VIRGINIA was the Negro's first home in the British Colonies of North America.
Anthony, one of the Negroes in the shipload that arrived in 1619, married Isabella,
and the son born to them in 1624, of whom there is record, was the first native Negro
of Virginia. The infant was taken from his home in Kecoughtan to Jamestown in 1625,
and there christened William in honor of Captain William Tucker.
Another Anthony, who probably came in 1622, and his wife Mary were bound servants in 1625;
but by 1651 Anthony Johnson had secured his freedom and accumulated enough funds to import
five servants, on whose headrights he acquired 250 acres on the eastern shore.
First free Negro and first Negro landowner of Virginia, Anthony Johnson perhaps has the added
distinction of being the first person in the colony, white or black, to hold as a lifetime
servant a Negro who had committed no crime. Johnson petitioned the court of Northampton County in 1653 for the return of one John Casor, a runaway Negro whom he claimed for life.
Although Casor protested that he had already been held 'seven years longer than he should or
ought,' he was returned to his master for life.
As far as is known, this was the first judicial sanction in the English colonies of life servitude where crime was not involved.
Ignoring northern and southern interests , the Virginia legislature during the Revolution barred all slave importations into the State after 1778,This action antedated by 30 years a similar ban imposed by the National Government. In 1782, Jefferson prevailed upon the legislature to legalize the manumission (Set Free) of slaves. Although a wave of freedom grants swept the State, the provision that the master must continue to support the slaves he freed was a serious deterrent to emancipation. Virginia delegates to the National Constitutional Convention of 1787 fought valiantly for the immediate prohibition of the slave traffic and the gradual abolition of slavery. But the slave traders of New England and the cotton planters of the Deep South forced a compromise that continued the traffic until 1808 and failed to provide constitutional relief for the slaves.
(source: Virginia Guide to the Old Dominion, 1940
"The next time someone mentions "Andersonville" tell them about this"
passed by both Houses of Congress:
"Rebel prisoners in our hands are to be subjected to a treatment finding
its parallels only in the conduct of savage tribes and resulting in
the death of multitudes by the slow but designed process of starvation
and by mortal diseases occasioned by insufficient and unhealthy food and
wanton exposure of their persons to the inclemency of the weather."
♠....passed by both houses....♠
In 1862 Sherman wrote his wife that his purpose in the war would be "extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people" of the South. His loving and gentle wife wrote back that her wish was for "a war of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing."
"I am a little uneasy about the abolishment of slavery in this District (of Columbia)."
Abraham Lincoln To Horace Greeley
Section 11 of An Act for the Release of certain Persons held to Service
or Labor in the District of Columbia
Sec. 11. And be it further enacted, That the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, is hereby appropriated, to be expended under the direction of the President of the United States, to aid in the colonization and settlement of such free persons of African descent now residing in said District, including those to be liberated by this act, as may desire to emigrate to the Republics of Hayti or Liberia, or such other country beyond the limits of the United States as the President may determine: Provided, The expenditure for this purpose shall not exceed one hundred dollars for each emigrant.
Approved, April 16, 1862.
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."
It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.
It had been proclaimed that the war was not waged against slavery;
that is was not an abolition war,
but a war for the restoration of the Union only.
---American Soldiers of the Civil War. page 129, by George R. S. Connell, 1895
"If the Union was formed by the accession of States
then the Union may be dissolved by the secession of States."
---Daniel Webster, US Senate, February 15, 1833
"Any people whatever have a right to abolish the existing government
and form a new one that suits them better"
---Abraham Lincoln, Congressional Records, 1847
"Had President Buchanan, in 1860, sent an armed force to prevent the nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act, as Andrew Jackson threatened to do in 1833, there would have been a secession of fifteen Northern States instead of thirteen Southern States. Had the Democrats won out in 1860, the Northern States would have the seceding States not the Southern."
---George Lunt of Massachusetts in Origins of the Late War
"If the Declaration of Independence justified the secession of 3,000,000 colonists in 1776, I do not see why the Constitution ratified by the same men should not justify the secession of 5,000,000 of the Southerners from the Federal Union in 1861.
We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence that government derives its power from the consent of the governed is sound and just, then if the Cotton States, the Gulf States or any other States choose to form an independent nation they have a clear right to do it.
The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it exists nevertheless; and we do not see how one party can have a right to do what another party has a right to prevent. We must ever resist the asserted right of any State to remain in the Union and nullify or defy the laws thereof; to withdraw from the Union is another matter. And when a section of our Union resolves to go out, we shall resist any coercive acts to keep it in. We hope never to live in a Republic where one section is pinned to the other section by bayonets."
---Horace Greeley, New York Tribune