Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century / Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World

by Unknown

Washington was at heart an anti-slavery man. He wished in his heavy but wholly patriotic way as heartily as Lincoln wished that all men might enjoy the blessings of freedom. Jefferson was almost radical on the question. Though he did not heartily believe in an overruling Providence, he felt the need of one when he considered the afflictive system of slavery with which his State and country were encumbered. He said that considering it he trembled when he remembered that God is just.

Meanwhile the unprofitableness of slavery in the Northern colonies had co-operated with the conscience of Puritanism to engender a sentiment against slavery in that part of the Union. So, although the institution was tolerated in the Constitution and even had guarantees thrown around it, it was, nevertheless, disfavored in our fundamental law. One may readily see how the patriots labored with this portentous question. Already in Great Britain an anti-slavery sentiment had appeared. There were anti-slavery leaders, statesmen, philosophers and philanthropists. By the terms of the Constitution the slave trade should cease in the year 1808. Sad to reflect that the inventive genius of man and the prodigality of nature in her gifts of cotton, sugar and rice to the old South should have produced a reaction in favor of slavery so great as to fasten it more strongly than ever upon our country.

The fact is, that to all human seeming at the middle of our century American slavery seemed to be more firmly established than ever before. Neither the outcry of the Northern abolitionists nor the appeals of Southern patriots such as Henry Clay, availed to check the pro-slavery disposition in fully one-half the Union, or to abate the covert favor with which the institution was regarded in nearly all the other half.

Meanwhile, however, slavery was suffering and expiring in nearly all parts of Europe. England began her battle against it even before the beginning of the century. The work of the philanthropists, begun as far back as 1786-87, when the Quakers, under the leadership of Clarkson and Sharpe, began to cry out against the atrocity of human bondage, now reached the public authorities, and ministers found it necessary to take heed of what the people were saying and doing. Both Pitt and Fox became abolitionists before the close of the eighteenth century. The first attack was against the slave trade. Bills for the abolition of this trade were passed in 1793-94 by the House of Commons, but were rejected by the Peers. In 1804 another act was passed; but this also was rejected by the Lords. So too, the bill of 1805! The agitation continued during 1806; and in 1807, just after the death of Fox, the slave trade was abolished in Great Britain.

The abolitionists went straight ahead, however, to attack slavery itself. The Anti-slavery Society was founded. Clarkson and Wilberforce and Buxton became the evangels of a new order that was seen far off. It was not, however, until the great reform agitation of 1832 that the government really took up the question of the abolition of slavery. The bill for this purpose was introduced in the House of Commons on the twenty-third of April, 1833. The process of abolition was to be gradual. The masters were to be compensated. There were to be periods of apprenticeship, after which freedom should supervene. Twenty million pounds were to be appropriated from the 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.