Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/258

 252 Southern Historical Society Papers.

But there is further evidence that I am not mistaken in charging that Rhode Island had much more to do with this negro importa- tion than the people of this State, for it appears that but 2,006 of 39,075 slaves brought into Charleston were imported by our mer- chants and planters, while Rhode Islanders imported for us 8,338. (See Judge Smith's Statistics Year Book City of Charleston, 1880.)

Again. More than fifty years after this, in 1858, the London Times charged that New York had become "the greatest slave-trading mart in the world"; and Vice-President Wilson, in his work upon the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, quotes from the New York daily papers that there were "eighty-five vessels fitted out from New York, from February, 1859, to July, 1860," for the slave trade; that "an average of two vessels each week clear out of our harbor, bound for Africa and a human cargo ; " " that from thirty to sixty thousand (negroes) a year are taken from Africa to Cuba by vessels from the single port of New York." (Rise and Fall of Slave Trade in America, Volume II, page 618.)

Is it not absurd, with these historical facts upon record, for the Northern people, especially the New Englanders, to charge us with the " moral offence " of slavery?

Slavery as an institution was doubtless the incident upon which the differences between the people of the North and the South set- tled and concentrated, but the moral offence of it that so aroused the fanaticism of the world was not the cause of the war. When slavery was prohibited in the Northwestern Territory in 1787, with the unani- mous consent of the Southern delegates in Congress, but three of the Northern States had determined to put an end to slavery within their own borders, and of these three Rhode Island and Pennsylvania freed no slaves then living, but only provided that those born after a certain time should be free; Vermont alone emancipated her seven- teen slaves. Franklin, it is true, had organized an Abolition Society in 1787, but for many years, during which the "Federal" and "National" parties continued their controversies as to the form of government, it was only proposed to bring to bear upon the insti- tution of slavery the sentiment of the people of the States. The power of the Federal Government to interfere in the matter was not even thought of.

The admission of Missouri, in 1820, no doubt was strenuously re- sisted because her Constitution permitted slavery, and was only passed by Congress upon the compromise that slavery should not be introduced in the territories belonging then to the United States lying