The Middle Period, 1817-1858. John William Burgess
it is summed up in the very misleading propositions that all men are born equal and are endowed with freedom, and that the people have the right to change or abolish existing government at their pleasure. Whatever we may think of these doctrines now, our ancestors professed to believe in them, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of their profession, so far as their own consciousness went. They saw also the inconsistency of slavery with these doctrines, and quickly came to regard slavery as an evil which should be removed as soon as possible.
| First prohibition upon slave importation. |
The Continental Congress took the first step in this direction. Two years before it declared independence it prohibited any further importation of slaves, and repeated the prohibition two years later. These acts are good evidence that, at the moment, the question of slavery was regarded as a matter of national concern.
The Congress was, however, so occupied with the duties pertaining to the prosecution of the war, that it failed to go forward in this matter, as well as in many other matters of national concern; and when the Confederate Congress succeeded the Continental Congress, it did so upon the basis of a written constitution, or rather articles of union, which vested no powers whatsoever in it over the subject of slavery.
| Abolition of slavery in the Northern Commonwealths after the beginning of the Revolution. |
The separate colonies, now become "States" by the theory of the Articles of Confederation, took up the question. Massachusetts abolished slavery substantially by her constitution of 1780. Pennsylvania provided for gradual emancipation by a statute of the same year. Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire followed the example of Pennsylvania. And New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia forbade any further importation of slaves.
| The Ordinance of 1787. |
Under such impulses and influences the Confederate Congress, in spite of the fact that no power in respect to slavery had been conferred upon it, assumed to pass the famous Ordinance of 1787, decreeing the free status exclusively in all of the territory then belonging to the United States north of the Ohio River. The power to enact the Ordinance could not even be derived by the most generous principles of implication from any provision in the Articles of Confederation. To justify the exercise of it by the Confederate Congress it is necessary to go back to the general principle of political science that, as there was no government for this territory but the Confederate Congress, and as there were no limitations in the Articles of Confederation upon the powers of the Congress in this territory, the powers of that Congress must have extended in this territory to all subjects usually regulated by government.
The claim sometimes made that this Ordinance was a treaty between the "States" forming the Confederation, or between them and the "States" to be formed out of that territory in the future, is altogether untenable. It was nothing more nor less than a legislative act of the Congress.
It is an incontrovertible proof of the universality and intensity of the opposition to the farther spread of slavery that the common consciousness of the age acquiesced in this most latitudinarian construction of the powers of the Confederate Congress, and that the Congress itself voted the measure with but a single dissenting voice.
| Slavery and the Constitution of 1787. |
At the same moment that this measure was being considered in the Congress, the Constitutional Convention, sitting at Philadelphia, was framing the national Constitution of 1787. The attitude which the nation would assume in this new instrument of its organic law toward the subject of slavery was one of the most, if not the most, important of the questions which the Convention was called upon to consider.
There can be little doubt that the men of 1787 had come to regard the question of the rights of man a little more calmly than they did during the heat of the battle with the motherland. In Luther Martin's famous letter to the legislature of Maryland upon the work of the Convention of 1787, a very significant passage concerning the existing views upon slavery occurs. He wrote: "At this time we do not generally hold this commerce" (the slave-trade) "in so great abhorrence as we have done. When our liberties were at stake we warmly felt for the common rights of men. The danger being thought to be past which threatened ourselves we are daily growing more insensible to those rights."
The Constitution of 1787 contains evidence of the correctness of this statement. Among its provisions were to be found three most important compromises with the slavery interest, three most important recognitions of slavery. The first was political in its nature. It counted the negro for three-fifths of the white man in the distribution of the representation in the House of Representatives and in the Presidential Electoral Colleges. The second was commercial in its nature. It forbade the Congress to prohibit, before the year 1808, the migration or importation of such persons as the existing "States" might see fit to admit. The third was a direct guarantee of slave property. It required the surrender to his master of an escaped slave wherever found in the United States. These were most momentous provisions. They secured slave property, increased slave property, and made slavery a vast political power in the hands of the slave-masters. There is no doubt that the clock of the ages was turned back full half a century in regard to this great question by the Constitution of 1787.
| Reaction against the humanitarian principles of the Revolution. |
From 1787 to 1808 the reactionary course was pursued almost without a single break. Kentucky was made a Commonwealth with the slave status. The Congress accepted from North Carolina and Georgia cessions of the territory which lay to the west of them, and which they claimed as belonging to them, with a condition that slavery should not be forbidden therein by Congress. The slave Commonwealth of Tennessee was immediately formed out of a part of this territory. The vast territory of Louisiana, in which slavery existed wherever it was inhabited, was added to the domain of the Union. The District of Columbia, the seat of the general Government, was made a slave-holding community, through the adoption by Congress of the laws of Maryland as the code of the District. A fugitive slave-law was passed by Congress, which enabled any white man to seize, as his slave, any man of color, and bring him before any magistrate, and, upon proof satisfactory to the latter, to demand such papers and certificates as would legally warrant him in reclaiming the slave and transporting him to the place whence he was said to have escaped; and petitions to Congress complaining of the abuse of this arbitrary power were laid aside without consideration. Even the Territory of Indiana prayed Congress to suspend for it that part of the Ordinance of 1787 which forbade slavery within its limits. And South Carolina abolished her law against the importation of slaves, and opened the way wide for a vast increase of the slave population.
| Abolition of the foreign slave-trade by Congress. |
These last acts seem to have aroused the consciousness of the Congress to the rapidity with which the whole country was becoming again subject to the slave-holding interests. The Congress resisted the importunities of the Indiana leaders, and after giving South Carolina a reasonable time to re-enact her law abolishing the foreign slave-trade, without effect, proceeded itself to abolish the trade from the first moment that the Constitution permitted this to be done, from January 1st, 1808.
| Cotton culture and the cotton-gin. The effect of the return to the arts of peace upon the ideas concerning slavery. |
It has been customary to ascribe the great revulsion of view in regard to slavery, which certainly manifested itself everywhere in the United States between 1790 and 1807, to cotton culture and the cotton-gin. The invention of the cotton-gin, in the first part