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He had before this tried to induce the Virginia law-makers to legalize manumission, and in 1778 succeeded in having them forbid importation of slaves. Dr.
But supposing the war to have ceased, either by the success of the Northern arms or by the consent of both belligerents, the question of manumission in the Southern States when reduced to the condition of territories or restored to the sway of their own elected governors and legislatures, though difficult, is by no means one of insuperable difficulty; and I do not believe that a great nation of Englishmen, having once the will to rid itself of a danger and a disgrace, will fail to find a way.
Her father wrote of the loss of his own wife; and as the size and color of Maria answered to the description of his own wife, as recorded on his manumission papers, be proposed to take Maria and the children a few miles away in the night, where they would be kept secreted until the excitement of hunting for them was over, when he proposed to take them a night's journey northward.
Enough may have been said in the foregoing pages, to prove that something yet remains to be done to effect the manumission of the African, and preserve the important branches of commerce, which necessity has allied with the slave trade; and I entreat my readers to give this subject that dispassionate consideration which its merits require, and beg to assure them, that I obtrude my suggestions upon their notice with great submission and diffidence, trusting that what may appear in my system deficient, others more competent will embrace the subject, and excite the beneficence of my country in behalf of the African, promote civilization and Christian society in his country, display its arcana of wealth to the world, and open a path to its commerce, free and unobscured.
For the next ten years manumission went on at the rate of 8000 a year. Afterward the law was made more restrictive. Massachusetts adopted in 1780 a constitution and bill of rights, asserting, as the Declaration had done, that all men are born free and have an equal and inalienable right to defend their lives and liberties, to acquire property and to seek and obtain freedom and happiness.
The action of those three Legislatures marked the height of the early anti-slavery tide, and prompted a hope which was never fulfilled. The Manumission Society of North Carolina in 1825 took a kind of census of the State, and concluded that of its people 60 in 100 favored emancipation in some form.
The next day the chief alderman of Nuceria interrogated me at the town hall, praised me, declared that I had saved the town many horrors and much damage and loss, and asked me what reward I craved. I answered, boldly, that what I craved was what all slaves craved: freedom. Such a manumission would be difficult to arrange and its arrangement would take a long time.
Surely the increased stringency of the Southern slave-laws, the more than ever vigilant precautions against all attempts to enlighten or educate the negroes, the severer restrictions on manumission, the thrusting forth out of certain States of all free persons of colour, the atrocious Fugitive Slave Bill, one of the latest achievements of Congress, and the piratical attempts upon Cuba, avowedly on the part of all Southerners, abetting or justifying it because it will add slave-territory and 600,000 slaves to their possessions; surely these do not seem indications of the better state of things you anticipate, except, indeed, as the straining of the chain beyond all endurable tightness significantly suggests the probability of its giving way.
I stood beside his desk in the White House to see him sign the proclamation the same desk at which he had received me, some eight years before, when I came beseeching him to be merciful to the proscribed people whose freedom he was now announcing. Perhaps the manumission that he was granting, gave a benignity to his face. Perhaps the emotion in my own mind transfigured him to me.
In short, while the Italian allies had formerly stood to the Romans partly in the relation of brothers under tutelage, protected rather than ruled and not destined to perpetual minority, partly in that of slaves tolerably treated and not utterly deprived of the hope of manumission, they were now all of them subject nearly in equal degree, and with equal hopelessness, to the rods and axes of their Roman masters, and might at the utmost presume like privileged slaves to transmit the kicks received from their masters onward to the poor provincials.
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