d its introduction into the
Northwestern Territory, the only country we owned then free from it. At
the framing and adoption of the Constitution, they forbore to so much
as mention the word "slave" or "slavery" in the whole instrument. In
the provision for the recovery of fugitives, the slave is spoken of as a
"person held to service or labor." In that prohibiting the abolition of
the African slave trade for twenty years, that trade is spoken of as "the
migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing
shall think proper to admit," etc. These are the only provisions alluding
to slavery. Thus the thing is hid away in the Constitution, just as an
afflicted man hides away a wen or cancer which he dares not cut out at
once, lest he bleed to death,--with the promise, nevertheless, that the
cutting may begin at a certain time. Less than this our fathers could not
do, and more they would not do. Necessity drove them so far, and farther
they would not go. But this is not all. The earliest Congress under the
Constitution took the same view of slavery. They hedged and hemmed it in
to the narrowest limits of necessity.

In 1794 they prohibited an outgoing slave trade--that is, the taking
of slaves from the United States to sell. In 1798 they prohibited the
bringing of slaves from Africa into the Mississippi Territory, this
Territory then comprising what are now the States of Mississippi and
Alabama. This was ten years before they had the authority to do the same
thing as to the States existing at the adoption of the Constitution. In
1800 they prohibited American citizens from trading in slaves between
foreign countries, as, for instance, from Africa to Brazil. In 1803 they
passed a law in aid of one or two slave-State laws in restraint of the
internal slave trade. In 1807, in apparent hot haste, they passed the law,
nearly a year in advance,--to take effect the first day of 1808, the very
first day the Constitution would permit, prohibiting the African slave
trade by heavy pecuniary and corporal penalties. In 1820, finding these
provisions ineffectual, they declared the slave trade piracy, and annexed
to it the extreme penalty of death. While all this was passing in the
General Government, five or six of the original slave States had adopted
systems of gradual emancipation, by which the institution was rapidly
becoming extinct within their limits. Thus we see that the plain,
unmistakable spirit of that age