VI ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE AFTER the Revolutionary War, when the colonists tried to form a Constitution they found themselves hopelessly divided over the question of one or two houses in the legislature and the basis of representation. The presence of the Negro in large numbers in the South where slavery was steadily on the increase occasioned much of the trouble. Two of the three great compromises which made the Constitution a possibility bore directly on this unequal distribution of free and slave, white and black population. By the terms of the second compromise five slaves in the basis of popular representation were to be counted as equal to three white men. The third compromise permitted the foreign slave trade to continue for twenty years. The moral effect of the abolition of the African slave trade by the United States, which was determined by an act of March 2, 1807, to go into effect the first day of the following year, is borne out by the action of several European countries. Great Britain, on March 25, same year, followed the example of the United States. Sweden was the next, in 1813; the Dutch and France did the like in 1814, the latter as the result of a treaty with Great Britain, though it was not in full operation until June 1, 1819. Spain lingered until the next year, and Portugal, which had legislated for absolute abolition in January, 1815, had the time for the cessation of the trade extended to January 21, 1823, and finally to February, 1830. To Denmark, however, must be given the honor of having pioneered in the movement for the abolition of the slave trade, a royal order having been issued May 16, 1792, to be enforced throughout her dominion at the end of ten years. VII FROM 1816 TO 1870 THE year 1816 witnessed the beginning of two divergent movements with respect to the black population of the United States. The first was the organization by the whites of the American Colonization Society, the adoption of its constitution, December 31, and the election of its officers, January 1, 1817. Henry Clay presided at the first meeting, which was held at the Capitol, December 21, 1816. At the adjourned meeting held in the hall of the House of Representatives the constitution was adopted with fifty men as charter members. Bushrod Washington, a nephew of George Washington and one of the justices of the Supreme Court, was elected first president. This movement, paradoxical as it may be, was held to be both in the interest of slavery and freedom-of slavery, because by the contemplated removal of the free people of color from the country it would destroy the unrest and dissatisfaction of the slave with his servile condition; in the interest of freedom, because the free Negro would be transported to a land in which he would have free scope for all his activities, energies, and aspirations, unfettered by the prejudice ace and unequal competition. The other epochal event was the creation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church denomination of colored Methodist societies in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore and the adjacent country. The black worshipers in the first-named city had been ordered up from their knees while in the act of praying, and in other places they were otherwise restricted. To save their self-respect they established churches composed entirely of their own race, and in this year was the first step towards connectional union. The movement to remove systematically the free men of the country was the first step to atone for the purchase of the twenty Negroes landed at Jamestown two hundred years before. The twenty had become in 1810, 1,369,864, of whom 183,897, were free. The Nation gave moral support to the colonization movement. Colored men desirous of going to Africa were not subjected to certain disabilities. They could receive educational facilities denied other colored Americans, and they enjoyed more of the freedom of locomotion. Yet during the entire period of the colonization movement from 1820, the time of the first settlement in Africa, the numbers who have gone to Liberia, including 5,722 recaptured Africans, up to the close of the nineteenth century were not more than 22,119, and their descendants in that country did not at the beginning of the twentieth century, amount to more than 25,000.1 On the other hand, the A. M. E. Church has grown rapidly from the beginning. In 1912 it had a membership of 620,234.2 The A. M. E. Zion Church, established largely for the same reasons in 1820, had the same year a membership of 547,216, distributed throughout the continental part of the United States. 1 Liberia Bulletin No. 16. 2 Dr. H. K. Carroll, Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. 3 Ibid. VIII SLAVERY-EXTENSION AND ABOLITION IN 1820 a battle royal was fought in Congress in which the right of determining whether new territory should be free or slave was the issue. After a prolonged debate the Missouri Compromise, as it is known, became a law. Missouri was admitted as a slave, Maine as a free State, and thereafter neither slavery nor involuntary servitude should be permitted in the United States north of 36° 30'. It was believed so far as Congress was concerned that the Slavery Question had been settled. Three events, however, the Denmark Vesey Insurrection of 1822, the Nat Turner Insurrection of 1831 and the organization of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 at Philadelphia, kept the Slavery Question before the country. The Amistad Captives, who in 1839 overcame the slave traders who were bringing them from Africa to this country to sell them into slavery,1 also held the popular attention. The persistent warfare of John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives in behalf of the right of petition; the rapid increase of slave population in the South, due to the smuggling of slaves and the struggle of the Slave Power to keep pace with the rapid growth of the Middle West and the annexation of Texas, brought the elements together again in conflict in 1850. After another prolonged debate, another compromise was adopted, by which among other things, First.-California was to be admitted as a free State. 1 Slavery and Anti-Slavery, W. Goodell. Third. The organization of the Territory of New Mexico without any restriction as to slavery. Fourth. The prohibition of domestic slave trade in the District of Columbia. The sentiment of the North was decidedly against the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, and the South, on the other hand did not keep faith with the Compromise of 1820, which by her solid delegation in Congress, aided by a strong contingent from the North she defied by the enactment in 1854, of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Here was an irrepressible conflict, which was accentuated by the Dred Scott Decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in 1857, delivered two days after the inauguration of President Buchanan. In Kansas the conflict was bitter and persistent, and in the end Freedom won. Both sides of the struggle between Freedom and Slavery were engaged in a political duel in Illinois, where Lincoln represented the idea of the National power of the country to check the westward extension of slavery, and Stephen Douglas championed the right to make a territory either free or slave at will. In 1859 another insurrection, this time led by John Brown, a white man, with 22 followers, at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, thrilled the country. It had most wide-reaching and permanent results, dooming slavery to extinction, although its leader and his associates paid the penalty of their lives on the scaffold. |