mr. Jefferson, this charge against the King of Great Britain is thus stated:
    "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep a market where men

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    should be bought and sold, he has at length prostituted his negative for suppressing any legislative attempt to prohibit and restrain this execrable commerce."

    This paragraph was objected to by the delegation from Georgia, and it was accordingly expunged from the document.

    A bundle of incongruities here present themselves, attesting the monstrous and anomalous character of the usages in question. The British Government, that had never dared, in the face of British Common Law, to attempt legalizing, directly and unequivocally, the slave traffic, interposed, it would seem, to prevent the colonies from suppressing it. The colonies that, (as will be shown,) had transcended and even outraged their constitutional charters by their iniquitous slave code, are found petitioning and attempting to legislate against the slave trade! Slave-holding republicans stigmatizing a monarch as a tyrant because he had permitted them to be supplied with the subjects of their own tyranny! A revolutionary Congress compelled or consenting to strike out the most weighty item in the list of offences that characterized their repudiated king as a tyrant!

    Whatever solution may be made of such paradoxes, or whatever may be inferred from them, they furnish a slippery and intricate labyrinth for slave-holders in search of their sacred and vested rights, the legal sanctions and the constitutional guaranties of their peculiar immunities, the very foundations of which were laid in piracy and crime.

    Thus much in respect to the colonial slave trade, the foundation of colonial slavery. We inquire next respecting such facts of history, whatever they may be, as shall afford information concerning the authority, either divine or human, by which the colonists held slaves, and the colonial legislatures, (that attempted the suppression of the slave trade as criminal,) enacted their slave laws.

    We are entering, here, upon no process of argument. We are only recording indisputable facts, without which our historical sketches would be unfaithful and incomplete. We

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    know of nothing so sacred in the claims of slavery as could warrant the suppression, of important historical facts.

    One of those facts is, that there were no English statute laws, prior to the American Revolution, authorizing the holding of slaves, either in England or in the American colonies. None such, at least that we know of, have ever been alleged to exist.

    Another fact is, that the common law of England was incompatible with slavery, and neither recognized nor permitted its existence.

    Another fact is, that in the year 1772, [in Somerset v Stewart] the Court of King's Bench, Lord Mansfield presiding, affirmed, in respect to England, the legal facts above stated, and decided that there neither then was, nor ever had been, any legal slavery in England.

    Another fact is, that the colonial charters, authorizing the colonial Legislatures to enact laws, gave no license to slavery, and contained the general proviso, that the laws of the colonies should "not be repugnant or contrary, but as nearly as circumstances would allow, conformable to the laws, statutes, and rights of our kingdom of England."*

    Another fact is, that when slavery was first introduced into the Anglo-American colonies, and for some time afterwards, there were no colonial enactments that authorized the holding of slaves, or defined the relation and condition of slavery. The practice of slave-holding grew up and was tolerated without law, till at length it acquired power to control legislation and wield it in favor of slavery.

    Another fact is, that when enactments were passed upon the subject, they assumed the existence of slavery, without so defining who were or might be slaves, as to enable any slave-master at the present day to prove that his slaves are held in virtue of any of the colonial enactments.

    Another fact is, that the authority of the colonial "charters,
    ____________
    *The charters of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, as well as of Pennsylvania and the New England colonies, were essentially alike in this particular.—Spooner, p. 24.

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    during their continuance, and the general authority of the common law, prior to the Revolution, have been recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States."*

    These important historical facts should be borne in mind, pondered, and used, when there is occasion for them, by all who wish to oppose slavery, or to understand the relation of slave-holding to the laws and institutions of the country.

    The landing of the founders of New England, at Plymouth, was in 1620. The first settlement in Virginia, at Jamestown, was in 1607. The charter to Lord Baltimore, of Maryland, was granted in 1632. The charter to William Penn, of Pennsylvania, in 1681. North Carolina began to be settled about 1650. South Carolina, about 1670, and Georgia in 1733.

    Virginia was the first of the colonies that introduced slavery. Such an event was a natural consequence of the character and position of the first inhabitants.
    "Of the one hundred and five persons on the list of emigrants destined to remain, there were no men with families,—there were but twelve laborers, and very few mechanics. The rest were composed of gentlemen of fortune, and of persons of no occupation,—mostly of idle and dissolute habits—who had been tempted to join the expedition through curiosity or the hope of gain; a company but poorly calculated to plant an agricultural State in a wilderness."—[Marcius] Willson's Am. Hist. [(NY: Ivison, Phinney, Blakeman & Co, 1846)], p. 162.

    New emigrants arrived in 1609, "most of whom were profligate and disorderly persons, who had been sent off to escape a worse destiny at home.''—Ib. p. 166.

    "In the month of August, 1620, a Dutch man-of-war entered James River and landed twenty negroes for sale. This was the commencement of negro slavery in the colonies."—Ib. p. 169.

    At this time "there were very few women in the colony"—"Ninety women of reputable character" were soon after sent over, and the colonists purchased them fur wives, "the price of a wife rising from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco."—Ib. p. 170.

    Though these were not held as slaves, yet the state of society indicated by these historical incidents, illustrate the moral and social position of the colonists, at the time they com-
    ____________
    *[Town of Pawlet v Daniel Clark, et al], 9 Cranch's U. S. Reports, 332-3 [13 US 292, 332-333; 3 L Ed 735, 749-750 (10 March 1815)], as quoted in "The Unconstitutionality of Slavery," by Lysander Spooner, pp. 25-6.

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    menced the practice of slave-holding. And, so far as law was concerned, there was no more legal authority or sanction, at that time, in Virginia, for the holding of negroes in slavery, than there was for making slaves of the white women they purchased. And the incident of purchasing wives shows that the mere act of purchasing human beings (of which mention is made in the Scriptures,) does not, of necessity, involve the ideas of chattelhood, or of forced servitude: no, not even in Virginia!*
          About the year 1671, Sir John Yeamans was appointed governor of South Carolina. "From Barbadoes he brought a number of African slaves, and South Carolina was, from the first, essentially, a planting State, with slave labor."— Willson's Am. Hist. p. 256.

    The first settlement of Georgia was commenced under auspices decidedly hostile to slavery. Gen. James Oglethorpe, a member of the British Parliament, "conceived the idea of opening for the poor of his own country, and for the persecuted protestants of all nations, an asylum in America." Having obtained a grant from the king, he landed at Savannah with 120 emigrants, and commenced his settlement in 1733. The Trustees strictly prohibited slavery, and "de-
    ____________
    *Another fact, illustrative of the social and moral influences under which slavery grew up and. entrenched itself in Virginia, deserves notice.

    The following were the views of Sir William Berkeley, a royal Governor of Virginia, on the subject of popular education. In a letter descriptive of the state of that province, some years after the Restoration, he says:

    "I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have, these hundred years; for learning has brought heresy and disobedience and sects into the world, and printing divulges them, and commits libels against the government. God keep us from both !"

    This must have been since the year 1660, the era of the "Restoration" of Charles II., or nearly half a century after the lawless introduction of slavery into the colony. And it is among the archives of this dark period of Virginian brutality, sensualism, ignorance, lawlessness, despotism, servility, and semi-barbarism—in a community without wives, or with wives purchased like negroes with tobacco, without printing presses or free schools for more than half a century, and no prospect of them in future—here it is that our learned civilians and erudite theologians, in gowns and spectacles, are reverently searching for the credentials of the "peculiar institution," with its sacred legal rights and Bible guaranties! Worthy successors of Sir William Berkeley! Accomplished expounders of his law, and of his gospel!—"God keep us from both!"

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    clared it to be not only immoral, but contrary to the laws of England."—Willson's Am. Hist., p. 262.
          Unhappily—"Most of those who first came over were unaccustomed to habits of labor." (Ib. 262.) "The Colony did not prosper," and some of the colonists began to "complain that they were prohibited the use of slave-labor.

          "The regulations of the trustees began to be evaded, and the laws against slavery were not rigidly enforced. At first, slaves from South Carolina were hired for short periods; then, for a hundred years, or during life, and a sum equal to the value of the negro paid in advance; and finally, slavers for Africa sailed directly from Savannah; and Georgia, like Carolina, became a planting State, with slave-labor."—Willson's Am. Hist. p. 265.

          "In 1752, the trustees of Georgia, wearied with complaints against the system of government which they had established, and finding that the Colony languished under their care, resigned their charter to the king," &c.—Ib. p. 266.

    The historical evidence is here complete, that slavery and the slave trade were introduced into Georgia, not only without the sanction of either British or Colonial law, but in manifest and flagrant violation of both.

    Gen. Oglethorpe, defeated in his laudable efforts, returned to England, in 1743. He afterwards became the friend and co-adjutor of Granville Sharp [1735-1813], and wrote against slavery, and the impressment of seamen. Under date of Cranham, Hall, 13th October, 1776, he wrote to Mr. Sharp the following particulars respecting his former connection with the colony of Georgia:
          "My friends and I settled the Colony of Georgia, and by charter were established trustees, to make laws, &c. We determined not to suffer slavery there. But the slave merchants and their adherents occasioned us not only much trouble, but at last got the then government to favor them. We would not suffer slavery, (which is against the Gospel, as well as the fundamental law of England) to be authorized under our authority; we refused, as trustees, to make a law permitting such a horrid crime. The government, finding the trustees resolved firmly not to concur with what they believed unjust, took away the charter by which no law could be passed without our consent."—Stuart's Memoir of Sharp, p. 25.

    Ed. Note: Full Citation: Stuart, Charles [1781-1865], A Memoir of Granville Sharp to Which is Added Sharp's "Law of Passive Obedience," and an Extract from His "Law of Retribution" (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836).

    The particulars which follow demand careful attention.

    In Virginia, "slavery was introduced in 1620, but no act

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    was passed even purporting to tell who might be slaves, until 1670"—and this act was afterwards found so defective in the description, as to need a new act for the purpose in 1748, one hundred and twenty-eight years after slavery had been introduced.—Spooner's Unconstitutionally of Slavery, pp. 38-9.
          "In North Carolina, no general law at all was passed, prior to the revolution, declaring who might be slaves." (See Iredell's Statutes, revised by Martin).—Spooner, p. 40.

          "In South Carolina the only statutes, prior to the revolution, that attempted to designate the slaves, was passed [ex post facto/bill-of-attainder style] in 1740—after slavery had a long time" (sixty-nine years) "existed." And even this statute, in reality defined nothing, for the whole purport of it was to declare that all negroes, Indians, mulattoes, and mestizoes, except those who were then free, should be slaves."—Spooner, p. 40.

    But no previous law had told who were then legally slaves, nor who were legally free!

    Ed. Note: Examples of court precedents overturning laws pursuant to the "void for vagueness doctrine" include: Kolender v Lawson, 461 US 352, 357 (1983); Papachristou v City of Jackson, 405 US 156; 92 S Ct 839; 31 L Ed 2d 110 (1972); Gooding v Wilson, 405 US 518; 92 S Ct 1103; 31 L Ed 2d 408 (1972); and Grayned v City of Rockford, 408 US 104, 108-109; 92 S Ct 2294; 33 L Ed 2d 222 (1972).
          "The same law, in nearly the same words, was passed in Georgia, in 1770," [ex post facto/bill-of-attainder style] more than a quarter of a century after the introduction of slavery, and after the commencement and brisk prosecution of the African slave trade."—Vide Spooner, pp. 40, 41—Willson's History, &c.

    The "earliest law" of Maryland, noticed by Judge Stroud, defining who might be held as slaves, was enacted in 1663, thirty-one years after the settlement of the colony. The language of the [Maryland] statute [unconstitutionally] assumes the previous fact of slaveholding, and alludes also to a still more remarkable fact.
          "Divers free-born English women, forgetful of their free condition, and to the disgrace of our nation, do intermarry with negro slaves; by which, also, divers suits may arise, touching the issue of such women, and great damage doth befall the master of such negroes," &c.

    To deter from such matches, the statute enacts as follows:
          "Whatsoever free-born woman shall intermarry with any slave, shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband, and that all the issue of such free born women, so married, shall be slaves, as their fathers were."—Stroud's Sketch of the Slave Laws, p 10.

    Ed. Note: Full Citation: George M. Stroud (1795-1875), A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several States of the United States of America (Philadelphia: Kimber and Sharpless, 1827)

    This last provision was a departure from the prevalent maxim of the slave code, that the child follows the condition

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    of the mother. The temporary end, of the statute of 1663 having been answered, it was repealed in 1681, with a clause saving the rights under the act of 1663, so that the masters might continue to hold in slavery the descendants, if any, of the "free born English women" who might have married slaves, during the operation of the act of 1663, which was repealed "to prevent persons from purchasing white women as servants, and marrying them to their slaves, for the purpose of making slaves of them and their offspring."
    Yet ''the doctrine of 'partus sequitur' obtained in the province" (i.e. the children of slaves followed the condition of the father) "till the year 1699 or 1700, when a general revision of the laws took place, and the acts in which this doctrine was recognized were, with many others, repealed. An interval of about fifteen years appears to have elapsed, without any written law on this subject; but in 1715 (chap. 44, sec. 22) the following one was passed: "All negroes and slaves already imported, or hereafter to be imported into this province, and all children now born or hereafter to be born of such negroes and slaves, shall be slaves during their natural lives." Thus, (continues Stroud) was the maxim of the civil law, 'partus sequitur ventrem' introduced, and the condition of the mother, from that day to the present time, has continued to determine the fate of the child."—Stroud's Sketch, pp. 10, 11.

    Had the opposite maxim prevailed—had the child followed the condition of the father, there would have been comparatively few slaves in. Maryland, or in any of the southern states, at the present time.

    The dates of colonial enactments on the subject of slavery are important historical items, as already hinted, because they are necessary in order to establish the fact of legalized colonial slavery, and to fix the period of its commencement, in a given colony, (if any such legislation under the Colonial Charters already alluded to, can be supposed to have been valid.) And we have already noticed that the practice of slaveholding obtained in the principal slave colonies, for long periods, and, in one instance, up to the period of the American Revolution, without any action of the colonial authorities, attempting to tell who were slaves; viz. in Virginia, 50 years; in South Carolina, 69 years; in Georgia, more than 25 years;

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    in Maryland, (from its first settlement), 31 years, and in North Carolina there was no colonial definition at all!

    But the dates and the various provisions of the several colonial enactments, admitting them to have been constitutionally valid, become important historical facts in another point of view, not only as bearing upon the inquiry, Who were, legally, slaves, but also on the question, What was the slavery under which they were thus legally held, and When was it, that that slavery, as thus legislatively defined, became legalized?

    For, if it were clearly ascertained and established, that "SLAVERY," in general terms, had been legalised by valid and constitutional enactments of the colonial legislatures, in the first commencement of their authority, the question would still remain whether the slavery thus legalized was identical with the slavery defined many years afterwards, or whether it was altogether another thing though known by the same name.

    The South Carolina enactment of 1740, and the Georgia enactment of 1770, would tell us, distinctly enough, what was the slavery of those colonies at those periods: but they could not tell us whether the slavery legalized in those colonies (if, indeed, there were any) sixty-nine, and twenty-five years previous, was precisely the same thing. It might have been only the bond-service of Massachusetts, in 1641; defined by "the law of God established in Israel," and which, if followed out, would have secured "a jubilee throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof," long ago. In Georgia, as we have seen, the first slavery was the hiring of slaves for short periods, then for one hundred years—then buying, then importing them, and thus the whole system was changed.

    When we are told of the inherited, imprescriptible, time-sanctioned, and guarantied rights of the present American slaveholder, it becomes a matter of the deepest interest to learn, if we may, the origin, the date, the tenure, and the description of those rights, as originally defined. Between the right to import Africans into the colonies, with "their own free consent" in the times of Queen Elizabeth [1558-1603] or James I. [1603-1625],

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    and the right to hold the descendants of those Africans, and of all the nations of Europe, as chattels personal, in the present American States, there seems a perceptible chasm, and before the latter can be inferred from the former some attention inust needs be paid to the various arches of the bridge by which this chasm is conceived to have been spanned. A few missing links and bolts might endanger the safety of the transition. Into the requisite examination we cannot now enter. We only indicate the field of inquiry, and note down a few obvious facts.

    In consulting Stroud's Sketch of the Slave Laws, one is struck with the fact that most, if not all of the colonial enactments cited, bear date many years after the practice of slave-holding is known to have been introduced, and after the slaves must have become numerous. From this fact, and from the implications or statements in the preambles to those acts, it appears evident that the usages of slavery grew up first, and that the colonial legislation came in, to sanction and shelter them, afterwards, indicating the fact of a previously existing slavery without statute, and consequently ILLEGAL, since no one maintains that it could have originated in natural right, or in the principles of common law.

    Thus, in Virginia, where slavery, in fact, commenced in 1620, the first slave law cited by Stroud or by Spooner, is that of 1670, and most of the acts defining slavery are, perhaps, since 1700.

    Ed. Note: See also Virginia writer S. G. Tucker, Disser-tation on Slavery (1796), pp 47-66, especially p 64.

    —Of the slave laws of Maryland, (which was settled in 1632,) the first cited is that of 1663, and the remainder are from 1715 to 1751.—Of those of South Carolina, where slavery commenced in 1671, the first cited bears date 1695,—the remainder from 1711 to 1740, at which latter date the "peculiar institution" evidently received, (so far as the statute is concerned,) its full proportions and shape.

    —Of those of North Carolina, settled about 1650, the first cited is that of 1729, and the remainder bear date from 1741 to 1743, about which time the definition of slavery appears to have been settled, upon very nearly its present basis, in that Colony.

    —Of those of Georgia, where slavery commenced prior to 1743,

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    the first and only distinct reference is to the law of 1770, by which, very manifestly, the cardinal features of the slave law, in that Colony, were determined.—These eras in colonial slave legislation are too distinctly marked to be mistaken or forgotten by the student of American slave law; though, doubtless, there must have been some earlier acts, not noticed by Judge Stroud, and some of his references are to Digests and Manuals, In which the dates of legislation are not given.

    Slave legislation, since the American Revolution, has made some important strides. "Virginian slavery reposes on her revised code of 1819, and is what that makes it, without dreaming of any hazard to the venerable antiquity of her claims.

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    CHAPTER IV.

    EARLY TESTIMONIES AGAINST SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE.

    THE Dominicans in Spanish America, as related by Clarkson, "considered slavery as utterly repugnant to the principles of the gospel, and recommended the abolition of it." Being opposed by the Franciscans, "a controversy on the subject between them was carried to Pope Leo X. for his decision."

    Pope Leo X. [1513-1521] declared that "not only the Christian religion, but that nature herself cried out against slavery."

    Charles V. (as before stated) bore testimony against slavery, by abolishing it in his dominions, in the year 1543.

    Between A. D. 1670 and 1680, Godwyn, a clergyman of the Established Church, and Richard Baxter, the celebrated Non-conformist, bore strong testimony against these oppressions, the former, describing, with nervous eloquence, the brutality of slavery, as he had witnessed it in Barbadoes;—the latter protesting against the traffic, and denouncing those engaged in it as pirates and robbers. These writers were followed by Southern, Hutcheson, Foster, Atkins, Wallts, and others. [Vide Clarkson.]

    Bishop Warburton, in 1676, preached a sermon, denouncing, in strong language, those who "talk, as of herds of cattle, of property in rational creatures!"

    Dr. Porteus, Bishop of London, said that the slave trade was contrary to the religion we professed. He vindicated the Bible against the assertion that it sanctioned slavery—"Nay," (said he) "it classed men-stealers or slave traders among the murderers of fathers and mothers, and the most profane criminals on earth." [I Tim. 1:9-10].

    [Rev.] John Wesley [1703-1791], the founder of Methodism, who had witnessed the workings of slavery in our North American colonies and in the West Indies, declared "American slavery" to be "the vilest that ever saw the sun," and constituting "the sum [combination] of all villanies."

    [Ed. Note: Examples of slaver "villainies" include but are not limited to
    (1) abuses,
    (2) adultery,
    (3) atrocities,
    (4) axe-murder,
    (5) Bible-refusing,
    (6) branding,
    (7) burning-alive,
    (8) concubines for clergy,
    (9) commandment-breaking,
    (10) degradation,
    (11) doctrine-changing to aid slavery,
    (12) extortion,
    (13) eye-gouging,
    (14) genocide,
    (15) infinite train of iniquities,
    (16) kidnaping white women,
    (17) making infidels,
    (18) mass abuses,
    (19) parent of all sin,
    (20) racism,
    (21) racking and salting,
    (22) rape,
    (23) reign of terror,
    (24) robbery,
    (25) Seminole War,
    (26) skinning,
    (27) three-fourths of Christians "of the devil,"
    (28) torture,
    (29) torture-murder,
    (30) violence,
    (31) war of aggression against Mexico,
    (32) whip-to-death,
    (33) worse than the ancients,
    (34) worst in history,
    (35) worst sin.
    "Bible-Belt" slavery: truly a “peculiar institution”—if too horrible to read about— too horrible to have happened.
    It was what would later be called the Nazi untermenschen view, that some people are untermenschen, subhuman, have no rights worth respecting. The untermenschen view was upheld by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case under smoker Roger Taney.
    Torturing continued in the South after the Civil War. See examples such as
  • details on the 1963 murders of three civil rights workers, and torture of one, by Reporter Jerry Mitchell, "Experts: Autopsy reveals beating Chaney wasn't just shot to death, pathologists insist" (Clarion-Ledger, 4 June 2000)
  • details on lynching-related tortures by Prof. David Pilgrim, "The Brute Caricature" (Ferris State Univ, Nov 2000).
  • A Linden, Texas, beating and torture case, cited by Andre Coe, "'Good ole boys': Weapons of Black destruction" (2003)
    This is the "Bible-Belt" in action, the natural consequence of pro-slavery preaching and teaching. Such clergy are of the devil.
    For further analysis, see p 131, infra.

    • Slave dealers, he [Wesley] denominated "man stealers; the worst of thieves, in comparison of whom high-way robbers [car-jackers]

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    and house-breakers are comparatively innocent." He adds, "And men-buyers are exactly on a level with men stealers." [Excerpt at Pillsbury; other excerpt at Fee].

    Jonathan Edwards, the younger, said: "To hold a man in a state of slavery, is to be, every day, guilty of robbing him of his liberty, or of man stealing "

    Bishop [Samuel] Horsley [1733-1806] said: "Slavery is injustice, which no consideration of policy can extenuate." [Ed. Note: More by Dr. Horsley.]

    Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-1784] said: "No man is by nature the property of another. The rights of nature must be some way forfeited before they can justly be taken away."

    Edmund Burke [1729-1797] said: "Slavery is a state so improper, so degrading, and so ruinous to the feelings and cipacities of human nature, that it ought not to be suffered to exist."

    Archdeacon Paley said: "Slavery is a dominion and system of laws, the most merciless and tyrannical that were ever tolerated upon the face of the earth."

    [Charles de Secondat, baron de] Montesquieu [1689-1755] ironically said: "If we allow negroes to be men, it will begin to be believed that we, ourselves, are not Christians!"

    [Prof. William] Blackstone [1723-1780], the jurist, sums up an elaborate scrutiny of the subject thus: "If neither captivity nor contract can, by the plain law of nature and reason, reduce the parent to a state of slavery, much less can they reduce the offspring "

    William Pitt [1708-1778] declared it to be "injustice to permit slavery to remain for a single hour."

    Charles James Fox [1749-1806] said: "With regard to a regulation of slavery, my detestation of its existence induces me to know no such thing as a regulation of robbery, and a restriction of murder." "Personal freedom is a right of which he who deprives a fellow creature is criminal in so depriving him, and he who withholds is no less criminal in withholding "

    Bishop Butler said: "Despicable as they" (the negroes) "may appear in our eyes, they are the creatures of God, and of the race of mankind, for whom Christ died, and it is inexcusable to keep them in ignorance of the end for which they were made, and of the means whereby they may become partakers of the general redemption."

    Hannah More [1745-1833] said: "Slavery is vindicated in print (1788), and defended in the House of Peers! Poor human reason' When wilt thou come to years of discretion?"

    Dr. Samuel Hopkins [1721-1803] said: "Slavery is, in every instance, wrong, unrighteous, oppressive, a very great and crying sin, there being nothing of the kind equal to it on the face of the earth."

    The learned [Hugo] Grotius [1583-1645] said "Those are men stealers who abduct, keep, sell or buy slaves or free men. To steal a man is the highest [worst] kind of theft."

    Ed. Note: For more by Grotius (e.g., the "original grant" concept), see
  • Rev. James Rankin, Letters (1823), p 100
  • James Birney, Bulwarks (1840), p 29
  • Rev. Parker Pillsbury, Forlorn Hope (1847), p 8
  • Rev. John Fee, Non-Fellowship (1849), p 6
  • Rev. John Fee, Anti-Slavery Manual (1849), p 116
  • Sen. Charles Sumner, Barbarism (1860), p 132
  • Rev. Parker Pillsbury, Acts (1883), p 365.

    • -28-
    Dr. Benjamin Rush [1746-1813] said: "Domestic slavery is repugnant to the principles of Christianity." "It is rebellion against the authority of a common Father."

    Dr. Primatt said: "It has pleased God to cover some men with white skins and others with black, but as there is neither merit nor demerit incomplexion, the white man, notwithstanding the barbarity of custom and prejudice, can have no right, by virtue of his color, to enslave and tyrannize over the black man."

    Dr. William Robertson [1721-1793] said: "No inequality, no superiority in power, no pretext of consent, can justify this ignominious depression of human nature."

    The Abbé [Henri] Grégoire [1750-1831] said: "The corruption of our times carries towards posterity all the elements of slavery and crime." "There is not a vice, not a species of wickedness, of which Europe is not guilty towards negroes, of which she has not shown them the example."

    The Abbé [Guillaume Thomas François] Raynal [1713-1796] said: "He who supports slavery is the enemy of the human race. He divides it into two societies of legal assassins, the oppressors and the oppressed." "I shall not be afraid to cite to the tribunal of reason and justice those governments which tolerate this cruelty, or which even are not ashamed to make it the basis of their power."

    Dr. Price, of London, said: "If you have a right to make another man a slave, he has a right to make you a slave."

    Joseph Addison [1672-1719] said: "What color of excuse can there be for the contempt with which we treat this part of our species" (the negroes), "that we should not put them upon the common footing of humanity?"—Vide Spectator.

    Dr. Adam Clarke [1762-1832], the learned commentator, said: "How can any nation pretend to fast, or worship God, or dare profess to believe in the existence of such a being, while they carry on what is called the slave trade, and traffic in the souls, blood, and bodies of men? O ye most flagitious of knaves, and worst of hypocrites? Cast off at once the mask of religion, and deepen not your endless perdition by professing the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, while you continue in this traffic.—Comment on Isa., 58:6.

    Macknight, the commentator, in exposition of 1 Tim 1:10, said: "Men stealers are inserted among the daring criminals against whom the law of God directed its awful curses These were persons who kidnapped men to sell them for slaves, and this practice seems inseparable from the other iniquities and oppressions of slavery, nor can a slave dealer easily keep free from this criminality, if indeed the receiver is as bad as the thief "

    Thomas Scott, the commentator, copied the preceding from Macknight, and in his practical observations on Rev. 18:13—"Souls of men"—said: "To number the persons of men with beasts, sheep, and horses, as the stock of a farm, or with bales of goods, as the cargo of a ship, is, no doubt, a most detestable and anti-Christian practice."

    -29-
    Abraham Booth (the Baptist theological writer) said: "I have not a stronger conviction of scarcely anything, than that slave holding (except when the slave has forfeited his liberty by crimes against society) is wicked and inconsistent with Christian character." "To me it is evident, that whoever would purchase an. innocent black man to make him a slave, would with equal readiness purchase a white one for the same purpose, could he do it with equal impunity, and no more disgrace."

    Mr. Booth preached a sermon (1792) entitled "Commerce in the Human Species, and the enslaving of innocent persons, inimical to the laws of Moses, and the Gospel of Christ." The text was from Exodus 21:16. "He that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hands, he shall surely be put to death." [See also Deuteronomy 24:7].

    James Beattie [1735-1803] said: "Slavery is inconsistent with the dearest and most essential rights of man's nature; it is detrimental to virtue and industry; it hardens the heart to those tender sympathies which form the most lovely part of human character; it involves the innocent in hopeless misery, in order to procure wealth and pleasure for the authors of that misery; it seeks to degrade into brutes, beings whom the Lord of Heaven and Earth endowed with rational souls, and created for immortality; in short, it is utterly repugnant to every principle of reason, religion, humanity, and conscience It is impossible for a considerate and unprejudiced mind, to think of slavery without horror."

    George Fox [1624-1691], when in Barbadoes, in 1671, addressed himself thus, to those who attended his religious meetings: "Consider with yourselves, if you were in the same condition as the poor Africans are, who came strangers to you, and were sold to you as slaves; I say, if this should be the condition of you or yours, you would think it a hard measure; yea, and very great bondage and cruelty."

    John Locke [1632-1704] said: "Slavery is so vile, so miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hard to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it."—Essay on Government.

    Thomas Jefferson

    Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826] said: "The whole commerce between master and slave, is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotisms, on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other." "I tremble for my country, when I reflect, that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever."—Notes on Virginia [1787]. [Excerpt]


    John Jay [1745-1829] said: "Till America comes into this measure" (abolition) "her prayers to Heaven will be impious. This is a strong expression, but it is just." "I believe that God governs the world, and I believe it to be a maxim in His, as in our courts, that those who ask for equity ought to do it."—Letter from Spain, 1780. [More].


    Dr. Benjamin Franklin [1706-1790] said: "Slavery is an atrocious debasement of human nature."

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    James Oglethorpe [1696-1785], the founder of Georgia, said: "This cruel custom of a private man's being supported in exercising more power over the man, whom he affirms to have bought as his slave, than the magistrate has over the master, is a solecism in politics."—Stuart's Memoir of Sharp, p 25.

    [Jean Jacques] Rousseau [1712-1778], said: "The terms slavery and right, contradict and exclude each other."

    Buffon said: "It is apparent that the unfortunate negroes are endowed with excellent hearts, and possess the seeds of every human virtue. I cannot write their history without lamenting their miserable condition." "Humanity revolts at those odious oppressions that result from avarice."

    Brissot said: "Slavery, in all its forms, in all its degrees, is a violation of divine law, and a degradation of human nature "

    Sir William Jones said: "I pass with haste, by the coast of Africa, whence my mind turns with indignation at the abominable traffic in the human species, from which a part of our countrymen dare to derive their inauspicious wealth."

    Our limits forbid us to extend, this list of witnesses, into which we have introduced but few of the names most prominently connected, in England and America, with specific enterprises for abolishing the slave trade and slavery. Nor have we quoted the more modern writers on the subject, nor many of the American statesmen during and since the Revolution, (some of them slave-holders,) whose testimony would have been appropriate. In another connection we may refer to some of them.

    Nor have we cited the long catalogue of eminent poets, all of whom, with bcarcely an exception, have deplored and condemned slavery.

    And yet, our chapter of testimonies is sufficient to show that the moral sense, the reason, the sympathy, the humanity, the philosophy, and the professed RELIGION of the civilized world, are against slavery, which is, of course, destined to fall.

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    CHAPTER V.

    ACTION OF RELIGIOUS BODIES AGAINST THE SLAVE TRADE
    AND SLAVERY, COMMENCING BEFORE THE
    AMERICAN REVOLUTION, AND ITS RESULTS.

    George Fox in Barbadoes—William Edmundson, A.D. 1675—Friends in England,
    A.D. 1727—l761—1763—l772—Friends in America—Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia,
    A.D. 1696—Gov. Penn, 1700—Quarterly Meetings of Chester, Haddonfield, &c.
    Yearly Meeting, 1754—1774—1776—Frienda in New England—Rhode Island
    Quarterly Meeting, A.D. 1716—1727—1770—Yearly Meeting of New York,
    1759—Purchase Quarterly Meeting, 1767. Yearly Meeting, 1771—1781—Yearly
    Meeting of Virginia, A.D. 1757—1766—1767—1768—1778—1787—Compensation
    provided for Emancipated Slaves—Stirring Agitations among Friends during
    this Reformation—William Burling, Ralph Sandiford, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman,
    Anthony Benezet—Congregationalists in America—
    Dr. Samuel Hopkins—Church at Newport, 1769.

    FROM the records of early anti-slavery testimony, we turn to those of early anti-slavery action. As those testimonies were evidently founded, for the most part, in the principles of the Christian religion, and were urged on religious considerations, it was natural that the early efforts against slavery and the slave trade should partake of the same character, and be propounded in religious bodies.

    FRIENDS IN ENGLAND.

    George Fox, as already mentioned, remonstrated with the "Friends" in Barbadoes, concerning their treatment of the negroes. This was in 1671. He exhorted them to give their slaves religious instruction, and "bring them to know the Lord Christ." In his journal he says:
    "I desired, also, that they would cause their overseers to deal mildly and gently with their negroes, and not use cruelty towards them, as the manner

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    of some had been; and that, after certain years of servitude, they should make them free."*

    In a public discourse, he said:
    "Let me tell you, it will doubtless be very acceptable to the Lord, if so be that masters of families here, would deal so with their servants, and negroes, and blacks, whom they have bought with their money, as to let them go free, after they have served faithfully a considerable number of years, be it thirty, more or less, and when they go, and are made free, let them not go away empty handed."†

    William Edmundson, a fellow-laborer with Fox, bore a similar testimony. He complained of the herding of the slaves together like brute beasts, without any religious instruction, or a sufficiency of suitable sustenance.—Clarkson, p. 5.

    Both Fox and Edmundson were charged with exciting the slaves to revolt, and the latter was arraigned before the governor, in 1675, on that false allegation.—"Brief Statement," p. 6.

    Ed. Note: Full Citation: Society of Friends' Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, A Brief Statement of the Rise and Progress of the Testimony of the Religious Society of Friends, Against Slavery and the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: J. and W. Kite, 1843).

    Thus early began the false charge of bloody designs, and no peacefulness of principles, no mildness of manner and language, and no moderation of measures—though even faulty in that direction, have ever exempted the earnest friends of emancipation from these charges.
    "I do not find any individual of this Society (i. e. in England) moving in this cause, for some time after the death of George Fox and William Edmundson. The first circumstance of moment which I discover, is a resolution of the whole society, on the subject, at their yearly meeting, held in London, in the year 1727. The resolution was in the following words":—

    "It is the sense of this meeting, that the importing of negroes from their native country and relations, by Friends, is not a commendable or allowed practice, and is therefore censured by this meeting."— Clarkson's History, p. 51.

    From this record it is evident that Friends, in England, at this time, were, to a greater or less extent, implicated in the African slave trade. And it is equally clear from what follows, that this very cautious and gentle admonition had not
    ____________
    *Clarkson's History, p. 50.

    †Brief Statement, &c., by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 1843, page 6.

    -33-
    fully sufficed, in thirty-one years, to purge the Society from the guilt of that traffic. In 1758, the following resolution was adopted:
    "We fervently warn all in profession with us, that they carefully avoid being in any way concerned in reaping the unrighteous profits arising from the iniquitous practice of dealing in negro or other slaves, whereby, in the original purchase, one man selleth another, as he doeth the beasts that perish, without any better pretension to property in him, than that of superior force, in direct violation of the Gospel rule, which teacheth all to do as they would be done by, and to do good to all. We, therefore, can do no less than, with the greatest earnestness, impress it upon Friends, everywhere, that they endeavor to keep their hands clear of the unrighteous gain of oppression."

    Three years afterwards, 1761, the Society took a further step, as appears by the following:
    "This meeting, having reason to apprehend that diverse, under our name, are concerned in the unchristian traffic in negroes, doth recommend it earnestly to the care of Friends, everywhere, to discourage, as much as in them lies, a practice so repugnant to our Christian profession, and to deal with all such as shall persevere in a conduct so reproachful to Christianity; and disown them, if they do not desist therefrom."

    In 1763, this action was repeated, and the cords drawn still tighter, in the following:
    "We renew our exhortation that Friends, everywhere, be especially careful to keep their hands clear of giving encouragement, in any shape, to the slave-trade, being evidently destructive of the natural rights of mankind, who are all ransomed by one Savior, and visited by one divine light, in order to salvation, a traffic calculated to enrich and aggrandize some, upon the misery of others; in its nature, abhorrent to every just and tender sentiment, and contrary to the whole tenor of the Gospel."

    By the minute which was made on this occasion, I apprehend that no one belonging to the Society, could furnish even materials for such voyages."—Clarkson, p. 52.

    It is to be noticed that all this action was directed against the slave trade, or the importing of negroes. Nothing is said directly of slave holding, though slaves were then held in England, whether by Quakers we cannot tell, though Quakers in America held slaves at that time.

    In 1772, the Society in England approved the "salutary

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    endeavors" of Friends in America, to discourage the holding of slaves.

    FRIENDS IN AMERICA.

    The movement among Friends in America began earlier:
    "The Quakers in America, it must be owned, did most of them, originally, as other settlers there, with respect to the purchase of slaves."— Clarkson, p. 57.

    They, however, treated them with peculiar lenity, yet individuals among them soon became uneasy about holding slaves at all.
    In the year 1696, the yearly meeting of Philadelphia advised its members to " be careful not to encourage the bringing in of any more negroes, and that those who have negroes be careful of them, bring them to meetings, have meetings with them in their families, and restrain them from loose and lewd living, as much as in them lies, and from rambling abroad, on First days, or other times."*—"Brief Statement," &c., p 8.

    The quarterly meetings of Chester, Haddonfield, Philadelphia, Bucks, Burlington, and Salem, subordinate to the yearly meeting, took measures from time to time, on the subject. The quarterly meeting of Chester extended into Virginia.—"Brief Statement" &c.

    In the yearly meeting, the subject was kept alive by renewed testimonies from time to time, and advance steps were taken, until, in 1754, the meeting recommended to "advise and deal with such as engage" in the traffic. They also expressed a desire to guard against "promoting the bondage of such an unhappy people." They "observe that their number is, of late, increased among us." They intimate the injustice of living upon their unrequited labor, and beseech those who have received slaves as an inheritance that they so train them
    ____________
    *William Penn, while Governor, in 1700, laid before the meeting his concern on the same subject, recommending religious meetings with the slaves. "His attempts to improve their condition by legal enactments were defeated m the House of Assembly."—Ib., p 9. A law imposing a duty of twenty pounds upon every slave imported, was a few years afterwards enacted, but disannulled by the British Crown.—Ib., p 11.

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    as to prepare them for freedom, if they should hereafter set them at liberty.—Clarkson's History, pp. 58, 59.*

    In 1774 another advance step was taken.
          "By a resolution of that year, all members concerned in importing, selling, purchasing, giving, or transferring negroes or other slaves, or otherwise acting in such a manner as to continue them in slavery beyond the term limited by law or custom (i.e., for white persons), were directed to be excluded from membership, or disowned."—Clarkson's History, p. 60.

          "In the year 1776, the same yearly meeting carried the matter still farther. It was then enacted, That the owners of slaves, who refused to execute proper instruments for giving them their freedom, were to be disowned likewise."—Ib.

    As the result of this action, it appears that the practice of slaveholding was generally discontinued within the bounds of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, not many years afterwards. The subordinate meetings took early measures for carrying out the views of the Yearly Meeting. The Philadelphia Monthly Meeting reported, in 1781, that "there was but one case," under care, and, in 1783, that "there were no slaves owned by its members."
          "As the minute of 1781 is the last on record" (of the Yearly Meeting) "on this subject, which speaks of slaves being still owned by our members, it is probable that before the succeeding Yearly Meeting, they had all been freed."—Brief Statement, p. 35.

    These measures were followed by efforts for the religious instruction of the emancipated negroes; and in some instances they were compensated for their past services.
    ____________
          *From the more full quotation of this document, in the Brief Statement of 1843, we learn that it also held the more stern language that follows:

          "And we entreat all to examine, whether the purchasing of a negro, either born here or imported, doth not contribute to a further importation, and consequently to the upholding all the evils above mentioned, and promoting man stealing—the only theft which, by the Mosaic law, was punished with death: 'He that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.'—Ex. 21:16."—Brief Statement, see p. 18.

          So that the ecclesiastical testimony of the "Friends"—invidiously commended by some for its mildness, did not reach its object, till it had identified slaveholding with man stealing. This testimony is recorded as being "supposed to have been from the pen of Anthony Benezet."

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    The course of action by the New England Yearly Meeting and its subordinate meetings, was very similar and but little later in dates. The earliest action on record is a query by the Monthly Meeting of Dartmouth to the Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting, in 1716, asking

    "whether it be agreeable to Truth, for Friends to      
    purchase slaves, and keep them for a term of life?"

    The question was referred back to the different monthly meetings composing that quarterly meeting. The answers of several meetings were in the negative. The matter came up again before the Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting, in 1717, but no decisive minute was made on the subject.

    In 1727 the Yearly Meeting made a short minute censuring the practice "of importing negroes from their native country and relations." In 1760, the discipline was revised, and the language of the "printed epistle of the London Yearly Meeting of 1758, against dealing in negroes and other slaves," was incorporated into the discipline. In the same year the following inquiry was adopted:
          "Are Friends clear of importing negroes, or buying them when imported; and do they use those well, when they are possessed by inheritance or otherwise, endeavoring to train them up in the principles of religion?"

    In 1769 the Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting proposed to the Yearly Meeting such an amendment of this query as should not imply that the holding of slaves was allowed. The Yearly Meeting deferrred action until 1770, when the query was so amended as to include the following.
          "And are all set at liberty that are of age, capacity and ability, suitable for freedom?"

    This action was carried forward until, in 1782, the Yearly Meeting says:
          "We know not but all the members of this members are clear of that iniquitous practice of holding or dealing with mankind as slaves."—Brief Statement, &c., pp. 44 to 47.

    It was not, however, until 1787, that the Yearly Meeting could report a satisfactory settlement for the past services of those who had been held in slavery. (Ib.)

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    The Yearly Meeting of New York, previous to 1759, had manifested its disapprobation of the slave trade.—The Purchase Quarterly Meeting, in 1767, suggested the inquiry, "whether it is consistent with a Christian spirit to keep those in slavery we have already in possession, by purchase, gift, or any other way?"

    In 1771, the Yearly Meeting concluded "that those Friends who have negroes shall not sell them for slaves, excepting in cases of executors," &c., who are, in that case, to advise with their respective monthly meetings.—Measures were taken, the same year, to encourage manumissions.

    In 1776, the Yearly Meeting took still higher ground, refusing to accept or employ the services in the church, or "receive the collections," of those who "continue these poor people in bondage."

    In 1784, a solitary case of slaveholding was reported—and in 1787 there were none at all.

    In 1781, the Yearly Meeting advised each monthly meeting to appoint suitable persons to inspect the cases of the recent emancipations, and afford such assistance and advice, both in respect to the temporal and spiritual good of the emancipated, as might be in their power, and "endeavor to find what, in justice, may be due them."

    At the succeeding Yearly Meeting, it was recommended that committees be appointed by the monthly meetings to "hand out to the said negroes" "the sum or sums which may appear to be due them."—"So faithfully and earnestly did Friends carry out these views of the Yearly Meeting, that in the year 1784 there appear to have been but three unsettled cases remaining.—"Brief Statement, &c., pp. 47 to 51.

    The Yearly Meeting of Virginia introduced a query "designed to forbid the trafficking in slaves," in 1757. In 1764, the Meeting advised additional attention to the religious instruction and clothing of slaves. In 1766, it was proposed to forbid its members to purchase any more negroes, and the subject was referred back to the quarterly meetings. In 1767, the Yearly Meeting could not unanimously conclude

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    upon issuing any injunctions either with regard to purchasing or setting them free, but earnestly desired each member to be careful and not encumber himself or posterity with any further purchases.—In 1768, this advice was made a rule of discipline.—In 1773, the Yearly Meeting earnestly recommended manumissions, and quoted the words of the prophet—"The people of the land have used oppression and exercised robbery," &c.

    The measure was followed up till 1787, when it appeared that there were still some members who held slaves. It is stated that, after this, "the Yearly Meeting of Virginia gradually cleared itself of this grievous burthen:" but the precise date of its final extinction is not given.—"Brief Statement," &c., pp. 51 to 56.

    A very interesting feature of this reformation among the Friends, was the compensation provided for the emancipated slaves, in striking contrast with the absurd claim, sometimes set up, for compensation to the master.

    Another circumstance worthy of note is the uniformity and celerity with which the reformation was effected, so soon as the ecclesiastical bodies adventured to characterize slaveholding, in the strong but truthful language of Scripture, as robbery and man-stealing; giving proof of the earnestness and sincerity of their testimony, by taking measures for withdrawing religious fellowship from slaveholders. It is stated that some were actually "disowned," for non-compliance.—"Brief Statement, &c., p. 46.

    Nor was this great change effected, in the Society of Friends without stirring agitations, exciting appeals, and long-continued and earnest debates and discussions. The cautiously guarded and modified records of the ecclesiastical bodies, especially the more early testimonies, expressing, perhaps, in the language of compromise, the hesitant and even reluctant assent of the predominating and conservative portion of the body, must not be taken as specimens of the tone and manner of the agitators by whom the subject was continually pressed upon the attention of the Society, until final action was

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    reached. A long succession of these untiring and zealous laborers were engaged in this great work.

    William Burling, of Long Island, was, perhaps, the first of these. He began his testimony early in life, and seldom if ever permitted a Yearly Meeting to assemble and separate without hearing his earnest remonstrance against their toleration of slavery.

    Ralph Sandiford, of Philadelphia, was another earnest agitator. He published his "Mystery of Iniquity, in a brief examination of the practice of the times," in the year 1729. The language is described as bold, stirring, energetic, and uncompromising. The very title-page is a sufficient indication of the fact.

    Ed. Note: Full Citation: Sandiford, Ralph [1693-1733], A Brief Examination of the Practice of the Times: By the Foregoing and the Present Dispensation; Whereby is Manifested, How the Devil Works in the Mystery, Which None Can Understand and Get the Victory Over (Philadelphia: Franklin and Meredith,1729).

    Benjamin Lay published his Treatise on Slave-keeping in 1737. It was printed by Benjamin Franklin. The title of this book* shows that he opposed not merely the slave trade and slave buying, (which was all that the Yearly Meeting was prepared to do, six years afterwards,) but likewise the practice of slaveholding, and denounced it as a high crime. He is described by Clarkson as "a man of strong understanding, and of great integrity, but of warm and irritable feelings, and more particularly so when he was called forth on any occasion in which the oppressed Africans were concerned."†

    Ed. Note: Full Citation: Lay, Benjamin [1677-1759], All Slave-keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage Apostates Pretending to Lay Claim to the Pure & Holy Christian Religion, of What Congregation So Ever, But Especially in Their Ministers, By Whose Eample the Filthy Leprosy and Apostacy is Spread Far and Near; It Is a Notorious Sin Which Many of the True Friends of Christ and His Pure Truth, called Quakers, Has Been for Many Years and Still Are Concern'd to Write and Bear Testimony Against as a Practice So Gross & Hurtful to Religion, and Destructive to Government Beyond What Words Can Set Forth, or Can Be Declared of by Men or Angels, and Yet Lived in by Ministers and Magistrates in America (Philadelphia: Ben Franklin, 1737).

    ____________
    *"All Slave-keepers, that keep the innocent in bondage, apostates."

    †Some specimens of his manner of agitating "the delicate question" may be interesting.

    "Calling-on a Friend in the city (Philadelphia), he was asked to sit down to breakfast. He first inquired, 'Dost thou keep slaves in thy house?' On being answered in the affirmative, he said, 'Then I will not partake with thee of the fruits of thy unrighteousness.'—After an ineffectual attempt to convince a farmer and his wife in Chester county of the iniquity of keeping slaves, he seized their only child, a little girl of three years of age, under pretence of carrying her away, and when the cries of the child and his singular expedient alarmed them, he said, 'You see and feel, now, a little of the distress which you occasion by the inhuman practice of slave-keeping."—First Annual Report, New Hampshire A. S. Society, by John Farmer, Esq.—Emancipator for August, 1835..

    At Friends' Monthly Meetings, if a slaveholder rose to speak, Benjamin Lay would rise and exclaim—"There's another negro master!"

    On one occasion he seated himself in a Friends' Meeting among slaveholders, with a bladder of bullock's blood secreted under his mantle, and at length broke the quiet

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    For forty-one years, and until his death, in 1759, he bore an uncompromising and zealous testimony against the sin of slavery.

    John Woolman travelled through the provinces as a preacher and anti-slavery agitator, from 1746 to 1767. He travelled much of the time on foot, conversing with the people, and discoursing to public assemblies.

    Anthony Benezet published a work against slavery in 1762, and another in 1767. He wrote also in the public journals, in the almanacs, and labored in every practicab