Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/31



HILE the war of 1861-65 between the Union, or Northern and non-slaveholding States, and the Confederate, or Southern and slaveholding was not fought by the South as a whole, and certainly not by Virginia, for the perpetuation of slavery, nor by the North, at least in its inception, for its abolition; yet every candid student of the history of the colonies and the States must admit that the slavery question, often under the name of "State rights" of one kind or another, was a dominant factor making issues that led to the temporary disruption of the Union. The history of Virginia during that war would be incomplete without a brief review of the story of her prior connection with African slavery.

Slaves were introduced into Virginia by Dutch merchantmen in 1619; from that time the importation of African negroes was engaged in by nearly all the commercial nations of Europe, especially by the Dutch, Spanish, French, Portuguese and British. In 1646, a ship from Boston was the first from the American colonies, so far as known, to engage in this traffic, which from that time until 1808 was more or less shared in by the commercial Northern States. In 1670 there were 2,000 slaves in Virginia. At the breaking out of the revolution, slavery extended over the North American continent wherever settled by Europeans. In 1774, Rhode Island, which up to that time had been considerably engaged in the slave trade, interdicted the importation of slaves into her borders. In 1778, Virginia, the second of the States to act, prohibited the introduction of slaves from abroad. Other States followed and gradual emancipation began in many of the Northern States. When Maryland refused to sign the articles of confederation of 1777, unless Rh