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 and is much above ninety years old, the finest 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 eulogizes "the firm and manly conduct of the "5th. To show the world that we are not in- The principles of civil and political | arraignment of British tyranny; but liberty, so patiently evolved and so 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." 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 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: 8.887 293,427 11.830 3,417 657,527 cause. 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. 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 |