From 1680 to 1700, by convention with Spain, the English, it is estimated, stole from Africa 300,000 negroes to supply the Spanish West Indies with slaves. By the treaty of Utrecht (1713) Spain granted to England, during thirty years, the absolute monopoly of supplying slaves to the Spanish colonies. By this treaty England agreed to take to the West Indies not less than 144,000 negroes, or 4800 each year; and, to guard against scandal to the Roman Catholic religion, heretical slave-traders were forbidden. This monopoly was granted by England to the "South Sea Company." England did not confine her trade to the West Indies. In 1750, it was shown in the English Parliament that 46,000 negroes were annually sold to English colonies.( 6) As early as 1565, Sir John Hawthorne and Menendez imported negroes as slaves into Florida, then a Spanish possession, and with Spain's sanction many were carried into the West Indies and sold into slavery. ( 1) Epistle to Philemon. ( 2) The references to the Bible are taken from the most learned advocates of the divinity of slavery, in its last years. _Ought American Slavery to be Perpetuated?_ (Brownlow and Pryne debate), p. 78, etc. _Slavery Ordained of God_ (Ross), 146, etc., 176, etc. Rev. Frederick A. Ross, D. D. (the author), a celebrated Presbyterian minister, was arrested in 1862 at Huntsville, Alabama, while it was occupied by the Union forces, for praying from the pulpit for the success of secession. Parson Brownlow was a Union man in 1861, was much persecuted at his home in Knoxville, Tenn., later advocated emancipation. ( 3) It is interesting to note that more than fifteen hundred years (twelfth century) after Alexander's conquests, Saladin, the great Sultan, and other Mohammedan rulers, and Richard Coeur de Lion, and other crusade leaders in Syria, respectively, doomed their captives to slavery, regardless of nationality or color.-- _Saladin_ (Heroes of Nations, Putnams), 229-232, 338. ( 4) Slavery and the slave trade, in spite of the teachings of the Koran, grew up in Mohammedan countries. The traffic in slaves, however, had been frequently proclaimed against by the Ottoman Porte. ( 5) But the first trace of negro slavery in America came in 1502, only ten years after its discovery, through a decree of Ferdinand and Isabella permitting negro slaves born in Spain, descendants of natives brought from Guinea, to be transported to Hispaniola.-- _Life of Columbus_, by Irving (Putnams), p. 275. ( 6) _History for Ready Reference_, vol. iv., p. 2923. II INTRODUCTION OF SLAVERY INTO THE COLONIES In August, 1619, a Dutch man-of-war sailed up the James River in Virginia, landed and sold to the colony at Jamestown _twenty_ negroes as slaves. This event marked the beginning of negro slavery in English-American colonies. Two centuries and a half did not suffice to put an end the Ethiopian slavery and the evils of a traffic begun on so small a scale.