This decision may be taken as fairly representative of the general advance that the cause of the Negro was making in England at the time. Early in the century sentiment against the slave-trade had begun to develop, many pamphlets on the evils of slavery were circulated, and as early as 1776 a motion for the abolition of the trade was made in the House of Commons. John Wesley preached against the system, Adam Smith showed its ultimate expensiveness, and Burke declared that the slavery endured by the Negroes in the English settlements was worse than that ever suffered by any other people. Foremost in the work of protest were Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, the one being the leader in investigation and in the organization of the movement against slavery while the other was the parliamentary champion of the cause. For years, assisted by such debaters as Burke, Fox, and the younger Pitt, Wilberforce worked until on March 25, 1807, the bill for the abolition of the slave-trade received the royal assent, and still later until slavery itself was abolished in the English dominions (1833).
This high thought in England necessarily found some reflection in America, where the logic of the position of the patriots frequently forced them to take up the cause of the slave. As early as 1751 Benjamin Franklin, in his _Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind_, pointed out the evil effects of slavery upon population and the production of wealth; and in 1761 James Otis, in his argument against the Writs of Assistance, spoke so vigorously of the rights of black men as to leave no doubt as to his own position. To Patrick Henry slavery was a practice "totally repugnant to the first impressions of right and wrong," and in 1777 he was interested in a plan for gradual emancipation received from his friend, Robert Pleasants. Washington desired nothing more than "to see some plan adopted by which slavery might be abolished by law"; while Joel Barlow in his _Columbiad_ gave significant warning to Columbia of the ills that she was heaping up for herself.
