He began by
expressing a hope, that the present debate, instead of exciting asperity
and confirming prejudice, would tend to produce a general conviction of the
truth of what in fact was incontrovertible; that the abolition of the
Slave-trade was indispensably required of them, not only by morality and
religion, but by sound policy. He stated that he should argue the matter
from evidence. He adverted to the character, situation, and means of
information of his own witnesses; and having divided his subject into
parts, the first of which related to the manner of reducing the natives of
Africa to a state of slavery, he handled it in the following manner.
He would begin, he said, with the first boundary of the trade. Captain
Wilson and Captain Hills, of His Majesty's navy, and Mr. Dalrymple of the
land service, had concurred in stating, that in the country contiguous to
the river Senegal, when slave-ships arrived there, armed parties were
regularly sent out in the evening, who scoured the country, and brought in
their prey. The wretched victims were to be seen in the morning bound back
to back in the huts on shore, whence they were conveyed, tied hand and
foot, to the slave-ships.
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