16 SLAVERY IN VIRGINIA tensified by the bitterness and partizanship with which, during the three decades immediately preceding the Civil War, the subject had become invested; To present the situation with respect to the controversy at the time Virginia seceded from the Union; and finally, To consider the effects, if any, upon her position, of President Lincoln's Proclamations of Emancipation issued subsequent thereto. African slaves were first brought to Virginia in 1619 by a Dutch vessel.George W. Williams, the negro historian of his race in America, says, "It is due to the Virginia colony to say that the slaves were forced upon them."1 Though slaves were thus introduced as early as 1619, it was not until 1661 that the institution of slavery was recognized in Virginia by statute law.' For a long period after their first introduction, very few slaves were imported. At the end of the first halfcentury there were only some two thousand, and as late as the year 1715 they numbered only about twenty-five thousand. In the sixty years, however, immediately preceding the Revolution, they came in ever-increasing numbers, so that at the latter date they almost equalled the white population of the colony. With the great increase of this element in the population, the colonists were quick to realize their danger and numerous acts were passed by the Colonial Legislature designed to lessen, if not actually to stop, further im 'History of the Negro Race in America, Williams, Vol. 1, p. 119. "History of Slavery in Virginia, Ballagh, p. 34. "History of the Negro Race in America, Williams, Vol. 1, p. 133. 'A letter from the celebrated Colonel William Byrd of "Westover" to Lord Egmont, under date of July 12, 1736, will serve to illustrate this fact. Colonel Byrd writes, "Your Lord's opinion concerning Rum and Negroes is certainly very just, and your VIRGINIA'S COLONIAL RECORD 17 portations. Alluding to these efforts of the Virginia people, Mr. Bancroft says: "Again and again they had passed laws restraining the importation of negroes from Africa, but their laws were disallowed. How to prevent them from protecting themselves against the increase of the overwhelming evil was debated by the King in Council; and on the 10th of December, 1770, he issued an instruction under his own hand commanding the Governor 'upon pain of the highest displeasure, to assent to no laws by which the importation of slaves should be in any respect prohibited or obstructed."" Edmund Burke, in his speech on conciliating America, in response to the suggestion that the slaves might be freed and used against the colonies, said, "Dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from the very nation which excluding both of them from your colony of Georgia will be very happy... I wish, my Lord, we could be blessed with the same prohibition. They import so many negroes here that I fear this colony will some time or other be confirmed by the name of New Guinea. I am sensible of the many bad consequences of multiplying the Ethiopians amongst us. They blow up the pride and ruin the Industry of our White People, who seeing a Rank of poor creatures below them, detest work for fear it should make them look like slaves. Then that poverty which will ever attend upon Idleness disposes them as much to pilfer as it does the Portuguese. But these private mischiefs are nothing if compared to the publick danger. It were therefore worth the consideration of a British Parliament, my Lord, to put an end to this unchristian traffick of making merchandise of our Fellow Creatures. At least, the further importation of them into our Colony should be prohibited lest they prove as troublesome and dangerous elsewhere as they have been lately in Jamaica. . . . All these matters duly considered, I wonder the Legislature will Indulge a few ravenous traders to the danger of the Publick Safety." (From Unpublished Byrd Manuscripts at Lower Brandon, Va.) 'History of United States, Bancroft, Vol. III, p. 410. 18 EFFORTS TO EXCLUDE SLAVES had sold them to their present masters-from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic. An offer of freedom from England would come rather oddly, shipped to them in an African vessel, which is refused an entry into the ports of Virginia or Carolina, with a cargo of three hundred Angola Negroes." In addition to legislative enactments, appeals were addressed directly to the throne. But the great personages interested in the slave trade proved more influential with the King than the prayers of his imperilled people. There is something at once pathetic and prophetic in the appeals made by these Virginians to their sovereign against the slave trade. The petition presented by the House of Burgesses in 1772 recites: "We implore your Majesty's paternal assistance in averting a calamity of a most alarming nature. The importation of slaves into the colonies from the coast of Africa hath long been considered as a trade of great inhumanity, and under its present encouragement we have too much reason to fear will endanger the very existence of your Majesty's American dominions. We are sensible that some of your Majesty's subjects may reap emoluments from this sort of traffic, but when we consider that it greatly retards the settlement of the colonies with more useful inhabitants and may in time have the most destructive influence, we presume to hope that the interests of a few will be disregarded when placed in competition with the security and happiness of such numbers of your Majesty's dutiful and loyal subjects. We, therefore, beseech your Majesty to remove all these restraints on your Majesty's Governor in this colony which inhibits their assenting to such laws as might check so pernicious a consequence. 1 Burke's Works, Little, Brown & Co.'s. Ed., Vol. II, p. 135. 'Journal of House of Burgesses, p. 131, and Tucker's Blackstone, appendix, note H. Vol. II, p. 351. 1 ORIGINAL DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 19 This petition was reported from a Committee of the House which included Edmund Pendleton, Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Harrison and others of equal prominence.1 But the King and Ministers continued to turn deaf ears and except with respect to more moderate measures the Royal Veto was interposed to annul all anti-slavery laws. Chief among the causes which aroused the opposition of the Virginia colonists and placed them in the forefront of the Revolution was the course of the King with respect to this momentous subject. When Thomas Jefferson came to write the Declaration of Independence and to epitomize the grounds of indictment which the colonists presented against the British King, it was the latter's veto of the laws passed by Virginia to suppress the slave trade, and the active aid lent by his Government to force the captives of Africa upon his defenseless subjects, that evoked the fiercest arraignment in that historic document. Mr. Jefferson declared: "George the Third has waged cruel war against humanity itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people who never offended him; captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative by 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 these very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of 'Defense of Virginia, Dabney, p. 48. 20 REASONS FOR AMENDING DECLARATION which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." "These words," says Mr. Bancroft, "expressed precisely what had happened in Virginia." That this portion of the Declaration was stricken out by Congress before its formal presentation to the world does not negative the fact that, in thus declaring, Mr. Jefferson proclaimed the sentiments of his native state. It was ominous of her future experience with respect to this baneful subject, that the voice of Virginia was then silenced in deference to the states of the far South and certain of their Northern sisters. Mr. Jefferson has left upon record that this clause in the Declaration of Independence was stricken out: "In compliance 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 these censures, for though their people had very few slaves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others." The biographers of Abraham Lincoln, Nicolay and Hay, say: "The objections of South Carolina and Georgia sufficed to cause the erasure and suppression of the obnoxious paragraph. Nor were the Northern States guiltless; Newport was yet a great slave mart, and the commerce of 'History of United States, Bancroft, Vol. IV, p. 445. |