vation, its preparation, and its fabric costs to the unfortunate Afri- 

 cans. Well! Compare these inconveniences with the advantages that 

 the Sugar Maple presents, and you will again, once more, be con- 

 vinced what great pains we often take to be uselessly criminal. . . . 

 I wish there were formed from north to south a holy coalition to 

 accumulate the produce of that Divme Tree, if above all, it were 

 looked upon as an impiety to destroy so useful a tree, either for burn- 

 ing or clearing lands; America might not only furnish for its own 

 use, but might also inundate the markets of Europe with a sugar, 

 whose cheapness would, in time, annihilate that sugar which is 

 sprinkled with the tears and blood of slaves, for the Maple Sugar 

 does not cost but three-pence the pound." 



The trees were abundant; the celebrated Dr. Rush, of Philadel- 

 phia, writing as late as 1793, to Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the 

 United States, (who permitted only maple sugar used in his house- 

 hold, and planted maples on his estate in Virginia, for the purpose of 

 producing it), describes them as covering "five or six acres in a body, 

 more often mixed with other trees." Generally, there averaged from 

 thirty to fifty sugar maples on an acre, and residents of Pennsylvania 

 are recorded, as making from two hundred to four hundred pounds 

 of sugar per year. 



Dr. Rush considered maple sugar an extremely healthy article of 

 diet, and thought that its use might lessen malignant fevers. He 

 quotes Sir John Pringle as remarking that the plague had never been 

 known in any country where sugar was eaten in considerable quanti- 

 ties. However, there had hitherto been the insuperable difficulty — 

 "many persons refuse to be benefited, even indirectly, by the labour of 

 slaves." 



"I cannot help contemplating a Sugar Maple with a species of 

 affection and even veneration, for I have persuaded myself to behold 

 in it the happy means of rendering the commerce and slavery of our 

 African brethren in the sugar islands, as unnecessary as it has always 

 been inhuman and unjust." 



Tench Coxe, of Philadelphia, Penn., author of "A View of the 

 United States" (published in 1794), says that the total consumption 

 of sugar and molasses in this country at that time amounted to twenty- 

 six million pounds, and that "every farmer having one hundred acres 

 of maple sugar land in a state of ordinary American improvement 

 . . . can make one thousand pounds weight of sugar with only his 

 necessary farming and kitchen utensils." 



55 



