an coast.

But a Virginian, George Mason, had another tone. He called the traffic
"infernal." "Slavery," he went on, "discourages arts and manufactures.
The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the
emigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They
produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is
born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As
nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be
in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence
punishes national sins by national calamities."

These were warnings worth heeding. But Ellsworth retorted with a sneer:
"As he had never owned a slave, he could not judge of the effect of
slavery on character." He said, however, that, "if it was to be
considered in a moral light, we ought to go farther, and free those
already in the country." But, so far from that, he thought it would be
"unjust toward South Carolina and Georgia," in whose "sickly rice
swamps" negroes died so fast, should there be any intermeddling to
prevent the importation of fresh Africans to labor, and, of course, to
perish there. Perhaps it was this shrewd argument of the Connecticut
delegate that suggested, half a century afterward, to a Mississippi
agricultural society, the economical calculation that it was cheaper to
use up a gang of negroes every few years, and supply its place by a
fresh gang from Virginia, than rely upon the natural increase that would
follow their humane treatment as men and women. His colleague, Roger
Sherman, came to Ellsworth's aid. It would be, he thought, the duty of
the general government to prohibit the foreign trade in slaves, and,
should this be left in its power, it would probably be done. But he
would not, if the Southern States made it the condition of consenting to
the Constitution that the trade should be protected, leave it in the
power of the general government to do that which he acknowledged that it
should and probably would do.

Delegates from Georgia and the Carolinas declared that to be the
condition,--among them C. C. Pinckney of South Carolina. "He should
consider," he said, "a rejection of the clause as an exclusion of South
Carolina from the Union." Nevertheless he said to the people at home,
when they came together to consider the Constitution: "We are so weak
that by ourselves we could not form a union strong enough for the
purpose