strain, but
had always fostered the slave trade. Jefferson, in his _Autobiography_
(vol. i, p. 19), suggests that other sections sympathized with
Georgia and South Carolina in this matter.

"Our Northern brethren . . . felt a little tender under these
censures: for though their people had very few slaves themselves,
yet they had been considerable carriers of them to others."

Jefferson said King George preferred the advantage:

"of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American
States and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this
infamous practice."(10)

While it is not true, as has often been claimed, that England is
solely responsible for the introduction of slavery into her American
colonies, it is true that her King and Parliament opposed almost
every attempt to prohibit it or to restrict the importation of
slaves. Colonial legislative enactments of Virginia and other
colonies directed against slavery were vetoed by the King or by
his command by his royal governors. Such governors were early
forbidden to give their assent to any measure restricting slavery
in the American colonies, and this policy was pursued until the
colonies became independent.(11)

The treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States,
signed at Paris, September 3, 1783, contained a stipulation that
Great Britain should withdraw her armies from the United States
"with all convenient speed, and without causing any destruction,
or _carrying_ away any _negroes or other property_ of the American
inhabitants." Both governments thus openly recognized, not only
the existence of slavery in the United States, but that slaves were
merely _property_.

While slavery was deeply seated in the colonies and had many
advocates, including noted divines, who preached the "divinity of
slavery," there were, in 1776, and earlier, many great men, South
as well as North, who looked confidently to an early emancipation
of slaves, and who were then active in suppressing the African
slave trade, among whom were Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and
the two Adamses.

Washington presided at a "Fairfax County Convention," before the
Revolution. It resolved that "no slaves ought to be imported into
any of the British colonies"; and Washington himself expressed "the
most earnest wish to see an entire stop forever put to such a
wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade."(12)

John Wesley, when fully acquainted with American slaver