opposition, it attacked the life of the beneficent government which had fostered its growth through forbearance, and perished from the sword of its own drawing.
The odious distinction of establishing negro slavery in the thirteen colonies belongs to England. Although the Dutch were the first to engage in transporting Africans to the colonies, yet, under their commerce alone, it languished, and slavery thus introduced could easily have been removed by the benevolent spirit of colonial legislation. It was not until after the treaty of Utrecht, under English monopoly, that the slave trade with the colonies acquired its importance. By the decisions of her chief counsellors, York and Talbot, England legalized it; by her sovereignty the American ports were thrown open to the slave trade, and the prohibitions of the colonies against such importation annulled; by her Queens and Lords, the business was carried on and profits shared; by her ministers, a cloak of religion was thrown around its foulness, and they called it a mode to evangelize the heathen; by her merchants it was declared that “negro labor will keep our colonies in due subserviency to their mother country; for while our plantations depend only on planting by the negro, our colonies can never prove injurious to British manufactories, never become independent of their kingdom.” In 1702 Queen Anne instructed the governor of New York and New Jersey to “give due encouragement to slave merchants, and in particular to the royal African Company of England.” In 1775 the Earl of Dartmouth declares “we can not allow the colonies to check, or discourage in any degree, a traffic so beneficial to the nation.” Prior to 1740 England had introduced into the colonies about one hundred and thirty thousand blacks; by 1776 it had increased to three hundred thousand. The population of negro slaves among the thirteen colonies in 1754 stood as follows: New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine, 3,000; Rhode Island, 4,500; Connecticut 3,500; New York 11,000; New Jersey
