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but it is by encouragement alone that we can expect that the change will take place. Surely some of the onerous duties imposed by the Trinity House might be removed, not from the present class of vessels, but from those built hereafter with first-rate sailing properties. These, however, are points which call for a much fuller investigation than I can here afford them; but they are of vital importance to our maritime superiority, and as such should be immediately considered by the Government of Great Britain.

41

SLAVERY

It had always appeared to me as singular that the Americans, at the time of their Declaration of Independence, took no measures for the gradual, if not immediate, extinction of slavery; that at the very time they were offering up thanks for having successfully struggled for their own emancipation from what they considered foreign bondage, their gratitude for their liberation did not induce them to break the chains of those whom they themselves held in captivity. It is useless for them to exclaim, as they now do, that it was England who left them slavery as a curse, and reproach us as having originally introduced the system amongst them. Admitting, as is the fact, that slavery did commence when the colonies were subject to the

mother country; admitting that the petitions for its discontinuance were disregarded, still there was nothing to prevent immediate manumission at the time of the acknowledgment of their independence by Great Britain. They had then every thing to recommence; they had to select a new form of government, and to decide upon new laws; they pronounced, in their Declaration, that "all men were equal;" and yet, in the face of this Declaration, and their solemn invocation to the Deity, the negroes, in their fetters, pleaded to them in vain.

I had always thought that this sad omission, which has left such an anomaly in the Declaration of Independence as to have made it the taunt and reproach of the Americans by the whole civilized world, did really arise from forgetfulness; that, as is but too often the case, when we are ourselves made happy, the Americans in their joy at their own deliverance from a foreign yoke, and the repossessing them

selves of their own rights, had been too much engrossed to occupy themselves with the undeniable claims of others. But I was mistaken; such was not the case, as I shall presently shew.

In the course of one of my sojourns in Philadelphia, Mr. Vaughan, of the Athenæum of that city, stated to me that he had found the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, in the hand-writing of Mr. Jefferson, and that it was curious to remark the alterations which had been made previous to the adoption of the manifesto which was afterwards promulgated. It was to Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, that was entrusted the primary drawing up of this important document, which was then submitted to others, and ultimately to the Convention, for approval; and it appears that the question of slavery had NOT been overlooked when the document was first framed, as the following clause, inserted in the original draft by Mr. Jefferson, but expunged when it was laid

before the Convention), will sufficiently prove. After enumerating the grounds upon which they threw off their allegiance to the King of England, the Declaration continued, in Jefferson's nervous style:

"He [the king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the person of a distant people who never offended him; captivating and carrying them into slavery, in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold; he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce; and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has de

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