The Battle of Principles | Page 5

Hands of an Angry God," he was
the owner of slaves. When that philosopher, whose writings had sent
his name into all Europe, died, he bequeathed a favourite slave to his
descendants. Whitefield was the great evangelist of that era, but
Whitefield during his visit to the colonies purchased a Southern
plantation, stocked it with seventy-five slaves, and when he died
bequeathed it to a relative, whom he characterizes as "an elect lady,"
who, notwithstanding she was "elect," was quite willing to derive her
livelihood from the sweat of another's brow.
And yet even in the Providence plantations, where more slaves were
bought and sold than in any other of the Northern colonies, the traffic
soon began to wane. The simple fact is that the rigour of the climate
and the severity of the winters of New England made the life of the
African brief. The slave was the child of a tropic clime, unaccustomed
to clothing, and the January snows and the March winds soon
developed consumption and chilled to death the child of the tropics. It
was found impracticable to use the black man in either the forests or
fields, and in a short time slaves were purchased only as domestic
servants.
But about 1750 the conscience of New England awakened. Men in the
pulpit took a strong position against the traffic. The Congregational
churches of Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut declared against
slavery and asked the legislatures to adopt the Jewish law,
emancipating all slaves whatsoever at the end of the tenth year of
servitude. A little later, slavery was made illegal in all the New
England colonies, Pennsylvania at length remembered William Penn,
who had freed all his slaves in his will, while the German churches of
that State began to expel all members who were known to have bought
or held a slave. When, therefore, the convention met in Philadelphia, in

1776, preparatory to the Declaration of Independence, the delegates
were able to say that as a whole the Northern colonies had cleansed
their borders of the abuse, and had decided to build their institutions
and civilization upon free labour, as the sure foundation of individual
and social prosperity.
But the antagonism to slavery in the Southern colonies was only less
pronounced, and this, not because of economic reasons, but because of
moral considerations. The Southern climate was friendly to cotton and
tobacco, indigo and rice. These products made heavy demands upon
labour, but white labour was unequal to the intense heat of the Southern
summer and workmen were scarce. During the revolutions under King
Charles I and Charles II and the wars at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, England needed every man at home. Virginia offered high
wages and large land rewards, but it was well-nigh impossible for her
to secure immigrants and the labour she needed. In that hour the captain
of a slave ship appeared in the House of Burgesses and offered to
supply the need, but the people of Virginia instructed the delegates to
the assembly to protest against the traffic. Finally, the colony imposed
a duty upon each slave landing, and made the duty so high as to destroy
the profits of the slave trade. King George was furious with anger, and
sent out a royal proclamation forbidding all interference with the slave
traffic under heavy penalty, and affirming that this trade was "highly
beneficial to the colonies, as well as remunerative to the throne."
Growing more antagonistic to slavery, the planters of Fairfax County
called a convention at which Washington presided. Later, in
Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin brought in the resolutions condemning
slavery as "a wicked, cruel and unjustifiable trade." Soon the leading
men of the Southern colonies sent a formal protest to England. Lord
Mansfield supported them in a decision that in English countries,
governed by English laws, freedom was the rule, and slavery illegal,
unless the colony, through its assembly, expressly legalized the slave
traffic.
When the first convention met in Philadelphia, Jefferson included
among the articles of indictment against George the Third this
paragraph: "He has waged cruel war against human nature 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 or to incur a miserable death in the transportation thither."
This passage, however, was struck out of the Declaration in compliance
with the wishes of the delegates from two colonies, who desired to
continue slavery. But in 1784 Jefferson reopened the question by
reporting an ordinance prohibiting slavery after the year 1800 in the
territory that afterwards became Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and
Kentucky, as well as the territory north of the Ohio River. This
anti-slavery clause was lost in the convention by only a single vote.
"The voice of a