this plantation has succeeded; and though at present I have only eight working hands, yet in all probability there will be more raised in one year, and with a quarter the expense, than has been produced at Bethesda for several years last past.  This confirms me in the opinion I have entertained for a long time, that Georgia never can or will be a flourishing province without negroes are allowed."[519]

The sentiment in favor of the importation of Negro slaves had become well-nigh unanimous.  The trustees began to waver.  On the 10th of January, 1749, another petition was presented to the trustees.  It was carefully drawn, and set forth the restrictions under which slaves should be introduced.  On the 16th of May following, it was read to the trustees; and they resolved to have it “presented to His Majesty in council.”  They also asked that the prohibition against the introduction of Negroes, passed in “1735, be repealed.”  The Earl of Shaftesbury, at the head of a special committee, draughted a bill repealing the prohibition.  On the 26th of October, 1749, a large and influential committee of twenty-seven drew up and signed a petition urging the immediate introduction of slavery, with certain limitations.  The paper was duly attested, and returned to the trustees.  The opposition to the introduction of slavery into the colony of Georgia had been conquered; and, after a long and bitter struggle, slavery was firmly and legally established in this the last Province of the English in the Western world.  The colonists were jubilant.

The charter under which the trustees acted expired by limitation in 1752, and a new form of government was established under the Board of Trade.  The royal commission appointed a governor and council.  One of the first ordinances enacted by them was one whereby “all offences committed by slaves were to be tried by a single justice, without a jury, who was to award execution, and, in capital cases, to set a value on the slave, to be paid out of the public treasury.”  At the first session of the Assembly in 1755, a law was passed “for the regulation and government of slaves.”  In 1765 an Act was passed establishing a pass system, and the rest of the legislation in respect to slaves was a copy of the laws of South Carolina.

The history of slavery in Georgia during this period is unparalleled and incomparably interesting.  It illustrates the power of the institution, and shows that there was no Province sufficiently independent of its influence so as to expel it from its jurisdiction.  Like the Angel of Death that passed through Egypt, there was no colony that it did not smite with its dark and destroying pinions.  The dearest, the sublimest, interests of humanity were prostrated by its defiling touch.  It shut out the sunlight of human kindness; it paled the fires of hope; it arrested the development of the branches of men’s better natures, and peopled their lower being with base and consuming desires; it placed the “Golden Rule” under the unholy heel of time-servers and self-seekers; it made the Church as secular as the Change, and the latter as pious as the former:  it was a gigantic system, at war with the civilization of the Roundheads and Puritans, and an intolerable burden to a people who desired to build a new nation in this New World in the West.