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for this remarkable display of legal 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.

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

That the slaves

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. in the Eastern colonies were few, and mainly confined to the seaports, does not disprove this statement. The 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. 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

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.

ness and to the savages. South Carolina, a century ago, was as intensely, conspicuously aristocratic and slaveholding as in our own day. But when Slavery had obtained everywhere a foothold, and, in most colonies, a distinct legal recognition, without encountering aught deserving the name of serious resistance, it were absurd to claim for any colony or section a moral superiority in this regard over any other.

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.

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

31

characterized the British system of Imprisonment for Debt, he devoted himself to their reform, and carried through the House an act to this end. His interest in the fortunes of bankrupt and needy debtors led him to plan the establishment of a colony to which they should be invited, and in which they might hope, by industry and prudence, to attain independence. This colony was also intended 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

acquainted with an African prince, 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,

12 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:

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,

was retaliated by a much stronger Spanish expedition, which took Fort St. Simon, on the Altamaha, and might easily have subdued the whole colony, but it was alarmed and repelled by a stratagem of his conception. Oglethorpe soon after returned to England; the trustees finally surrendered 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 description 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 soon 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 figure you ever saw. He perfectly realizes all my ideas of Nestor. His literature is great, his knowledge of the world extensive, and his faculties 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 Biography.

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 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 The enthusiast who imagines that our patriots were all

and

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

convinced of the danger and essential iniquity of Slavery, and the conservative who argues that few or none perceived and admitted the direct application of their logic to the case of men held in perpetual and limitless 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 freemen and the rights of all men everywhere; but the more discerning and logical of the patriots comprehended and confessed that their assertion of the rightful inseparability of Representation from Taxation necessarily affirmed the grander and more essential 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 in all the resolutions of the "grand American Congress in Philadelphia last October." The second resolution is denunciatory of England, in shutting up the land office, and in other oppressive acts. The third is opposed to ministerial 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 influenced by any contracted or interested motive, but a general philanthropy for all mankind, of whatever climate, language, or complexion, we hereby declare our disapprobation and abhorrence 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 timeş to use our utmost efforts for the manumis

The principles of civil and political | arraignment of British tyranny; but liberty, so patiently evolved and so which were, nevertheless, widely and thoroughly commended during the deeply felt to be an important and long controversy which preceded integral portion of our case. Even the appeal to arms, were reduced divested of this, the Declaration to axioms, and became portions of stands to-day an evidence that our the popular faith. When Jeffer- fathers regarded the rule of Great son, in drafting our immortal | Britain as no more destructive to Declaration of Independence, em- their own rights than to the rights of bodied in its preamble a formal and mankind. emphatic assertion of the inalienable Rights of Man, he set forth propositions novel and startling to European 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 passionate 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 slavetrade 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 slaveholding rendered it impolitic to send forth as an integral portion of our

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.

"The following is the indictment of George III., as a patron and upholder of the African slavetrade, 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

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."

3

* Mr. Jefferson, in his Autobiography, gives the following reason for the omission of this remarkable passage from the Declaration as adopted, 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.

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