While it is not true, as has often been claimed, that England is solely responsible for the introduction of slavery into her American colonies, it is true that her King and Parliament opposed almost every attempt to prohibit it or to restrict the importation of slaves. Colonial legislative enactments of Virginia and other colonies directed against slavery were vetoed by the King or by his command by his royal governors. Such governors were early forbidden to give their assent to any measure restricting slavery in the American colonies, and this policy was pursued until the colonies became independent.(11) The treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States, signed at Paris, September 3, 1783, contained a stipulation that Great Britain should withdraw her armies from the United States "with all convenient speed, and without causing any destruction, or _carrying_ away any _negroes or other property_ of the American inhabitants." Both governments thus openly recognized, not only the existence of slavery in the United States, but that slaves were merely _property_. While slavery was deeply seated in the colonies and had many advocates, including noted divines, who preached the "divinity of slavery," there were, in 1776, and earlier, many great men, South as well as North, who looked confidently to an early emancipation of slaves, and who were then active in suppressing the African slave trade, among whom were Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and the two Adamses. Washington presided at a "Fairfax County Convention," before the Revolution. It resolved that "no slaves ought to be imported into any of the British colonies"; and Washington himself expressed "the most earnest wish to see an entire stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade."(12) John Wesley, when fully acquainted with American slavery and the slave trade, pronounced the latter as "_the execrable sum of all villanies_," and he inveighed against the former as the wickedest of human practices. The Continental Congress of 1776 resolved, "that no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen United Colonies." There had then been imported by the cruel traffic above 300,000 blacks, bought or stolen from the African shore; and the blacks then constituted twenty per cent. of the total population, a greater per centum than at any time since. During the century previous to 1776, English and colonial slavers had carried into the West Indies and to English colonies nearly 3,000,000 negroes; and it is estimated that a quarter of a million more died of cruel treatment on shipboard, and their bodies were cast into the sea.