GEORGIA A FREE COLONY. olina, a century ago, was as intense- 31 ness and to the savages. South Car- | characterized the British system of Imprisonment for Debt, he devoted himself to their reform, and carried through the House an act to this end. His interest in the fortunes of bankrupt and needy debtors led him to plan the establishment of a colony to which they should be invited, and in which they might hope, by industry and prudence, to attain independence. This colony was also intended to afford an asylum for the oppressed Protestants of Germany and other portions of the continent. He interested many eminent and influential personages in his project, obtained for it a grant of nearly ten thousand pounds sterling from Parliament, with subscriptions to the amount of sixteen thousand more, and organized a company for its realization, whereof the directors were nearly all noblemen and members of Parliament. Its constitution forbade any director to receive any pecuniary advantage therefrom. Being himself the animating soul of the enterprise, he was persuaded to accept the arduous trust of governor of the colony, for which a royal grant had been obtained of the western coast of the Atlantic from the mouth of the Savannah to that of the Altamaha, and to which the name of Georgia was given in honor of the reigning sovereign. The trustees were incorporated in June, 1732. The pioneer colonists left England in November of that year, and landed at Charleston in January, 1733. Proceeding directly to their territory, they founded the city of Savannah in the course of the ensuing month. Oglethorpe, as director and vice-president of the African Company, had previously become The single and most honorable exception to the general facility with which this giant wrong was adopted and acquiesced in, is presented by the history of Georgia. That colony may owe something of her preëminence to her comparatively recent foundation; but she is far more indebted to the character and efforts of her illustrious founder. JAMES OGLETHORPE was born in 1688, or 1689, at Godalming, Surry County, England; entered the British army in 1710; and, having resigned on the restoration of peace, was, in 1714, commended by the great Marlborough to his former associate in command, the famous Prince Eugene of Savoy, by whom he was appointed one of his aids. He fought under Eugene in his brilliant and successful campaign against the Turks in 1716 and 1717, closing with the siege and capture of Belgrade, which ended the war. Declining to remain in the Austrian service, he returned, in 1722, to England, where, on the death of his elder brother about this time, he inherited the family estate; was elected to Parliament for the borough of Hazelmere, which he represented for the ensuing thirty-two years, and, becoming acquainted with the frightful abuses and inhumanities which then acquainted with an African prince, | was retaliated by a much stronger captured and sold into slavery by some neighboring chief, and had returned him to his native country, after imbibing from his acquaintance with the facts a profound detestation of the Slave-Trade and of Slavery. One of the fundamental laws devised by Oglethorpe for the government of his colony was a prohibition of slaveholding; another was an interdiction of the sale or use of Rum-neither of them calculated to be popular with the jail-birds, idlers, and profligates, who eagerly sought escape from their debts and their miseries by becoming members of the new colony. The spectacle of men, no wiser nor better than themselves, living idly and luxuriously, just across the Savannah river, on the fruits of constrained and unpaid negro labor, doubtless inflamed their discontent and their hostility. As if to add to the governor's troubles, war between Spain and England broke out in 1739, and Georgia, as the frontier colony, contiguous to the far older and stronger Spanish settlement of East Florida, was peculiarly exposed to its ravages. Oglethorpe, at the head of the South Carolina and Georgia militia, made an attempt on Saint Augustine, which miscarried; and this, in 1742, 12 Oglethorpe lived to be nearly a hundred years old-dying at Cranham Hall, Essex, England, June 30, 1787. It is not recorded nor probable that he ever revisited America after his relinquishment of the governorship of Georgia; but he remained a warm, active, wellinformed friend of our country after, as well as before and during, her struggle for independence. In 1784, Hannah More thus wrote of him: "I have got a new admirer; it is Gen. Oglethorpe, perhaps the most remarkable man of his time. He was foster-brother to the Pretender, Spanish expedition, which took Fort St. Simon, on the Altamaha, and might easily have subdued the whole colony, but it was alarmed and repelled by a stratagem of his conception. Oglethorpe soon after returned to England; the trustees finally surrendered their charter to the Crown; and in 1752 Georgia became a royal colony, whereby its inhabitants were enabled to gratify, without restraint, their longing for Slavery and Rum. The struggle of Oglethorpe" in Georgia was aided by the presence, counsels, and active sympathy, of the famous John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, whose pungent description of Slavery as "the sum of all villainies," was based on personal observation and experience during his sojourn in these colonies. But "another king arose, who knew not Joseph;" the magisterial hostility to bondage was relaxed, if not wholly withdrawn; the temptation remained and increased, while the resistance faded and disappeared; and soon Georgia yielded silently, passively, to the contagion of evil example, and soon became not only slaveholding, but, next to South Carolina, the most infatuated of all the thirteen colonies in its devotion to the mighty evil. and is much above ninety years old; the finest figure you ever saw. He perfectly realizes all my ideas of Nestor. His literature is great, his knowledge of the world extensive, and his faculties as bright as ever. * *He is quite a preux chevalier; heroic, romantic, and full of the old gallantry." Pope-who praised so sparingly-had spoken of him, not quite half a century earlier, in terms evincing like admiration; and many other contemporaries of literary eminence bore testimony to his signal merits.-See Sparks's American Biography. III. SLAVERY IN THE REVOLUTION. THE American Revolution was no sudden outbreak. It was preceded by eleven years of peaceful remonstrance and animated discussion. The vital question concerned the right of the British Parliament to impose taxes, at its discretion, on British subjects in any and every part of the empire. This question presented many phases, and prompted various acts and propositions. But its essence was always the same; and it was impossible that such men as James Otis, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry, should discuss it without laying broad foundations for their argument in premises affecting the natural and general Rights of Man to self-government, with the control of his own products or earnings. The enthusiast who imagines that our patriots were all 1 Witness the Darien (Ga.) resolutions. In the Darien committee, Thursday, June 12, 1775: "When the most valuable privileges of a people are invaded, not only by open violence, but by every kind of fraud, sophistry, and cunning, it behooves every individual to be upon his guard, and every member of society, like beacons in a country surrounded by enemies, to give the alarm, not only when their liberties in general are invaded, but separately, lest the precedent in one may affect the whole; and to enable the collective wisdom of such a people to judge of its consequences, and how far their respective grievances concern all, or should be opposed to preserve their necessary union. Every laudable attempt of this kind by the good people of this Colony, in a constitutional manner, has been hitherto frustrated by the influence and authority of men in office and their numerons dependents, and in every other natural and just way by the various arts they have put in practice. We, therefore, the representatives of the extensive district of Darien, in the colony of Georgia, being now assembled in congress by the authority and free choice of the inhabitants of the said district, now free from their fetters, do Resolve-" convinced of the danger and essential iniquity of Slavery, and the conservative who argues that few or none perceived and admitted the direct application of their logic to the case of men held in perpetual and limitless bondage, are alike mistaken. There were doubtless some who did not perceive, or did not admit, the inseparable connection between the rights they claimed as British freemen and the rights of all men everywhere; but the more discerning and logical of the patriots comprehended and confessed that their assertion of the rightful inseparability of Repre sentation from Taxation necessarily affirmed the grander and more essential right of each innocent, rational being to the control and use of his own capacities and faculties, and to the enjoyment of his own earnings.1 eulogizes "the firm and manly conduct of the people of Boston and Massachusetts," acquiescing in all the resolutions of the "grand American Congress in Philadelphia last October." The second resolution is denunciatory of England, in shutting up the land office, and in other op pressive acts. The third is opposed to ministerial mandates under the name of constitutions. The fourth is denunciatory of the number of officers appointed over the colonies by the British crown, and their exorbitant salaries. The fifth is as follows: "5th. To show the world that we are not influenced by any contracted or interested motive, but a general philanthropy for all mankind, of whatever climate, language, or complexion, we hereby declare our disapprobation and abhorrence of the unnatural practice of Slavery in America (however the uncultivated state of our country, and other specious arguments, may plead for it), a practice founded in injustice and cruelty, and highly dangerous to our liberties (as well as lives), debasing part of our fellow-creatures below men, and corrupting the virtue and morals of the rest, and as laying the basis of that liberty we contend for (and which we pray the Almighty to continue to the latest posterity) on a very wrong foundation. We therefore resolve at all There are six resolutions in all. The first times to use our utmost efforts for the manumis The principles of civil and political | arraignment of British tyranny; but which were, nevertheless, widely and deeply felt to be an important and integral portion of our case. Even divested of this, the Declaration stands to-day an evidence that our fathers regarded the rule of Great Britain as no more destructive to their own rights than to the rights of mankind. liberty, so patiently evolved and so thoroughly commended during the long controversy which preceded the appeal to arms, were reduced to axioms, and became portions of the popular faith. When Jefferson, in drafting our immortal Declaration of Independence, embodied in its preamble a formal and emphatic assertion of the inalienable Rights of Man, he set forth propositions novel and startling to European ears, but which eloquence and patriotic fervor had already engraven deeply on the American heart. That Declaration was not merely, as Mr. Choate has termed it, "the passionate manifesto of a revolutionary war;" it was the embodiment of our forefathers' deepest and most rooted convictions; and when, in penning that Declaration, he charged the British government with upholding and promoting the African slavetrade against the protests of the colonists, and in violation of the dictates of humanity, he asserted truths which the jealous devotion of South Carolina and Georgia to slaveholding rendered it impolitic to send forth as an integral portion of our 2 sion of our slaves in this colony upon the most safe and equitable footing for the masters and themselves."—American Archives, 4th Series, vol. i., 1774 and 1775. The following is the indictment of George III., as a patron and upholder of the African slavetrade, embodied by Mr. Jefferson in his original draft of the Declaration : "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 those very people to rise in arms among us, and purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed No other document was ever issued which so completely reflected and developed the popular convictions which underlaid and impelled it as that Declaration of Independence. The cavil that its ideas were not original with Jefferson is a striking testimonial to its worth. Originality of conception was the very last merit to which he would have chosen to lay claim, his purpose being to embody the general convictions of his countrymen-their conceptions of human, as well as colonial, rights and British wrongs, in the fewest, strongest, and clearest words. The fact that some of these words had already been employed-some of them a hundred times to set forth the same general truths, in no manner unfitted them for his use. The claim that his draft was a pla against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another." 'Mr. Jefferson, in his Autobiography, gives the following reason for the omission of this remarkable passage from the Declaration as adopted, issued, and published: "The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures; for, though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others." - Jefferson's Works, vol. i., p. 170. SLAVERY IN THE REVOLUTION. giarism from the Mecklenburg (N. | taining happiness and safety." also the Mecklenburg Declaration. 35 See The original draft of the Declaration of American Independence was first communicated by Mr. Jefferson separately to two of his colleagues, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, on the committee chosen by Congress to prepare it; then to the whole committee, consisting, in addition, of Roger Sherman and Robert R. Liv gestation, on the 28th of June; read in Committee of the Whole on the 1st of July; earnestly debated and scanned throughout the three following days, until finally adopted on the evening of the 4th. It may safely be said that not an affirmation, not a sentiment, was put forth therein to the world, which had not received the deliberate approbation of such cautious, conservative minds as those of Franklin, John Adams, and Roger Sherman, and of the American People, as well as their representatives in Congress, those of South Carolina and Georgia included. C.) Declaration of April 20th, preceding, he indignantly repelled; but he always observed that he employed whatever terms best expressed his thought, and would not say how far he was indebted for them to his reading, how far to his original reflections. Even the great fundamental assertion of Human Rights, which he has so memorably set forth as follows: "We hold these truths to be self-ingston; reported, after twenty days' evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness," was no novelty to those who hailed and responded to it. Three weeks before, the Virginia Convention had unanimously adopt ed a Declaration of Rights, reported on the 27th of May by George Mason, which proclaims that "All men are by nature equally free, and have inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possess ing property, and pursuing and ob The grandfather of James M. Mason, late U.S. Senator from Virginia, since Confederate The progress of the Revolution justified and deepened these convictions. Slavery was soon proved our chief source of weakness and of peril. Of our three millions of people, half a million were the chattels of others; and though all the colonies tolerated, and most of them expressly legalized slaveholding, the slaves, nearly concentrated in the Southern States, paralyzed the energies and enfeebled the efforts of their patriots. Incited by proclamations of royal governors and military commanders, thousands of the negroes escaped to British camps and garrisons, and were there Emissary to England. George Mason was one of Virginia's most illustrious sons. |