sition was grounded upon the
preservation of those rights to which God and nature has entitled us,
not in _particular_, but in _common with all the rest of mankind_;
that we had appealed to the Supreme Being for his assistance, as the
God of freedom, who could not but approve our efforts to preserve
the rights which he had thus imparted to his creatures; that now,
when we had scarcely risen from our knees, from supplicating his
mercy and protection in forming our government over a free people, a
government formed pretendedly on the principles of liberty, and for
its preservation,--in that government to have a provision, not only
of putting out of its power to restrain and prevent the slave trade,
even encouraging that most infamous traffic, by giving the States
the power and influence in the Union in proportion as they cruelly
and wantonly sported with the rights of their fellow-creatures,
ought to be considered as a solemn mockery of, and insult to, that
God whose protection we had thus implored, and could not fail to
hold us up in detestation, and render us contemptible to every true
friend of liberty in the world. It was said that national crimes can
only be, and frequently are, punished in this world by _national
punishments_, and that the continuance of the slave trade, and thus
giving it a national character, sanction, and encouragement, ought
to be considered as justly exposing us to the displeasure and
vengeance of him who is equally the Lord of all, and who views
with equal eye the poor _African slave_ and his _American master_![92]

[Footnote 92: How terribly and justly has this guilty nation been
scourged, since these words were spoken, on account of slavery and
the slave trade! Secret Proceedings, p. 64.]

"It was urged that, by this system, we were giving the general
government full and absolute power to regulate commerce, under which
general power it would have a right to restrain, or totally prohibit,
the slave trade: it must, therefore, appear to the world absurd and
disgraceful to the last degree that we should except from the
exercise of that power the only branch of commerce which is
unjustifiable in its nature, and contrary to the rights of mankind.
That, on the contrary, we ought to prohibit expressly, in our
Constitution, the further importation of slaves, and to authorize
the general government, from time to time, to make such regulations
as should be thought most advantageous for the gradual