Against human nature.
When her great son,
Mr. Jefferson, came to pen the
Declaration of Independence, and to arraign the
King for his veto of these enactments, he declared that George III ‘has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of distant people who never offended him, captivating them and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.’ * * * ‘This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the
Christian King of
Great Britain.
Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.’
This clause in the
Declaration of Independence was omitted from the draft adopted by Congress.
Jefferson declares in his autobiography
[
77]
that it ‘was struck out in compliance to
South Carolina and
Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures, for though their people had very few slaves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.’
In October, 1778, the General Assembly of
Virginia, then freed from the control of the
British King, passed an act forever prohibiting the further importation of slaves into her Commonwealth.
When she ceded to the
Union the great northwest territory, won by the blood and the treasure of her people, she not only dedicated to the general government this imperial empire, but by the hand of her sons,
Edward Carrington and
Richard Henry Lee, constituting with
Nathan Dane, of
Massachusetts, a special committee, prepared the celebrated ordinance of 1787 for its government, in which it was provided that slavery should never exist in all that wide territory.
