en of
the North, reduced to the alternative of departing from the vital
principle of their liberty, or of forfeiting the Union itself, averted
their faces, and with trembling hand subscribed the bond.

Twenty years passed away--the slave markets of the South were
saturated with the blood of African bondage, and from midnight of the
31st of December, 1807, not a slave from Africa was suffered ever more
to be introduced upon our soil. But the internal traffic was still
lawful, and the _breeding_ States soon reconciled themselves to a
prohibition which gave them the monopoly of the interdicted trade, and
they joined the full chorus of reprobation, to punish with death the
slave-trader from Africa, while they cherished and shielded and
enjoyed the precious profits of the American slave-trade exclusively
to themselves.

Perhaps this unhappy result of their concession had not altogether
escaped the foresight of the freemen of the North; but their intense
anxiety for the preservation of the whole Union, and the habit already
formed of yielding to the somewhat peremptory and overbearing tone
which the relation of master and slave welds into the nature of the
lord, prevailed with them to overlook this consideration, the internal
slave-trade having scarcely existed, while that with Africa had been
allowed. But of one consequence which has followed from the slave
representation, pervading the whole organic structure of the
Constitution, they certainly were not prescient; for if they had been,
never--no, never would they have consented to it.

The representation, ostensibly of slaves, under the name of persons,
was in its operation an exclusive grant of power to one class of
proprietors, owners of one species of property, to the detriment of
all the rest of the community. This species of property was odious in
its nature, held in direct violation of the natural and inalienable
rights of man, and of the vital principles of Christianity; it was all
accumulated in one geographical section of the country, and was all
held by wealthy men, comparatively small in numbers, not amounting to
a tenth part of the free white population of the States in which it
was concentrated.

In some of the ancient, and in some modern republics, extraordinary
political power and privileges have been invested in the owners of
horses but then these privileges and these powers have been granted
for the equivalent of extraordinary duties and services to th