touching the soil of England, but returned a slave. Such was the approved law of Virginia in the first half of the last century; such was the opinion of Yorke and Talbot, the law officers of the crown, as expressed in 1729, and, after a lapse of twenty years, repeated and confirmed by Yorke as chancellor of England. 1695. The influence of the manufacturers was still worse. They clamored for the protection of a trade which opened to them an African market. Thus the party of the slave-trade dictated laws to England. A resolve of the commons, in the days of William and Mary, proposed to lay open the trade in negroes "for the better supply of the plantations;" and the statute-book of England soon declared the opinion of its king and its parliament, that "the trade is highly beneficial and advantageous to the kingdom and the colonies." In 1708, a committee of the house of commons report that "the trade is important, and ought to be free;" in 1711, a committee once more report that "the plantations ought to be supplied with negroes at reasonable rates," and urge an increase of importations. In June, 1712, Queen Anne, in her speech to parliament, boasts of her success in securing to Englishmen a new market for slaves in Spanish America. In 1729, George II. recommended a provision, at the national expense, for the African forts; and the recommendation was followed. At last, in 1749, to give the highest activity to the traffic, every obstruction to private enterprise was removed, and the ports of Africa were laid open to English competition; for "the slave-trade," such are the words of the statute, "is very advantageous to Great Britain." "The British senate," wrote one of its members, in February, 1750, "have this fortnight been pondering meth- Feb. 25. ods to make more effectual that horrid traffic of selling negroes. It has appeared to us that six-and-forty thousand of these wretches are sold every year to our plantations alone." 1750. But, while the partial monopoly of the African company was broken down, and the commerce in men was opened to the competition of all Englishmen, the monopoly of British subjects was rigidly enforced against foreigners. That Englishmen alone might monopolize all wealth to be derived from the trade, Holt and Pollexfen, and eight other judges, in pursuance of an order in council, had given their opinion "that negroes are merchandise," and that therefore the act of navigation was to be extended to English slave ships to the exclusion of aliens. 1702. The same policy was manifested in the relations between the English crown and the colonies. Land from the public domain was given to emigrants, in one West India colony at least, on condition that the resident owner would "keep four negroes for every hundred acres." The eighteenth century was ushered in by the royal instruction of Queen Anne to the governor of New York and New Jersey, "to give due encouragement to merchants, and in particular to the royal African company of England." That the instruction was general is evi dent from the apology of Spotswood for the small number of slaves brought into Virginia. In that commonwealth, the planters beheld with dismay the increase of negroes. 1726. A tax repressed their importation; and, in 1726, Hugh Drysdale, the deputy governor, announced to the house that "the interfering interest of the African company had obtained the repeal of that law." Long afterwards, a statesman of Virginia, in full view of the course of colonial legislation and English counteracting authority, unbiassed by hostility to England, bore true testimony that "the British government constantly checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to this infernal traffic." On whatever ground Virginia opposed the trade, the censure was just. May 12. The white man, emigrating, became a dangerous freeman : it was quite sure that the negroes of that century would never profess republicanism; their presence in the colonies increased dependence. This reasoning was avowed by "a British merchant," in 1745, in a political tract entitled "The African Slave Trade the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in America." "Were it possible for white men to answer the end of 1745. We negroes in planting," it is there contended, "our colonies would interfere with the manufactures of these kingdoms. In such case, indeed, we might have just reason to dread the prosperity of our colonies; but, while we can supply them abundantly with negroes, we need be under no such apprehensions." "Negro labor will keep our British colonies in a due subserviency to the interest of their mother country; for, while our plantations depend only on planting by negroes, our colonies can never prove injurious to British manufactures, never become independent of their kingdom." This policy of England knew no relenting. "My friends and I," wrote Oglethorpe, "settled the colony of Georgia, and by charter were established trustees. determined not to suffer slavery there; but the slave merchants and their adherents not only occasioned us much trouble, but at last got the government to sanction them." South Carolina in 1760, from prudential motives, attempted restrictions, and gained only a rebuke from the English ministry. Great Britain, steadily rejecting every colonial limitation of the slave-trade, instructed the governors, on pain of removal, not to give even a temporary assent to such laws; and, but a year before the prohibition of the slave-trade by the American congress in 1776, the Earl of Dartmouth addressed to a colonial agent these memorable words: "We cannot allow the colonies to check, or discourage in any degree, a traffic so beneficial to the nation." The assiento treaty, originally extorted from Spain by force of arms, remained a source of jealousy between that kingdom and England. Other collisions were preparing on the American frontier, where Spain claimed to extend her jurisdiction north of the Savannah River, as far at least as St. Helena Sound. The foundation of St. Augustine had preceded that of Charleston by a century; national pride still clung to the traditions of the wide extent of Florida; the settlement of the Scottish emigrants at Port Royal had been dispersed; Indians and negroes were received as ready allies against English encroachments; and it was feebleness alone which had tolerated the advancement of the plantations of South Carolina towards the Savannah. Mean time, England resolved to pass that stream, and carry her flag still nearer the walls of St. Augustine. 1728. The resolution was not hastily adopted. In 1717, a proposal was brought forward, by one whose father had been interested in the unfortunate enterprise of Lord Cardross, to plant a new colony south of Carolina, in the region that was heralded as the most delightful country of the universe. The land was to be tilled by British and Irish laborers exclusively, without "the dangerous help of blackamoors." Three years afterwards, in the excited season of English stock-jobbing and English anticipations, the suggestion was revived. When Carolina became by purchase a royal province, Johnson, its governor, was directed to mark out townships as far south as the Alatamaha; and, in 1731, a site was chosen for a colony of Swiss in the ancient land of the Yamassees, but on the left bank of the Savannah. The country between the two rivers was still a wilderness, over which England held only a nominal jurisdiction, when the spirit of benevolence formed a partnership with the selfish passion for extended territory, and, heedless of the objection that "the colonies would grow too great" for England "and throw off their dependency," resolved to plant the sunny clime with the children of misfortune, with those who in England had neither land nor shelter, and those on the continent to whom, as Protestants, bigotry denied freedom of worship and a home. In the days when protection of property was avowed to be the end of government, the gallows was set up as the penalty for a petty theft. Each year, in Great Britain, at least four thousand unhappy men were immured in prison for the misfortune of poverty; a small debt exposed to a perpetuity of imprisonment; one indiscreet contract doomed the miserable dupe to lifelong confinement. The subject won the attention of James Oglethorpe, a member of the British parliament; in middle life; educated at Oxford; an hereditary loyalist; receiving his first commission in the English army during the ascendency of Bolingbroke; a volunteer in the family of Prince Eugene; present at the siege of Belgrade. To him, in the annals of legislative philan thropy, the honor is due of having first resolved to lighten the lot of debtors. Touched with the sorrows which the walls of a prison could not hide from him, he searched into the gloomy horrors of jails, Where sickness pines, where thirst and hunger burn, In 1728, he invoked the interference of the English parliament; and, as a commissioner for inquiring into the state of the jails in the kingdom, persevered, till, "from extreme misery, he restored to light and freedom multitudes who, by long confinement for debt, were strangers and helpless in the country of their birth." He did more. For them, and for persecuted Protestants, he planned a new destiny in America, where former poverty would be no reproach, and where the simplicity of piety could indulge the spirit of devotion without fear of persecution from men who hated the rebuke of its example. 1732. To further this end, a charter from George II., dated the ninth day of June, 1732, erected the coun- June 9. try between the Savannah and the Alatamaha, and from the head-springs of those rivers due west to the Pacific, into the province of Georgia, and placed it for twenty-one years under the guardianship of a corporation, “in trust for the poor." The common seal of the corporation, having on one side a group of silk-worms at their toils, with the motto, "Non sibi, sed aliis,"-"Not for themselves, but for others," expressed the purpose of the patrons, who by their own request were restrained from receiving any grant of lands, or any emolument whatever. On the other side of the seal, the device represented two figures reposing on urns, emblematic of the boundary rivers, having between them the genius of "Georgia Augusta," with a cap of liberty on her head, a spear in one hand, the horn of plenty in the other. But the cap of liberty was, for a time at least, a false emblem; for all executive and legislative power, and the institution of courts, were for twenty-one years given exclusively to the trustees, or their common council, who were appointed during good behavior. The trustees held these grants to contain but "proper powers for establishing |