Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century | Page 7

England; and thus also our colonies.
Time was, even down to the dawn of the Revolution, when every
American colony was slave-holding. Time was when the system was
taught in the schools and preached in the pulpits of all the civilized
world.
It was about the Revolutionary epoch, that is, the last quarter of the

eighteenth century, when the conscience of men began to be active on
the subject of human bondage. We think that the disposition to
recognize the wickedness and impolity of slavery was a part of the
general movement which came on in civilization, tending to
revolutionize not only the political but the social and ethical condition
of mankind. We know well that in our own country, when our political
institutions were in process of formation slavery was courageously
challenged. It was not challenged more audaciously in the Northern
than in the Southern colonies. Some of the latter, as, for example,
Georgia, had at the first excluded slavery as a thing intolerable to
freedom and righteousness. The leading men of the old Southern States
at the close of the last century nearly all repudiated slavery in principle.
They admitted it only in practice and because it was a part of their
inheritance. The patriots, both North and South, were averse not only to
the extension of the area of bondage, but to the existence of it as a fact.
Washington was at heart an anti-slavery man. He wished in his heavy
but wholly patriotic way as heartily as Lincoln wished that all men
might enjoy the blessings of freedom. Jefferson was almost radical on
the question. Though he did not heartily believe in an overruling
Providence, he felt the need of one when he considered the afflictive
system of slavery with which his State and country were encumbered.
He said that considering it he trembled when he remembered that God
is just.
Meanwhile the unprofitableness of slavery in the Northern colonies had
co-operated with the conscience of Puritanism to engender a sentiment
against slavery in that part of the Union. So, although the institution
was tolerated in the Constitution and even had guarantees thrown
around it, it was, nevertheless, disfavored in our fundamental law. One
may readily see how the patriots labored with this portentous question.
Already in Great Britain an anti-slavery sentiment had appeared. There
were anti-slavery leaders, statesmen, philosophers and philanthropists.
By the terms of the Constitution the slave trade should cease in the
year 1808. Sad to reflect that the inventive genius of man and the
prodigality of nature in her gifts of cotton, sugar and rice to the old
South should have produced a reaction in favor of slavery so great as to
fasten it more strongly than ever upon our country.
The fact is, that to all human seeming at the middle of our century

American slavery seemed to be more firmly established than ever
before. Neither the outcry of the Northern abolitionists nor the appeals
of Southern patriots such as Henry Clay, availed to check the
pro-slavery disposition in fully one-half the Union, or to abate the
covert favor with which the institution was regarded in nearly all the
other half.
Meanwhile, however, slavery was suffering and expiring in nearly all
parts of Europe. England began her battle against it even before the
beginning of the century. The work of the philanthropists, begun as far
back as 1786-87, when the Quakers, under the leadership of Clarkson
and Sharpe, began to cry out against the atrocity of human bondage,
now reached the public authorities, and ministers found it necessary to
take heed of what the people were saying and doing. Both Pitt and Fox
became abolitionists before the close of the eighteenth century. The
first attack was against the slave trade. Bills for the abolition of this
trade were passed in 1793-94 by the House of Commons, but were
rejected by the Peers. In 1804 another act was passed; but this also was
rejected by the Lords. So too, the bill of 1805! The agitation continued
during 1806; and in 1807, just after the death of Fox, the slave trade
was abolished in Great Britain.
The abolitionists went straight ahead, however, to attack slavery itself.
The Anti-slavery Society was founded. Clarkson and Wilberforce and
Buxton became the evangels of a new order that was seen far off. It was
not, however, until the great reform agitation of 1832 that the
government really took up the question of the abolition of slavery. The
bill for this purpose was introduced in the House of Commons on the
twenty-third of April, 1833. The process of abolition was to be gradual.
The masters were to be compensated. There were to be periods of
apprenticeship, after which freedom should supervene. Twenty million
pounds were to be appropriated from the