Colony of Virginia, for instance, passed no less than twenty-three acts, tending to suppress this traffic — all of which acts were negatived by the English Government.[1] In 1772, before the Declaration of Independence, the Assembly of Virginia went so far as to set forth, in a respectful petition to the king, the inhumanity of the slave-trade, and to suggest that "it might endanger the very existence of his American dominions." And to show her sincerity — in 1778, as soon as she got the power into her own hands — in the very midst of the war of independence — the same Colony passed an act making the slave-trade punishable by death.[2] This was nearly thirty years before the slave-trade was abolished in Great Britain. Other Colonies followed the example of Virginia in the effort to exclude or check the introduction of slaves. New York laid a duty upon their importation as early as 1753, Pennsylvania in 1762, and New Jersey in 1769.
The United States, as a nation, also, was the first to prohibit the prosecution of the slave-trade. In the year 1794 — thirteen years before any act on the subject was passed by Great Britain — it was enacted by the Congress of the United States, that "no person in the United States should fit out any vessel there, for the purpose of carrying on any traffic in slaves." In 1800, it. was enacted that "it should be unlawful for any citizen of the United States to have any property in any vessel employed in transporting slaves, from one foreign country to another, or to serve on board any vessel so employed," and any of the commissioned
