ighteenth century not a
single non-slave-holding race or nation on the globe! All were alike
brutalized by the influences and traditions of the ancient system. All
were familiar with it--aye, they were nursed by it; for it has been
one of the strange aspects of human life that the children of the free
have been nursed by the mothers of the enslaved. All races, we repeat,
were alike poisoned with the venom of the serpent. Thus poisoned were
France and Germany. Thus poisoned was England; and thus also our
colonies. Time was, even down to the dawn of the Revolution, when
every American colony was slave-holding. Time was when the system was
taught in the schools and preached in the pulpits of all the civilized
world.

It was about the Revolutionary epoch, that is, the last quarter of the
eighteenth century, when the conscience of men began to be active on
the subject of human bondage. We think that the disposition to
recognize the wickedness and impolity of slavery was a part of the
general movement which came on in civilization, tending to
revolutionize not only the political but the social and ethical
condition of mankind. We know well that in our own country, when our
political institutions were in process of formation slavery was
courageously challenged. It was not challenged more audaciously in
the Northern than in the Southern colonies. Some of the latter, as,
for example, Georgia, had at the first excluded slavery as a thing
intolerable to freedom and righteousness. The leading men of the old
Southern States at the close of the last century nearly all repudiated
slavery in principle. They admitted it only in practice and because it
was a part of their inheritance. The patriots, both North and South,
were averse not only to the extension of the area of bondage, but to
the existence of it as a fact.

Washington was at heart an anti-slavery man. He wished in his heavy
but wholly patriotic way as heartily as Lincoln wished that all men
might enjoy the blessings of freedom. Jefferson was almost radical on
the question. Though he did not heartily believe in an overruling
Providence, he felt the need of one when he considered the afflictive
system of slavery with which his State and country were encumbered. He
said that considering it he trembled when he remembered that God is
just.

Meanwhile the unprofitableness of slavery in the Northern colonies had
co-operated with the conscience of Puritanism to engender a sentime