Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/191

 The letter, from which tin's is an extract, produced a desirable effect upon many of those who perused it, but particularly upon such as began to be seriously disposed in those times. And as George Whitefield continued a firm friend to the Africans, never losing an opportunity of serving them, he interested, in the course of his useful life, many thousands of his followers in their favor.

In the year 1712, a disposition favorable to the oppressed Africans became very generally manifest in some of the American Provinces. The house of burgesses of Virginia even presented a petition to the king, beseeching his majesty to remove all those restraints on his governors of that colony, which inhibited their assent to such laws as might check that inhuman and impolitic commerce, the slave-trade: and it is remarkable that the refusal of the British government to permit the colonists to exclude slaves from among them bylaw, was enumerated afterwards among the public reasons for separating from the mother country.

In allusion to the fact just stated, Mr. Jefferson, in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, said: "he (the king of England) has waged civil war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him; captivating, and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain: determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce; and, that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes, committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." (See the facsimile of this draft in Jefferson's Correspondence.) But this passage was struck out when the Declaration of Independence was adopted.

But the friendly disposition was greatly increased in the year 1773, by the literary labors of Dr. Benjamin Rush, of Philadelphia. In this year, at the Instigation of Anthony Benezet, he took up the cause of the oppressed Africans in a little work, which he entitled An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements on the Slavery of the Negroes; and soon afterwards in another, which was a vindication of the first, in answer to an acrimonious attack by a West Indian planter. These publications contained many new observations. They were written in a polished style; and while they exhibited the erudition and talents, they showed the liberality and benevolence of the author. Having had considerable circulation, they spread conviction among many, and promoted the cause for which they had been so laudably under taken.