was the pride of Virginia; but all
were feeble in comparison with the enthusiastic fervor and prophetic
instincts of George Mason. They reasoned, that slavery was inconsistent
with Christianity, was in conflict with the rights of man; that it was a
slow poison, daily contaminating the minds and morals of their people;
that, by reducing a part of their own species to abject inferiority,
they lost the idea of the dignity of man, which the hand of Nature had
implanted within them for great and useful purposes; that, by the habit
from infancy of trampling on the rights of human nature, every liberal
sentiment was extinguished or enfeebled; that every gentleman was born a
petty tyrant, and by the practice of cruelty and despotism became
callous to the finer dictates of the soul; that in such an infernal
school were to be educated the future legislators and rulers of
Virginia. And before the war broke out, the House of Burgesses of
Virginia was warned of the choice that lay before them: either the
Constitution must by degrees work itself clear by its own innate
strength and the virtue and resolution of the community, or the laws of
impartial Providence would avenge on their posterity the injury done to
a class of unhappy men debased by their injustice.

At the opening of the war of the Revolution, the Narragansett country of
Rhode Island, the Southern part of Long Island, New York City and the
counties on the Hudson, and East New Jersey had in their population
about as large a proportion of slaves as Missouri four years ago. In all
the Colonies collectively the black men were to the white men as five to
twenty-one. The British authorities unanimously held that the master
lost his claim to his slave by the act of rebellion. In Virginia a
system of emancipation was inaugurated; and the emancipation of slaves
by success in arms Jefferson pronounced to be right. But the system of
emancipation took no large proportions: partly because the invaders in
the beginning of the war were driven from the Chesapeake; partly because
the large slaveholders of South Carolina, on the subjugation of the low
country in that State, renewed their allegiance to the Crown; and partly
because British officers chose to ship slaves of rebels to the markets
of the West Indies. Yet the continued occupation of Rhode Island, Long
Island, and New York City, and the exodus of slaves with other refugees
at the time of peace, facilitated the movements in Rhode