Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/256

 250 Southern Historical Society Papers.

traffickers in the slave trade ; but as the negro could not live in her latitude, the Rhode Islanders the great negro traders provided a scheme of emancipation, which took a lifetime to work out, leaving in 1840 five slaves still in that State.

Connecticut was too much interested to indulge her philanthropy at the expense of a sudden emancipation. In 1790 there were 2,750 slaves, and so, like Rhode Island, she adopted a gradual plan of emancipation, by the slow and prudent workings of which, seventeen only of her slaves remained as such in 1840.

Pennsylvania was in the same situation, having 3,737 slaves in 1790, and she, too, provided for gradual emancipation. The census of 1 840 showed sixty-five negroes still in slavery ; and in this State of Brotherly Love, as late as 1823, a negro woman was sold by the sheriff to pay the debts of her master.

In New York, in which in 1790 there were 21,324 slaves, a similar act of gradual emancipation was passed (1799), by the operations of which, in 1840, all but four slaves had been gotten rid of, whether by emancipation, death, or shipment for sale at the South, can only be conjectured.

New Jersey, though adopting the same scheme, was slower in get- ting rid of her slaves, 674 still remaining in 1840.

Now, my comrades, what did this scheme of gradual or future emancipation mean? You will at once see that if our Northern brethren had been earnest in freeing these people, in accordance with their righteous abhorrence of the institution of slavery and with their zealous love of universal freedom, they would all have been as phi- lanthropic and disinterested as Vermont with her seventeen slaves, and would have emancipated their negroes as suddenly and more immediately than Mr. Lincoln did ours by his famous proclamation. But such a course would have cost their citizens just the market value of their slaves. What, then, could they do with these negroes ? The negroes came from a warmer climate, and could not live and thrive and be profitable with them. It was expedient, therefore, as an economical measure, to get rid of the burden of their support, and the plan of emancipation, at a given time in the future, would accomplish the purpose. How ? Mark you, it was the negroes their slave traders had landed upon their shores they wished to get rid of not slavery. A provision of the law, then, that at a given day in the future all sl.ives would be free, "would accomplish the purpose, because under such a law the owners of slaves did not lose the value of their slaves, but were only required by a given time to send them