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Where any of the natives were stolen, in order to be sold to the Europeans, it was done secretly, or at least, only connived at by those in power: this appears From Barbot and Bosman's account of the matter, both agreeing that man-stealing was not allowed on the Gold Coast. And adds, "That man-stealing was punished on the Gold Coast with rigid severity and sometimes with death itself." Fr.
In that last day, the mayors, recorders, sheriffs, and others, who have been engaged, whether in their official or individual capacity, in slave-catching and man-stealing, will find human laws but a flimsy protection against the wrath of Him, who judges his creatures by his own and not by human laws.
And we intreat you to examine, whether the purchasing of a Negro, either born here or imported, doth not contribute to a further importation, and, consequently, to the upholding of all the evils above mentioned, and to the promoting of man-stealing, the only theft which by the Mosaic law was punished with death; 'He that stealeth a man, and selleth him; or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.
But what should we say, if it should turn out, that we were the causes of those very cruelties, which we affected to prevent? But, if it were not so, ought the first nation in the world to condescend to be the executioner of savages? Another way of keeping up the Slave-trade was by the practice of man-stealing. The evidence was particularly clear upon this head.
Torrey, of Philadelphia, published in 1817: "To enumerate all the horrid and aggravating instances of man-stealing, which are known to have occurred in the State of Delaware, within the recollection of many of the citizens of that State, would require a volume.
"It would be far better for the Southern slaves, if our institution, as regards them, were left to 'gradual mitigation and decay, which time may bring about. The course of the Abolitionists, while it does nothing to destroy this institution, greatly adds to its hardships. Tell me that 'man-stealing' is a sin, and I will agree with you, and will insist that the Abolitionists are guilty of it.
In 1646 one John Smith brought home two Negroes from the Guinea Coast, where we are told he "had been the means of killing near a hundred more." The General Court, "conceiving themselves bound by the first opportunity to bear witness against the heinous and crying sin of man-stealing," ordered that the Negroes be sent at public expense to their native country.
Contrast this penalty for man-stealing with that for property-stealing. Exod. xxii. If a man stole an ox and killed or sold it, he was to restore five oxen; if he had neither sold nor killed it, the penalty was two oxen. The selling or the killing being virtually a deliberate repetition of the crime, the penalty was more than doubled.
What though Elizabeth countenanced John Hawkins in stealing the natives of Africa? what though James, and Charles, and George, opened a market for them in the English colonies? what though modern Dracos have "framed mischief by law," in legalizing man-stealing and slaveholding? what though your ancestors, in preparing to go "to their own place," constituted you the owner of the "neighbors" whom they had used as cattle? what of all this, and as much more like this, as can be drawn from the history of that dreadful process by which men "are deemed, sold, taken, reputed, and adjudged in law to be chattels personal?"
No voice? Yes, we have heard on the high seas the voice of a war-steamer, built for a man-stealing Confederacy with English gold in an English dockyard, going out of an English harbor, manned by English sailors, with the full knowledge of English Government-officers, in defiance of the Queen's proclamation of neutrality. So far has English sympathy overflowed.
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