Charles Sumner: his complete works, volume 10 (of 20)Sumner, Charles
History
Charles Sumner: his complete works, volume 10 (of 20)
Sumner, Charles
Slavery -- United States; Speeches, addresses, etc., American
monarch, and the Emperor once flatly refused, was now spontaneously
done by him, doubtless in the hope of conciliating British sentiment.
His hundred days of power were signalized by an ordinance abolishing
the slave-trade in France and her colonies. Louis the Eighteenth, once
again restored by British arms, and with the shadow of Waterloo resting
upon France, could not do less than ratify the imperial ordinance by
a royal assurance that “the traffic was henceforth forever forbidden
to all the subjects of his most Christian Majesty.”[81] Holland
came under the same influence, and accepted the restitution of her
colonies, except the Cape of Good Hope and Guiana, on condition of
the entire abolition of the slave-trade in the restored colonies, and
also everywhere else beneath her flag. Spain was the most indocile;
but this proud monarchy, under whose auspices the African slave-trade
first came into being, at last yielded. By the treaty of Madrid, of 23d
September, 1817, extorted by Great Britain, it stipulated the immediate
abolition of the trade north of the equator, and also, after 1820,
its abolition everywhere, in consideration of four hundred thousand
pounds, the price of Freedom, paid by the other contracting party. In
vindication of this intervention, Wilberforce declared in Parliament,
that “the grant to Spain would be more than repaid to Great Britain in
commercial advantages by the opening of a great continent to British
industry,”--all of which was impossible, if the slave-trade was allowed
to continue under the Spanish flag.[82]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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