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 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."[[11]]
"These words," says Mr. Bancroft, "expressed precisely what had happened in Virginia."
REASONS FOR AMENDING DECLARATION
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."[[12]]
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 New England drew more advantages from the traffic than did the agriculture of the South."[[13]]
VIRGINIA'S ANTI-SLAVERY SENTIMENTS, 1774
But the position of Virginia with respect to slavery and the vetoes of George III and the slave trade was not left to be determined by unofficial utterances though coming from one of her greatest sons. As early as 1774 her people registered their sentiments in the most varied and emphatic forms. Mass meetings in many of the counties adopted resolutions, the purport and tenor of which may be gathered from those of Fairfax County,—"We take the opportunity of declaring our most earnest wishes to see an entire stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel and unnatural trade."[[14]]