, when we had
scarcely risen from our knees, from supplicating his mercy and
protection in forming our government over a free people, a government
formed pretendedly on the principles of liberty, and for its
preservation,--in that government to have a provision, not only of
putting out of its power to restrain and prevent the slave trade, even
encouraging that most infamous traffic, by giving the States the power
and influence in the Union in proportion as they cruelly and wantonly
sported with the rights of their fellow-creatures, ought to be
considered as a solemn mockery of, and insult to, that God whose
protection we had thus implored, and could not fail to hold us up in
detestation, and render us contemptible to every true friend of
liberty in the world. It was said that national crimes can only be,
and frequently are, punished in this world by _national punishments_,
and that the continuance of the slave trade, and thus giving it a
national character, sanction, and encouragement, ought to be
considered as justly exposing us to the displeasure and vengeance of
him who is equally the Lord of all, and who views with equal eye the
poor _African slave_ and his _American master!_ [9]

[Footnote 9: How terribly and justly as the guilty nation been
scourged, since these words were spoken, on account of slavery and the
slave trade!]

"It was urged that, by this system, we were giving the general
government full and absolute power to regulate commerce, under which
general power it would have a right to restrain, or totally prohibit,
the slave trade: it must, therefore, appear to the world absurd and
disgraceful to the last degree that we should except from the exercise
of that power the only branch of commerce which is unjustifiable in
its nature, and contrary to the rights of mankind. That, on the
contrary, we ought to prohibit expressly, in our Constitution, the
further importation of slaves, and to authorize the general
government, from time to time, to make such regulations as should be
thought most advantageous for the gradual abolition of slavery, and
the emancipation of the slaves already in the States. That slavery is
inconsistent with the genius of republicanism, and has a tendency to
destroy those principles on which it is supported, as it lessens the
sense of the equal rights of mankind, and habituates to tyranny and
oppression. It was further urged that, by this system of government,
every State is to be pr