About this time, some feeling against American slavery, but more against the “aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the Southern colonists,” stirred England, and a general enfranchisement of the slaves was proposed. Edmund Burke, in his famous speech of March 22, 1775, on the “Conciliation with America,” touches on the incongruity of such a proposition of freedom coming from England: “Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic? An offer of freedom from England would come rather oddly, shipped to them in an African vessel, which is refused entry into the ports of Virginia or Carolina, with a cargo of three hundred Angola negroes. It would be curious to see the Guinea captain attempt at the same instant to publish his proclamation of liberty and to advertise the sale of slaves.” After throwing off the British yoke, the abolition of the slave traffic and of slavery was still a paramount issue with these men of Virginia, and in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had drafted a clause relative to the moral obliquity; this clause, “reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under these censures; for though their people had few slaves themselves, yet they had been very considerable carriers of them to others.”[9]