Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century | Page 8

national treasury to pay the
expenses of the abolition process.
It was on the seventh of August, 1833, that this bill was adopted by the
House of Commons. Two weeks afterward the House of Lords assented,
and on the twenty-eighth of August the royal assent was given. The
emancipation, however, was set for the first of August, 1834; and this
is the date from which the abolition of slavery in Great Britain and her
dependencies may be said to have occurred. In some parts, however,

the actual process of extinguishing slavery lagged. It was not until 1843
that the 12,000,000 of slaves under British control in the empire were
emancipated.
The virtual extinction of human slavery in the present century, presents
a peculiar ethnical study. Among the Latin races, the French were the
first to move for emancipation. It appears that the infusion of Gallic
blood, as well as the large influence of the Frankish nations in the
production of the modern French, has given to that people a bias in
favor of liberty. All the other Latin races have lagged behind; but,
France foreran even Great Britain in the work of abolition. Scarcely
had the great Revolution of 1789 got under way, until an act of
abolition conceding freedom to all men without regard to race or color
was adopted by the National Assembly.
It was on the fifteenth of May, 1791, that this great act was passed. One
of the darkest aspects of the character of Napoleon I. was the favor
which he showed to the project of restoring slavery in the French
colonies. But that project was in vain. The blow of freedom once struck
produced its everlasting results. Though slavery lingered for nearly a
half century in some of the French colonies, it survived there only
because of the revolutions in the home government which prevented its
final extinction. Acts were passed for the utter extirpation of the system
during the reign of Louis Philippe, and again in the time of the Second
Republic.
Meanwhile, the northern nations proceeded with the work of abolition.
In Sweden slavery ceased in 1847. In the following year Denmark
passed an Act of Emancipation. But the Netherlands did not follow in
the good work until the year 1860. The Spaniards and Portuguese have
been among the last to cling to the system of human servitude. In the
outlying possessions of Spain, in Spanish America and elsewhere, the
institution still maintains a precarious existence. In Brazil it was not
abolished until 1871. In the Mohammedan countries it still exists, and
may even be said to flourish. In Russia serfdom was abolished in 1863.
He who at that date looked abroad over the world, might see the pillars
of human bondage shaken, and falling in every part of the habitable
globe which had been reclaimed by civilization.
In the meantime, Great Britain, in her usual aggressive way, had
established an anti-slavery propaganda, from which strong influences

extended in every direction. Her Anti-slavery Society re-established
itself in the United States. Abolition candidates for the presidency
began to be heard of and to be voted for at every quadrennial election.
Such was Birney in 1844. Such (strange to say) was Martin Van Buren
in 1848. Such four years afterward was John P. Hale, of New
Hampshire, and such in 1856, as the storm came on, was John C.
Fremont.
The political history of the United States shows at this epoch an
astounding growth of anti-slavery sentiment; and this expanding force
culminated in the election of Lincoln. Great, indeed, was the change
which had already swept over the landscape of American thought and
purpose since the despised Birney, in 1844, received only a few
thousand votes in the whole United States. Now the Rail-splitter had
come! The tocsin of war sounded. The Union was rent. War with its
flames of fire and streams of blood devastated the Republic. But the
bow of promise was set on the dark background of the receding storm.
American slavery was swept into oblivion, and the end of the third
quarter of the century saw such a condition established in both the New
World and the Old, as made the restoration of human bondage forever
impossible.
Not until the present order of civilization shall be destroyed will man
be permitted again to hold his fellow-man in servitude. The chain that
was said "to follow the mother," making all her offspring to be slaves;
the manacles and fetters with which the weak were bound and
committed to the mercies of heartless traders; all of the insignia and
apparatus of the old atrocious system of bondage, have been heaped
together and cast out with the rubbish and offal of the civilized life into
the valley of Gehenna. There the whole shall be burned with