ity, if the work of man may justly aspire to such a title. It may, nevertheless, perish in an hour by the folly or corruption or negligence of its only keepers,-THE PEOPLE. Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest; and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people in order to betray them.

CHAPTER XLVI.

[BY THE EDITOR.]

THE EMANCIPATION OF THE SLAVES.

§ 1915. OUR examination of the Constitution would be incomplete without some notice of the interesting and highly important changes made therein by amendments adopted after the conclusion of the great civil war.

§ 1916. The original compromises on the subject of slavery, and the condition of the country and of society at the time the Constitution was adopted, and from which those compromises sprung, have been touched upon in the preceding pages.1 It is very generally believed that but for the mutual concessions then made the Constitution could not at that time have been adopted, and possibly all attempts to form a national government might for a long period have proved wholly abortive. The subject of slavery was one upon which, for obvious reasons, the utmost sensitiveness might reasonably be looked for among men just emerging from a successful struggle for their own liberties; and it is worthy of remembrance that the Constitution, as finally agreed upon, did not mention it by name, but only referred to servitude and the slave-trade in vague terms as things the existence of which under a free constitution was to be overlooked rather than recognized. It is not probable, however, that at that time the

1 Supra §§ 636-644, 1332-1337, 1807-1811.

2 Curtis, Hist. of Const. II. 20, 292, 313; Life and Writings of Judge Iredell, II. 213; Life of Webster by Curtis, II. 382; Tucker's Hist. of U. S., I. 362; Everett's Speeches, IV. 390; Greeley's American Conflict, ch. 5.; Lecture on Slavery at Faneuil Hall, by Robert Toombs, January 24, 1856. On these concessions, it has justly been remarked by a recent writer, "hung mighty issues. They are of the past now. They were the price that was paid for republican government." Frothingham's Rise of the Republic, 594. Mr. Choate expresses the same idea, and classes concession "among the whiter virtues." Life and Writings by Brown, II. 432, 433. 3 "The word 'slave' is not in the Constitution; and so peculiar and wise were its provisions that, when State after State abolished slavery, no alteration was required to meet the great social change. Nor would any change have been required

perpetuation of slavery was anticipated by any considerable number of the people. Indeed, in the colonial period no little repugnance had been manifested to the introduction of slaves; and though the people of the colonies were far from being blameless in the matter, the guilt of the slave-trade rested principally upon the mother country, whose government had authorized and protected it, and as a matter of state policy had refused its assent to the measures proposed by the colonies to check it.1 Those measures were adopted with a view to the ultimate extinction of the institution; and the refusal to sanction them was among the grave complaints made against the royal government which Mr. Jefferson would have introduced into the indictment incorporated in the declaration of independence.2 The Congress of 1776 resolved

had all the States abolished slavery." Frothingham's Rise of the Republic, 602. "The word was carefully excluded from the instrument." Everett's Orations, IV. 390; Writings of Madison, III. 150; Draper's Civil War, I. 327, 328.

1 Some notice of efforts against slavery in the colonial period will be found in Franklin's Works, X. 403. A history of the legislation on the subject in Virginia is given in the pamphlet published by Judge St. George Tucker in 1796, in which the gradual abolition of the institution in that State was urged. Referring to the petition of the burgesses in 1772 for the removal of restraints upon the authority to "check so very pernicious a commerce as the traffic in slaves, he says: "A citizen

of Virginia will feel some satisfaction at reading so clear a vindication of his country from the opprobrium but too lavishly bestowed upon her, of fostering slavery in her bosom whilst she boasts a sacred regard to the liberty of her citizens and of mankind in general." Mr. Walsh, in his "Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain respecting the United States of America," presents the proposed colonial measures still more fully.

2 Mr. Jefferson's draft contained these words, afterwards struck out: "He [the king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distingished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." Jefferson's Works, I. 23. For the efforts by the colonies to put an end to the slave-trade which were frustrated by the royal negative, see Walsh's Appeal, 312 et seq.; Jefferson's Works, I. 3, 48, 135; Niles's Principles and Acts of the Revolution, 199; Brougham's Colonial Policy, Book II. sec. 1; Tucker's Blackstone, App. to vol. I. No colony was so persistent in its efforts to check the trade as Virginia; and Judge Tucker enumerates twenty-three acts on the subject, begin

"that no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen colonies; the leading men of the rising nation were earnestly opposed to this species of human bondage; 2 its extension into the vast and rich territory north-west of the Ohio was prohibited by ordinance in 1787; and the desire as well as the expectation appeared to be general that it must in time pass away, and that its extinction might be and ought to be hastened by appropriate legislation.3 Some of the States had begun the work before the Constitution was formed; 4 but the evil was one which existed in different

ning with 1699. The petition of the assembly to the king in 1772 denounced the trade as one of great inhumanity, and prayed the king to "remove all those restraints on your majesty's governors of this colony which inhibit their assenting to such laws as might check so pernicious a commerce." The written instructions brought over by the governors in some cases forbade their assenting to any such laws, but they scarcely needed such instructions, for they participated more or less in the trade, and found their profit in it. Lord North gave as a reason for refusing his assent to petitions against the slave-trade that its profitable character made it necessary to the several European nations. Mr. Burke, in his speech on conciliation with America, justly observes, in response to a proposal to free the slaves and make use of them against the insurgents, that "dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation which had sold them to their present masters, - from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic? An offer of freedom from England would come rather oddly, shipped to them in an African vessel, which is refused an entry into the ports of Virginia or Carolina, with a cargo of three hundred Angola negroes. It would be curious to see the Guinea captain attempting at the same instant to publish his proclamation of liberty and to advertise his sale of slaves." Burke's Works (Little, Brown, & Co.'s ed.), II. 135.

1 Walsh's Appeal, 321; Works of John Adams, III. 39.

2 Mr. A. H. Stephens, in The War between the States, justly says of Mr. Jefferson that " no more earnest or ardent devotee to the emancipation of the black race, upon humane, rational, and constitutional principles, ever lived than he was." Vol. I. p. 10. And see Jefferson's Works, I. 38, 49, 377; II. 357; VIII. 404; Everett's Orations, IV. 390. For similar views held by Mr. Madison, see his collected Writings, III. 138, 170, 193, 239; IV. 60, 213, 277. Samuel Adams, when a slave-girl was given to his wife [in 1764 or 1766] declared no slave should live in his house. If she came, she should be free. Life of S. Adams, I. 138. And see Id. III. 187.

3 Works of John Adams, III. 268; Works of Jefferson, I. 49, 377; Walsh's Appeal, 308, 391; Lunt's Origin of the Late War, 17. In 1796, Judge St. George Tucker, a jurist of whom Virginia is justly proud, published a forcible appeal to the people of that State, urging them to take steps towards gradual abolition.

4 Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts, not by an enactment expressly adopted for the purpose, but by a decision of the Supreme Court in 1781 that its existence was inconsistent with the declaration in the bill of rights that "all men are born free and equal." Bradford's History of Massachusetts, II. 227; Draper's Civil War, I. 318. Some individuals had previously manumitted their slaves, from a perception of their inconsistency in depriving others of liberty while contending for the like blessing for themselves. See a copy of a deed for this purpose in Memoirs of Chief

degrees in different parts of the country; and by common consent the convention of 1787 left the remedies for it to be discovered and administered by the several States, with the single exception that the general government was empowered, after 1808, to prohibit altogether the further importation of slaves. In all the States north of the Potomac the number of the slaves was small, and an early emancipation might be counted upon with reasonable certainty. South of that river it was different. The climate and the character of the labor was uninviting to white laborers, and whatever might be the scruples of conscience or the promptings of humanity, the tendency of self-interest was to quiet the one and to check the other. And this tendency received a wonderful acceleration in 1793, when the invention of the cotton-gin added so immensely to the profits and to the apparent necessity of slave labor. In 1790, Franklin, who had joined an anti-slavery society in Pennsylvania, united in a memorial to Congress for prohibitory legislation; but this memorial being rejected for want of power, the subject was allowed to rest for nearly thirty years, with but little discussion, either in Congress or out of it, except that which was had in arranging the details of an abolition of the slave-trade, which took place at the earliest period permitted by the Constitution, and in accordance with a tacit understanding at the time that instrument was adopted.2 Meantime, though many thoughtful people still desired and hoped for the complete enfranchisement of all the people, the institution of slavery was constantly but imperceptibly strengthening itself, and taking stronger and firmer hold upon the interests and feelings of the people, and becoming more closely interwoven with the fabric of social life; and these circumstances, together with the great and constantly-increasing number

Justice Parsons, 176, note; Sumner's Speeches, II. 289. They had occasion for self-reproach, for the same papers which published and rejoiced over the Declaration of Independence contained advertisements of runaway slaves. Tyler's Memoir of Taney, 338; Granville Sharp's Injustice of Slavery. The first act in Pennsylvania looking to gradual emancipation was adopted in 1780.

1 Annals of Congress, 1789-1791, vol. 2, p. 1197; Benton's Abridgement of Debates, I. 204; Tucker's Hist. of U. S., I. 431; Rives's Life of Madison, III. 129; Lunt's Origin of the Late War, 24; Stephens's War between the States, II. 28.

2 See Life of Josiah Quincy, p. 42. Mr. Walsh, writing of the slave-trade in 1819, declares that in America "we have had no instance of a formal vindication of it in any shape. I have never heard of an American speech or pamphlet on the subject which did not acknowledge its atrocity." Walsh's Appeal, 320. Virginia forbade the traffic in 1778, being in this particular in advance of the more northern States.