cial committee, draughted a bill
repealing the prohibition. On the 26th of October, 1749, a large and
influential committee of twenty-seven drew up and signed a petition
urging the immediate introduction of slavery, with certain
limitations. The paper was duly attested, and returned to the
trustees. The opposition to the introduction of slavery into the
colony of Georgia had been conquered; and, after a long and bitter
struggle, slavery was firmly and legally established in this the last
Province of the English in the Western world. The colonists were
jubilant.

The charter under which the trustees acted expired by limitation in
1752, and a new form of government was established under the Board of
Trade. The royal commission appointed a governor and council. One of
the first ordinances enacted by them was one whereby "all offences
committed by slaves were to be tried by a single justice, without a
jury, who was to award execution, and, in capital cases, to set a
value on the slave, to be paid out of the public treasury." At the
first session of the Assembly in 1755, a law was passed "_for the
regulation and government of slaves_." In 1765 an Act was passed
establishing a pass system, and the rest of the legislation in respect
to slaves was a copy of the laws of South Carolina.

The history of slavery in Georgia during this period is unparalleled
and incomparably interesting. It illustrates the power of the
institution, and shows that there was no Province sufficiently
independent of its influence so as to expel it from its jurisdiction.
Like the Angel of Death that passed through Egypt, there was no colony
that it did not smite with its dark and destroying pinions. The
dearest, the sublimest, interests of humanity were prostrated by its
defiling touch. It shut out the sunlight of human kindness; it paled
the fires of hope; it arrested the development of the branches of
men's better natures, and peopled their lower being with base and
consuming desires; it placed the "_Golden Rule_" under the unholy heel
of time-servers and self-seekers; it made the Church as secular as the
Change, and the latter as pious as the former: it was a gigantic
system, at war with the civilization of the Roundheads and Puritans,
and an intolerable burden to a people who desired to build a new
nation in this New World in the West.

FOOTNOTES:

[514] Stephens's Journal, vol. iii. p. 281.

[515] Freedom and Bondage, vol. i. p. 310, note.