Page:The rising son, or, The antecedents and advancement of the colored race (IA risingsonthe00browrich).pdf/279

 *ern States, was forty thousand three hundred and seventy; in the Southern, six hundred and fifty-three thousand nine hundred and ten.

It is very common at this day to speak of our revolutionary struggle as commenced and hurried forward by a union of free and slave colonies; but such is not the fact. However slender and dubious its legal basis, slavery existed in each and all of the colonies that united to declare and maintain their Independence. Slaves were proportionately more numerous in certain portions of the South; but they were held with impunity throughout the North, advertised like dogs or horses, and sold at auction, or otherwise, as chattels. Vermont, then a territory in dispute between New Hampshire and New York, and with very few civilized inhabitants, mainly on its southern and eastern borders, is probably the only portion of the revolutionary confederation never polluted by the tread of a slave.

The spirit of liberty, aroused or intensified by the protracted struggle of the colonists against usurped and abused power in the mother-country, soon found itself engaged in natural antagonism against the current form of domestic despotism.

"How shall we complain of arbitrary or unlimited power exerted over us, while we exert a still more despotic and inexcusable power over a dependent and benighted race?" was very fairly asked. Several suits were brought in Massachusetts—where the fires of liberty burned earliest and brightest—to test the legal right of slaveholding; and the leading Whigs gave their money and their legal services to support these actions, which were generally on one ground or another, successful. Efforts for an express law of eman