Excerpt from A Pioneer of Freedom: An Address Delivered Before the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Illinois Historical Society Upon the Life and Services of Benjamin Lundy In obedience to your most kind invitation, I wish to bring to you, as far as my time will allow, something of this man. Shall we not first profitably inquire into his times, and the day and generation in which he lived and which he served? The period from 1800 to 1830 may well be called, in discussing the question of human slav ery, a period of stagnation. Slavery, introduced into Virginia in 1619, had fastened itself upon the country, North and South alike. In the North, however, the slaves were used only for domestic purposes, and being the source of neither pleasure nor profit they soon ceased to be a factor in its domestic or political economy. In the South, on the contrary, the milder climate, contributing as it did to the lassitude of the white population, became a fitting environment for the negro. Yet even there for a century and a half the slave had no special economic significance, and above all, was not a source of any great profit. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.