[4] Had the negroes in general
possessed any means of concerted action, they might conceivably have played
off the British and American belligerents to their own advantage. In
actuality, however, they were a passive element whose fate was affected
only so far as the master race determined.
[Footnote 4: G.W. Williams, _History of the Negro Race in America_ (New
York [1882]), I, 353-362.]
Some of the politicians who championed the doctrine of liberty inherent and
universal used it merely as a means to a specific and somewhat unrelated
end. Others endorsed it literally and with resolve to apply it wherever
consistency might require. How could they justly continue to hold men in
bondage when in vindication of their own cause they were asserting the
right of all men to be free? Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Edmund
Randolph and many less prominent slaveholders were disquieted by the
question. Instances of private manumission became frequent, and memorials
were fairly numerous advocating anti-slavery legislation. Indeed Samuel
Hopkins of Rhode Island in a pamphlet of 1776 declared that slavery in
Anglo-America was "without the express sanction of civil government," and
censured the colonial authorities and citizens for having connived in the
maintenance of the wrongful institution.
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