it had hitherto assumed, but throwing off the mask, openly, by Patents from the Crown, sanctioned and encouraged it. In 1585 and 1588, two several Patents were granted to "certain rich merchants in London," to trade to the Coast of Guinea, within certain Latitudes. In 1592, a third Patent was granted to the same Company, greatly extending their privileges, and enlarging the territory of their trade. The Company, however, either from want of funds, ignorance of the mode of conducting the trade, or an expiration of their charter, became extinct, and the trade was in a great measure abandoned. It was revived and prosecuted with renewed activity in the reign of James I. In 1608, a Patent was granted to another company of merchants, with an extensive right to the trade, and "of more validity and extent than any of the former grants." During the period of the Commonwealth also, in1651,similar privileges were granted to other merchants in London, but the unsettled state of the country, rendered the Patent of little or no advantage to them. The commerce fell into ruin, but was still prosecuted by some few private individuals.

In 1662, under the reign of Charles II, another Company was erected into a corporation, by a Patent from the Crown, under the name of the "Royal Company of England trading to Africa." The war which succeeded, with the Dutch, immediately after, utterly ruined the trade, and the Company surrendered their charter to the Crown, upon payment of a sum of money, The King immediately (1672) erected another corporation under the name of the "Royal African Company. "This Company continued to exist from this period with a continual enlargement of its privileges, until the final abolition of the Slave Trade in England, in

the year 1807. We think it unnecessary to proceed any farther in our account of the progress of this detestable traffic. The Parliamentary History of the English Empire, since the year 1672, is so easy of access, that little or no difficulty can be encountered by those who are anxious to continue the chronology of the Trade. Our object, so far as it is connected with our general design, is sufficiently obtained by the abstract we have already given.

If then, we are unhappily afflicted with an evil, the curse of which is felt and acknowledged by every enlightened man in the Slave-holding States, it should be a matter of sympathy, rather than of rebuke, particularly when it is recollected that it was not of our own creation. It must be conceded by every fair and candid reasoner, who is at all acquainted with the history of our country, that the introduction of this mischievous and unhappy institution is not imputable to the present generation, nor are we answerable either to heaven, or to earth, for its existence. "Slavery" said Mr. King (ami des noirs) "unhappily exists in the United States; enlightened men in the States, even where it is permitted, and every where out of them, regret its existence among us, and seek for the means of mitigating it. The first introduction of Slaves is not imputable to the present generation, nor to their ancestors. Before the year 1642, the trade and ports of the Colonies were open to foreigners, equally as those of the mother country, and as early as the year 1620, a few years after planting the Colony of Virginia, and the same in which the first settlement was made in the old Colony of Plymouth, a cargo of Negroes was brought into and sold as slaves, in Virginia, by a foreign ship; from this beginning the importation was

continued for nearly two centuries. To her honor, VIRGINIA, while a Colony, opposed the importation of slaves, and was the first State to prohibit the same by a law passed for this purpose in 1778, thirty years before the general prohibition, enacted by Congress in 1808." Admitting, for a moment, however, that the existence of slavery among us was an institution of our own voluntary adoption, and not forced upon us, let us inquire how far the people of the SOUTH and WEST Can be called to the bar of public opinion, by those of the NORTH and EAST, and what proportionate or relative agency, each of these sections of our empire had, in the introduction of the very evil, of which both complain, and to the dangers of which the former are most sensibly alive.

The Northern and Eastern sections of our Union, then, in common with ourselves, Colonies of the British Empire, were at a very early period, actively and industriously engaged in the very traffic to which is to be attributed the introduction and existence of the sin of which they have since so loudly and clamorously. complained. The "atrocious crime" of slavery among us as a people, of which, their own agency was, in a great degree, the proximate cause, ought, in strict justice, therefore to be attributed to them, or, as will be shown, is less imputable to us. Great Britain, and the then Northern and Eastern Colonies of her American possessions, were the first dealers in the odious and reproachful commerce that has entailed upon our country, the evil which we all lament, and if the latter made any early or obviously direct efforts, to abolish the trade, it was not so much from any "compunctious visitings" of conscience, or from any more enlightened feelings of philanthropy, as from the operation of the

acts of the British Parliament, which, from time to time granted peculiar and exclusive privileges to British merchants, that amounted to a virtual prohibition, and debarred her Colonies from any participation in the trade. When the latter found that they were to be inundated by a class of people, from the introduction of which, they no longer were to derive the commercial advantages they had hitherto possessed, exertions were then made to abolish the traffic, or to lay it under heavy imposts. It was not until the period to which we have referred, that any very serious disposition was shown by them to interrupt the stream of wealth that poured its riches into their laps, or to divert it from the >channels in which it had hitherto flowed. The history of the times is emphatic upon this point. The first expression of the Legislation in the then North-American Colonies which took place upon this subject, was that of the "General Court of Massachusetts," in 1645, in which they prohibited the buying and selling of slaves, "except those who were condemned to servitude by tho sentence of a court of justice, or those who were taken in time of war." In 1703, more than half a century after the qualified provisions of the act which we have just quoted, another effort was made to restrict the importation of slaves, by subjecting it to a heavy impost, which failed. From the complexion of these historical documents, it would appear that it was from no very nice and scrupulous abhorrence of the "odious crime" of slavery, on the part of the Northern and Eastern Colonies, that they interdicted the trade in human flesh, but a necessary result of the commercial avarice of the mother country, which closed the door of the trade upon her Colonies, and shut up the gates of its African commerce to all but

native born British merchants, and consequently destroyed all prospects of advantage on the part of the Colonies in this respect. It was not, then, so much the generous result of a more enlarged and enlightened philanthropy on the part of these Colonies, as It was a calculating policy which dictated the steps that they took, in relation to the importation of slaves. If it were not, why delay the expression of their abhorrence of what they deemed a curse and a scourge upon the country, from the year 1645 to 1703, in the years intermediate between the two periods of which, the exclusive privileges to which we have referred were granted by the crown; or why the distinction between the situation of the individual who may have been fairly purchased on the Coast of Africa, and brought into the country, and that of him who was taken prisoner in lawful war, fighting boldly against the enemies of his race, and manfully exerting all the energies which God and nature gave him, to repel the notorious and uninterrupted aggressions of the Colonists upon his liberty and life. The red man of the woods, who was the original proprietor of the soil on which they had settled, if taken captive while resisting the encroachments of his more civilized and unwelcome neighbors, was declared to be a slave, and could be bought and sold as such, at the discretion or caprice of those into whose hands the fortune of war may have thrown him; while the black man was no sooner landed on their shores, than he became invested with the privileges of a higher and more fortunate condition. And yet these Colonies now arrogate to themselves, the proud and peculiar distinction of having first interdicted the traffic in human flesh, and of having, from the purest and most disinterested humanity, first exhibited to the world the

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