CHAPTER I

NEGRO SLAVERY AT THE TIME OF THE FORMATION OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES

In the present aspect of our affairs, that is, considering the jealousies and even the animosities that are becoming more and more intensified between the North and the South, as well as the disposition that is ever increasing in the stronger section to dominate the weaker,-it is becoming necessary to think over calmly and seriously the causes that have produced these evils, and to ascertain, if we can, the remedy, if remedy there be.

It will not be denied that the Federal Constitution was formed by the voluntary action of the several States, and that in the beginning each State was free to join the union by a ratification of the Constitution or to remain a free, separate, sovereign, and independent State by rejecting it.

Different interests and diverse aspirations in the several States were manifested in the Federal Convention of 1787. It was then noted that the main divergence would be marked by lines that separated the Northern States from the Southern. The Northern States were commercial and the Southern agricultural. Because of this difference in pursuits arose diversity of interests and, as a consequence, inharmonious and contradictory views in relation to the powers to be granted to the Federal Government. But the greatest cause of diversity and dissension grew out of the institution of slavery. When this is stated only a half-truth is told. That slavery was then, and has been since, the most prominent of all causes of dissension is true; but it was not so much slavery per se as that diverse views in relation to that institution became the occasion of marking more distinctly the division that naturally grew up with respect to other issues.

At this era, when slavery has been abolished throughout the world and is condemned by the consensus of civilized na

tions, it is difficult to appreciate fully the very different status which that institution occupied in past eras of human history. Slavery and traffic in slaves are older than the records of human society. In Greece slavery antedated the earliest traditions; the father of the Jewish nation was a slaveholder and a purchaser of slaves.1

Except in Australasia, slavery has prevailed in every portion of the globe: the Saxon even carried it in its most repulsive form into England. It was practised by all religions; both the Christian and the Mohammedan indulged in it. The latter left no alternative to Christian captives but apostasy or servitude, and Christians in return treated infidels in the same way.2

The Moors, after the conquest of Granada and their subsequent expulsion from Spain, in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and almost contemporaneously with the discovery of America, settled on the southern shores of the Mediterranean in North Africa and engaged in enslaving Christians.

And the Christians, naming all Africans "Moors," enslaved them in return. Yet Negro slavery is not the invention of the white man, for the earliest accounts of black men attest that Negro masters held black men of their own race as slaves and sold them to others. There were Negro slaves in Greece and Rome.⭑

In 990 A. D. the slave trade was opened by the Moors in Central Africa. About the middle of the fifteenth century there seems to have grown up a prejudice against enslaving Africans as such, and one Gonzales, having imported into Europe Africans that were merely Moors, was commanded to return them, which he did; and the Moors gave him as ransom, not only gold, but black Moors, with curled hair, and thereupon Negroes became objects of commerce."

Not long after the settlement of Virginia Negro slaves were brought here, and even the slavery of whites was permitted for a time in Virginia and New England. "Not the

Scots only," says Bancroft, "who were taken on the field of Dunbar were sold into servitude in New England, but the Royalist prisoners taken at the battle of Worcester." 1 The leaders of the insurrection of Penruddock were shipped to America for sale as slaves.

Slavery existed in all the American colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence. There had been before that date slavery of whites, as we have seen, and also slavery of Indians, as well as of Africans. But in the main the slavery of whites had ceased at that date. Vermont, however, in her constitution of 1777, after declaring the "inherent and unalienable" right of liberty in all men, who were also declared to be born "equally free and independent," provided further: "Therefore, no male person born in this country or brought from over sea ought to be holden by law to serve any person as a servant, slave, or apprentice after his arrival at the age of twenty-one years, nor female in like manner after the arrival at the age of eighteen years, unless they are bound by their own consent, after they arrive at such age, or bound by law for the payment of debts, damages, fines, costs, or the like."

While slavery was recognized in all the colonies as a matter of purely domestic concern, it was at an early day made the subject of protection by interstate compact.

In 1643 A. D. a Confederacy was formed of four New England Colonies,-Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven.2 The articles of this New England Confederacy not only provided for the return of the fugitive slave, but also classed persons among the spoils of war and doomed captured men to slavery; and as early as 1637 Negro slaves were introduced into New England from Providence Isle.

In 1626 Negro slaves were introduced into New York, being brought by way of the West Indies and directly from Guinea. And Bancroft adds: "That New York was not a slave State, like Carolina, is due to climate and not to the superior humanity of its founders." 3

The importation of Negroes into New Jersey was encour1 Bancroft's History, Vol. I, p. 175.

2 Ibid., p. 420.

® Ibid.

aged by a present of seventy-five acres of land for each ablebodied slave imported.1

In Pennsylvania William Penn took care that there should be an agreement that the whites should love the red man, but he himself employed and owned Negro slaves. He chartered and encouraged a society of traders that agreed that after fourteen years' service the negro slave should remain under the severe conditions of adscript of the soil.2

At a later day Penn attempted to legislate, not for the abolition of slavery, but for the sanctity of marriage among slaves and for their personal safety. The latter object was effected. But the former,-sanctity of marriage, which would have been the forerunner of family life and freedom,—was defeated.3

In his will he directed that his own slaves be emancipated, but his direction was not observed by his son, and it seems there was no law in Pennsylvania that could compel him to do so; if there was, public opinion in favor of slavery was so strong that the law could not be enforced.

Although the slavery of whites and Indians was at one time tolerated in the Colonies, it was for obvious reasons discontinued. There was a natural repugnance to the slavery of one man to another. This sentiment secured the freedom of the whites, while the red man was never a profitable slave, and that fact secured his freedom. Bancroft says: Bancroft says: "There is not, in all the Colonial legislation of America,-one law which recognized the rightfulness of slavery in the abstract. The real question at issue was from the first, not one of slavery and freedom generally, but of the relations between the European and African races." The Englishman in America tolerated and enforced, not the slavery of man, but the slavery of the man "who was guilty of a skin not colored as his own. In the skin lay the unexpiated and, as it was held, the inexpiable guilt. To the Negro whom the benevolence of his master enfranchised the path of social equality was not open."

Yet it was not the mere color of his skin as color that constituted the reason of his enslavement, and the denial to him, when free, of social rights and political power, but it was

1 Bancroft's History, Vol. I, p. 420.

2 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 403.

8 Ibid.