Untitled - African American History

HISTORICAL SKETCH OF SLAVERY.
And knowing as we do, and rejoicing as we should, in
the honesty and purity of their motives, we should ex-
pect to find such men prosecuting their principles to
their legitimate results, and proclaiming all involuntary
servitude to he opposed to the natural rights of man.
It is not surprising, then, that Franklin should have
been the president of the first abolition society in Penn-
sylvania, as early as 1787 ; nor that Henry, and Jeffer-
son, and Jay, should avow their hostility to the system,
and their hopes for its overthrow ; nor that even the
wise, and good, and great Washington, should, by his
will emancipating his own slaves, acknowledge that his
own mind was at least wavering as to the propriety of
their bondage. In fact, at that day, Virginia was much
more earnest in the wish for general emancipation thcai
were New York, Massachusetts, or Rhode Island. So
general was the feeling, that the Ordinance of 1787,
which excluded slavery from the Northwest Territory
(out of which the present populous and thriving Northwestern
States are formed), was ratified by the first Con-
gress of the United States, with but one dissenting voice,
and that from a delegate from New York ; the entire
Southern vote being cast in its favor.
Neither the climate nor the productions of the northern
and eastern portions of the United States are adapted
to negro slavery. \The sun is as necessary to negro perfection
as it is to the cotton plant. The labor of the
slave is only valuable where that labor can be applied to
a routine of business which requires no reflection or
judgment upon the part of the laborer, and which continues
throughout the year. Hence, the number of
slaves in these older and more flourishing portions of
the States, by the census of 1790, amounted only to
40,370,
while the southern and more feeble colonies
(Virginia excepted), embraced in their territory 567,527.
It required, therefore, no sacrifice of interest upon the