s, 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