Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/130

 chartered to monopolize the slave-trade under the famous Assiento contract with Spain — the company which agreed to deliver 4,800 slaves per year, or 144,000 slaves in all, in the Spanish colonies alone, during the course of thirty years, and which did deliver many more than 4,800 slaves into the American colonies in the very year when Oglethorpe made a speech on the slave-trade declaring it a "horrid crime." He also owned a plantation near Parachucla, South Carolina, forty miles north of the Savannah River, that was worked by slaves. Oglethorpe proclaimed (as many an American did after him) that the slave-trade was "horrid," but he was one of the most active participants in it known to his age. The conclusion reached by Stevens in his "History of Georgia" is irresistible. "*It was policy and not philanthropy which prohibited slavery'? in the settlement of Georgia. The policy was the desire to place a buffer — perhaps one should rather say a sentinel troop — between the Spanish forces of Florida and the English colony of Carolina. The Carolina people felt that their slaves were an element of great weakness should the Spanish come as invaders. A colony of white men only would serve as an outpost that the Spaniards would fear and respect.

But Georgia did not prosper as a settlement of whites only, and slaves were, at last, introduced, at the urgent demand of the colonists.

To omit further details of colonial policy it may be said generally that, with the exception of Georgia, every colony did at one time and another impose taxes on imported negro slaves, and that in some cases the so-called restraint amounted to prohibition.