|
|
11. Ending the Slave Trade
uring the years 1777 and 8, the anxieties and agitations of the war weighed so heavily and constantly upon the legislature, that little attention could be spared to advancing the progress of political reform. Mr. Jefferson continued a member, but in obedience to more pressing engagements, suspended in great part the ruling purpose of his mind and buried himself in the external concerns of revolution. In all the practical details of legislation, he contributed his full quota of service; but they are too voluminous for incorporation into this work. Not a moment was passed unemployed. Every interval which could be safely spared from his duties in the legislature was devoted to the preparation of the revised code of Virginia or to a vigilant circumspection of the national affairs.
The following letter to Dr. Franklin, then in Paris, evinces the satisfaction with which he contemplated the establishment of republicanism in his native State, as well as the anxiety and zeal which he carried into every department of the public service.
In addition to the military operations which engaged the attention of the legislature, two important transactions of a civil character, in both of which Mr. Jefferson took the lead, distinguished the autumnal session of 1777. These were the ratification of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, proposed by Congress on the 17th of November, 1776, and the adoption of a plan to dispose of the unappropriated western lands of Virginia, with the proceeds to be applied to the creation of a sinking fund for discharging the public debt. A loan office was established in which the waste lands were registered and sold from time to time on moderate terms for the benefit of the State. In the then posture of affairs, no measure could have been proposed more directly and widely beneficial; it opened an incalculable resource for the support of the public credit.
Virginia, August 13, 1777. . .
"Honorable Sir,--I forbear to write you news, as the time of Mr. Shore's departure being uncertain, it might be old before you receive it, and he can in person possess you of all we have. With respect to the State of Virginia in particular, the people seem to have laid aside the monarchical and taken up the republican government with as much ease as would have attended their throwing off an old and putting on a new suit of clothes. Not a single throe has attended this important transformation. A half-dozen aristocratical gentlemen, agonizing under the loss of preeminence, have sometimes ventured their sarcasm on our political metamorphosis. They have been thought fitter objects of pity than of punishment. We are at present in the complete and quiet exercise of well-organized government, save only that our courts of justice do not open till the fall. I think nothing can bring the security of our continent and its cause into danger if we can support the credit of our paper. To do that, I apprehend one of two steps must be taken. Either to procure free trade by alliance with some naval power able to protect it; or, if we find there is no prospect of that, to shut our ports totally to all the world and turn our colonies into manufactories. The former would be most eligible, because most conformable to the habits and wishes of our people. Were the British Court to return to their senses in time to seize the little advantage which still remains within their reach from this quarter, I judge that, on acknowledging our absolute independence and sovereignty, a commercial treaty beneficial to them and perhaps even a league of mutual offense and defense might, not seeing the expense or consequences of such a measure, be approved by our people, if nothing in the mean time done on your part should prevent it. But they will continue to grasp at their desperate sovereignty till every benefit short of that is forever out of their reach. I wish my domestic situation had rendered it possible for me to join you in the very honorable charge confided to you. Residence in a polite Court, society of literati of the first order, a just cause and an approving God will add length to a life for which all men pray, and none more than"Your most obedient and humble servant." (ME 4:34)
he May session of 1778 also, notwithstanding the exigencies of the war, was distinguished by a civil transaction which is intimately connected with the reputation of Mr. Jefferson and the honor of our country, namely the abolition of the Slave Trade. The bill for this purpose was introduced by him in October, 1776, but was not acted upon finally until this session. A more particular illustration of the merits of this bill is provided by an historical comparison of the efforts of other nations. The British empire has claimed the honor of having set the example of the renunciation of this diabolical traffic, and Lord Castlereagh declared in the House of Commons on the 9th of February, 1818, that on the subject of making the slave trade punishable by law, Great Britain had led the way. A slight recurrence to dates, however, will unfold the historical truth on this point.
In the year 1791, Mr. Wilberforce, who is considered the father of African slave-trade abolition in England, made his first grand motion to that effect in the House of Commons. After a vehement and protracted debate, in the course of which Mr. Fox said that "if the house did not, by their vote, mark to all mankind their abhorrence of a practice so savage, so enormous, so repugnant to all laws human and divine, they would consign their character to eternal infamy," the motion was lost by a considerable majority. The ensuing year, he renewed his proposition with unabated ardor, and again it was rejected by the house. They nevertheless manifested some relaxation in their repugnance to the general principle by voting a gradual abolition the same year; but the House of Lords refused to concur. The same vote was again carried in 1794 in Commons by a very thin house, but lost with the peers by a majority of forty-five to four. Similar results attended the indefatigable exertions of the abolitionists for fourteen years, and it was not until the 25th of March, 1807, that England consented to renounce the slave trade by a law which enacted that no vessels should clear-out for slaves from any port within the British dominions after the 1st of May, 1807, and that no slave should be landed in the colonies after the first of March, 1808.
On the 16th of March, 1792, Denmark promulgated a law which interdicted the slave trade on the part of Danish subjects after the commencement of the year 1803, and which prescribed that all importations of slaves into the Danish dominions should cease at the same period. Sweden, who had never authorized the traffic, consented to its prohibition in 1813, and the King of the Netherlands, in 1814. In France, Bonaparte interdicted it immediately on his return from Elba in 1815. In 1816, Spain stipulated in a treaty with England to renounce the trade entirely after the 30th of March, 1820, in consideration of the sum of four hundred thousand pounds sterling. About the same time also, a treaty was concluded by the same power with Portugal in which she required the period of eight years to complete the work of abolition, together with certain material changes in the commercial relations of the two countries. (Walsh's Appeal, pp. 320-364.)
From the foregoing statements, it appears that the honor of having set the example in the magnanimous work of African slave-trade abolition, belongs clearly and absolutely to America. That Virginia was the first sovereign and independent State, herself a slave-holding community, which renounced this nefarious commerce; that she preceded Great Britain by twenty-nine years, and the other principal slave-dealing powers in Europe, except Denmark, by more than thirty-five years; and that among the multitude of statesmen and philanthropists whose praises have been deservedly emblazoned for their splendid successes in this species of legislation, the merit of priority and of self-denying patriotism attaches incontestably to Mr. Jefferson. The bill which he submitted to the legislature and which finally received their sanction, prohibited under heavy penalties the introduction of any slave into Virginia by land or by water, and declared that every slave imported contrary thereto should be immediately free, excepting such as might belong to persons emigrating from the other States, or be claimed by discount, devise, or marriage, or be at that time the actual property of any citizen of the commonwealth residing in any other of the United States, or belong to travelers making a transient stay and carrying their slaves away with them. The circumstance ought not to be overlooked that this important triumph was achieved amid the turbulence and anxiety of revolution, thus exhibiting the sublime spectacle of a people legislating for the liberties of another and distant continent before the recovery of their own. The example was followed by Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island in the years 1780, '87, '88; and in 1794, the Congress of the United States interdicted the trade from all the ports of the Union under severe penalties. The cause of emancipation is a very different subject. The opinions and a part of the official labors of Mr. Jefferson upon that point have already appeared or will be seen in due course. [visitor comment note]
n the month of February, 1779, the committee of revisors having completed their respective tasks, they convened at Williamsburg to review, approve and consolidate them into one report. They came together day after day and examined critically their several parts, scrutinizing and amending until they had agreed on the whole. They had, in this work, embodied all the common law which it was thought necessary to alter, all the British statutes from Magna Charta to the present day, and all the laws of Virginia which they thought should be retained, from the establishment of their separate legislature to the present time; all of this within the compass of one hundred and twenty-six bills, making a printed folio of ninety pages only. A monument of codification upon the republican model, almost incredible for that period! The whole of this labor, the major part of which fell to Mr. Jefferson, was accomplished at intervals amidst the occupations and anxieties of the times, within the brief space of two years.
In the execution of his part, Mr. Jefferson observed a rule in relation to style which may appear rather odd to the modern draughtsman. In reforming the ancient statutes, he preserved the diction of the text, and in all new draughts, he avoided the introduction of modern technicalities, adopting the example of antiquity, which, from its greater simplicity, would allow less scope for the chicanery of the lawyers and remove from among the people numberless liabilities to litigation. Against the labored phraseology of modern statutes, he has entered an amusing protest. "Their verbosity," says he, "their endless tautologies, their involutions of case within case, and parenthesis within parenthesis, and their multiplied efforts at certainty by saids and aforesaids, by ors and by ands, to make them more plain, do really render them more perplexed and incomprehensible, not only to common readers, but to the lawyers themselves." (Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:65)
On the 18th of June, 1779, the committee of revisors communicated their report to the general assembly accompanied by a letter to the speaker signed by Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Wythe, and authorized by Mr. Pendleton.
The revised code was not enacted in a mass, as was contemplated. The minds of the legislature were not prepared for so extensive a transition at once, and the violence of the times afforded little leisure for metaphysical discussion. Some bills were taken out occasionally from time to time and passed; but the main body of the work was not entered upon until after the general peace in 1785, "when," says Mr. Jefferson, "by the unwearied exertions of Mr. Madison in opposition to the endless quibbles, chicaneries, perversions, vexations and delays of lawyers and demi-lawyers, most of the bills were passed by the legislature with little alteration." That distinguished contemporary who is presented as having had so important an agency in carrying this code into operation has added verbal testimony of the uncommon estimate which he put upon its merits. "It has," says he, "been a mine of legislative wealth, and a model of statutory composition, containing not a single superfluous word, and preferring always words and phrases of a meaning fixed as much as possible by oracular treatises or solemn adjudications." (Letter to S. H. Smith, 1827.)
In preparing this work, Mr Jefferson improved the opportunity to push his favorite system of reform into every branch of administration. The principal innovations which he made upon the established order of things were the following:
1. The Repeal of the Law of Entails, which, though separately enacted at the first republican session, he incorporated into the Revised Code.
2. The Abrogation of the Right of Primogeniture and the equal division of inheritances among all the children or other representatives in equal degree.
3. The Assertion of the Right of Expatriation, or a republican definition of the rules whereby aliens may become citizens and citizens make themselves aliens.
4. The Establishment of Religious Freedom upon the broadest foundation.
5. The Emancipation of all Slaves born after the passage of the act and deportation at a proper age.-- not carried into effect.
6. The Abolition of Capital Punishment in all cases except those of treason and murder, and the graduation of punishments to crimes throughout upon the principles of reason and humanity.-- enacted with amendments.
7. The Establishment of a systematical plan of General Education, reaching all classes of citizens and adapted to every grade of capacity.-- not carried into effect.
The first of these prominent features of the revisal has already been considered at sufficient length. The second in the catalogue holds an eminent rank among the ancient and venerable foundations of republicanism. It overturned one of the most arbitrary and unrighteous among the multiplied institutions that have been permitted to evict the laws of God and the order of nature from the social systems of mankind. The aristocracy of Virginia opposed the innovation with the usual pertinacity which marked their adherence to the ancient privileges of the order, but the bill was finally carried in 1785 and forms the present Law of Descents in that commonwealth.
The law on the subject of expatriation established the republican doctrine on the much controverted principle of revolution. The opinions of the author in reference to this question, with the singular discrepancy between them and those of his leading compatriots, have been illustrated in a preceding chapter by an appeal to the written testimony of that period. Heterodox and presumptuous as his rights of colonization were deemed by the politicians of the first stages of the revolution, the public mind had now approached so nearly to the same point as to authorize the attempt to establish them upon a legal basis. The bill for this purpose was taken up separately and carried on the 26th of June, 1779, principally through the exertions of George Mason, into whose hands the author had committed it on his retiring from the legislature. After stating the conditions of naturalization and declaring who shall be deemed citizens and who aliens on terms extremely liberal and democratic, the act goes on to prescribe:
"And in order to preserve to the citizens of this commonwealth that natural right, which all men have, of relinquishing the country in which birth or other accident may have thrown them, and seeking subsistence and happiness wheresoever they may be able, or may hope to find them; and to declare, unequivocally, what circumstances shall be deemed evidence of an intention in any citizen to exercise that right: It is enacted and declared," etc.
Having defined the necessary circumstances of evidence and the mode of proceeding thereon, the act concludes by giving to all free white inhabitants of other States, except paupers and fugitives from justice, the same rights, privileges, and immunities, as belong to the free citizens of the Commonwealth, and the liberty of free ingress and egress to and from the same; reserving, however, the right and authority of retaining persons guilty or charged with the commission of any high crime or misdemeanor in another State and of delivering them over to the authorities of the State from which they fled upon demand of the Governor or executive power of such State. Speaking of this Act in the continuation of Burk's History of Virginia, it is observed:
"Its operation has been superseded by subsequent institutions, but that philanthropy which opened in Virginia an asylum to individuals of any nation not at open war with America upon their removing to the State to reside and taking an oath of fidelity, and that respect for the natural and social rights of men which lays no restraints whatever on expatriation and claims the allegiance of citizens so long only as they are willing to retain that character, cannot be forgotten. The legislators of Virginia well knew that the strongest hold of a government on its citizens is that affection which rational liberty, mild laws, and protecting institutions never fail to produce, especially when physical advantages march in front with political blessings and industry and worth are perennial sources of comfort and respectability."
Top | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Front Page
© 1997 by Eyler Robert Coates, Sr.