Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/403

 tobacco, or twenty days' service! What is much more remarkable than the passage of this statute, it remains unrepealed to this day.

On the banks of the Savannah a new colony was planted. Its founder was James Edward Oglethorpe, an officer of the English army, and member of the House of Commons. Desirous to provide a place in America for such discharged prisoners and others of the suffering poor as might be willing to commence there a life of industry and sobriety, Oglethorpe, in conjunction with several others, petitioned the king for a grant of territory. The charter was issued June 9, 1732. The right of legislation for the province was vested in a board of trustees. Oglethorpe superintended in person the planting of the colony. The use of rum was prohibited; and, the better to exclude this source of demoralization, all trade with the West Indies was forbidden. The trustees did not wish to see their province "void of white inhabitants, filled with blacks, the precarious property of a few, equally exposed to domestic treachery and foreign invasion." They prohibited negro slavery, not only as unjust and cruel — for so it was beginning to be esteemed by all the more intelligent and humane — but as fatal to the interests of the poor white settlers, for whose special benefit the colony had been projected.

The city of New York became, in 1741, the scene of a cruel and bloody delusion, less notorious, but not less lamentable than the Salem witchcraft. That city then contained some seven or eight thousand inhabitants, of whom twelve or fifteen hundred were slaves. Nine fires in rapid succession, most of them, however, merely the burning of chimneys, produced a perfect insanity of terror. An indented servant woman purchased her liberty and secured a reward of £100 by pretending to give information of a plot formed by a low tavern-keeper, her master, and three negroes, to burn the city and murder the whites. This story was confirmed and amplified by an Irish prostitute convicted of a robbery, who, to recommend herself to mercy, reluctantly turned informer. Numerous arrests had been already made among the slaves and free blacks. Many others followed. The eight lawyers who then composed the bar of New York all assisted by turns on behalf of the prosecution. The prisoners, who had no counsel, were tried and convicted upon most insufficient evidence. The lawyers vied with each other in heaping all sorts of abuse on their heads, and chief-justice Delancey, in passing sentence, vied with the lawyers. Many confessed to save their lives, and then accused others. Thirteen unhappy convicts were burned at the stake, eighteen were hanged, and seventy-one transported.

The slow progress of Georgia for twenty years, furnished new proofs, if such were needed, that the colonization of a wilderness, even with abundant facilities for it, is, for the most part, a tedious process; and, when undertaken by a company or the public, very expensive.

The results of their own idleness, inexperience, and incapacity, joined to the inevitable obstacles which every new settlement must encounter, were obstinately ascribed by the inhabitants of Georgia to that wise but ineffectual prohibition of slavery, one of the fundamental laws of the province. The convenience of