Chief among the causes which aroused the opposition of the Virginia
colonists and placed them in the forefront of the Revolution was the
course of the King with respect to this momentous subject. When Thomas
Jefferson came to write the Declaration of Independence and to epitomize
the grounds of indictment which the colonists presented against the
British King, it was the latter's veto of the laws passed by Virginia to
suppress the slave trade, and the active aid lent by his Government to
force the captives of Africa upon his defenseless subjects, that evoked
the fiercest arraignment in that historic document. Mr. Jefferson
declared:
"George the Third has waged cruel war against humanity itself,
violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons
of a distant people who never offended him; captivating and carrying
them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death
in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the
opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of
Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be
bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative by suppressing every
legislative attempt to prohibit, or to restrain, this execrable
commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of
distinguished dye, he is now exciting these very people to rise in
arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived
them, by murdering the people on whom he obtruded them; thus paying
off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with
crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of
another."[11]
"These words," says Mr. Bancroft, "expressed precisely what had happened
in Virginia."