enty-eight since a Massachusetts
vessel returned from the Bahamas with negro slaves for a part of its
cargo, two hundred and twenty years since men of Boston introduced them
directly from Guinea. Slavery in the United States had not its origin in
British policy: it sprung up among Americans themselves, who in that
respect acquiesced in the customs and morals of the age. But at a later
day the importation of slaves was insisted upon by the government of the
mother country, under the influence of mercantile avarice, with the
further purpose of weakening the rising Colonies, and impeding the
establishment among them of branches of industry that might compete with
the productions of England. Climate and the logical consequences of the
principles of the Puritans checked the increase of slaves in
Massachusetts, from which it gradually disappeared without the necessity
of any special act of manumission; in Virginia, the country within the
reach of tide-water was crowded with negroes, and the marts were
supplied by continuous importations, which the Colony was not suffered
to prohibit or restrain.

The middle of the eighteenth century was marked by a rising of opinion
in favor of freedom. The statesmen of Massachusetts read the great work
of Montesquieu on the Spirit of Laws; and in bearing their first very
remarkable testimony against slavery, they simply adopted his words,
repeated without passion,--for they had no dread of the increase of
slavery within their own borders, and never doubted of its speedy and
natural decay. The great men of Virginia, on the contrary, were struck
with terror as they contemplated its social condition; they drew their
lessons, not from France, not from abroad, but from themselves and the
scenes around them; and half in the hope of rescuing that ancient
Commonwealth from the corrupting element of slavery, and half in the
agony of despair, they went in advance of all the world in their
reprobation of the slave-trade and of slavery, and of the dangerous
condition of the white man as the master of bondmen. In the years
preceding the war of the Revolution, the Ancient Dominion rocked with
the strife of contending parties: the King with all his officers and
many great slaveholders on the one side, against a hardy people in the
back country and the best of the slaveholders themselves. On the side of
liberty many were conspicuous,--among them Richard Henry Lee, George
Wythe, Jefferson, who from his youth