pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations has been the victim.

"So, likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity, gilding with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

"As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils! Such an attachment of a small or weak toward a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter. Again the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial, else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defence against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests.

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"The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.

Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

"Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

"Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?

"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world, so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be misunderstood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But in my opinion it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.

"Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.

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powers so disposed, in order to give trade a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the government to support them, conventional rules of intercourse, the best that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary and liable to be from time to time abandoned or varied as experience and circumstances shall dictate; constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that by such acceptance it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more. There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

"In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish that they will control the usual current of the passions or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But if I may even flatter myself that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism, this hope will be a full recompense for the solicitude for your welfare by which they have been dictated.

"How far in the discharge of my official duties I have been guided by the principles which have been delineated the public records and other evidences of my conduct must witness to you and to the world. To myself, the assurance of my own conscience is that I have at least believed myself to be guided by them.

the case, had a right to take, and was bound in duty and interest to take, a neutral position. Having taken it, I determined as far as should depend upon me to maintain it with moderation, perseverance, and firmness.

"The considerations which respect the right to hold this conduct it is not necessary on this occasion to detail. I will only observe that, according to my understanding of the matter, that right, so far from being denied by any of the belligerent powers, has been virtually admitted by all.

"The duty of holding a neutral conduct may be inferred, without anything more, from the obligation which justice and humanity impose on every nation, in cases in which it is free to act, to maintain inviolate the relations of peace and amity toward other nations.

"The inducements of interest for observing that conduct will best be referred to your own reflections and experience. With me a predominant motive has been to endeavor to gain time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption to that degree of strength and consistency which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.

“Though in reviewing the incidents of my Administration I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence, and that, after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.

"Relying on its kindness in this as in other things, and actuated by that fervent love toward it which is so natural to a man who views in it the native soil of himself and his progenitors for several generations, I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize without alloy the sweet enjoyment of partaking in the midst of my fellow-citizens the benign influence of good laws under a free government the ever favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.

"UNITED STATES, Sept. 17, 1796."

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Anti-slavery sentiment had taken root early in all the States and had continued until the extensive cultivation of cotton opened up a vast field for rapid development in the lower South. There had been two movements one for the abolition of further importations of negroes, and another for the actual and absolute abolition of slavery. When the non-importation resolutions of 1774 were adopted it was agreed that, after December 1, 1774, no slave should be imported into any of the colonies and that no colonial vessels should either engage in the traffic themselves or be hired to others for that purpose.* This stand was reaffirmed in a special resolution of Congress April 6, 1776; but the restriction was hardly necessary, for during the war and certainly by 1783 the importation of slaves had almost ceased. During this time many of the States passed laws

* Ford's ed. of the Journals of Continental Congress, vol. i., pp. 75-80; Von Holst, Constitutional and Political History, vol. i., p. 281.

†M. S. Locke, Anti-Slavery in America, p. 73.

The fugitive slave law of 1793 - Other

against the traffic, so that by 1778 all the northern States, as well as Virginia and Maryland, had practically made such importations impossible.

After the war, there was a tendency in the far South to revive the slavetrade, but in 1786 a duty was laid by North Carolina on all slaves imported into her borders, and the following year South Carolina declared for absolute prohibition. Georgia held out for some time. In 1788 Virginia forbade the importation of slaves, and a committee appointed to revise the statutes drew up a plan for gradual emancipation.* In 1792 South Carolina passed a new prohibitory act; in 1794 North Carolina, who had repealed her restrictive act in 1790, again passed an act prohibiting further importation; and in 1798 Georgia did likewise. Nevertheless, as it was possible for any of the States to repeal their prohibitory acts, it was deemed desirable when the new Con

* Von Holst, Constitutional and Political History. vol. i., p. 285.

† W. E. B. DuBois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, pp. 51, 71.

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stitution was passed that the new government should have full control over the slave-trade. Such a provision was introduced in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and caused long and heated discussion. Georgia and the Carolinas so sturdily contended for the right to regulate the trade themselves that the other States finally compromised the matter by allowing the traffic to continue until 1808, though the right to impose a tax of $10 on each imported person was reserved to the government.* Another debate then ensued as to the basis of representation in the lower House of Congress, the South demanding the inclusion of both blacks and whites, and the North claiming that, as the South did not allow the slaves to vote, they should not be used as a basis of representation in Congress. The same arguments were used in the effort to fix the basis for a direct tax, the dispute finally terminating in a compromise by which only three-fifths of the slaves were to be counted.

Vermont, when its people declared themselves a State, was the first of the American States to declare for freedom for the slaves, a bill of rights having been adopted in 1777 forbidding slavery.f In 1784 New Hampshire declared in her organic law that "all men are born equally

See chapter on the framing of the Constitution, Second Period, Part ii., chap. vi., ante. A short account is in Von Holst, Constitutional and Political History, vol. i., pp. 288-301.

† Locke, Anti-Slavery in America, p. 80.

as

free and independent," and slavery had no hold in that State there was no contest. In Massachusetts several attempts to secure the passage by the Legislature of an emancipation act had failed, but the Constitution of 1780 declared that "all men are born free and equal," and in 1783 the courts held that this declaration established freedom from slavery. As Maine was then under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, she also became free territory.* Immediate emancipation was nowhere successful at this time, and gradual emancipation was seen to be the only course open. By an act of March 1, 1780, Pennsylvania adopted this form of abolition, and she was followed by Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784, and by New Jersey in 1804.† The majority of the public men of the South, especially of Virginia, were opposed to slavery on principle, but the slaves constituted the wealth of a great many people, and they naturally opposed emancipation. Moreover, emancipators could not formulate any plan for disposing of the negroes after they should be freed, and hence the movement failed.‡

In the West the Abolitionists had been able to forestall slavery, the

*Ibid, pp. 80-82; Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, vol. i., p. 14. Locke, Anti-Slavery, pp. 77-79, 123-125, 127

128.

J. C. Ballagh, History of Slavery in Virginia, pp. 130-136. See also Madison's Works (Congress ed.), vol. i., p. 200. See also the chapter on "Cotton and the Extension of Slavery," in Hammond, The Cotton Industry, p. 34 et seq.

territory north and west of the Ohio being dedicated to freedom by the united action of the Northerners and Southerners, Jefferson leading the movement. In 1784 it was attempted to prohibit slavery after 1800 throughout the West, but this attempt was defeated by one vote. In 1787 the plan to prohibit slavery in the Northwest was successfully carried out, but in the territory south of the Ohio slavery was allowed to flourish; and in 1798, when Mississippi became a territory, the provision prohibiting slavery there was overwhelmingly defeated.* In 1805 a bill for gradual emancipation in the District of Columbia was rejected by a vote of 77 to 31.t

After the organization of the new government, numerous petitions were sent to Congress requesting the abolition of the slave traffic. During the first session of the First Congress, while the revenue bill was under discussion, Parker, of Virginia, introduced an amendment to that measure, providing that a duty of $10 apiece be laid on all negroes imported into this country. He and his colleagues supported the measure chiefly to discourage the irrational and inhuman" traffic, thinking that a tax

* Annals of Congress, 5th Congress, 3d session, pp. 1306-1312. See also Von Holst, Constitutional and Political History, vol. i., pp. 285-288, 322. † Annals of Congress, 8th Congress, 2d session, p. 995; Tremaine, Slavery in the District of Columbia, p. 58 (University of Nebraska Seminary Papers).

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might act as a deterrent.* This discussion showed that the leading members north of Pennsylvania were either lukewarm toward the movement or were willing to abandon it if South Carolina would vote for the protective duties so much desired by New England. In the course of the debate, Madison said:

*

*

"It is to be hoped that by expressing a national disapprobation of this trade we may destroy it, and save ourselves from reproaches, and our posterity the imbecility ever attendant on a country filled with slaves. * If there is any one point in which it is clearly the policy of this nation, so far as we constitutionally can, to vary the practice obtaining under some of the state governments, it is this. It is as much the interest of Georgia and South Carolina as of any in the Union. Every addition they receive to their number of slaves tends to weaken and render them less capable of self-defence. It is a necessary duty of the general government to protect every part of the empire against danger, as well internal as external. Everything, therefore, which tends to increase this danger, though it may be a local affair, yet, if it involves national expense or safety, becomes a concern to every part of the Union, and is a proper subject for the consideration of those charged with the general administration of the government." †

Burke said that there was practically no difference between laying a specific duty of $10 on slaves and collecting a 5 per cent. duty on them as merchandise, the amount of revenue being nearly the same.‡ But the Georgia and South Carolina members prevented action. Jackson, of Georgia, waxing hot in his speech, said