OCR Text |
Show 218 DESP01'151'11 It seems, t hen, to be very plainly made out, that at the commencement of our Revolution, slavery had no legal basis in any of the North Am~rican ?olonies."' It existed, as many other wrongs cxtsted, _m all of them. In many of the colonies, the assemblies, _under a mistaken view of the law of England or of their own powers, or through wilful dis~cgard _of aclmow~cdgcd restraints, had attempted to gtvc to 1t the sanc~10n of law. But by that same Jaw of ?'ngland, whiCh the colonists claimed as t hctr b1rthnght, and to whiCh t lll'y so loudly appealed again;t the usurpation• of the mother country, all such statutes wer~ v<_>id. 'rhe negroes were too ignorant to know the1r nghts, and too helpless to vindicate t hem. They eould not ap· peal to England, like the South Carolma dtssenter~, nor had they a powerful party there to support thmr rights; but, legally speaking, they were ~II free; and this as to all of them at least who had oecn born 111 the 'colonies, was fully admitted, as has been. already noticed, eight years previo?s ~o tl~e dec!sLOn 111 Som~ cr::;et's case, by James Ot1s, m lus famous tract on the "Rights of the Col'?nists." It remams, then, to mqmre, whether t hat Revolu· tion which we are accustomed to &.dol as an out. bur;t of liberty, a memorable vindication of the Rights of Man, did, in fact, give to sla~ery a legal character· whether men, entitled by Bnt1sh law to their freedom, because slaves under the S.tate an? F ederal Constitutions; and this is t~e ques~wn whwh we propose to discuss in the followlllg sectwn. • For further details on this subject, and an account of tho pnbticular incident upon which Jefferson's charges s~m to have 1 ~!l chiefly bn.scd, sec llildroth's JIUtory of eM Umtcd Slate.~, vo · u. chup. xxvii. IN AMERICA. 219 SECTION III. Slavery in lite States, and under lite Federal Constitution. WE examined in t he previous section the pretensions of slavery-as it existed in the British North American colonies prior to the Revolution which converted those colonies into the United States of America-to rest. upon a legal basis. We found, in most of the colomes, statutes of the colonial assemblies _of an earl_ier or later date, atrd .in all of t hem, a pra<.:ttce assumwg to legalize the slavery of negroes, Indians, and the mixed race; to make that slavery hereditary wherever the mother was a slave; and, as to a ll claims of freedom, to throw the burden of proof on the claimant. But we also found that t his practice, and all the statutes attempting to legalize it, were in direct conllict with great and perfectly well settled principles of the Jaw of England, which was a lso the t:iUpreme law of t he colonies; principles which the colonia l legislatures and the colonial courts had no authority to set aside or to contradict; an_d thence we concluded. that American slavery, Jmor to the Revolution, had no legal basis, but existed as it had done in England for some two centuries or more prior to Somerset's case- a mere usurpation on the part of the masters, and a mere wrong as respected those alleged to be slaves. . Nor is this view of the matter by any means origmal, or at all of recent origin. It was taken and nctcd on and made t he basis of emancipation in Massachusetts1 ,while thr British rule still prevailed Jn Amcnca. I he best account, indeed, almost the only original account of the abolition of slavery in Massach_usctts_, is contained in a paper by D1·. Belknap, prmted 111 the J\1a;sachusetts Historical Col\ec! Jons. Dr. Belknap states, that about the time of the commencement of the revolutionary disputes, sev- |