slaves to captivity.  “Why,” Dr. Johnson had asked, “do the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves?” We are forced to recognise, upon any study of the facts, that they could not really have made the Union otherwise than as they did; yet a doubt presents itself as to the general soundness and sincerity of their boasted notions of liberty.  Now, later on we shall have to understand the policy as to slavery on behalf of which Lincoln stepped forward as a leader.  In his own constantly reiterated words it was a return to the position of “the fathers,” and, though he was not a professional historian, it concerns us to know that there was sincerity at least in his intensely historical view of politics.  We have, then, to see first how “the fathers”—­that is, the most considerable men among those who won Independence and made the Constitution—­set out with a very honest view on the subject of slavery, but with a too comfortable hope of its approaching end, which one or two lived to see frustrated; secondly, how the men who succeeded them were led to abandon such hopes and content themselves with a compromise as to slavery which they trusted would at least keep the American nation in being.

Among those who signed the Declaration of Independence there were presumably some of Dr. Johnson’s “yelpers.”  It mattered more that there were sturdy people who had no idea of giving up slavery and probably did not relish having to join in protestations about equality.  Men like Jefferson ought to have known well that their associates in South Carolina and Georgia in particular did not share their aspirations—­the people of Georgia indeed were recent and ardent converts to the slave system.  But these sincere and insincere believers in slavery were the exceptions; their views did not then seem to prevail even in the greatest of the slave States, Virginia.  Broadly speaking, the American opinion on this matter in 1775 or in 1789 had gone as far ahead of English opinion, as English opinion had in turn gone ahead of American, when, in 1833, the year after the first Reform Bill, the English people put its hand into its pocket and bought out its own slave owners in the West Indies.  The British Government had forced several of the American Colonies to permit slavery against their will, and only in 1769 it had vetoed, in the interest of British trade, a Colonial enactment for suppressing the slave trade.  This was sincerely felt as a part, though a minor part, of the grievance against the mother country.  So far did such views prevail on the surface that a Convention of all the Colonies in 1774 unanimously voted that “the abolition of domestic slavery is the greatest object of desire in those Colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.  But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves in law, it is necessary to exclude all further importation from Africa.”  It was therefore very commonly assumed when, after an interval of war which suspended such reforms, Independence was achieved, that slavery was a doomed institution.