le to
forbid the importation of slaves in 1808. A national law to that effect
was passed in 1807, making the trade illegal and affixing to it heavy
penalties. The American Colonization Society was formed in 1816 for the
purpose of negro deportation. It did little of this, but rendered some
service toward carrying out the act against slave importation. A new law
in 1820, which made this traffic piracy, punishable with death, was
partly due to its influence. Also many, like Birney, Gerrit Smith and
the Tappans, who began as colonizationists, subsequently became
abolitionists.

Notwithstanding all these influences slavery increased in strength every
year. South Carolina and Georgia were finding it exceedingly profitable
for cotton and rice culture, and the income from slave traffic into the
vast opening lands of Tennessee and Kentucky constituted an irresistible
temptation. In spite of the law of 1807 and of the indescribable horrors
of the business, even the foreign slave trade went on. The institution
found many defenders in the Federal Convention of 1787, and in the first
and subsequent Congresses. The pleas began to be raised, so current
later, that the negro was an inferior being, slavery God's ordinance, a
blessing to slaves and masters alike, and emancipation a folly. Now
began also that policy of bravado by which, for sixty years, the friends
of slavery bullied their opponents into shameful inaction upon that
accursed thing politically as well as morally, which was so nearly to
cost the nation its life. Thus stood matters when the Missouri
Compromise was mooted in the national Legislature.

We hardly need say that this strife ended in a compromise. Missouri was
created a slave State, balanced by Maine as a free State, but at the
same time slavery was to be excluded forever from all the remainder of
the Louisiana purchase north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, the southern
line of Virginia and Kentucky as well as of Missouri itself. The land
between Missouri and Louisiana had been in 1819 erected into the
"Territory of Arkansaw."

In the memorable discussion over this issue, involving the country as
well as Congress, two sorts of argumentation were heard in favor of the
suit of Missouri. The genuine pro-slavery men urged the sacredness of
property as such, and the special sacredness of property-right in slaves
as tacitly guaranteed by the Constitution. They also made much of the
third article of the Louisiana purchase