o see frustrated; secondly, how the men who succeeded
them were led to abandon such hopes and content themselves with a
compromise as to slavery which they trusted would at least keep the
American nation in being.

Among those who signed the Declaration of Independence there were
presumably some of Dr. Johnson's "yelpers." It mattered more that there
were sturdy people who had no idea of giving up slavery and probably did
not relish having to join in protestations about equality. Men like
Jefferson ought to have known well that their associates in South
Carolina and Georgia in particular did not share their aspirations--the
people of Georgia indeed were recent and ardent converts to the slave
system. But these sincere and insincere believers in slavery were the
exceptions; their views did not then seem to prevail even in the greatest
of the slave States, Virginia. Broadly speaking, the American opinion on
this matter in 1775 or in 1789 had gone as far ahead of English opinion,
as English opinion had in turn gone ahead of American, when, in 1833, the
year after the first Reform Bill, the English people put its hand into
its pocket and bought out its own slave owners in the West Indies. The
British Government had forced several of the American Colonies to permit
slavery against their will, and only in 1769 it had vetoed, in the
interest of British trade, a Colonial enactment for suppressing the slave
trade. This was sincerely felt as a part, though a minor part, of the
grievance against the mother country. So far did such views prevail on
the surface that a Convention of all the Colonies in 1774 unanimously
voted that "the abolition of domestic slavery is the greatest object of
desire in those Colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their
infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves in law,
it is necessary to exclude all further importation from Africa." It was
therefore very commonly assumed when, after an interval of war which
suspended such reforms, Independence was achieved, that slavery was a
doomed institution.

Those among the "fathers" whose names are best known in England,
Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Hamilton, were
all opponents of slavery. These include the first four Presidents, and
the leaders of very different schools of thought. Some of them,
Washington and Jefferson at least, had a few slaves of their own.
Washington's attitude to his slaves