Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/409

 English law, no local enactments in the colonies could give it any validity. To avoid overturning slavery in the colonies, it was absolutely necessary to uphold it in England. At a subsequent period, as stated in a former chapter, the law of England was definitively settled in favor of liberty, the extra-judicial opinion of Talbot and Hardwicke being set aside by a solemn decision of the King's Bench.

The remaining exclusive privileges of the Royal African Company having expired, the English government undertook to maintain, at their own expense the forts and factories on the African coast; and thus the slave-trade was thrown open to free competition. The recent introduction of the cultivation of coffee into the West Indies, and the increasing consumption in Europe of colonial produce, gave fresh impulse to this detestable traffic, and it now began to be carried on to an extent which soon roused against it the indignant humanity of an enlightened age. The West Indies were the chief market; but the imports to Virginia and the Carolinas were largely increased. New England rum, manufactured at Newport, was profitably exchanged on the coast of Africa for negroes, to be sold in the southern colonies; and vessels sailed on the same business from Boston and New York. The trade, however, was principally carried on by the English merchants of Bristol and Liverpool. Except in Pennsylvania, the colonial duties levied on the import of slaves were intended chiefly for revenue. They were classed in the instructions to the royal governors with duties on British goods, as impediments to British commerce not to be favored. On this ground several of these acts received the royal veto. Yet Virginia was allowed to impose such duties as she pleased, on the sole condition of making them payable by the buyer.

The position of the Africans in the colonies was disastrous. Not only were they servants for life, which possibly the law of England might have countenanced, but by colonial statute and usage this servitude descended to their children also. The few set free by the good will or the scruples of their masters seemed a standing reproach to slavery, and an evil example in the eyes of the rest. They became the objects of a suspicious legislation, which deprived them of most of the rights of freemen, and reduced them to a social position eery similar, in many respects, to that which inveterate prejudice in many parts of Europe has fixed upon the Jews. Hence, too, legislative restraints on the bounty or justice of the master in manumitting his slave.

Intermarriage with the inferior race, whether bond or free, was prohibited by religion as a sin, by public opinion as a shame, and by law as a crime. But neither law, gospel, nor public opinion could prevent that amalgamation which, according to all experience, inevitably and extensively takes place whenever two races come into that close juxtaposition which domestic slavery of necessity implies. Falsehood and hypocrisy took the place of restraint and self-denial. The Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonists, less filled with pride of race, and less austere and pretending in their religious morality, esteemed that white man mean and cruel who did not, so far as his ability permitted, secure for his colored children emancipation and some pecuniary