1749.

The Slave-Trade Encouraged.

343

was passed bestowing additional encouragements upon slavetraders, and emphatically asserting, "The slave-trade is very advantageous to Great Britain." There are no passages in all her history so humiliating as these.

It is marvellous that such things were done, deliberately, and with all the solemnities of legal sanction, by men not unacquainted with the Christian religion, and humane in all the ordinary relations of life. The Inquisition inflicted no suffering more cruel than was endured by the victim of the slave-trader. Hundreds of men and women, with chains upon their limbs, were packed closely together into the holds of small vessels. There, during weeks of suffering, they remained, enduring fierce tropical heat, often deprived of water and of food. They were all young and strong, for the fastidious slave-trader rejected men over thirty as uselessly old. But the strength of the strongest sank under the horrors of this voyage. Often it happened that the greater portion of the cargo had to be flung overboard. Under the most favorable circumstances, it was expected that one slave in every five would perish. In every cargo of five hundred, one hundred would suffer a miserable death. And the public sentiment of England fully sanctioned a traffic of which these horrors were a necessary part.

They England took

At one time the idea was prevalent in the colonies that it was contrary to Scripture to hold a baptized person in slavery. The colonists did not on that account liberate their slaves. They escaped the difficulty in the opposite direction. withheld baptism and religious instruction. some pains to put them right on this question. The bishops of the Church and the law-officers of the Crown issued authoritative declarations, asserting the entire lawfulness of owning Christians. The colonial legislatures followed with enactments to the same effect. The colonists, thus reassured, gave consent that the souls of their unhappy dependants should be cared for.

Up to the Revolution it was estimated that three hundred thousand negroes had been brought into the country direct from Africa. The entire colored population was supposed to amount to nearly half a million.

When America gained her independence slavery existed in all the colonies. No State was free from the taint. Even the New England Puritans held slaves. At an early period they had learned to enslave their Indian neighbors. The children of the Pilgrims owned Indians, and in due time owned Africans, without remorse. But the number of slaves in the North was always small. At first it was not to the higher principle or clearer intelligence of the Northern men that this limited prevalence of slavery was due. The North was not a region where slave labor could ever be profitable. The climate was harsh, the soil rocky and bleak. Labor required to be directed by intelligence. In that comparatively unproductive land the mindless and heartless toil of the slave would scarcely defray the cost of his support. At the Revolution there were half a million of slaves in the colonies, and of these only thirty to forty thousand were in the North.

It was otherwise in the sunny and luxuriant South. The African was at home there, for the climate was like his own. The rich soil yielded its wealth to labor in the slightest and least intelligent form. The culture of rice and tobacco and cotton supplied the very kind of work which a slave was fitted to perform. The South found profitable employment for as many Africans as the slave-traders were able to steal.

And yet at the Revolution slavery enjoyed no great degree of favor. The free spirit enkindled by the war was in violent opposition to the existence of a system of bondage. Everywhere in the North slavery was regarded as an objectionable and decaying institution. The leaders of the Revolution, themselves mainly slave-owners, were eagerly desirous

1776.

Opposition to Slavery.

345

that slavery should be abolished. Washington was utterly opposed to the system, and provided in his will for the emancipation of his own slaves. Hamilton was a member of an association for the gradual abolition of slavery. John Adams would never own a slave. Franklin, Patrick Henry, Madison, Monroe, were united in their reprobation of slavery. Jefferson, a Virginian, who prepared the Declaration of Independence, said that, in view of slavery, "he trembled for his country, when he reflected that God was just."

In the convention which met to frame a Constitution for America the feeling of antagonism to slavery was supreme. Had the majority followed their own course, provision would have been made then for the gradual extinction of slavery. But there arose here a necessity for one of those compromises by which the history of America has been so sadly marked. When it was proposed to prohibit the importation of slaves, all the Northern and most of the Southern States favored the proposal. But South Carolina and Georgia were insatiable in their desire for African labor. They decisively refused to become parties to a union in which there was to be no importation of slaves. The other States yielded. Instead of an immediate abolition of this hateful traffic, it was agreed merely that after twenty years Congress would be at liberty to abolish the slave-trade if it chose. By the same threat of disunion the slave States of the extreme South gained other advantages. It was at last enacted that a slave who fled to a free State was not therefore to become a free man. He must be given back to his owner. It was yet further conceded that the slave States should have increased political power in proportion to the number of their slaves. A black man did not count for so much as a white. Every State was to send members to the House of Representatives according to its population, and in reckoning that population five negroes were to be counted as three.

And yet at that time, and for years after, the opinion of the South itself regarded slavery as an evil, thrust upon them by England, difficult to be got rid of, profitable, it might be, but lamentable and temporary. No slave-holder refused to discuss the subject or admit the evils of the system. No violence was offered to those who denounced it. The clergy might venture to preach against it. Hopeful persons might foretell the approach of liberty to those unhappy captives. Even the lowest of the slave-holding class did not yet resent the expression of such hopes.

But a mighty change was destined to pass upon the tone of Southern opinion. The purchase of Louisiana opened a vast tract of the most fertile land in the world to the growth of cotton. The growth of cotton became profitable. Slaveholding became lucrative. It was wealth to own a little plantation and a few negroes. There was an eager race for the possession of slaves. Importation alone could not supply the demand. Some of the more northerly of the Southern States turned their attention to the breeding of slaves for the Southern markets.

During many years the leader of the slave-owners was John C. Calhoun. He was a native of South Carolina, a tall, slender man, with an eye whose wondrous depth and power impressed all who came into his presence. Calhoun taught the people of the South that slavery was good for the slave. It was a benign, civilizing agency. The African attained to a measure of intelligence in slavery greatly in advance of that which he had ever reached as a free man. To him, visibly, it was a blessing to be enslaved. From all this it was easy to infer that Providence had appointed slavery for the advantage of both races; that opposition to this heaven-ordained institution was profane; that abolition was merely an aspect of infidelity. So Calhoun taught. So the South learned to believe. Calhoun's last speech in Congress warned the North