The Declaration of American Independence, made July 4th, 1776, had scarcely been enunciated, and an organization of the government commenced, ere the people found themselves surrounded by new and trying difficulties, which, for a time, threatened to wreck the ship of state. The forty-five slaves landed on the banks of the James river, in the colony of Virginia, from the coast of Africa, in 1620, had multiplied to several thousands, and were influencing the political, social and religious institutions of the country. Brought into the colonies against their will; made the hewers of wood, and the drawers of water; considered in the light of law and public opinion as mere chattels, things to be bought and sold at the will of the owner; driven to their unrequited toil by unfeeling men, picked for the purpose from the lowest and most degraded of the uneducated whites, whose moral, social and political degradation by slavery was equal to that of the slave—the condition of the Negro was indeed a sad one! The history of this people, full of sorrow, blood and tears, is full also of instruction for mankind. God has so ordered it that one class shall not degrade another without becoming themselves contaminated. So with slavery in America. The institution bred in the master insulting arrogance, deteriorating sloth, pampered the loathsome lust it inflamed until licentious luxury sapped the strength and rottened the virtue of the slave owners of the South. Never were the institutions of a people, or the principles of liberty, put to such a severe test as those of the American Republic. The convention to frame the Constitution for the Government of the United States had not organized before the slave-masters began to press the claims of their system upon the delegates. They wanted their property represented in the National Congress, and undue guarantees thrown around it; they wanted the African slave-trade made lawful, and their victims returned if they should attempt to escape; they begged that an article might be inserted in the Constitution making it the duty of the general government to put down the slaves if they should imitate their masters in striking a blow for freedom. They seemed afraid of the very evil they were clinging to closely to. "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all."