12 JAMES MONROE-JOHN JAY JOEL BARLOW. of my fellow beings was emancipated. As we ought with gratitude to admire that decree of heaven, which has numbered us among the free, we ought to lament and deplore the necessity of holding our fellow men in bondage.-Debate in Virginia Convention. JAMES MONROE. We have found that this evil has preyed upon the very vitals of the Union; and has been prejudicial to all the states in which it has existed.-Speech in the Virginia Convention. JOHN JAY The state of New York is rarely out of my mind or heart, and I am often disposed to write much respecting its affairs; but I have so little information as to its present political objects and operations, that I am afraid to attempt it.-An excellent law might be made out of the Pennsylvania one, for the gradual abolition of slavery. Till America comes into this measure, her prayers to heaven will be impious. This is a strong expression but it is just. Were I in your legislature, I would present a bill for the purpose with great care, and I would never cease moving it till it became a law, or I ceased to be a member. I believe God governs the world, and I believe it to be a maxim in his as in our court, that those who ask for equity ought to do it.-Letter from Spain, 1780. Our society has been favored with your letter of the first of May last, and we are happy that efforts so honorable to your nation are making in your country to promote the cause of justice and humanity relative to the Africans. That they who know the value of liberty, and are blessed with the enjoyment of it, ought not to subject others to slavery, is like most other moral precepts, more generally admitted in theory than observed in practice. This will continue to be too much the case while men are impelled to action by their passions rather than by their reason, and while they are more solicitous to acquire wealth than to do as they would be done by. Hence it is that India and Africa experience unmerited oppression from nations who have been long distinguished by their attachment to their civil and religious liberties, but who have expended not much less blood and treasure in violating the rights of others than in defending their own. The United States are far from being irreproachable in this respect. It undoubtedly is very inconsistent with their declarations on the subject of human rights, to permit a single slave to be found within their jurisdiction; and we confess the justice of your strictures on that head.Letter to an English Abolition Society from the Manumision Society of New York. JOEL BARLOW. Nor shall I strain The powers of pathos in a task so vain, SAMUEL ADAMS-KOSCIUSKO. Where slavery pens her woes, tho' 'tis but there Tyrants are never free, and small and great, Struts, cringes, bullies, begs, as courtiers must, But knows no equal, finds no friend in man. Ah, would you not be slaves with lords and kings! And following nature is the march of man.- Their fibres, feelings, reasoning powers the same, Impale each tyrant on their pens of steel, Declare how freemen can a world create, And slaves and masters ruin every state.-The Columbiad. SAMUEL ADAMS. 13 "His principles on the subject of human rights, carried him far beyond the narrow limits which many loud asserters of their own liberty have prescribed to themselves, to the recognition of this right in every human being. One day the wife of Mr. Adams returning home, informed her husband that a friend had made her a present of a female slave. Mr. Adams replied in a firm decided manner, She may come but not as a slave, for a slave cannot live in my house; if she comes, she, must come free. She came, and took up her free abode with the family of this great champion of American liberty, and there she continued free and there she died free.”—Rev. Mr. Allen, Uxbridge, Mass. KOSCIUSKO. General Kosciusko, by his will, placed in the hands of Mr. Jefferson a sum exceeding twenty thousand dollars, to be laid out in the purchase of young female slaves, who were to be educated and emancipated. The laws of Virginia prevented the will of Kosciusko from being carried into effect.-Aurora, 1920. 14 HORATIO GATES-WILLIAM PINKNEY. HORATIO GATES. A few days ago, passed through this town, the Hon. General Gates and lady, on their way to take possession of their new and elegant seat on the banks of the East river. The general, previous to leaving Virginia, summoned his numerous family and slaves about him, and amidst their tears of affection and gratitude, gave them their freedom; and what is still better, made provision that their liberty should be a blessing to them.-Baltimore paper, Sept. 8, 1790. WILLIAM PINKNEY. SIR,-Iniquitous, and most dishonorable to Maryland, is that dreary system of partial bondage, which her laws have hitherto supported with a solicitude worthy of a better object, and her citizens by their practice countenanced. Founded in a disgraceful traffic, to which the parent country lent her fostering aid, from motives of interest, but which even she would have disdained to encourage, had England been the destined mart of such inhuman merchandise, its continuance is as shameful as its origin. Wherefore should we confine the edge of censure to our ancestors, or those from whom they purchased? Are not we EQUALLY guilty? They strewed around the seeds of slavery-we cherish and sustain the growth. They introduced the system-we enlarge, invigorate, and confirm it. That the dangerous consequences of this system of bondage have not as yet been felt, does not prove they never will be. At least the experiment has not been sufficiently made to preclude speculation and conjecture. To me, sir, nothing for which I have not the evidence of my senses is more clear, than that it will one day destroy that reverence for liberty, which is the vital principle of a republic. While a majority of your citizens are accustomed to rule with the authority of despots, within particular limits; while your youth are reared in the habit of thinking that the great rights of human nature are not so sacred but they may with innocence be trampled on, can it be expected that the public mind should glow with that generous ardor in the cause of freedom, which can alone save a governmeut like ours from the lurking demon of usurpation? Do you not dread the contamination of principle? The example of Rome shows that slaves are the proper, natural implements of usurpation, and therefore a serious and alarming evil in every free community. With much to hope for by a change, and nothing to lose, they have no fears of consequences. Despoiled of their rights by the acts of government and its citizens, they have no checks of pity, or of conscience, but are stimulated by the desire of revenge, to spread wide the horrors of desolation, and to subvert the foundation of that liberty of which they have never participated, and which they have only been permitted to envy in others. But where slaves are manumitted by government, or in consequence of its provisions, the same motives which have attached them to tyrants, WARNER MIFFLIN-WILLIAM EATON. 15 when the act of emancipation has flowed from them, would then attach them to government. They are then no longer the creatures of despotism. They are bound by gratitude, as well as by interest, to seek the welfare of that country from which they have derived the restoration of their plundered rights, and with whose prosperity their own is inseparably involved. All apostacy from these principles, which form the good citizen, would, under such circumstances, be next to impossible.— Speech in the Maryland House of Delegates, 1789. WARNER MIFFLIN. In a pamphlet, entitled "Observations on the American Revolution,” published by order of Congress, in 1779, the following sentiments are declared to the world, viz: "The great principle (of government) is and ever will remain in force, that men are by nature free; as accountable to him that made them, they must be so; and so long as we have any idea of divine justice, we must associate that of human freedom. Whether men can part with their liberty, is among the questions which have exercised the ablest writers; but it is concluded on all hands, that the right to be free can never be alienated-still less is it practicable for one generation to mortgage the privileges of another." Humane petitions have been presented to excite in congress benevolent feelings for the sufferings of our fellow-citizens under cruel bondage to the Turks and Algerines, and that the national power and influence might be exerted for their relief; with this virtuous application I unite, but lament that any of my countrymen, who are distinguished as men eminently qualified for public stations, should be so enslaved by illiberal prejudice as to treat with contempt a like solicitude for another class of men still more grievously oppressed. I profess freely and am willing my profession was known over the world, that I feel the calls of humanity as strong towards an African in America, as an American in Algiers, both being my brethren; especially as I am informed the Algerine treats his slave with more humanity; and I believe the sin of oppression on the part of the American is greatest in the sight of the Father of the family of mankind. WARNER MIFFLIN. Kent County, Delaware, 2d of 1st mo. 1793. WILLIAM EATON. [The Tunisians had captured nine hundred and twenty Sardinian slaves, of whom General Eaton thus makes mention:] "Many have died of grief, and the others linger out a life less tolerable than death. Alas-remorse seizes my whole soul when I reflect, that this is indeed but a copy of the very barbarity which my eyes have seen in my own native country. And yet we boast of liberty and national justice. How frequently in the southern states of my own country, have I seen weeping mothers leading the guiltless infant to the sales with as deep anguish as if they led them to the slaughter; 16 WILLIAM RAY-RILEY-DE WITT CLINTON. and yet felt my bosom tranquil in the view of these aggressions on defenceless humanity. But when I see the same enormities practised upon beings whose complexions and blood claim kindred with my own, I curse the perpetrators, and weep over the wretched victims of their rapacity. Indeed, truth and justice demand from me the confession, that the Christian slaves among the barbarians of Africa, are treated with more humanity than the African slaves among professing Christians of civilized America; and yet here sensibility bleeds at every pore for the wretches whom fate has doomed to slavery."—Letter to his wife. WILLIAM RAY. Are you republicans ?-away! Your hands besmear'd with human blood? "Slaves to be sold," hark, what a sound? A scar, a stigma of disgrace, Which you nor time can e'er efface, And prove, of nations yet unborn, The curse, the hatred, and the scorn! The Horrors of Slavery, or Turs of Tripoli CAPTAIN RILEY. Strange as it may seem to the philanthropist, my free and proudspirited countrymen still hold a million and a half of human beings in the most cruel bonds of slavery; who are kept at hard labor, and smarting under the lash of inhuman mercenary drivers; in many instances enduring the miseries of hunger, thirst, imprisonment, cold, nakedness, and even tortures. This is no picture of the imagination. For the honor of human nature, I wish likenesses were no where to be found! I myself have witnessed such scenes in different parts of my own country; and the bare recollection of them now chills my blood with horror.-Riley's Narrative. DE WITT CLINTON. During the period of his legislative career (1797,) a large portion of his attention was bestowed on the protection of the public health, the promotion of agriculture, manufactures, and the arts, the gradual abolition of slavery, &c. The record of the proceedings of the senate of New York for the |