s:--

"Article I. Section 9. The Migration or Importation of such
Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to
admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year
one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be
imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each
Person."

This settlement of the slavery question brought out distinct differences
of moral attitude toward the institution, and yet differences far from
hopeless. To be sure, the South apologized for slavery, the Middle
States denounced it, and the East could only tolerate it from afar; and
yet all three sections united in considering it a temporary institution,
the corner-stone of which was the slave-trade. No one of them had ever
seen a system of slavery without an active slave-trade; and there were
probably few members of the Convention who did not believe that the
foundations of slavery had been sapped merely by putting the abolition
of the slave-trade in the hands of Congress twenty years hence. Here lay
the danger; for when the North called slavery "temporary," she thought
of twenty or thirty years, while the "temporary" period of the South was
scarcely less than a century. Meantime, for at least a score of years, a
policy of strict _laissez-faire_, so far as the general government was
concerned, was to intervene. Instead of calling the whole moral energy
of the people into action, so as gradually to crush this portentous
evil, the Federal Convention lulled the nation to sleep by a "bargain,"
and left to the vacillating and unripe judgment of the States one of the
most threatening of the social and political ills which they were so
courageously seeking to remedy.

37. ~Reception of the Clause by the Nation.~ When the proposed
Constitution was before the country, the slave-trade article came in for
no small amount of condemnation and apology. In the pamphlets of the day
it was much discussed. One of the points in Mason's "Letter of
Objections" was that "the general legislature is restrained from
prohibiting the further importation of slaves for twenty odd years,
though such importations render the United States weaker, more
vulnerable, and less capable of defence."[24] To this Iredell replied,
through the columns of the _State Gazette_ of North Carolina: "If all
the States had been willing to adopt this regulation [i.e., to prohibit
the slave-trade], I should as an indi