“ARTICLE I. SECTION I. All men are born equally free and independent, and among them natural, inherent and inalienable rights, are the rights of enjoying and defending life and LIBERTY.”

This section meant a great deal to a people who had abandoned their homes in the United States, where a chief justice of the Supreme Court had declared that “a Negro has no rights which a white man is bound to respect,”—­a country where the Federal Congress had armed every United-States marshal in all the Northern States with the inhuman and arbitrary power to apprehend, load with chains, and hurl back into the hell of slavery, every poor fugitive who sought to find a home in a professedly free section of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”  These brave black pilgrims, who had to leave “the freest land in the world” in order to get their freedom, did not intend that the solemn and formal declaration of principles contained in their constitution should be reduced to a reductio ad absurdum, as those in the American Constitution were by the infamous Fugitive-slave Law.  And in section 4 of their constitution they prohibit “the sum of all villanies”—­slavery!  The article reads:—­

“There shall be no slavery within this republic.  Nor shall any citizen of this republic, or any person resident therein, deal in slaves, either within or without this republic.”

They had no measure of compromise by which slavery could be carried on beyond certain limits “for highly commercial and business interests of a portion of their fellow-citizens.”  Liberians might have grown rich by merely suffering the slave-trade to be carried on among the natives.  The constitution fixed a scale of revenue, and levied a tariff on all imported articles.  A customs-service was introduced, and many reforms enforced which greatly angered a few avaricious white men whose profession as men-stealers was abolished by the constitution.  Moreover, there were others who for years had been trading and doing business along the coast, without paying any duties on the articles they exported.  The new government incurred their hostility.

In April, 1850, the republic of Liberia entered into a treaty with England, and in article nine of said treaty bound herself to the suppression of the slave-trade in the following explicit language:—­

“Slavery and the slave-trade being perpetually abolished in the republic of Liberia, the republic engages that a law shall be passed declaring it to be piracy for any Liberian citizen or vessel to be engaged or concerned in the slave-trade.”

Notwithstanding the above treaty, the enemies of the republic circulated the report in England and America that the Liberian government was secretly engaged in the slave-trade.  The friends of colonization in both countries were greatly alarmed by the rumor, and sought information in official quarters,—­of men on the ground.  The following testimony will show that the charge was malicious:—­