us legislation was to mitigate the horrors which the poor negroes
endured on board ship, or to prevent wives from being sold away from
their husbands or children from their parents. Such was the outlook to
one of the greatest political philosophers of modern times just
eighty-two years before the immortal proclamation of President Lincoln!
But how vast was the distance between Burke and Bossuet, who had
declared about eighty years earlier that "to condemn slavery was to
condemn the Holy Ghost!" It was equally vast between Burke and his
contemporary Thurlow, who in 1799 poured out the vials of his wrath upon
"the altogether miserable and contemptible" proposal to abolish the
slave-trade. George III. agreed with his chancellor, and resisted the
movement for abolition with all the obstinacy of which his hard and
narrow nature was capable. In 1769 the Virginia legislature had enacted
that the further importation of negroes, to be sold into slavery, should
be prohibited. But George III. commanded the governor to veto this act,
and it was vetoed. In Jefferson's first-draft of the Declaration of
Independence, this action of the king was made the occasion of a fierce
denunciation of slavery, but in deference to the prejudices of South
Carolina and Georgia the clause was struck out by Congress. When George
III. and his vetoes had been eliminated from the case, it became
possible for the states to legislate freely on the subject. In 1776
negro slaves were held in all the thirteen states, but in all except
South Carolina and Georgia there was a strong sentiment in favour of
emancipation. In North Carolina, which contained a large Quaker
population, and in which estates were small and were often cultivated by
free labour, the pro-slavery feeling was never so strong as in the
southernmost states. In Virginia all the foremost statesmen--Washington,
Jefferson, Lee, Randolph, Henry, Madison, and Mason--were opposed to the
continuance of slavery; and their opinions were shared by many of the
largest planters. For tobacco-culture slavery did not seem so
indispensable as for the raising of rice and indigo; and in Virginia the
negroes, half-civilized by kindly treatment, were not regarded with
horror by their masters, like the ill-treated and ferocious blacks of
South Carolina and Georgia. After 1808 the policy and the sentiments of
Virginia underwent a marked change. The invention of the cotton-gin,
taken in connection with the sudden and p