wner by confirming to the
slave his resumption of his natural rights. It is the master's spontaneous
act to bring him to this country; he knows when he brings him that he
divests himself of his property; and it is, in fact, a minor species of
slave trading, when he has thus enfranchised his slave, to _re-capture_
that slave by the necessities of his condition, or by working upon the
better feelings of his heart. Abstractedly from all legal technicalities,
there is no real difference between thus compelling the return of the
enfranchised negro, and trepanning a free native of England by delusive
hopes into perpetual slavery. The most ingenious casuist could not point
out any essential distinction between the two cases. Our boasted liberty
is the dream of imagination, and no longer the characteristic of our
country, if its bulwarks can thus be thrown down by colonial special
pleading. It would well become the character of the present Government to
introduce a Bill into the Legislature making perpetual that freedom which
the slave has acquired by his passage here, and thus to declare, in the
most ample sense of the words, (what indeed we had long fondly believed to
be the fact, though it now appears that we have been mistaken,) THAT
NO SLAVE CAN EXIST WITHIN THE SHORES OF GREAT BRITAIN.
NARRATIVE OF LOUIS ASA-ASA,
A CAPTURED AFRICAN.
The following interesting narrative is a convenient supplement to the
history of Mary Prince. It is given, like hers, as nearly as possible in
the narrator's words, with only so much correction as was necessary to
connect the story, and render it grammatical. The concluding passage in
inverted commas, is entirely his own.
While Mary's narrative shews the disgusting character of colonial slavery,
this little tale explains with equal force the horrors in which it
originates.
It is necessary to explain that Louis came to this country about five
years ago, in a French vessel called the Pearl. She had lost her
reckoning, and was driven by stress of weather into the port of St. Ives,
in Cornwall. Louis and his four companions were brought to London upon a
writ of Habeas Corpus at the instance of Mr. George Stephen; and, after
some trifling opposition on the part of the master of the vessel, were
discharged by Lord Wynford. Two of his unfortunate fellow-sufferers died
of the measles at Hampstead; the other two returned to Sierra Leone; but
poor Louis, when offered the choice of goin
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