cide
the status of a slave, and the Supreme Court ruled that under this
clause slavery no longer existed in Massachusetts. Its 6000 negroes were
now entitled to the suffrage on the same terms as the whites. The same
held good of the free blacks in four other States. In all the States but
Massachusetts slavery retained a legal existence, the number ranging in
1790 from 158 in New Hampshire to nearly 4000 in Pennsylvania, over
21,000 in New York, 100,000 in each of the Carolinas, and about 300,000
in Virginia. Ships of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the Middle States
were still busy in bringing negroes from Africa to the South, though
there were brave men like Dr. Hopkins at Newport who denounced the
traffic in its strongholds.

Jefferson planned nobly for the exclusion of slavery from the whole as
yet unorganized domain of the nation, a measure which would have belted
the slave States with free territory, and so worked toward universal
freedom. The sentiment of the time gave success to half his plan. His
proposal in the ordinance of 1784 missed success in the Continental
Congress by the vote of a single State. The principle was embodied in
the ordinance of 1787 (when Jefferson was abroad as Minister to France),
but with its operations limited to the Northwestern territory, the
country south of the Ohio being left under the influence of the slave
States from which it had been settled.

The young nation crystalized into form in the constitutional convention
of 1787, and the ratification of its act by the people. It was indeed,
as John Fiske's admirable book names it, "the critical period of
American history." To human eyes it was the parting of the ways between
disintegration toward anarchy, and the birth of a nation with fairer
opportunities and higher ideals than any that had gone before. The work
of those forty men in half a year has hardly a parallel. Individually
they were the pick and flower of their communities. The circumstances
compelled them to keep in such touch with the people of those
communities that their action would be ratified. They included men of
the broadest theoretical statesmanship, like Madison and Hamilton; men
of great practical sense and magnanimity, like Washington and Franklin;
and they also included and needed to include the representatives of
various local and national interests. They had been schooled by the
training of many momentous years, and the emergency brought out the
strongest tr