to the house of David only the tribes of Benjamin and Judah. They, like the North, had received the benefit of this taxation. The chief part of the enormous expenditures was made within their borders, and they, like New England, flourished and prospered at the expense of their brethren.
By the Constitution, a citizen of the South had a right to pursue his fugitive slave into any of the States, apprehend and bring him back; but so unfriendly had the North become towards the South, and so regardless of her duties under the Constitution, that Southern citizens, in pursuing and attempting to apprehend runaway negroes in the North, were thrown into jail, maltreated and insulted despite of their rights. Northern people loaded the mails for the South with inflammatory publications inciting the negroes to revolt, and encouraging them to rise up, in servile insurrection, and murder their owners. Like tampering with the negroes was one among the causes which led Virginia into her original proposition to the
other colonists, that they should all, for the common good and common safety, separate themselves from Great Britain and strike for independent existence. In a resolution, unanimously adopted in convention for a declaration of such independence, it is urged that the King's representative in Virginia was "tempting our slaves by every artifice to resort to him, and training and employing them against their masters."[1] To counteract this attempt by the New England people to do the like, the Legislatures of Virginia and other Southern States felt themselves constrained to curtail the privileges of the slave, to increase the patrols, and for the public safety to enact severe laws against the black man. This grated upon the generous feelings of our people the more, because they were thus compelled in self-defence to spread hateful laws upon the statute-book of their State, and subject her fair fame to invidious criticisms by posterity, and this in consequence of the repeated attempt of the Northern people to tamper with the negroes and interfere with our domestic affairs. It was a shaft which sank deep and rankled long; it brought to mind colonial times, and put into Southern heads the idea of another separation. But this was not all. Societies were formed in the North to encourage our negroes to escape and to harbor the runaways; emissaries came down to inveigle them away; and while they were engaged at this, the Northern States aided and abetted by passing acts prohibiting their
- ↑ Resolutions of Virginia for a Declaration of Independence, unanimously adopted 15th May, 1776.—Page 1, Code of Virginia, 1860.
