Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/414

 saw that nothing was to be hoped. Nursed and educated in the daily habit of seeing the degraded condition, both bodily and mental, of those unfortunate beings, not reflecting that that degradation was very much the work of themselves and their fathers, few had yet doubted that they were as legitimate subjects of property as their horses and cattle. The quiet and monotonous course of colonial life had been disturbed by no alarm and little reflection on the value of liberty, and when alarm was taken at an enterprise on their own, it was not easy to carry them the whole length of the principles which they invoked for themselves. In the first or second session of the legislature after I became a member, I drew to this subject the attention of Colonel Bland, one of the oldest, ablest, and most respectable members, and he undertook to move for certain moderate extension of the protection of the laws to these people. I seconded his motion, and, as a younger member, was more spared in the debate; but he was denounced as an enemy to his country, and was treated with the greatest indecorum." With the advance of the revolution, the sentiments Jefferson made a certain progress, resulting in the prohibition of the slave-trade and the freedom of emancipations, already mentioned; yet, though the constitution of Virginia declared life, liberty, and property to be unalienable rights, no legal restraint was placed upon the exorbitant and despotic power hitherto exercised over those held as slaves; and Washington, in 1785, complained in a letter to La Fayette that some "petitions for the abolition of slavery, presented to the Virginia Legislature, could scarcely obtain a hearing."

New York and New Jersey followed the example of Virginia and Maryland in prohibiting the further introduction of slaves — a prohibition extended to the domestic as well as to the African slave trade. Neither of these states, however, declared a general emancipation until many years thereafter. Slavery did not wholly cease in New York until about 1830, and in New Jersey a few years later.

The same generous sentiments had penetrated also into North Carolina, especially among the Quaker population; but the legislators of that state did not fully sympathize with them. Complaining of the frequency and danger of freedom given to slaves, the Assembly of 1777 reënacted the old restrictive law on the subject, with this modification, that, instead of the governor and council, the consent of the county court was made necessary to emancipations; and all negroes emancipated without that consent were ordered to be resold into slavery. Yet in 1186, by an act which declared the introduction of slaves into the state to be "of evil consequences and highly impolitic" a duty of £5 per head was imposed upon all future importations. South Carolina and Georgia omitted to follow the example of the other states in enacting laws to prevent or restrict the further introduction of slaves. So long, however, as the war lasted, an effectual stop, so far as importations from Africa were concerned, was put to that detestable traffic. Congress, indeed, never abrogated that part of the American Association by which the African slave-trade was totally renounced.

The disposition of the territories belonging to the thirteen recent colonies,