Unveiling of the Hoivitzer Monument.
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>ut of a solid New England. " Twenty years," exclaimed Madison, " will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves; " and George Mason rebuked the melan- choly choice of Mammon, for that "some of our eastern brethren had from a lust of gain engaged in this nefarious traffic." With a prophet's majesty he implored the South to reject the provision ex- torted as the price of this concession the provision to pass com- mercial laws by simple majorities. "This," he said, "would be to deliver the South, bound hand and foot, to the eastern States, and enable them to say, in the words of Cromwell on a certain occasion, ' The Lord hath delivered them into our hands.' '
Public opinion had as yet experienced no violent displacement as to the merchantable quality of negroes ; for the very States in which slavery itself had ceased, or was ceasing to exist, were those most actively engaged in the traffic in slaves.*
THE KING DENOUNCED BY JEFFERSON.
In the original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson had denounced the King for warring against human nature. "Determined to keep an open market, where men should be bought and sold, he has pros- tituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable traffic. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them." This denunciation was stricken out partly in deference to South Carolina and Georgia. "But," adds Jefferson, "our Northern, brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under these censures; for, though their people had few slaves
- A dispatch from Hartford, Connecticut, to the Boston Herald says:
Many of Connecticut's old-time Abolitionists have greeted Jason Brown, son of John Brown, the martyr of Harper's Ferry, who has been visiting here for two or three days past. * In referring to the slavery question he gives this significant opinion : " I believe that slavery was a sectional evil, and that the people of the North were as much to blame for its long con- tinuance as the people of the South. Why ? Because the old slave States of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania, when they found slavery no longer profitable, sold their slaves to other peo- ple of the South and pocketed the money. To be sure, a few liberated their slaves noticeably, the Quakers." Baltimore Sun, June 2, 1891.
