  Virginia's Colonial Record with Respect to Slavery President Lincoln in his inaugural address declared:—"One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes slavery is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute." Other voices proclaimed that there existed an "irrepressible conflict" between the North and the South in which the abolition or maintenance of slavery was the gage of battle. The two assertions may be combined and the question considered whether Virginia seceded either to extend slavery into the territories or to perpetuate the institution within her borders. SLAVERY IN VIRGINIA In considering these questions it will be well to review Virginia's record with respect to slavery both during the period of her existence as a colony and her career as a state; To collate the sentiments of her great sons antagonistic to the institution; To show the small number of her citizens holding slaves as compared with the great company of those who possessed no such interest; To note the injurious effects upon her prosperity resulting from the presence of the institution; To summarize what were considered the almost insuperable difficulties which embarrassed every plan of emancipation—difficulties that were augmented and intensified To present the situation with respect to the controversy at the time Virginia seceded from the Union; and finally, To consider the effects, if any, upon her position, of President Lincoln's Proclamations of Emancipation issued subsequent thereto. VIRGINIA'S COLONIAL RECORD African slaves were first brought to Virginia in 1619 by a Dutch vessel. George W. Williams, the negro historian of his race in America, says, "It is due to the Virginia colony to say that the slaves were forced upon them." Though slaves were thus introduced as early as 1619, it was not until 1661 that the institution of slavery was recognized in Virginia by statute law. For a long period after their first introduction, very few slaves were imported. At the end of the first half-century there were only some two thousand, and as late as the year 1715 they numbered only about twenty-five thousand. In the sixty years, however, immediately preceding the Revolution, they came in ever-increasing numbers, so that at the latter date they almost equalled the white population of the colony. EFFORTS TO EXCLUDE SLAVES With the great increase of this element in the population, the colonists were quick to realize their danger "Again and again they had passed laws restraining the importation of negroes from Africa, but their laws were disallowed. How to prevent them from protecting themselves against the increase of the overwhelming evil was debated by the King in Council; and on the 10th of December, 1770, he issued an instruction under his own hand commanding the Governor 'upon pain of the highest displeasure, to assent to no laws by which the importation of slaves should be in any respect prohibited or obstructed.'" Edmund Burke, in his speech on conciliating America, in response to the suggestion that the slaves might be freed and used against the colonies, said, "Dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from the very nation which In addition to legislative enactments, appeals were addressed directly to the throne. But the great personages interested in the slave trade proved more influential with the King than the prayers of his imperilled people. There is something at once pathetic and prophetic in the appeals made by these Virginians to their sovereign against the slave trade. The petition presented by the House of Burgesses in 1772 recites: "We implore your Majesty's paternal assistance in averting a calamity of a most alarming nature. The importation of slaves into the colonies from the coast of Africa hath long been considered as a trade of great inhumanity, and under its present encouragement we have too much reason to fear will endanger the very existence of your Majesty's American dominions. We are sensible that some of your Majesty's subjects may reap emoluments from this sort of traffic, but when we consider that it greatly retards the settlement of the colonies with more useful inhabitants and may in time have the most destructive influence, we presume to hope that the interests of a few will be disregarded when placed in competition with the security and happiness of such numbers of your Majesty's dutiful and loyal subjects. We, therefore, beseech your Majesty to remove all these restraints on your Majesty's Governor in this colony which inhibits their assenting to such laws as might check so pernicious a consequence." But the King and Ministers continued to turn deaf ears and except with respect to more moderate measures the Royal Veto was interposed to annul all anti-slavery laws. ORIGINAL DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE Chief among the causes which aroused the opposition of the Virginia colonists and placed them in the forefront of the Revolution was the course of the King with respect to this momentous subject. When Thomas Jefferson came to write the Declaration of Independence and to epitomize the grounds of indictment which the colonists presented against the British King, it was the latter's veto of the laws passed by Virginia to suppress the slave trade, and the active aid lent by his Government to force the captives of Africa upon his defenseless subjects, that evoked the fiercest arraignment in that historic document. Mr. Jefferson declared: "George the Third has waged cruel war against humanity itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people who never offended him; captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in their transportation thither. 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 to restrain, this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of "These words," says Mr. Bancroft, "expressed precisely what had happened in Virginia." REASONS FOR AMENDING DECLARATION That this portion of the Declaration was stricken out by Congress before its formal presentation to the world does not negative the fact that, in thus declaring, Mr. Jefferson proclaimed the sentiments of his native state. It was ominous of her future experience with respect to this baneful subject, that the voice of Virginia was then silenced in deference to the states of the far South and certain of their Northern sisters. Mr. Jefferson has left upon record that this clause in the Declaration of Independence was stricken 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 these censures, for though their people had very few slaves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others." The biographers of Abraham Lincoln, Nicolay and Hay, say: "The objections of South Carolina and Georgia sufficed to cause the erasure and suppression of the obnoxious paragraph. Nor were the Northern States guiltless; Newport was yet a great slave mart, and the commerce of VIRGINIA'S ANTI-SLAVERY SENTIMENTS, 1774 But the position of Virginia with respect to slavery and the vetoes of George III and the slave trade was not left to be determined by unofficial utterances though coming from one of her greatest sons. As early as 1774 her people registered their sentiments in the most varied and emphatic forms. Mass meetings in many of the counties adopted resolutions, the purport and tenor of which may be gathered from those of Fairfax County,—"We take the opportunity of declaring our most earnest wishes to see an entire stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel and unnatural trade." VIRGINIA'S FIRST CONSTITUTION In August, 1774, the Virginia Colonial Convention resolved: "We will neither ourselves import, nor purchase any slave or slaves imported by any other person, after the first day of November, next, either from Africa, the West Indies or any other place." On the fifth of September, 1774, when the Continental Congress assembled for the first time, her delegates in that body submitted the memorial known in history as, "A Summary View of the Rights of British America," in which the course of George III was arraigned and the sentiments of Virginia in regard to the slave trade declared as follows: "For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, His Majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was, unhappily, introduced in their infant state. The representatives from Virginia in the Continental Congress were active in their efforts to secure the adoption of the Non-Importation Agreement which included a resolve to discontinue the slave trade and a pledge neither to hire "our vessels nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it." W. E. B. DuBois declares: "Virginia gave the slave trade a special prominence and was in reality the leading spirit to force her views on the Continental Congress." Nor were these resolves of the Virginia people idle, for numerous evidences can be cited of the activity of her vigilance committees. At Norfolk, the committees, finding that one John Brown had purchased slaves from Jamaica, reported that we "hold up for your just indignation Mr. John Brown, merchant of this place ... to the end ... that every person may henceforth break off all dealings with him." VIRGINIA'S BILL OF RIGHTS Two years later, but before the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, Virginia adopted a written constitution and Bill of Rights. In the preamble to the former there are set forth the reasons which influenced Her Bill of Rights opened with the then novel and far reaching declaration: "That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any contract deprive or divest their posterity; namely the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." With respect to this great document, Mr. Bancroft declares: "Other colonies had framed Bills of Rights in reference to their relations with Britain; Virginia moved from charters and customs to primal principles; from the altercation about facts to the contemplation of immutable truth. She summoned the eternal laws of man's being to protest against all tyranny. The English Petition of Right, in 1688, was historic and retrospective; the Virginia declaration came out of the heart of nature and announced governing principles for all peoples in all times. It was the voice of reason going forth to speak a new political world into being. At the bar of humanity Virginia gave the name and fame of her sons as hostages that her public CANONS OF LIBERTY This Bill of Rights was incorporated in every subsequent constitution of Virginia and is to-day a part of her organic law. Two months after its first adoption came the Declaration of American Independence. The words of Mason: "That all men are by nature equally free and independent," are re-echoed in the words of Jefferson, "That all men are created equal," and both declare that among the inalienable rights of man are "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." To these principles, Virginia acknowledged allegiance; to the Bill of Rights, by the unanimous vote of her Constitutional Convention; and to the Declaration of Independence by the united voices of her delegates in the Continental Congress. The institution of slavery could not square with these great canons. Henceforth its existence in Virginia could be justified only by the difficulties and dangers attending its abolition. These recitals bring us down to the close of Virginia's life as a colony, and the assumption by her people of the rights and obligations of statehood. In the more than one hundred and fifty years of her colonial existence—despite protests, appeals and statutes—the inflowing tide from Africa had continued, so that out of a population of some six hundred thousand souls, over two-fifths were negro slaves. It was amid such conditions that Virginia met the problems incident to her birth into statehood, bore her part in founding the Republic, furnished her quota of soldiers to resist the armies of Great Britain, and held with fixed determination her ever advancing border line against the craft and courage of the Red Men.
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