and
importance of the slave-trade, which proved to be far more powerful than
the platitudes of many of the Revolutionists had assumed.

The effect of the movement on the slave-trade in general was to begin,
possibly a little earlier than otherwise would have been the case, that
temporary breaking up of the trade which the war naturally caused.
"There was a time, during the late war," says Clarkson, "when the slave
trade may be considered as having been nearly abolished."[28] The prices
of slaves rose correspondingly high, so that smugglers made
fortunes.[29] It is stated that in the years 1772-1778 slave merchants
of Liverpool failed for the sum of L710,000.[30] All this, of course,
might have resulted from the war, without the "Association;" but in the
long run the "Association" aided in frustrating the very designs which
the framers of the first resolve had in mind; for the temporary stoppage
in the end created an extraordinary demand for slaves, and led to a
slave-trade after the war nearly as large as that before.

30. ~The Slave-Trade and Public Opinion after the War.~ The Declaration
of Independence showed a significant drift of public opinion from the
firm stand taken in the "Association" resolutions. The clique of
political philosophers to which Jefferson belonged never imagined the
continued existence of the country with slavery. It is well known that
the first draft of the Declaration contained a severe arraignment of
Great Britain as the real promoter of slavery and the slave-trade in
America. In it the king was charged with waging "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 in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable
death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the
opprobrium of _infidel_ powers, is the warfare of the _Christian_ king
of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where _men_ should be
bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every
legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.
And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished
die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and
to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the
people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes
committed a