Mr. President, the thirteen colonies, which on the 4th of July, 1776, asserted their independence, were British colonies, governed by British laws.  Our ancestors in their emigration to this country brought with them the common law of England as their birthright.  They adopted its principles for their government so far as it was not incompatible with the peculiarities of their situation in a rude and unsettled country.  Great Britain then having the sovereignty over the colonies, possessed undoubted power to regulate their institutions, to control their commerce, and to give laws to their intercourse, both with the mother and the other nations of the earth.  If I can show, as I hope to be able to establish to the satisfaction of the Senate, that the nation thus exercising sovereign power over these thirteen colonies did establish slavery in them, did maintain and protect the institution, did originate and carry on the slave trade, did support and foster that trade, that it forbade the colonies permission either to emancipate or export their slaves, that it prohibited them from inaugurating any legislation in diminution or discouragement of the institution—­nay, sir, more, if, at the date of our Revolution I can show that African slavery existed in England as it did on this continent, if I can show that slaves were sold upon the slave mart, in the Exchange and other public places of resort in the city of London as they were on this continent, then I shall not hazard too much in the assertion that slavery was the common law of the thirteen States of the Confederacy at the time they burst the bonds that united them to the mother country.

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This legislation, Mr. President, as I have said before, emanating from the mother country, fixed the institution upon the colonies.  They could not resist it.  All their right was limited to petition, to remonstrance, and to attempts at legislation at home to diminish the evil.  Every such attempt was sternly repressed by the British Crown.  In 1760, South Carolina passed an act prohibiting the further importation of African slaves.  The act was rejected by the Crown; the Governor was reprimanded; and a circular was sent to all the Governors of all the colonies, warning them against presuming to countenance such legislation.  In 1765, a similar bill was twice read in the Assembly of Jamaica.  The news reached Great Britain before its final passage.  Instructions were sent out to the royal Governor; he called the House of Assembly before him, communicated his instructions, and forbade any further progress of the bill.  In 1774, in spite of this discountenancing action of the mother Government, two bills passed the Legislative Assembly of Jamaica; and the Earl of Dartmouth, then Secretary of State, wrote to Sir Basil Keith, the Governor of the colony, that “these measures had created alarm to the merchants of Great Britain engaged in that branch of commerce;” and forbidding him, “on pain of removal from his Government, to assent to such laws.”