r to starve,
suffocate, mutilate, torture, or murder a black man in whom he had
acquired a property right by the simple process of kidnapping required
more than half a century to attain complete success.

The first serious blow to the slave-trade fell in 1772, when an English
court declared that any slave coming into England straightway became free.
That closed all English ports to the slavers. Two years after the American
colonists, then on the threshold of the revolt against Great Britain,
thought to put America on a like high plane, and formally resolved that
they would "not purchase any slave imported after the first day of
December next; after which time, we will wholly discontinue the
slave-trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we
hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who
are concerned in it." But to this praiseworthy determination the colonists
were unable to live up, and in 1776, when Jefferson proposed to put into
the Declaration of Independence the charge that the British King had
forced the slave-trade on the colonies, a proper sense of their own guilt
made the delegates oppose it.

It was in England that the first earnest effort to break up the
slave-trade began. It was under the Stars and Stripes that the slavers
longest protected their murderous traffic. For a time the effort of the
British humanitarians was confined to the amelioration of the conditions
of the trade, prescribing space to be given each slave, prescribing
surgeons, and offering bounties to be paid captains who lost less than two
per cent. of their cargoes on the voyage. It is not recorded that the
bounty was often claimed. On the contrary, the horrors of what was called
"the middle passage" grew with the greed of the slave captains. But the
revelations of inhumanity made during the parliamentary investigation were
too shocking for even the indifferent and callous public sentiment of that
day. Humane people saw at once that to attempt to regulate a traffic so
abhorrent to every sense of humanity, was for the nation to go into
partnership with murderers and manstealers, and so the demand for the
absolute prohibition of the traffic gained strength from the futile
attempt to regulate it. Bills for its abolition failed, now in the House
of Lords, then in the House of Commons; but in 1807 a law prohibiting all
participation in the trade by British ships or subjects was passed. The
United Sta