injustice, grievances, and oppression." Its terms are few and simple: a governor, to be appointed by the company; a permanent council, likewise to be appointed by the company; a general assembly, to be convened yearly, and to consist of the members of the council, and of two burgesses to be chosen from each of the several plantations by the respective inhabitants. The assembly might exercise full legislative authority, a negative voice being reserved to the governor; but no law or ordinance would be valid, unless ratified by the company in England. It was further agreed that, after the government of the colony should have once been framed, no orders of the court in London should bind the colony, unless they should in like manner be ratified by the general assembly. The courts of justice were required to conform to the laws and manner of trial used in the realm of England.

Such was the constitution which Sir Francis Wyatt, the successor of the mild but inefficient Yeardley, was commissioned to bear to the colony. The system of representative government and trial by jury thus became in the new hemisphere an acknowledged right. On this ordinance Virginia erected the superstructure of her liberties. Its influences were wide and enduring, and can be traced through all her history. It constituted the plantation, in its infancy, a nursery of freemen; and succeeding generations learned to cherish institutions which were as old as the first period of the prosperity of their fathers. The privileges then 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 praise of having auspicated 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 honor on Sir Edwin Sandys, the Earl of Southampton, Nicholas Ferrar, and the patriot royalists of England, that, though they were unable to establish guarantees of a liberal administration at home, they were careful to connect popular freedom inseparably with the life, prosperity, and state of society of Virginia.

CHAPTER V.

SLAVERY. DISSOLUTION OF THE LONDON COMPANY.

WHILE Virginia, by the concession of a representative 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, though not so old as freedom, 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.

The Hebrews, when they burst the bands of their own thraldom, carried with them beyond the desert the institution of slavery. The light that broke from Sinai scattered the illusions of polytheism; but slavery planted itself even in the promised land. 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.

The countries that bordered on Palestine were equally familiar with domestic servitude; and Tyre, the oldest and most famous commercial city of Phoenicia, was, like Babylon, 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 seaside was in danger from the kidnapper. Greeks enslaved each other. The 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; the hero of Macedon sold men of his own kindred and language into hopeless slavery. More than four centuries before the Christian era, Alcidamas, a pupil of Gorgias, taught that "God has sent forth all men free; nature has made no man slave." While one class of Greek authors of that period confounded the authority of master and head of a family, others asserted that the relation of master and slave is conventional; that freedom is the law of nature, which knows no difference between master and slave; that slavery is therefore the child of violence, and inherently unjust. "A man, O my master," so speaks the slave in a comedy of Philemon, "because he is a slave, does not cease to be a man. He is of the same flesh with you. Nature makes no slaves." Aristotle, though he recognises "living chattels " as a component part of the complete family, has left on record his most deliberate judgment, that the prize of freedom should be placed within the reach of every slave. Yet the idea of universal free labor was only a dormant bud, not to be

quickened for many centuries. In every Grecian republic slavery was an element.

The diffusion of bondage throughout the dominions of Rome, and the severities of the law towards the slave, hastened the fall of the 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 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 various nations and colors. "Slaves are they!" writes Seneca; 66 say that they are men." "By the law of nature, all men are born free," are the words of Ulpian, who held that slavery first came in by the law of man. The Roman digests pronounced slavery "contrary to nature."

The

The middle age witnessed rather a change in the channels of the slave-trade, than a diminution of its evils. pirate and the kidnapper and the conqueror still continued their pursuits. The Saxon race carried the most repulsive forms of slavery to England, 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 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.

1102.

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 only refuge from 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."

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

In Sicily, and perhaps in Italy, the children of Asia and Africa, in their turn, were exposed for sale. In the extremity of poverty, the Arab father would sometimes pawn even his children to the Italian merchant, in the vain hope of soon effecting their ransom. Rome itself long remained

a mart where Christian slaves were exposed for sale, to supply the domestic market of Mahometans. The Venetians, in their commercial intercourse with the ports of unbelieving nations, as well as with Rome, purchased alike infidels and Christians, and sold them again to the Arabs in Sicily and Spain. Christian and Jewish avarice supplied the slave-market of the Saracens. What though the trade was exposed to the censure of the church, and prohibited by the laws of Venice? It could not be effectually checked, till, by the Venetian law, no slave might enter a Venetian ship, and to tread the deck of an argosy of Venice became the privilege and the evidence of freedom.

The spirit of the Christian religion might, before the discovery of America, have led to the abolition of the slavetrade, but for the hostility between the Christian church and the followers of Mahomet. In the twelfth century, Pope Alexander III., true to the spirit of his office, which, during the supremacy of brute force in the middle age, made of the chief minister of religion the tribune of the people and the guardian of the oppressed, had written that, “nature having made no slaves, all men have an equal right to liberty." But the slave-trade had never relented among the Mahometans: the captive Christian had no alternative but apostasy or servitude, and the captive infidel was treated in Christendom with corresponding intolerance. In the camp