Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 17.djvu/437

 Development of the Free Soil Idea in the United States. 429

Development of the Free Soil Idea in the United States.

An Address Delivered Before the Members of the Nebraska State Historical Society on the Evening of January '14, i8go.

By Hon. W. H. Eller.

The causes leading to the organization of Nebraska territory, date back of the adoption of the American constitution, and forms a part of the history of that freedom which now distinguishes the people of the United States from all other governments. The Federal Union is, within itself, a compact of free and independent States, formed from those physical parts, and bounded by those natural and artificial lines which peculiarly fit each separate dominion to become a part of the whole, all within the belt of the temperate zone of the western hemisphere.

The development of the free soil doctrine, which made it Nebraska, really began before it had a settler and before the American Revolu- tion had accomplished its great results, to understand which it is necessary to state a few facts in the history of African slavery. The African slave trade first introduced slavery in the province of Vir- ginia in the year 1619, and by the year 1670 it is estimated that there were at least 2,000 slaves in that dominion. The first English slave «hip fitted out in the colonies, sailed from Boston in 1646. The French admitted slavery to be established in their colonies in 1624. The whole "civilized** world engaged in the traffic for profit for more than a century afterward, and it became common in all the American colonies.

About the year 1775, with the development of the doctrines of popular liberty, the evil began gradually to contract in the Dominion of Canada and the Northern American colonies, owing to the un- profitable conditions of slave labor upon the one hand, and the de- velopment and the assertion of equal and universal rights upon the other, so that in 1784, Rhode Island had led the way in the interdic- tion of importing slaves into her territory, and in the year following enacted a law for their gradual emancipation. When the census of 1840 was taken, she had but five slaves left within her borders. Massachusetts, by her bill of rights, abolished slavery ia- 1780, and the act went into full effect by the decision of her courts in 1783, and no slaves are shown by the census of 1790. In the same year Penn- sylvania barred the further introduction of slaves, and also enacted a