CHAPTER XXVII.

THE RISE OF FREE COMMONWEALTHS.

1780.

It is older

FREEDOM is of all races and of all nationalities. than bondage, and ever rises from the enslavements of violence or custom or abuse of power; for the rights of man spring from eternal law, are kept alive by the persistent energy of constant nature, and by their own indestructibility prove their lineage as the children of omnipotence.

In an edict of the eighth of August 1779, Louis XVI. announced "his regret that many of his subjects were still without personal liberty and the prerogatives of property, attached to the glebe, and, so to say, confounded with it." To all serfs on the estates of the crown he therefore gave back their freedom. He had done away with torture, and he wished to efface every vestige of a rigorous feudalism; but he was restrained by his respect for the laws of property, which he held to be the groundwork of order and justice. While the delivering up of a runaway serf was in all cases forbidden, for emancipation outside of his own domains he did no more than give leave to other proprietors to follow his example, to which even the clergy declined to conform. But the words of the king spoken to all France deeply branded the wrong of keeping Frenchmen in bondage to Frenchmen.

In Overyssel, a province of the Netherlands, Baron van der Capellen tot den Pol, the friend of America, sorrowed over the survival of the ancient system of villeinage; and, in spite of the resistance and sworn hatred of almost all the nobles, he, in 1782, brought about its complete abolition.

Here the movement for emancipation during the American revolution ceased for the Old World. "He that says slavery is opposed to Christianity is a liar," wrote Luther, in the sixteenth century. "To condemn slavery is to condemn the Holy Ghost," were the words of Bossuet near the end of the seventeenth. In the last quarter of the eighteenth the ownership of white men by white men still blighted more than the half of Europe. The evil shielded itself under a new plea, where a difference of skin set a visible mark on the victims of commercial avarice, and strengthened the ties of selfishness by the pride of race. In 1780 Edmund Burke tasked himself to find out what laws could check the new form of servitude which wrapt all quarters of the globe in its baleful influences; yet he did not see a glimmering of hope even for an abolition of the trade in slaves, and only aimed at establishing regulations for their safe and comfortable transportation. He was certain that no one of them was ever so beneficial to the master as a freeman who deals with him on equal footing by convention; yet for slave plantations he suggested nothing more than some supervision by the state, and some mitigation of the power of the master to divide families by partial sales. Although for himself he inclined to a gradual emancipation, his code for the negroes was founded on the conviction that slavery was "an incurable evil." He sought no more than to make that evil as small as possible, and to draw out of it some collateral good.

George III. was the firm friend of the slave-trade; and Thurlow, one of his lord chancellors, so late as 1799 insisted that the proposal to terminate it was "altogether miserable and contemptible." Yet the quality of our kind is such that a government cannot degrade a race without marring the nobleness of our nature.

So long as the legislation of the several English colonies in America remained subject to the veto of the king, all hope of forbidding or even limiting the importation of negro slaves was made vain by the mother country. The first American. congress formed an association "wholly to discontinue the slave-trade." Jefferson inserted in his draft of the declaration of American independence a denunciation of the slave-trade

and of slavery, but it was rejected by the congress of 1776 in deference to South Carolina and Georgia. The antagonism between the northern and southern states, founded on climate, pursuits, and labor, broke out on the first effort to unite them permanently. When members from the North spoke freely of the evil of slavery, a member from South Carolina answered that, "if property in slaves should be questioned, there must be an end of confederation." In the same month the vote on taxing persons claimed as property laid bare the existence of a geographical division of parties, the states north of Mason and Dixon's line voting compactly on the one side, and those south of that line, which were duly represented, on the other.

The clashing between the two sections fastened the attention of reflecting observers. In August 1778, Gerard, soon after his reception at Philadelphia, reported to Vergennes: "The states of the South and of the North, under existing subjects of division and estrangement, are two distinct parties, which at present count but few deserters. The division is attributed to moral and philosophical causes." He further reported that the cabal against Washington found supporters exclusively in the North.

The French minister desired to repress the ambition of congress for the acquisition of territory, because it might prove an obstacle to connection with Spain; and he found support in northern men. Their hatred of slavery was not an impulse of feeling, but an earnest conviction. No one could declare himself more strongly for the freedom of the negro than Gouverneur Morris of New York, a man of business and a man of pleasure. His hostility to slavery brought him into some agreement with the policy of Gerard, to whom, one day in October, he said that Spain would have no cause to fear the great body of the confederation, for reciprocal jealousy and separate interests would never permit its members to unite against her; that several of the most enlightened of his colleagues were struck with the necessity of establishing a law "de coercendo imperio," setting bounds to the American empire; that the provinces of the South already very much weakened the confederation; that further extension on that side would im

measurably augment this inconvenience; that the South was the seat of wealth and of weakness; that the poverty and vigor of the North would always be the safeguard of the republic; that on the side of the North lay the necessity to expand and to gain strength; that the navigation of the Mississippi below the mouth of the Ohio should belong exclusively to Spain, as the only means of retaining the numerous population which would be formed between the Ohio and the lakes; that the inhabitants of these new and immense countries, be they English or be they Americans, having the outlet of the river St. Lawrence on the one side and that of the Mississippi on the other, would be in a condition to domineer over the United States and over Spain, or to make themselves independent-that on this point there was, therefore, a common interest. Some dread of the relative increase of the South may have mixed with the impatient earnestness with which two at least of the New England states demanded the acquisition of Nova Scotia as indispensable to their safety, and therefore to be secured at the pacification with England. The leader in this policy was Samuel Adams, whom the French minister always found in his way.

The several states employed black men as they pleased; it was the rule that the slave who served in the ranks was enfranchised by the service. When, in March 1779, congress recommended Georgia and South Carolina to raise three thousand active, able-bodied negro men, the recommendation was coupled with a promise of "a full compensation to the proprietors of such negroes for the property."

So long as Jefferson was in congress, he kept Virginia and Massachusetts in a close and unselfish union, of which the unanimous assertion of independence was the fruit. When he withdrew to service in his native commonwealth, their friendship lost something of its disinterestedness. Virginia manifested its discontent by successive changes in its delegation, and the two great states came more and more to represent different classes of culture and ideas and interests.

In 1779, when the prosperity of New England was thought to depend on the fisheries, and when its pathetic appeals, not unmingled with menaces, had been used prodigally and without effect, Samuel Adams said rashly that "it would become

more and more necessary for the two empires to separate." On the other hand, when the North offered a preliminary resolution that the country, even if deserted by France and Spain, would continue the war for the sake of the fisheries, four states read the draft of a definitive protest.

In the assertion of the sovereignty of each separate state there was no distinction between North and South. Massachusetts expressed itself as absolutely as South Carolina. As a consequence, the confederation could contain no interdict of the slave-trade, and the importation of slaves would therefore remain open to any state according to its choice. When, on the seventeenth of June 1779, a renunciation of the power to engage in the slave-trade was proposed as an article to be inserted in the treaty of peace, all the states, Georgia alone being absent, refused the concession by the votes of every member except Jay and Gerry.

Luzerne, the French envoy who succeeded Gerard, soon came to the conclusion that the confederacy would run the risk of an early dissolution, if it should give itself up to the hatred which began to show itself between the North and South.

Vermont, whose laws from the first rejected slavery, knocked steadily at the door of congress to be taken in as a state, and Washington befriended its desire. In August 1781 its envoys were present in Philadelphia, entreating admission. New York gave up its opposition; but the states of the South held that the admission of Vermont would destroy "the balance of power" between the two sections of the confederacy and give the preponderance to the North. The idea was then started that the six states south of Mason and Dixon's line should be conciliated by a concession of a seventh vote which they were to exercise in common; but the proposal, though it formed a subject of conversation, was never brought before congress; and Vermont was left to wait till a southern state could simultaneously be received into the union.

In regard to the foreign relations of the country, congress was divided between what the French envoy named "Gallicans" and "anti-Gallicans:" the southerners were found more among the "Gallicans;" the North was suspected of a par tiality for England.