latitude; otherwise every State in the Union would have been a slaveholding State to this day. It was not profitable there, and it died out-lingering, indeed, in New York, till July, 1827. It died out; but not so much by the manumission of slaves as by their transportation and sale in the South. And thus New England, sir, turned an honest penny with her left hand, and with her right modestly wrote herself down in history as both generous and just. In the South, gentlemen, all this was precisely reversed. The earliest and most resolute enemies to slavery were Southern men. But climate had fastened the institution upon them; and they found no way to strike it down. From the beginning, indeed, the Southern colonies especially had resisted the introduction of African slaves; and, at the very outset of the revolution, Virginia and North Carolina interdicted the slave-trade. The Continental Congress soon after, on the 6th of April, 1776, three months earlier than the Declaration of Independence, resolved that no more slaves ought to be imported into the Thirteen Colonies. Jefferson, in his draught of the Declaration, had denounced the king of England alike for encouraging the slave-trade, and for fomenting servile insurrection in the provinces. Ten years later, he boldly attacked slavery, in his "Notes on Virginia;" and in the Congress of the Confederation, prior to the adoption of the Constitution, with its solemn compacts and compromises upon the subject of slavery, proposed to exclude it from the territory north-west of the river Ohio. Col. Mason, of Virginia, vehemently condemned it, in the Convention of 1787. Nevertheless, it had already become manifest that slavery must soon die away in the North, but in the South continue and harden into, perhaps, a permanent, uneradicable system. Hostile interests and jealousies sprang up, therefore, in bitterness, even in the Convention. But the blood of the patriot brothers of Carolina and Massachusetts smoked yet upon the battle-fields of the Revolution. The recollection of their kindred language and common dangers and sufferings, burned still fresh in their hearts. Patriotism proved more powerful than jealousy, and good sense stronger than fanaticism. There were no Sewards, no Hales, no Sumners, no Greeleys, no Parkers, no Chase, in that Convention. There was a Wilson, but he rejoiced not in the name of Henry; and he was a Scotchman. There was a clergyman-no, not in the Convention of '87, but in the Congress of '76; but it was the devout, the learned, the pious, the patriotic Witherspoon; of foreign birth, also-a native of Scotland, too. The men of that day and generation, sir, were content to leave the question of slavery just where it belonged. It did not occur to them, that each one among them was accountable for "the sin of slaveholding in his fellow; and that to ease his tender conscience of the burden, all the fruits of revolutionary privation, and blood, and treasureall the recollections of the past, all the hopes of the future-nay, the Union, and with it, domestic tranquillity and national independence-ought to be offered up as a sacrifice. They were content to deal with political questions, and to leave cases of conscience to the Church and the schools, or to the individual man. And, accord

ingly, to this Union and Constitution, based upon these compromises-execrated now as "covenants with death and leagues with hell"-every State acceded; and upon these foundations, thus broad and deep and stable, a political superstructure has, as if by magic, arisen, which, in symmetry and proportion, and, if we would but be true to our trust, in strength and durability, finds no parallel in the world's history.

Patriotic sentiments, sir, such as marked the era of '89, continued to guide the statesmen and people of the country, for more than thirty years, full of prosperity; till, in a dead political calm, consequent upon temporary extinguishment of the ancient party lines and issues, the MISSOURI QUESTION, resounding through the land with the hollow moan of the earthquake, shook the pillars of the Republic even to their deep foundations.

Within these thirty years, gentlemen, slavery, as a system, had been abolished by law or disuse, quietly and without agitation, in every State north of Mason and Dixon's line-in many of them lingering, indeed, in individual cases, so late as the census of 1840. But, except in half a score of instances, the question had not been obtruded upon Congress. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 had been passed without opposition, and without a division, in the Senate; and by a vote of forty-eight to seven in the House. The slave-trade had been declared piracy, punishable with death. Respectful petitions from the Quakers of Pennsylvania, and others, upon the slavery question, were referred to a committee, and a report made thereon, which laid the matter at rest. Other petitions, afterward, were quietly rejected, and, in one instance, returned to the petitioner. Louisiana and Florida, both slaveholding countries, had, without agitation, been added to our territory. Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, slave States each one of them, had been admitted into the Union, without a murmur. No Missouri Restriction, no Wilmot Proviso, had as yet reared its discordant front to terrify and confound. NON-INTERVENTION was then both the practice and the doctrine of the statesmen and people of that period; though, as yet, no hollow platform enunciated it as an article of faith, from which, nevertheless, obedience might be withheld, and the platform "spit upon," provided the tender conscience of the recusant did not forbid him to support the candidate, and help to secure the "spoils." Once only, sir, was there a deliberate purpose shown, by a formal assault upon the compromises of the Constitution, to array the prejudices of geographical sections upon the question of slavery. But, originating within the secret counsels of the Hartford Convention, it partook of the odium which touched every thing connected with that treasonable assembly,* till, set on fire by a live coal from

THE HARTFORD CONVENTION.-"Resolved, That it is expedient to recommend to the several State legislatures certain amendments to the Constitution, viz.:

"That the power to declare or make war, by the Congress of the United States, be restricted. That it is expedient to attempt to make provision for restraining Congress in the exercise of an unlimited power to make new States,

the altar of jealousy and fanaticism, it burst into a conflagration, six years later. And now, sir, for the first time in our history under the Constitution, a strenuous and most embittered struggle ensued, on the part of the North-the Federalists of the North-to prevent the admission of a State into the Union; really, because the North-the Federalists of the North-strove for the mastery, and to secure the balance of power in her own hands; but ostensibly because slaveholding, which the Missouri Constitution sanctioned, was affirmed to be immoral and irreligious. In this first fearful strife, this earliest departure from the Constitution and the ancient sound policy of the country, the North-for the truth of history shall be vindicatedTHE NORTH was the aggressor; and that, too, without the slightest provocation. Vermont, in New England, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, out of territory once the property of slaveholding Virginia, had been admitted into the Union; and Michigan organized into a territorial government, without one hostile vote from the South given upon the ground that slavery was interdicted within their limits. Even Maine had been permitted, by vote of Congress, to slough off from Massachusetts, and become a separate State. But now Missouri knocked for admission, with a constitution not introducing, but continuing slavery, which had existed in her midst from the beginning; and four several times, at the first, she was rejected by the North. The South resisted, and the storm raged. Jefferson, professing to hate slavery, but living and dying himself a slaveholder, or, in the delicate slang of to-day, a "slave-breeder," loving yet his country with all the fervid patriotism of his early manhood five and forty years before, heard in it "the knell of the Union," and mourned that he must "die now in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, was to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons;" consoling himself—the only solace of the patriot of fourscore years-that he should not live to weep over the blessings thrown thus recklessly away for "an abstract principle;' " and the folly and madness of this "act of suicide and of treason against the hopes of the world."*

and admit them into the Union. That an amendment be proposed respecting SLAVE REPRESENTATION AND SLAVE TAXATION."-The third resolution of the Hartford Convention, reported Dec. 24, 1814, and subsequently adopted.

It was also resolved "that the capacity of naturalized citizens to hold offices of trust, honor, or profit, ought to be restricted.

*THE MISSOURI QUESTION A FEDERAL MOVEMENT THE NORTH THE AGGRESSOR." The slavery agitation took its rise during this time (1819-20), in the form of attempted restriction on the State of Missouri-a prohibition to hold slaves to be placed upon her as a condition of her admission into the Union, and to be binding upon her afterward. This agitation came from the North, and under a Federal lead, and soon swept both parties into its vortex.

The real struggle was political, and for the balance of power, as frankly declared by Mr. Rufus King, who disdained dissimulation. The resistance made to the admission of the State, on account of the clause in relation to free people of color, was only a mask to the real cause of opposition. For a while this formidable Missouri question threatened the total overthrow

But the incantations of hate and fanaticism had evoked the hideous specter, and it ought to have been quelled, never to re-appear. The appalling question was now stirred; and it should have been met and re-settled forever, by the men of that day, on the original basis of the Constitution-not left, as a legacy of discord, a Pandora's box full of all evil, of mischief and pestilence, to the next generation. They were not true to themselves; they were not true to us. They cowered before the goblin, and laid before it peace-offerings and a wave-offering, and sent us, their children, to pass through the fire in the valley of Hinnom. Setting aside the compromises of the Constitution, and usurping power not granted to Congress, they undertook to compromise about that which had already been definitely and permanently settled by that instrument. This was the beginning, sir, of that line of paltry and halting compromises; of fat-brained, mole-eyed, unmanlike expedients, which put the evil day off only to return laden with aggravated mischief. They hushed the terrible question for a moment; and the election machinery moved on, and the spoils of the Presidency were divided as before. But it was a reprieve only, not a final sentence." The "geographical line" thus once conceived for the first time, and held up to the angry passions of men, was, as Jefferson had foretold, never obliterated, but rather, by every irritation, marked deeper and deeper. And, after fifteen years' truce, it re-appeared in a new and far more dangerous form; and, enduring already for more than half the average life-time of man, has attained a position and magnitude which neither demands nor will hearken to any further compromise. Nevertheless, sir, but for the insolent intermeddling of the British government and British emissaries continued to this day, with the superaddition now of Napoleon the Third-it might have slumbered for many years longer.

In England, gentlemen, the form of personal bondage disappeared even to its last traces from her own soil, about the beginning of the seventeenth century; its legal existence continued till 1661; its worst realities remain to this day; for although, in that very humane and most enlightened Island, there be no involuntary, servitude except as a punishment for crime, yet in England, poverty is a crime,

of all political parties upon principle, and the substitution of geographical parties, distinguished by the slave line, and, of course, destroying the just and proper action of the Federal Government, and leading eventually to a separation of the States. It was a Federal movement, accruing to the benefit of that party, and, at first, was overwhelming, sweeping all the Northern Democracy into its current, and giving the supremacy to their adversaries. When this effect was perceived, the Northern Democracy became alarmed, and only wanted a turn or abatement in popular feeling at home, to take the first opportunity to get rid of the question, by admitting the State, and re-establishing party lines upon the basis of political principles. It was a political movement for the balance of power, balked by the Northern Democracy, who saw their own overthrow, and the eventual separation of the States, in the establishment of geographical parties divided by a slavery and anti-slavery line. . In the Missouri controversy, the North was the undisputed aggressor." Benton's Thirty Years, pp. 5, 10, and 136, of volume first.

punishable with the worst form of slavery, or by starvation and death. Three hundred years ago, she began to traffic in negro slaves. Queen Elizabeth was a sharer in its gains. A hundred and fifty years later, at the peace of Utrecht, England undertook, by compact with Spain, to import into the West Indies, within the space of thirty years, one hundred and forty-four thousand negroes, demanding, and with exactest care securing, a monopoly of the traffic. Queen Anne reserved one-quarter of the stock of the slave-trading company to herself, and one half to her subjects; to the king of Spain, the other quarter being conceded. Even so late as 1750, Parliament busied itself in devising plans to make the slave-trade still more effectual, while in 1775, the very year of the Revolution, a noble earl wrote to a colonial agent these memorable words: "We can not allow the Colonies to check or discourage, in any degree, a traffic so beneficial to the nation." Between that date, and the period of first importation, England had stolen from the coast of Africa, and imported into the new world, or buried in the sea on the passage thither, not less than three and a quarter millions of negroes-more, by half a million, than the entire population of the Colonies. In April, 1776, the American Congress resolved against the importation of any more slaves. But England continued the traffic, with all its accumulated horrors, till 1808; for so deeply had it struck its roots into the commercial interests of that country, that not all the efforts of an organized and powerful society, not the influence of her ministers, not the eloquence of all her most renowned orators, availed to strike it down for more than forty years after this, its earliest interdiction in any country, by a rebel congress. Nevertheless, sir, slavery in the English West Indies continued twenty-seven years longer. But the loss of her American Colonies, and the prohibition of the slave-trade, had left small interest to Great Britain in negro slavery. Her philanthropy found room now to develop and expand in all its wonderful proportions. And accordingly, in 1834, England-England, drunk with the blood of the martyrs, stoning the prophets, and rejecting the apostles of political liberty, in her own midst-robbed, by act of Parliament, one hundred millions of dollars from the wronged and beggared peasantry of Ireland, from the enslaved and oppressed millions of India, from the starving, overwrought, mendicant carcasses of the white slaves of her own soil, to pay to her impoverished colonists, plundered without voice and without vote in her legislature, the stipulated price of human rights; and with these, the wages of iniquity, in the outraged name of God and humanity, mocked the handful of her black bondsmen in the West Indies with the false and deluding shadow of liberty. Exeter Hall resounded with acclamation; bonfires and illuminations proclaimed the exultant joy of an aristocracy fat with the pride and lust of domination. But in that self-same hour-in that self-same hour, from the furnaces of Sheffield and the manufactories of Birmingham; from the wretched hovels of Ireland, full of famishing and pestilence; from ten thousand work-houses crowded with leprous and perishing paupers, the abodes of abominable cruel