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ORIGIN OF NEGRO SLAVERY IN AMERICA.

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indelibly soiled and stained by his | Religion was speciously invoked to undeniable and conspicuous implica- cover this new atrocity with her | tion in the enslavement of the Abori- broad mantle, under the plea of regines of this continent, so improperly lieving the Indians from a servitude, termed Indians. Within two years which they had already escaped after his great discovery, before he through the gate of death. But, had set foot on the continent, he was though the Papacy was earnestly imconcerned in seizing some scores of portuned to lend its sanction to this natives, carrying them to Spain, and device, and though its compliance. selling them there as slaves. His has been stoutly asserted, and was example was extensively followed. long widely believed, the charge rests The fierce lust for gold, which in- upon no evidence, is squarely denied, flamed the early adventurers on his and has been silently abandoned. track, incited the most reckless, For once, at least, avarice and cruelty shameless disregard of the rights and have been unable to gain a sacerhappiness of a harmless and guileless dotal sanction, and compelled to fall people,whose very helplessness should back in good order upon Canaan and have been their defense. Forced to Ham. But, even without benefit of hunt incessantly for gold, and to clergy, Negro Slavery, once introducminister in every way to the imperi- ed, rapidly, though thinly, overspread ous appetites of their stranger tyrants, the whole vast area of Spanish and they found in speedy death their only Portuguese America, with Dutch and relief from intolerable suffering. In French Guiana and the West India a few years, but a miserable remnant Islands; and the African slave-trade remained. And now the western was, for two or three centuries, the coast of Africa was thrown open to most lucrative, though most abhorreplace them by a race more indura- rent, traffic pursued by or known to ted to hardship, toil, and suffering. mankind.' It was the subject of

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tonio Gonzales, who had brought some Moorish
slaves into Portugal, was commanded to release
them. He did so; and the Moors gave him, as
their ransom,
not gold, but black Moors with
curled hair. Thus negro slaves came into Eu-
rope."

"In 1444, Spain also took part in the traffic. The historian of her maritime discoveries even claims for her the unenviable distinction of having anticipated the Portuguese in introducing negroes into Europe."— Ibid., p. 166.

3 "Columbus himself did not escape the stain. Enslaving five hundred native Americans, he sent them to Spain, that they might be publicly sold at Seville."--Ibid.

4 "In 1500, the generous Isabella commanded the liberation of the Indians held in bondage in her European possessions. Yet her native benevolence extended not to the Moors, whose valor had been punished by slavery, nor to the Africans; and even her compassion for the New World was but a transient feeling, which relieves the miserable who are in sight, not the deliberation of a just principle.”—Bancroft's Hist. U. S., vol. i., p. 128.

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5 "It was not Las Casas who first suggested the plan of transporting African slaves to Hispaniola; Spanish slaveholders, as they emigrated, were accompanied by their negroes.' Ibid.

6 "Even the voluptuous Leo X. declared that 'not the Christian religion only, but nature herself, cries out against the state of Slavery.' And Paul III., in two separate briefs, imprecated a curse on the Europeans who would enslave Indians, or any other class of men."-Ibid., p. 172.

*Upon the suggestion of Las Casas in favor of negroes for American slaves, in contradistinction to the Indians, negroes began to be poured into the West Indies.

"It had been proposed to allow four for each emigrant. Deliberate calculation fixed the number esteemed necessary at four thousand. That very year in which Charles V. sailed with a powerful expedition against Tunis, to attack the pirates of the Barbary States, and to emancipate Christian slaves in Africa, he gave an open, legal sanction to the African slave-trade."-Ibid., p. 170.

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When, in 1607, the first abiding English colony-Virginia-was founded on the Atlantic coast of what is now our country, Negro Slavery, based on the African slavetrade, was more than a century old throughout Spanish and Portuguese America, and so had already acquired the stability and respectability of an institution. It was nearly half a century old in the British West Indies. Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and British vessels and trading companies' vied with each other for the gains to be speedily acquired by purchasing, or kidnapping, young negroes on the coast of Guinea, and selling them in the American colonies of their own and other nations. The early colonists of Virginia were mainly adventurers of an unusually bad type-bankrupt prodigals, genteel spendthrifts, and incorrigible profligates, many of whom had left their native country for that country's good, in obedience to the urgent persuasion of sheriffs, judges, and juries. All were intoxicated by the common illusions of emigrants with regard to

8" A Flemish favorite of Charles V having obtained of this king a patent containing an exclusive right of importing four thousand negroes annually to the West Indies, sold it for twentyfive thousand ducats, to some Genoese merchants, who first brought into a regular form the commerce for slaves between Africa and America."-Holmes's Annals of America, vol. i., p. 35.

"In 1563, the English began to import negroes into the West Indies. Their first slave-trade was opened the preceding year on the coast of Guinea. John Hawkins, in the prospect of a great gain, resolved to make trial of this nefari- | ous and inhuman traffic. Communicating the design to several gentlemen in London, who became liberal contributors and adventurers, three good ships were immediately provided; and, with these and one hundred men, Hawkins sailed to the coast of Guinea, where, by money,

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the facilities for acquiring vast wealth at the cost of little or no labor in the Eden to which they were attracted. Probably no other colony that ever succeeded or endured was so largely made up of unfit and unpromising materials. Had it not been backed by a strong and liberal London company, which enjoyed for two or three generations the special favor and patronage of the Crown, it must have perished in its infancy. But the climate of tide-water Virginia is genial, the soil remarkably fertile and facile, the timber abundant and excellent, while its numerous bays and inlets abound in the choicest shellfish; so that a colony that would fail here could succeed nowhere. bacco, too, that bewitching but poisonous narcotic, wherewith Providence has seen fit to balance the inestimable gifts of Indian Corn and the Potato by the New World to the Old, grew luxuriantly on the intervals of her rivers, and was eagerly bought at high prices by the British merchants, through whom nearly every want of the colonists was supplied. Manual labor of all kinds was in great demand in the English colonies; so that, for some time, the

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treachery, and force, he procured at least three hundred negroes, and now sold them at Hispaniola."-Ibid., p. 83.

"Ferdinand" (in 1513) "issued a decree declaring that the servitude of the Indians is warranted by the laws of God and man.”—Ibid., p.32.

Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what nation or religion whatsoever."-Locke's Fundamental Constitution for South Carolina.

9 According to Bancroft, upon the establishment of the Assiento Treaty in 1713, creating a Company for the prosecution of the African Slave Trade, one-quarter of the stock was taken by Philip of Spain; Queen Anne reserved to herself another quarter, and the remaining moiety was to be divided among her subjects. "Thus did the sovereigns of England and Spain become the largest slave-merchants in the world."

LAWYER'S LAW FOR SLAVERY.

banishment thither of felons from the | mother country seems to have provoked no serious objection. That such a colony, in such an age, should have existed thirteen years prior to the introduction of Negro Slavery, indicates rather its weakness and poverty than its virtue. The probability is that its planters bought the first slaves that were offered them; at any rate, the first that they were able to pay for. When the Pilgrim Fathers landed on the rock of Plymouth, Virginia had already received and distributed her first cargo of slaves.11

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There is no record of any serious opposition, whether on moral or economic grounds, to the introduction of slaves and establishment of Slavery in the various British, Dutch, and Swedish Colonies, planted along the coast between the Penobscot and the Savannah rivers during the succeeding century. At the outset, it is certain that the importation of negro chattels into the various seaports, by merchants trading thither, was re

10 December 22, 1620. The first slaves brought to Virginia were sold from a Dutch vessel, which landed twenty at Jamestown, in 1620.

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In the first recorded case (Butts v. Penny, 2 Lev., 201; 3 Kib., 785), in 1677, in which the question of property in negroes appears to have come before the English courts, it was held, 'that, being usually bought and sold among merchants as merchandise, and also being infidels, there might be a property in them sufficient to maintain trover.'"-Hildreth's Hist. U. S., vol. ii., p. 214.

"What precisely the English law might be on the subject of Slavery, still remained a matter of doubt. Lord Holt had expressed the opinion, as quoted in a previous chapter, that Slavery was a condition unknown to English law, and that every person setting foot in England thereby became free. American planters, on their visits to England, seem to have been annoyed by claims of freedom set up on this ground, and that, also, of baptism. To relieve their embarrassments, the merchants concerned in the American trade" (in 1729) "had obtained a written opinion from Yorke and Talbot, the

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garded only with vague curiosity and marvel, like that which would now be excited by the experimental introduction of elephants or hippopotami as beasts of burden. Human rights, in the abstract, had not yet been made a theme of popular discussion, hardly of philosophic speculation: for English liberty, John Hampden had not yet poured out his blood on the battle-field, nor Algernon Sidney laid his head on the block. The negroes, uncouth and repulsive, could speak no word intelligible to British or Colonial ears, when first imported, and probably had a scarcely clearer conception of their own rights and wrongs than had those by whom they were surrounded. Some time ere the middle of the Seventeenth Century, a British Attorney-General, having the ques tion formally submitted to him, gave his official opinion, that negroes, being pagans, might justly be held in Slavery, even in England itself. The amount of the fee paid by the wealthy and prosperous slave-traders attorney and solicitor general of that day. According to this opinion, which passed for more than forty years as good law, not only was baptism no bar to Slavery, but negro slaves might be held in England just as well as in the Colonies. The two lawyers by whom this opinion was given rose afterward, one of them to be chief justice of England, and both to be chancellors. Yorke, sitting in the latter capacity, with the title of Lord Hardwicke" (in 1749), "had recently recognized the doctrine of that opinion as sound law. (Pearce v. Lisle, Ambler, 76.) He objects to Lord Holt's doctrine of freedom, secured by setting foot on English soil, that no reason could be found why slaves should not be equally free when they set foot in Jamaica, or any other English plantation. All our colonies are subject to the laws of England, although as to some purposes they have laws of their own! His argument is that, if Slavery be contrary to 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."—Ibid., p. 426.

erudition and acumen, is not recorded, but it probably included a liberal consideration for wear-andtear of conscience. Two or three decisions from British courts were, at different times thereafter, obtained, substantially echoing this opinion. It was not till 1772 that Lord Mansfield pronounced, in the ever-memorable Somerset case, his judgment that, by the laws of England, no man could be held in Slavery. That judgment has never since been disturbed, nor seriously questioned.

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for this remarkable display of legal | of Canaan had been by the Israelites under Joshua. Indian slavery, sometimes forbidden by law, but usually tolerated, if not entirely approved, by public opinion, was among the early usages of New England; and from this to negro slavery-the slavery of any variety of pagan barbarians-was an easy transition. That the slaves and in the Eastern colonies were few, mainly confined to the seaports, does not disprove this statement. harsh climate, the rocky soil, the rugged topography of New England, presented formidable, though not impassable, barriers to slaveholding. Her narrow patches of arable soil, hemmed in between bogs and naked blocks of granite, were poorly adapted to cultivation by slaves. The labor of the hands without the brain, of muscle divorced from intelligence, would procure but a scanty livelihood on those bleak hills. He who was compelled, for a subsistence, to be, by turns, farmer, mechanic, lumberman, navigator, and fisherman, might possibly support one slave, but would be utterly ruined by half a dozen. Slaveholding in the Northern States was rather coveted as a social distinction, a badge of aristocracy and wealth, than resorted to with any idea of profit or pecuniary advantage.

The austere morality and democratic spirit of the Puritans ought to have kept their skirts clear from the stain of human bondage. But, beneath all their fierce antagonism, there was a certain kinship between the disciples of Calvin and those of Loyola. Each were ready to suffer and die for God's truth as they understood it, and neither cherished any appreciable sympathy or consideration for those they esteemed God's enemies, in which category the savages of America and the heathen negroes of Africa were so unlucky as to be found. The Puritan pioneers of New England were early involved in desperate, life-or-death struggles with their Aboriginal neighbors, in whom they failed to discover those poetic and fascinating traits which irradiate them in the novels of Cooper and the poems of Longfellow. Their experience of Indian ferocity and treachery, acting upon their theologic convictions, led them early and readily to the belief that these savages, and by logical inference all savages, were the children of the devil, to be subjugated, if not extirpated, as the Philistine inhabitants

It was different southward of the Susquehanna, but especially in South Carolina, where the cultivation of Rice and Indigo on the seaboard had early furnished lucrative employment for a number of slaves far exceeding that of the white population, and whose Sea Islands afforded peculiar facilities for limiting the intercourse of the slaves with each other, and their means of escape to the wilder

GEORGIA A FREE COLONY.

The single and most honorable exception to the general facility with which this giant wrong was adopted and acquiesced in, is presented by the history of Georgia. That colony may owe something of her preëminence to her comparatively recent foundation; but she is far more indebted to the character and efforts of her illustrious founder. JAMES OGLETHORPE was born in 1688, or 1689, at Godalming, Surry County, England; entered the British army in 1710; and, having resigned on the restoration of peace, was, in 1714, commended by the great Marlborough to his former associate in command, the famous Prince Eugene of Savoy, by whom he was appointed one of his aids.

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ness and to the savages. South Car- | characterized the British system of olina, a century ago, was as intense- Imprisonment for Debt, he devoted ly, conspicuously aristocratic and himself to their reform, and carried slaveholding as in our own day. through the House an act to this end. But when Slavery had obtained eve- His interest in the fortunes of bankrywhere a foothold, and, in most col- rupt and needy debtors led him to onies, a distinct legal recognition, plan the establishment of a colony without encountering aught deserv- to which they should be invited, and ing the name of serious resistance, it in which they might hope, by inwere absurd to claim for any colony dustry and prudence, to attain indeor section a moral superiority in this pendence. This colony was also inregard over any other. tended to afford an asylum for the oppressed Protestants of Germany and other portions of the continent. He interested many eminent and influential personages in his project, obtained for it a grant of nearly ten thousand pounds sterling from Parliament, with subscriptions to the amount of sixteen thousand more, and organized a company for its realization, whereof the directors were nearly all noblemen and members of Parliament. Its constitution forbade any director to receive any pecuniary advantage therefrom. `Being himself the animating soul of the enterprise, he was persuaded to accept the arduous trust of governor of the colony, for which a royal grant had been obtained of the western coast of the Atlantic from the mouth of the Savannah to that of the Altamaha, and to which the name of Georgia was given in honor of the reigning sovereign. The trustees were incorporated in June, 1732. The pioneer colonists left England in November of that year, and landed at Charleston in January, 1733. Proceeding directly to their territory, they founded the city of Savannah in the course of the ensuing month. Oglethorpe, as director and vice-president of the African Company, had previously become

He fought under Eugene in his brilliant and successful campaign against the Turks in 1716 and 1717, closing with the siege and capture of Belgrade, which ended the war. Declining to remain in the Austrian service, he returned, in 1722, to England, where, on the death of his elder brother about this time, he inherited the family estate; was elected to Parliament for the borough of Hazelmere, which he represented for the ensuing thirty-two years, and, becoming acquainted with the frightful abuses and inhumanities which then

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