Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/255

 Address of Colonel Edward McCrady, Jr. 249

been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical distinctions Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views."

Curiously enough, and may we not add pitifully, too, we read in his original drafts of this address a passage stricken out and on the margin, opposite the words, "not important enough" which, when we come to examine, we find still more strongly indicated his appre- hension for the Union from this very cause, i. c., the geographical location of parties.

It is well-known that Mr. Jefferson, the author of the Kentucky Resolutions, was opposed to slavery ; while on the other hand the only vote in the First Congress against the exclusion of slavery in the great Northwestern Territory the munificent, or rather we should say under all the circumstances, looking now at it in the light of subsequent history, the prodigal and extravagant contribution of Virginia to the Union came from the State of New York. As Mr. Davis, in his work on The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Govern- ment, observes, "it was for climatic, industrial and economical, not moral or sentimental, reasons that slavery was abolished in the North- ern, while it continued to exist in the Southern States." It was the climate and the soil that forbade African slavery there and not philan- thropy. Let us look at the facts.

Vermont claims the honor of having first proposed to exclude slavery by her Bill of Rights in 1777, in anticipation of her separa- tion from New York, but the census of 1790, the year before the separation took effect, shows that her frosts and snows had effectually done the work before, as there were, in fact, but seventeen slaves in the State to be emancipated.

Slavery was introduced into Massachusetts soon after its first settle- ment, and was so " tolerated " there that as late as 1833 her Supreme Court could not say by what act, particularly, her institution was abolished. (Wine/tendon \. Hatficld, 4 Mass. 123; Commonwealth v. Aves, 1 8 Pick. 209.)

New Hampshire did not think it worth her while to pass an act to free the hundred and fifty-eight slaves which only remained in that State in 1790, and so one of them lived a slave in that free State as late as 1840.

In the plantations of Rhode Island slaves were more numerous than in the other New England States, as, indeed, they well might be, when the merchants and sailors of this little State were the greatest