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acquainted with an African prince, | was retaliated by a much stronger

captured and sold into slavery by some neighboring chief, and had returned him to his native country, after imbibing from his acquaintance with the facts a profound detestation of the Slave-Trade and of Slavery. One of the fundamental laws devised by Oglethorpe for the government of his colony was a prohibition of slaveholding; another was an interdiction of the sale or use of Rum-neither of them calculated to be popular with the jail-birds, idlers, and profligates, who eagerly sought escape from their debts and their miseries by becoming members of the new colony. The spectacle of men, no wiser nor better than themselves, living idly and luxuriously, just across the Savannah river, on the fruits of constrained and unpaid negro labor, doubtless inflamed their discontent and their hostility. As if to add to the governor's troubles, war between Spain and England broke out in 1739, and Georgia, as the frontier colony, contiguous to the far older and stronger Spanish settlement of East Florida, was peculiarly exposed to its ravages. Oglethorpe, at the head of the South Carolina and Georgia militia, made an attempt on Saint Augustine, which miscarried; and this, in 1742,

2 Oglethorpe lived to be nearly a hundred years old-dying at Cranham Hall, Essex, England, June 30, 1787. It is not recorded nor probable that he ever revisited America after his relinquishment of the governorship of Georgia; but he remained a warm, active, wellinformed friend of our country after, as well as before and during, her struggle for independence. In 1784, Hannah More thus wrote of him:

Spanish expedition, which took Fort
St. Simon, on the Altamaha, and
might easily have subdued the whole
colony, but it was alarmed and re-
pelled by a stratagem of his concep-
tion. Oglethorpe soon after returned
to England; the trustees finally sur-
rendered their charter to the Crown;
and in 1752 Georgia became a royal
colony, whereby its inhabitants were
enabled to gratify, without restraint,
their longing for Slavery and Rum.
The struggle of Oglethorpe" in
Georgia was aided by the presence,
counsels, and active sympathy, of
the famous John Wesley, the founder
of Methodism, whose pungent de-
scription of Slavery as "the sum of
all villainies," was based on personal
observation and experience during
his sojourn in these colonies. But
"another king arose, who knew not
Joseph;" the magisterial hostility to
bondage was relaxed, if not wholly
withdrawn ; the temptation remained
and increased, while the resistance
faded and disappeared; and soon
Georgia yielded silently, passively, to
the contagion of evil example, and
thus became not only slaveholding,
but, next to South Carolina, the most
infatuated of all the thirteen colonies
in its devotion to the mighty evil.

and is much above ninety years old, the finest
He perfectly realizes all
figure you ever saw.
my ideas of Nestor. His literature is great, his
knowledge of the world extensive, and his facul
ties as bright as ever. ** He is quite a preux
chevalier; heroic, romantic, and full of the old
gallantry."

Pope-who praised so sparingly-had spoken of him, not quite half a century earlier, in terms evincing like admiration; and many other contemporaries of literary eminence bore testimony to his signal merits.-See Sparks's American Bio

“I have got a new admirer; it is Gen. Oglethorpe, perhaps the most remarkable man of his time. He was foster-brother to the Pretender,graphy.

III.

SLAVERY IN THE REVOLUTION.

THE American Revolution was no sudden outbreak. It was preceded by eleven years of peaceful remonstrance and animated discussion. The vital question concerned the right of the British Parliament to impose taxes, at its discretion, on British subjects in any and every part of the empire. This question presented many phases, and prompted various acts and propositions. But its essence was always the same; and it was impossible that such men as James Otis, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry, should discuss it without laying broad foundations for their argument in premises affecting the natural and general Rights of Man to self-government, with the control of his own products or earnings. The enthusiast who imagines that our patriots were all

1 Witness the Darien (Ga.) resolutions. In the Darien committee, Thursday, June 12, 1775:

"When the most valuable privileges of a people are invaded, not only by open violence, but by every kind of fraud, sophistry, and cunning, it behooves every individual to be upon his guard, and every member of society, like beacons in a country surrounded by enemies, to give the alarm, not only when their liberties in general are invaded, but separately, lest the precedent in one may affect the whole; and to enable the collective wisdom of such a people to judge of its consequences, and how far their respective grievances concern all, or should be opposed to preserve their necessary union. Every laudable attempt of this kind by the good people of this Colony, in a constitutional manner, has been hitherto frustrated by the influence and authority of men in office and their numerous dependents, and in every other natural and just way by the various arts they have put in practice. We, therefore, the representatives of the extensive district of Darien, in the colony of Georgia, being now assembled in congress by the authority and free choice of the inhabitants of the said district, now free from their fetters, do Resolve-"

There are six resolutions in all. The first 3

convinced of the danger and essential
iniquity of Slavery, and the conserva-
tive who argues that few or none
perceived and admitted the direct
application of their logic to the case
of men held in perpetual and limit-
less bondage, are alike mistaken.
There were doubtless some who did
not perceive, or did not admit, the
inseparable connection between the
rights they claimed as British free-
men and the rights of all men every-
where; but the more discerning and
logical of the patriots comprehended
and confessed that their assertion of
the rightful inseparability of Repre-
sentation from Taxation necessarily
affirmed the grander and more essen-
tial right of each innocent, rational
being to the control and use of his
own capacities and faculties, and to
the enjoyment of his own earnings.'

eulogizes "the firm and manly conduct of the
people of Boston and Massachusetts," acquiescing
Congress in Philadelphia last October."
in all the resolutions of the "grand American
The
second- resolution is denunciatory of England,
in shutting up the land office, and in other op-
pressive acts. The third is opposed to ministe-
rial mandates under the name of constitutions.
The fourth is denunciatory of the number of
officers appointed over the colonies by the
British crown, and their exorbitant salaries.
The fifth is as follows:

"5th. To show the world that we are not in-
fluenced by any contracted or interested motive,
but a general philanthropy for all mankind, of
hereby declare our disapprobation and abhor-
whatever climate, language, or complexion, we
rence of the unnatural practice of slavery in
America (however the uncultivated state of our
country, and other specious arguments, may plead
for it), a practice founded in injustice and cruelty,
and highly dangerous to our liberties (as well
below men, and corrupting the virtue and morals
as lives), debasing part of our fellow-creatures
of the rest, and as laying the basis of that liberty
we contend for (and which we pray the Almighty
to continue to the latest posterity) upon a very
wrong foundation. We therefore resolve at all
times to use our utmost efforts for the manumis-

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The principles of civil and political | arraignment of British tyranny; but

liberty, so patiently evolved and so
thoroughly commended during the
long controversy which preceded
the appeal to arms, were reduced
to axioms, and became portions of
the popular faith. When Jeffer-
our immortal
son, in drafting
Declaration of Independence, em-
bodied in its preamble a formal and
emphatic assertion of the inalienable
Rights of Man, he set forth propo-
sitions novel and startling to Euro-
pean ears, but which eloquence and
patriotic fervor had already engraven
deeply on the American heart. That
Declaration was not merely, as Mr.
Choate has termed it, "the passion-
ate manifesto of a revolutionary
war" it was the embodiment of our
forefathers' deepest and most rooted
convictions; and when, in penning
that Declaration, he charged the
British government with upholding
and promoting the African slave-
trade against the protests of the
colonists, and in violation of the
dictates of humanity, he asserted
truths which the jealous devotion of
South Carolina and Georgia to slave-
holding rendered it impolitic to send
forth as an integral portion of our

2

sion of our slaves in this colony upon the most safe and equitable footing for the masters and themselves."-American Archives, 4th Series, vol. i., 1774 and 1775.

which were, nevertheless, widely and deeply felt to be an important and integral portion of our case.3 Even divested of this, the Declaration stands to-day an evidence that our fathers regarded the rule of Great Britain as no more destructive to their own rights than to the rights of mankind.

No other document was ever issued which so completely reflected and developed the popular convictions. which underlaid and impelled it as that Declaration of Independence. The cavil that its ideas were not original with Jefferson is a striking testimonial to its worth. Originality of conception was the very last merit to which he would have chosen to lay claim, his purpose being to embody the general convictions of his countrymen-their conceptions of human, as well as colonial, rights and British wrongs, in the fewest, strongest, and clearest words. The fact that some of these words had already been employed-some of them a hundred times-to set forth the same general truths, in no manner unfitted them for his use.

The claim that his draft was a pla

against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another."

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Mr. Jefferson, in his Autobiography, gives the 2 The following is the indictment of George III., following reason for the omission of this reas a patron and upholder of the African slave-markable passage from the Declaration as adopttrade, embodied by Mr. Jefferson in his original draft of the Declaration :

"Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed

ed, issued, and published:

"The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures; for, though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others." - Jefferson's Works, vol. i., p. 170.

SLAVERY IN THE REVOLUTION.

giarism from the Mecklenburg (N. | taining happiness and safety."

also the Mecklenburg Declaration.

35

See

The original draft of the Declaration of American Independence was first communicated by Mr. Jefferson separately to two of his colleagues, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, on the committee chosen by Congress to prepare it; then to the whole committee, consisting, in addition, of Roger Sherman and Robert R. Liv

gestation, on the 28th of June; read in Committee of the Whole on the 1st of July; earnestly debated and scanned throughout the three following days, until finally adopted on the evening of the 4th. It may safely be said that not an affirmation, not a sentiment, was put forth therein to the world, which had not received the deliberate approbation of such cautious, conservative minds as those of Franklin, John Adams, and Roger Sherman, and of the American People, as well as their representatives in Congress, those of South Carolina and Georgia included.

C.) Declaration of April 20th, preceding, he indignantly repelled; but he always observed that he employed whatever terms best expressed his thought, and would not say how far he was indebted for them to his reading, how far to his original reflections. Even the great fundamental assertion of Human Rights, which he has so memorably set forth as follows: "We hold these truths to be self-ingston; reported, after twenty days' evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles," and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness," was no novelty to those who hailed and responded to it. Three weeks before, the Virginia Convention had unanimously adopted a Declaration of Rights, reported on the 27th of May by George Mason, which proclaims that "All men are by nature equally free, and have inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and ob

4

4 The grandfather of James M. Mason, late U.S. Senator from Virginia, since Confederate

The progress of the Revolution justified and deepened these convictions. Slavery was soon proved our chief source of weakness and of peril. Of our three.millions of people, half a million were the chattels of others; and though all the colonies tolerated, and most of them expressly legalized slaveholding, the slaves, nearly concentrated in the Southern States, paralyzed the energies and enfeebled the efforts of their patriots. Incited by proclamations of royal governors and military commanders, thousands of the negroes escaped to British camps and garrisons, and were there

Emissary to England. George Mason was one of Virginia's most illustrious sons.

36

manumitted and protected; while the master race, alarmed for the safety of their families, were unable or unwilling to enlist in the Continental armies, or even to be called into service as militia.5

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The documents and correspondence of the Revolution are full of complaints by Southern slaveholders of their helplessness and peril, because of Slavery, and of the necessity thereby created of their more efficient defense and protection. The New England States, with a population less numerous than that of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, furnished more than double the number of soldiers to battle for the common The South was repeatedly overrun, and regarded as substan108,036 tially subdued, by armies that would not have ventured to invade New 29.264 England, and could not have maintained themselves a month on her soil. Indeed, after Gage's expulsion

The number of slaves in the States respectively, at the time of the Revolution, is not known. But it may be closely approximated by the aid of the census of 1790, wherein the slave population is returned as follows:

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8.887

293,427
100,572
107.094

11.830

3,417 657,527

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cause.

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with Franklin and Jay for negotiating peace with Great Britain, on the 14th of August, 1776, wrote from Charleston, S. C., to his son, then in England, a letter explaining and justifying his resolution to stand or fall with the cause of American Independence, in which he said:

In

"You know, my dear son, I abhor Slavery. I was born in a country where Slavery had been established by British kings and parliaments, as by the laws of that country, ages before my existence. I found the Christian religion and Slavery growing under the same authority and I nevertheless disliked it. cultivation. former days, there was no combating the prejudices of men supported by interest: the day, I hope, is approaching, when from principles of gratitude, as well as justice, every man shall strive to be foremost in showing his readiness to Not less than comply with the golden rule. twenty thousand pounds sterling would all my negroes produce, if sold at public auction tomorrow. I am not the man who enslaved them; they are indebted to Englishmen for that favor: nevertheless, I am devising means for manumitting many of them, and for cutting off the entail of slavery. Great powers oppose me,-the laws and customs of my country, my own and the avarice of my countrymen. What will my children say if I deprive them of so much estate These are difficulties, but not insuperable. will do as much as I can in my time, and leave the rest to a better hand.

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I

"I am not one of those who arrogate the pe culiar care of Providence in each fortunate event; nor one of those who dare trust in Providence for defense and security of their own liberty, while they enslave, and wish to continue in slavery, thousands who are as well entitled to

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