How fortunate it is that the ugly question of secession has been settled, and will never again divide Americans, or those who come to America!
CHAPTER II
EMANCIPATION PRIOR TO 1831
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and American vessels brought many thousands of negroes from Africa, and sold them as slaves in the British West Indies and in the British-American colonies. William Goodell, a distinguished Abolitionist writer, tells us[7] that "in the importation of slaves for the Southern colonies the merchants of New England competed with those of New York and the South" (which never had much shipping). "They appear indeed to have outstripped them, and to have almost monopolized at one time the profits of this detestable trade. Boston, Salem, and Newburyport in Massachusetts, and Newport and Bristol in Rhode Island, amassed, in the persons of a few of their citizens, vast sums of this rapidly acquired and ill-gotten wealth."[7]
The slaves coming to America went chiefly to the Southern colonies, because there only was slave labor profitable. The laws and conditions under which these negroes were sold in the American colonies were precisely the same as in the West Indies, except that the whites in the islands, so far as is known, never objected, whereas the records show that earnest protests came from Virginia[8] and also from Georgia[9] and North Carolina.[10] The King of England was interested in the profits of the iniquitous trade and all protests were in vain.
Of the rightfulness, however, of slavery itself there was but little question in the minds of Christian peoples until the closing years of the eighteenth century. Then the cruelties practised by ship-masters in the Middle Passage attracted attention, and then came gradually a revolution in public opinion. This revolution, in which the churches took a prominent part, originated in England, but it soon swept over America also, both North and South.
England abolished the slave trade in 1807. The United States followed in 1808; the Netherlands in 1814; France in 1818; Spain in 1820; Portugal in 1830. The great Wilberforce, Buxton, and others, who had brought about the abolition of the slave trade in England, continued their exertions in favor of the slave until finally, in 1833, Parliament abolished slavery in the British West Indies, appropriating twenty millions sterling ($100,000,000) as compensation to owners—this because investments in slave property had been made under the sanction of existing law.
"Great Britain, loaded with an unprecedented debt and with a grinding taxation, contracted a new debt of a hundred millions of dollars to give freedom, not to Englishmen, but to the degraded African. This was not an act of policy, but the work of statesmen. Parliament but registered the edict of the people. The English nation, with one heart and one voice, under a strong Christian impulse and without distinction of rank, sex, party, or religious names, decreed freedom to the slave. I know not that history records a national act so disinterested, so sublime."