This disposition however became more manifest in the year 1772; for the house of burgesses of Virginia presented a petition to the King, beseeching his majesty to remove all those restraints on his governors of that colony, which inhibited their assent to such laws, as might check that inhuman and impolitic commerce, the Slave-trade:  and it is remarkable, that the refusal of the British government to permit the Virginians to exclude slaves from among them by law, was enumerated afterwards among the public reasons for separating from the mother country.

But this friendly disposition was greatly increased in the year 1773, by the literary labours of Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia[A], who, I believe, is a member of the presbyterian church.  For in this year, at the instigation of Anthony Benezet, he took up the cause of the oppressed Africans in a little work, which he entitled An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements on the Slavery of the Negros; and soon afterwards in another, which was a vindication of the first, in answer to an acrimonious attack by a West Indian planter.  These publications contained many new observations.  They were written in a polished style; and while they exhibited the erudition and talents, they showed the liberality and benevolence, of the author.  Having had a considerable circulation, they spread conviction among many, and promoted the cause for which they had been so laudibly undertaken.  Of the great increase of friendly disposition towards the African cause in this very year, we have this remarkable proof;—­that when the Quakers, living in East and West Jersey, wished to petition the legislature to obtain an act of assembly for the more equitable manumission of slaves in that province, so many others of different persuasions joined them, that the petition was signed by upwards of three thousand persons.

[Footnote A:  Dr. Rush has been better known since for his other literary works; such as his Medical Dissertations, his Treatises on the Discipline of Schools, Criminal Law, &c.]

But in the next year, or in the year 1774[A], the increased good-will towards the Africans became so apparent, but more particularly in Pennsylvania, where the Quakers were more numerous than in any other state, that they, who considered themselves more immediately as the friends of these injured people, thought it right to avail themselves of it:  and accordingly James Pemberton, one of the most conspicuous of the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and Dr. Rush, one of the most conspicuous of those belonging to the various other religious communities in that province, undertook, in conjunction with others, the important task of bringing those into a society who were friendly to this cause.  In this undertaking they succeeded.  And hence arose that union of the Quakers with others, to which I have been directing the attention of the reader, and by which the third class of forerunners and coadjutors becomes now complete.  This society, which was confined to Pennsylvania, was the first ever formed in America, in which there was an union of persons of different religious denominations in behalf of the African race.