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A CHAPTER ON SLAVERY.
regulations of the Free States, just described, that emancipated slaves will no longer be able to find a retreat within those States. In consequence, there appears no prospect for them but a condition of hopeless slavery.[1]
- ↑ Professor Stowe (husband of the authoress of "Uncle Tom‘s Cabin"), in showing the ineffectiveness of attempts at emancipation, unless united with colonization, that is, removal to Africa — states the following striking case: — "In 1770, the Friends [Quakers] in the United States declared slavery to be inconsistent with the principles of Christianity, and prohibited it to the members of their body. The Friends of the Yearly Meeting of North Carolina, including a part of Tennessee and Virginia, amounting to many thousands, petitioned the Legislature of North Carolina for permission to emancipate their slaves. It was refused. They continued to press the subject with petition after petition for forty years, and with no better success. They, at length, without law, emancipated their slaves upon the soil; and what was the consequence? More than one hundred of those emancipated slaves were taken up and sold into perpetual and hopeless bondage, under the laws of the State. Emancipation on the soil was plainly impossible, in the existing state of public feeling. After various expedients, and having expended in ten years more than 20,000 dollars in procuring asylums for their slaves in the Free States, those Free States made enactments preventing this intrusion of free blacks upon them. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, were applied to in vain: the door was shut. Some years since they embarked one hundred of their liberated slaves for Pennsylvania. They were refused a landing in the State. They went over to New Jersey. The same refusal met them there. They were then left to float up and down the Delaware river, without a spot of dry land to set their feet upon, till the Colonization Society took them up, and gave them a resting place in Liberia. They [the Friends] have now five hundred slaves left whom they are anxious to liberate. And what shall they do? shall they get the laws of the State altered? They labored after that for forty years, and more than one whole generation of black men died in bondage, while their masters were striving to effectuate immediate emancipation. Immediate emancipation they found to be so slow a process, that they were obliged to resort to colonization in order that something might be done immediately." — Freeman's Plea for Africa, Appendix, p. 846.
