CHAPTER XXX. INTRODUCTION OF BLACKS INTO THE AMERICAN COLONIES.
Simultaneously with the landing of the Pilgrims from the Mayflower, on Plymouth Rock, December 22d, 1620, a clumsy-looking brig, old and dirty, with paint nearly obliterated from every part, slowly sailed up the James River, and landed at Jamestown. The short, stout, fleshy appearance of the men in charge of the vessel, and the five empty sour-crout barrels which lay on deck, told plainly in what country the navigators belonged.
Even at that early day they had with them their “native beverage,” which, though not like the lager of the present time, was a drink over which they smoked and talked of “Farderland,” and traded for the negroes they brought. The settlers of Jamestown, and indeed, all Virginia at that time, were mainly cavaliers, gentlemen-adventurers, aspiring to live by their wits and other men’s labor. Few of the pioneers cherished any earnest liking for downright persistent muscular exertion, yet some exertion was urgently required to clear away the heavy forest which all but covered the soil of the infant colony, and to grow the tobacco which easily became the staple export by means of which nearly everything required by its people but food was to be paid for in England.
The landing of the twenty slaves from the Dutch brig was the signal for all sorts of adventurers to embark in the same nefarious traffic. Worn-out and unseaworthy European ships, brigs, barks, schooners, and indeed, everything else that could float, no matter how unsafe, were brought into requisition to supply the demand for means of transportation in the new commerce.
Thousands of persons incarcerated in the prisons of the old world were liberated upon condition that they would man these slave-trading vessels. The discharged convicts were used in the slave factories on the African coast, and even the marauding expeditions sent out from the slave ships in search of victims were mainly made up of this vile off-cast and scum of the prison population of England, France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal. So great was the increase of this traffic, that in a short time the importation in a single year amounted to forty thousand slaves.
The immense growth of the slave population in the Southern States, soon caused politicians to take sides for or against the institution. This, however, did not manifest itself to any very great extent, until the struggle for National Independence was over, and the people, North and South, began to look at their interests connected with each section of the country.
At the time that the Declaration of Independence was put forth, no authentic enumeration had been made; but when the first census was taken in 1791, the total number of slaves in what are now known as the Northern States, was forty thousand three hundred and seventy; in the Southern, six hundred and fifty-three thousand nine hundred and ten.
It is very common at this day to speak of our revolutionary struggle as commenced and hurried forward by a union of free and slave colonies; but such is not the fact. However slender and dubious its legal basis, slavery existed in each and all of the colonies that united to declare and maintain their Independence. Slaves were proportionately more numerous in certain portions of the South; but they were held with impunity throughout the North, advertised like dogs or horses, and sold at auction, or otherwise, as chattels. Vermont, then a territory in dispute between New Hampshire and New York, and with very few civilized inhabitants, mainly on its southern and eastern borders, is probably the only portion of the revolutionary confederation never polluted by the tread of a slave.
The spirit of liberty, aroused or intensified by the protracted struggle of the colonists against usurped and abused power in the mother-country, soon found itself engaged in natural antagonism against the current form of domestic despotism.
“How shall we complain of arbitrary or unlimited power exerted over us, while we exert a still more despotic and inexcusable power over a dependent and benighted race?” was very fairly asked. Several suits were brought in Massachusetts—where the fires of liberty burned earliest and brightest—to test the legal right of slaveholding; and the leading Whigs gave their money and their legal services to support these actions, which were generally on one ground or another, successful. Efforts for an express law of emancipation, however, failed, even in Massachusetts; the Legislature doubtless apprehended that such a measure, by alienating the slaveholders, would increase the number and power of the Tories; but in 1777, a privateer having brought a lot of captured slaves into Jamaica, and advertised them for sale, the General Court, as the legislative assembly was called, interfered, and had them set at liberty. The first Continental Congress which resolved to resist the usurpations and oppressions of Great Britain by force, had already declared that our struggle would be “for the cause of human nature,” which the Congress of 1776, under the lead of Thomas Jefferson, expanded into the noble affirmation of the right of “all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” contained in the immortal preamble to the Declaration of Independence. A like averment that “all men are born free and equal,” was in 1780 inserted in the Massachusetts Bill of Rights; and the Supreme Court of that State, in 1783, on an indictment of a master for assault and battery, held this declaration a bar to slave-holding henceforth in the State.
A similar clause in the second Constitution of New Hampshire, was held by the courts of that State to secure freedom to every child born therein after its adoption. Pennsylvania, in 1780, passed an act prohibiting the further introduction of slaves, and securing freedom to all persons born in that State thereafter. Connecticut and Rhode Island passed similar acts in 1784. Virginia, in 1778, on motion of Mr. Jefferson, prohibited the further importation of slaves; and in 1782, removed all legal restrictions on emancipation. Maryland adopted both of these in 1783. North Carolina, in 1786, declared the introduction of slaves into the State “of evil consequences and highly impolitic,” and imposed a duty of £5 per head thereon. New York and New Jersey followed the example of Virginia and Maryland, including the domestic in the same interdict with the foreign slave-trade. Neither of these states, however, declared a general emancipation until many years thereafter, and slavery did not wholly cease in New York until about 1830, nor in New Jersey till a much later date. The distinction of free and slave states, with the kindred assumption of a natural antagonism between the North and South, was utterly unknown to the men of the Revolution.