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In the course of this enquiry it is easy to trace the desire of the legislature to pat a stop to the further importation of slaves; and had not this desire been uniformly opposed on the part of the crown, if is highly probable that event would have taken effect at a much earlier period than it did. A duty of five per cent. to be paid by the buyers, at first, with difficulty obtained the royal assent. Requisitions from the crown for aids, on particular occasions, afforded a pretext from time to time for increasing the duty from five, to ten, and finally to twenty per cent. with which the buyer was uniformly made chargeable. The wishes of the people of this colony, were not sufficient to counterbalance the interest of the English merchants, trading to Africa, and it is probable, that however disposed to put a stop to so infamous a traffic by law, we should never have been able to effect it, so long as we might have continued dependant on the British government: an object sufficient of itself to justify a
the first clause of our constitution, where among other acts of misrule, “the inhuman use of the royal negative” in refusing us permission to exclude slaves from among us by law, is enumerated, among the reasons for separating from Great Britain.
