, and then with the
greatest reluctance, and as a matter of compromise, as I will
presently show.

Such was the action of the American Congress in 1784--a unanimous vote
from the North, and two in nine from the South--in favor of excluding
slavery forever after 1800, in all new States to be formed, in
territory ceded or to be ceded, embracing Tennessee, Alabama, and
Mississippi, in the extreme South. Nothing can be clearer than that
the interdiction was to apply to all such States, and to constitute a
fundamental Constitution between them and the original States,
unalterable without the consent of Congress. The new State was to be
deprived of all power to admit slavery. This proposition was made and
voted for by JEFFERSON. But how many votes would such a proposition
receive in this Convention? Not many, I fear, even from the free
States. My friend and colleague, though strongly anti-slavery, and
earnestly devoted to freedom in the Territories, is afraid I shall
commit Massachusetts to this old Jeffersonian doctrine of no slavery,
and no right to establish it in the new States.

From this time till July, 1787, the question of slavery in the
Territories and new States remained open and unsettled. In 1785, RUFUS
KING renewed Mr. JEFFERSON'S proposition to prohibit, and it was
referred to a committee by the vote of eight States; but it never
became a law, a few from the South always preventing it.

The Federal Convention to revise the old, or frame a new
Constitution, assembled in Philadelphia on the second Monday of May,
1787. And here let me read a single paragraph from a lecture by Mr.
TOOMBS, of Georgia, delivered in Boston in 1856. It is as follows:

"The history of the times and the debates in the Convention
which framed the Constitution, show that the whole subject
of slavery was much considered by them, and perplexed them
in the extreme, and that those provisions which relate to it
were earnestly considered by the State Conventions which
adopted it. Incipient legislation providing for emancipation
had already been adopted by some of the States.
Massachusetts had declared that slavery was extinguished by
her Bill of Rights. The African slave trade had already been
legislated against in many of the States, including
Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, the largest
slaveholding States. The public mind was unquestionably
tending toward emancipatio