The first serious blow to the slave-trade fell in 1772, when an English court declared that any slave coming into England straightway became free.  That closed all English ports to the slavers.  Two years after the American colonists, then on the threshold of the revolt against Great Britain, thought to put America on a like high plane, and formally resolved that they would “not purchase any slave imported after the first day of December next; after which time, we will wholly discontinue the slave-trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it.”  But to this praiseworthy determination the colonists were unable to live up, and in 1776, when Jefferson proposed to put into the Declaration of Independence the charge that the British King had forced the slave-trade on the colonies, a proper sense of their own guilt made the delegates oppose it.

It was in England that the first earnest effort to break up the slave-trade began.  It was under the Stars and Stripes that the slavers longest protected their murderous traffic.  For a time the effort of the British humanitarians was confined to the amelioration of the conditions of the trade, prescribing space to be given each slave, prescribing surgeons, and offering bounties to be paid captains who lost less than two per cent. of their cargoes on the voyage.  It is not recorded that the bounty was often claimed.  On the contrary, the horrors of what was called “the middle passage” grew with the greed of the slave captains.  But the revelations of inhumanity made during the parliamentary investigation were too shocking for even the indifferent and callous public sentiment of that day.  Humane people saw at once that to attempt to regulate a traffic so abhorrent to every sense of humanity, was for the nation to go into partnership with murderers and manstealers, and so the demand for the absolute prohibition of the traffic gained strength from the futile attempt to regulate it.  Bills for its abolition failed, now in the House of Lords, then in the House of Commons; but in 1807 a law prohibiting all participation in the trade by British ships or subjects was passed.  The United States moved very slowly.  Individual States under the old confederation prohibited slavery within their borders, and in some cases the slave trade; but when our forefathers came together to form that Constitution under which the nation still exists, the opposition of certain Southern States was so vigorous that the best which could be done was to authorize a tax on slaves of not more than ten dollars a head, and to provide that the traffic should not be prohibited before 1808.  But there followed a series of acts which corrected the seeming failure of the constitutional convention.  One prohibited American citizens “carrying on the slave trade from the United States to any foreign place or country.”  Another forbade the