on
did not come until 1827.

Rhode Island, in the first year of the First Continental Congress
(1774), enacted:

"That for the future no negro or mulatto slave shall be brought
into the colony . . . and that all previously enslaved persons on
becoming residents of Rhode Island should obtain their freedom."

New Jersey in 1778, through Governor Livingstone, made an attempt
at emancipation which failed; it was not until 1804 that she
prohibited slavery in what proved a qualified way, and it seems
she held slaves at each census, including that of 1860, and possibly
in some form human slavery was abolished there by the Thirteenth
Amendment to the Constitution.

The census of 1790 showed slaves in all the original States save
Massachusetts alone; Vermont was admitted into the Union in 1790;
her Constitution prohibited slavery, but she returned at that census
seventeen slaves.

The first census under the Constitution, however, showed, in the
Northern States, 40,370 slaves, and in the Southern States, 657,572;
there being in Virginia alone 293,427, nearly one half of all.

The Convention closed its work September 17, 1787, and on the same
date George Washington, its President, by letter submitted the
"Constitution to the consideration of the United States in Congress
assembled," saying:

"It is obviously impracticable in the Federal Government of these
States to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each and
yet provide for the interest and safety of all. . . . In all our
deliberations on this subject we kept steadily in our view that
which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American,
_the consolidation of our Union_, in which is involved our prosperity,
felicity, safety; perhaps our national existence."

This Constitution by its preamble showed it was, in many things,
to supersede and become paramount to State authority. It was to
become a _charter of freedom_ for the people collectively, and in
some sense individually. Its preamble runs thus:

"We, the _people_ of the United States, in order to form a _more_
perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity,
provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and
secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do
ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of
America."

Nine States were, by its seventh article, necessary to ratify it
before it went into effect.

The ratificatio