State in 1836, there were some symptoms of a renewal of the Missouri struggle; but John Quincy Adams and other antislavery men agreed that the admission of Arkansas was fairly nominated in the Missouri bond, and the State was admitted. At the same session an increase in the area of Missouri made a considerable addition to the slave soil of the United States. Here the extension of slavery stopped with the exception of the admission of Florida and Texas as slave States in 1845. The area of Texas had been free soil under the decree of Guerrero, the Mexican Dictator in 1829, afterwards ratified by the Mexican Congress, and slavery is not recognized in the Constitution of the Mexican State Coahuila, and Texas, or in the provisional Texas Constitution of 1833 and 1835. But American settlers had brought their slaves with them, and fairly introduced the custom of slavery; and the Constitution of 1836 formally declared all persons of color slaves for life, if they had been in that condition before their emigration to Texas, and were then held in bondage. This, though the State was not in the Union as yet, was the only instance of the professed establishment of slavery by the organic law of an American State, unless we are to take the Massachusetts code of 1641 as the first. The basis of the system is clearly expressed in a section of the Kentucky Constitution of 1850 as follows: "The right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction; and the right of the owner of a slave to such slave is the same and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever." It was no more necessary, then to declare a constitutional right of property in the case of slaves, than in the case of horses; in both cases the Legislature was to accept and defend the right without question. A slave State was regularly declared such at its admission, only by the provision forbidding the Legislature to emancipate slaves without consent of owners, or to forbid the domestic slave trade.

As slavery reached the limits of its State extension in 1845, it only remains necessary to recur to its attacks upon the Territories. Here the customary basis of slavery makes manifest

the weakness of the claims for its extension after 1845. It is one thing to acknowledge the validity of a recognized and unopposed territorial custom in Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas, it is a very different thing to admit as two slavery advocates required, that the custom could not be abolished by statute, or prohibited where it did not exist. Nevertheless in this respect the compromise of 1850 gave the slave States all they then asked. It refrained from prohibiting the custom, and gave the territorial Legislature, the general right of legislation, subject, of course, to the veto powers of Congress. But this last was now a meaningless form; it was impossible to obtain the passage of an act by Congress, and the President, annulling a territorial law recognizing slavery. Congress practically gave loose reins to the territorial Legislatures and they took advantage of it. New Mexico (then including Arizona) passed an act in 1851, recognizing peonage for white slavery, and another in 1859, recognizing colored slavery; and Utah (then including Nevada) passed an act in 1852, maintaining the right of slave-holding emigrants to the services of their slaves. None of these acts were annulled until 1862.

The Kansas-Nebraska bill, in 1854, went a step further. It took off the Missouri prohibition of 1820, and allowed the introduction of the custom into all the Territories. It is at least doubtful, leaving out the good faith of the repeal, whether a custom could properly be introduced in that way; but the climax of doubtfulness was reached, when the Kansas struggle showed that the custom had no chance of practical introduction in that Territory. The pro-slavery claim was then advanced, that both Congress and the territorial Legislature were bound to defend slavery in the Territories. If colored slavery was based on custom, and not on organic law, this claim was certainly a novelty in jurisprudence. We can easily understand the recognition or the prohibition of a custom by statute, but the establishment of a custom by statute is beyond conception. Yet this is the sum of the Southern demand where divested of verbiage and reduced to its real essence; and Secession was based upon the refusal of the demand.

CHAPTER VIII.

SLAVERY IN AMERICA-CONTINUED.

"If I'm designed yon lordling's slave,

By Nature's laws designed;

Why was an independent wish

E'er planted in my mind?

If not, why am I subject to

His cruelty or scorn?

Or why has man the will and power
To make his fellow mourn?"

IN the year 1619, slavery was first introduced into Virginia.

the

In the month of August, a Dutch man-of-war sailed up river to the plantations and offered, by auction, twenty Africans. They were purchased by the wealthier class of planters and made slaves for life. It was, however, nearly half a century before the system of colored slavery became well established in the English Colonies.

There is no record of any serious opposition, whether on moral or economic grounds, to the introduction of slaves and establishment of slavery in the various British, Dutch and Swedish colonies planted along the coast between the Penobscot and the Savannah rivers during the succeeding century. At the outset it is certain that the importation of African chattles into the various seaports, by merchants trading thither, was regarded only with vague curiosity and marvel, like that which would now be excited by the experimental introduction of elephants as beasts of burden.

As we have said the first abiding English colony-Virginia was founded on the American coast in 1607. These early colonists of Virginia were merely adventurers of an unusually bad type-bankrupt prodigals, genteel spendthrifts and incorrigible profligates-many of whom had left their native country for that country's good, in obedience to the urgent persuasion of sheriffs, judges and juries. All were in

toxicated by the common illusions of emigrants, with regard to the facilities for acquiring vast wealth at the cost of little or no labor in the Eden to which they were attracted. Probably no other colony that ever succeeded or endured, was so largely made up of unfit and unpromising materials; and when the Pilgrim Fathers landed on the rock of Plymouth, Virginia had already received and distributed her first cargo of slaves.

As to the right to hold property in man, the first recorded case in 1677, in which the question appears to have come before the English courts, it was held, that being usually bought and sold among merchants as merchandise, and. also, being infidels, there might be property in them sufficient to maintain trover.

What precisely the English law might be on the subject of slavery still remained a matter of doubt. Lord Holt had expressed the opinion as quoted in a previous chapter that slavery was a condition unknown to English law, and that every person setting foot in England thereby became free. American planters on their visit to England, seem to have been annoyed by claims of freedom set up on this ground. To relieve their embarrassments, the merchants concerned in the American trade (in 1729) had obtained a written opinion from Yorke and Talbot, the attorney and solicitor general of that day. According to this opinion, which passed for more than forty years as good law, not only was baptism no bar to slavery, but Negro slaves might be held in England, just as well as in the Colonies. The two lawyers by whom this opinion was given rose afterward, one of them to be Chief Justice of England, and both to be Chancellors. Yorke, sitting in the latter capacity, with the title of Lord Hardwicke (in 1749) had recently recognized the doctrine of that opinion as sound law. He objects to Lord Holt's doctrine of freedom, secured by setting foot on English soil, that no reason could be found why slaves should not be equally free when they set foot in Jamaica or any other English plantation. All our Colonies are subject to the laws of England, although as to some purposes they have laws of their own. His argument is that, if slavery be contrary to English law, no local

enactments in the Colonies could give it any vitality. To avoid overturning slavery in the Colonies it was absolutely neces sary to uphold it in England.

The amount of the fee paid by the wealthy and prosperous slave traders for this remarkable display of legal erudition and acumen, is not recorded, but it probably included a liberal consideration for wear-and-tear of conscience. Two or three decisions from British courts were at different times thereafter, obtained, substantially echoing this opinion. However, in 1772 Lord Mansfield pronounced, in the ever memorable Somersett case, his judgment that, by the laws of England, no man could be held in slavery. That judgment has never since been disturbed, nor seriously questioned.

One would suppose that the austere morality and democratic spirit of the Puritans would have kept their skirts clear of the stain of human bondage, and indeed 'tis strange that our forefathers freed from the bondage and thraldom of England's oppressive king, should so soon enslave their fellow men. It is but another illustration of the ingratitude of man. Beneath all their fierce antagonism, there was a certain kinship between the disciples of Calvin and those of Loyola. Each were ready to suffer and die for God's truth as they understood it, and neither cherished any appreciable sympathy or consideration for those they esteemed God's enemies, in which category the savages of America and the Negroes of Africa were so unlucky as to be found. The Puritan pioneers of New England were early involved in desperate struggles with their aboriginal neighbors, in whom they failed to discover the fascinating traits found in the novels of Cooper or the poems of Longfellow. The ferocity and treachery of the Indian, acting upon their theologic convictions, led them early and readily to the belief that these savages, and by local inference, all savages, were the children of the devil, to be subjugated, if not extirpated, as the Philistine inhabitants of Canaan had been by the Israelites under Joshua. Indian slavery, sometimes forbidden by law, but usually tolerated if not entirely approved by public opinion, was among the early usuages of New England, and from this to