red patriots who had been delegates to the Convention, and
afterwards became members of Congress, that in passing these laws they
had violated the Constitution which they had framed with so much care
and deliberation. They supposed that to prohibit Congress in express
terms from exercising a specified power before an appointed day
necessarily involved the right to exercise this power after that day
had arrived.

If this were not the case, the framers of the Constitution had expended
much labor in vain. Had they imagined that Congress would possess no
power to prohibit the trade either before or after 1808, they would not
have taken so much care to protect the States against the exercise of
this power before that period. Nay, more, they would not have attached
such vast importance to this provision as to have excluded it from the
possibility of future repeal or amendment, to which other portions
of the Constitution were exposed. It would, then, have been wholly
unnecessary to ingraft on the fifth article of the Constitution,
prescribing the mode of its own future amendment, the proviso "that no
amendment which may be made prior to the year 1808 shall in any manner
affect" the provision in the Constitution securing to the States the
right to admit the importation of African slaves previous to that
period. According to the adverse construction, the clause itself, on
which so much care and discussion had been employed by the members of
the Convention, was an absolute nullity from the beginning, and all
that has since been done under it a mere usurpation.

It was well and wise to confer this power on Congress, because had
it been left to the States its efficient exercise would have been
impossible. In that event any one State could have effectually continued
the trade, not only for itself, but for all the other slave States,
though never so much against their will. And why? Because African
slaves, when once brought within the limits of any one State in
accordance with its laws, can not practically be excluded from any State
where slavery exists. And even if all the States had separately passed
laws prohibiting the importation of slaves, these laws would have failed
of effect for want of a naval force to capture the slavers and to guard
the coast. Such a force no State can employ in time of peace without the
consent of Congress.

These acts of Congress, it is believed, have, with very rare and
insignificant exceptions, acc