CHAP Commissioned to bear to the colony. The system IV. of representative government and trial by jury, was

1621. thus established in the new hemisphere as an acknowledged right; the colonists, ceasing to depend as servants on a commercial company, now became enfranchised citizens. Henceforward, the supreme power was held to reside in the hands of the colonial parliament, and of the king, as king of Virginia. The ordinance was the basis on which Virginia erected the superstructure of its liberties. Its influences were wide and enduring, and can be traced through all following years of the history of the colony. It constituted the plantation, in its infancy, a nursery of freemen; and succeeding generations learned tc cherish institutions which were as old as the first period of the prosperity of their fathers. The privileges which were now conceded, could never be wrested from the Virginians; and, as new colonies arose at the south, their proprietaries could hope to win emigrants only by bestowing franchises as large as those enjoyed by their elder rival. The London company merits the fame of having acted as the successful friend of liberty in America. It may be doubted, whether any public act during the reign of King James was of more permanent or pervading influence; and it reflects glory on the earl of Southampton, Sir Edwin Sandys, and the patriot party of England, who, unable to establish guaranties of a liberal administration at home, were careful to connect popular freedom so intimately with the life, prosperity and state of society of Virginia, that they never could be separated.

CHAPTER V.

SLAVERY. DISSOLUTION OF THE LONDON COMPANY.

V.

WHILE Virginia, by the concession of a represen- CHAP tative government, was constituted the asylum of liberty, by one of the strange contradictions in human affairs, it became the abode of hereditary bondsmen. The unjust, wasteful and unhappy system was fastened upon the rising institutions of America, not by the consent of the corporation, nor the desires of the emigrants; but, as it was introduced by the mercantile avarice of a foreign nation, so it was subsequently riveted by the policy of England, without regard to the interests or the wishes of the colony.

Slavery and the slave-trade are older than the records of human society: they are found to have existed, wherever the savage hunter began to assume the habits of pastoral or agricultural life; and, with the exception of Australasia, they have extended to every portion of the globe. They pervaded every nation of civilized antiquity. The earliest glimpses of Egyptian history exhibit pictures of bondage; the oldest monuments of human labor on the Egyptian soil are evidently the results of slave labor. The founder of the Jewish nation was a slave-holder and a purchaser of slaves. Every patriarch was lord in his own household.'

1 Gen. xii. 16; xvii. 12; xxxvii. 28.

CHAP

The Hebrews, when they burst the bands of them own thraldom, carried with them beyond the desert the institution of slavery. The light that broke from Sinai scattered the corrupting illusions of polytheism; but slavery planted itself even in the promised land, on the banks of Siloa, near the oracles of God. The Hebrew father might doom his daughter to bondage; the wife, and children, and posterity of the emancipated slave, remained the property of the master and his heirs; and if a slave, though mortally wounded by his master, did but languish of his wounds for a day, the owner escaped with impunity; for the slave was his master's money. It is even probable, that, at a later period, a man's family might be sold for the payment of debts.1

The countries that bordered on Palestine were equally familiar with domestic servitude; and, like Babylon, Tyre also, the oldest and most famous commercial city of Phenicia, was a market "for the persons of men." The Scythians of the desert had already established slavery throughout the plains and forests of the unknown north.

Old as are the traditions of Greece, the existence of slavery is older. The wrath of Achilles grew out of a quarrel for a slave; the Grecian dames had crowds of servile attendants; the heroes before Troy made excursions into the neighboring villages and towns to enslave the inhabitants. Greek pirates, roving, like the corsairs of Barbary, in quest of men, laid the foundations of Greek commerce; each commercial town was a slave-mart; and every cottage near the sea-side was in danger from the

1 Exodus, xxi. 4, 5, 6, 7. 21. Matthew, xviii. 25.

2 Ezekiel, xxvii. 13. Revela tion, xviii. 13.

SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE-TRADE IN THE MIDDLE AGE. 161

kidnapper.1

Greeks enslaved each other.

V.

The CHAP. language of Homer was the mother-tongue of the Helots; the Grecian city that made war on its neighbor city, exulted in its captives as a source of profit ; 2 the hero of Macedon sold men of his own kindred and language into hopeless slavery. The idea of universal free labor had not been generated. Aristotle had written that all mankind are brothers; yet the thought of equal enfranchisement never presented itself to his sagacious understanding. In every Grecian republic, slavery was an indispensable element.

The wide diffusion of bondage throughout the do minions of Rome, and the extreme severities of the Roman law towards the slave, contributed to hasten the fall of the Roman commonwealth. The power of the father to sell his children, of the creditor to sell his insolvent debtor, of the warrior to sell his captive, carried the influence of the institution into the bosom of every Roman family; into the conditions of every contract; into the heart of every unhappy land that was invaded by the Roman eagle. The slave-markets of Rome were filled with men of every complexion and every clime.3

When the freedom of savage life succeeded in establishing its power on the ruins of the Roman empire, the great swarms of Roman slaves began to disappear; but the middle age witnessed rather a change in the channels of the slave-trade, than a diminution of its evils. The pirate, and the kidnapper, and the conqueror, still continued their pursuits. The Saxon race

1 Thucydides, 1. i. c. v.

2 Arist. Pol., 1. i. c. 2, censures the practice, which was yet the common law.

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21

3 Senecæ Epist. xcv. A gmina exoletorum, per nationes coloresque descripta, &c. De Brevit. Vit. c. xii.

CHAP. carried the most repulsive forms of slavery to England, V. where not half the population could assert a right to

freedom, and where the price of a man was but four times the price of an ox. The importation of foreign slaves was freely tolerated: in defiance of severe penalties, the Saxons sold their own kindred into slavery on the continent; nor could the traffic be checked, till religion, pleading the cause of humanity, made its appeal to conscience. Even after the conquest, slaves 1102. were exported from England to Ireland, till the reign of Henry II., when a national synod of the Irish, to remove the pretext for an invasion, decreed the emancipation of all English slaves in the island.1

The German nations made the shores of the Baltic the scenes of the same desolating traffic; and the Dnieper formed the highway on which Russian merchants conveyed to Constantinople the slaves that had been purchased in the markets of Russia. The wretched often submitted to bondage, as the bitter but only refuge from absolute want. But it was the long wars between German and Slavonic tribes which imparted to the slave-trade its greatest activity, and filled France and the neighboring states with such numbers of victims, that they gave the name of the Slavonic nation to servitude itself; and every country of Western Europe still preserves in its language the record of the barbarous traffic in "Slaves." 2

Nor did France abstain from the slave-trade. At Lyons and Verdun, the Jews were able to purchase slaves for their Saracen customers.3

In Sicily, and perhaps in Italy, the children of Asia and Africa, in their turn, were exposed for sale. The

1 Wilkins's Concilia, i. 383, 471. Compare Lyttleton's Henry II. iii. 70: Turner, Lingard, Anderson.

2 Hüne's Darstellung, i. 102 and ff.

3 Fischer, in Hiine, i. 115.