It was on the fifteenth of May, 1791, that this great act was passed.  One of the darkest aspects of the character of Napoleon I. was the favor which he showed to the project of restoring slavery in the French colonies.  But that project was in vain.  The blow of freedom once struck produced its everlasting results.  Though slavery lingered for nearly a half century in some of the French colonies, it survived there only because of the revolutions in the home government which prevented its final extinction.  Acts were passed for the utter extirpation of the system during the reign of Louis Philippe, and again in the time of the Second Republic.

Meanwhile, the northern nations proceeded with the work of abolition.  In Sweden slavery ceased in 1847.  In the following year Denmark passed an Act of Emancipation.  But the Netherlands did not follow in the good work until the year 1860.  The Spaniards and Portuguese have been among the last to cling to the system of human servitude.  In the outlying possessions of Spain, in Spanish America and elsewhere, the institution still maintains a precarious existence.  In Brazil it was not abolished until 1871.  In the Mohammedan countries it still exists, and may even be said to flourish.  In Russia serfdom was abolished in 1863.  He who at that date looked abroad over the world, might see the pillars of human bondage shaken, and falling in every part of the habitable globe which had been reclaimed by civilization.

In the meantime, Great Britain, in her usual aggressive way, had established an anti-slavery propaganda, from which strong influences extended in every direction.  Her Anti-slavery Society re-established itself in the United States.  Abolition candidates for the presidency began to be heard of and to be voted for at every quadrennial election.  Such was Birney in 1844.  Such (strange to say) was Martin Van Buren in 1848.  Such four years afterward was John P. Hale, of New Hampshire, and such in 1856, as the storm came on, was John C. Fremont.

The political history of the United States shows at this epoch an astounding growth of anti-slavery sentiment; and this expanding force culminated in the election of Lincoln.  Great, indeed, was the change which had already swept over the landscape of American thought and purpose since the despised Birney, in 1844, received only a few thousand votes in the whole United States.  Now the Rail-splitter had come!  The tocsin of war sounded.  The Union was rent.  War with its flames of fire and streams of blood devastated the Republic.  But the bow of promise was set on the dark background of the receding storm.  American slavery was swept into oblivion, and the end of the third quarter of the century saw such a condition established in both the New World and the Old, as made the restoration of human bondage forever impossible.