unmerited and brutish servitude.  Of consequence, we sacrifice our reason, our humanity, our christianity, to an unnatural sordid gain.  We teach other nations to despise, and trample under foot, all the obligations of social virtue.  We take the most effectual method to prevent the propagation of the gospel, by representing it as a scheme of power and barbarous oppression, and an enemy to the natural privileges and rights of men.

“Perhaps all that I have now offered, may be of very little weight to restrain this enormity, this aggravated iniquity; however, I still have the satisfaction of having entered my private protest against a practice, which, in my opinion, bids that God, who is the God and Father of the Gentiles, unconverted to christianity, most daring and bold defiance, and spurns at all the principles both of natural and revealed religion.”

EXTRACT

From an ADDRESS

in the

VIRGINIA GAZETTE,

of MARCH 19, 1767.

Mr. RIND,

Permit me, in your paper, to address the members of our assembly on two points, in which the public interest is very nearly concerned.

The abolition of slavery, and the retrieval of specie in this colony, are the subjects on which I would bespeak their attention.—­

Long and serious reflections upon the nature and consequences of slavery have convinced me, that it is a violation both of justice and religion; that it is dangerous to the safety of the community in which it prevails; that it is destructive to the growth of arts and sciences; and lastly, that it produces a numerous and very fatal train of vices, both in the slave and in his master.

To prove these assertions, shall be the purpose of the following essay.

That slavery then is a violation of justice, will plainly appear, when we consider what justice is.  It is truly and simply defined, as by Justinian, constans et perpetua voluntas ejus suum cuique tribuendi; a constant endeavour to give every man his right.

Now, as freedom is unquestionably the birth-right of all mankind, Africans as well as Europeans, to keep the former in a state of slavery, is a constant violation of that right, and therefore of justice.

The ground on which the civilians who favour slavery, admit it to be just, namely, consent, force, and birth, is totally disputable; for surely a man’s own will and consent cannot be allowed to introduce so important an innovation into society, as slavery, or to make himself an outlaw, which is really the state of a slave; since neither consenting to, nor aiding the laws of the society in which he lives, he is neither bound to obey them, nor entitled to their protection.