Benjamin Harrison V in 1772 joined a Virginia House of Burgesses committee, including Thomas Jefferson, which submitted a petition to King George, requesting that he abolish the slave trade. The King, however, rejected it.
The Harrison families eventually abandoned their slaveholding as the abolitionist movement began to take hold with the civil war. Future President Benjamin Harrison had already begun his political career in Indiana and joined the fledgling Republican party in 1856, then being built in opposition to slavery. Abraham Lincoln similarly joined that party, and made effective efforts to end slavery by his Emancipation Proclamation, the victory of his Union army in the Civil War, and his promotion of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
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We are the American heartbreak —
The rock on which Freedom
Stumped its toe —
The great mistake
That Jamestown made
Long ago.
By Langston Hughes in 1967