tomed himself to impute this insecurity to the machina- Chap. I. tions of Northern abolitionists; but no machinations were necessary to produce it, and it had in fact existed long before the anti-slavery sentiment woke into activity in the Northern States. The very fact that opinion was against him, that he was a mark for reproach which he thought undeserved, and that this opinion was largely shared by his own countrymen, disposed him to assert and defend his rights with somewhat of that acerbity and tenacity which belong to party spirit. He knew also that the property he held was, even while it continued his own, liable to depreciation from other causes; for the value of slave-labour, which is always, in the gross, labour of an inferior sort, diminishes fast with the diminishing productiveness of the land to which it is applied. The strength of these feelings has been sometimes exaggerated by anti-slavery writers, but it is impossible not to see that they largely influenced-nay, they may be said to have ruled the action of the Southern Legislatures in their internal Government, and that of Southern members in the Federal Congress. To ward off not only every attack, but every approach, of the anti-slavery sentiment, to protect, and if possible increase, the political influence of the slave-holding interest in the public councils, and to enlarge its territorial dominion,-these were the objects which the South during a long course of years kept steadily in view and pursued with remarkable tenacity of purpose.

The sterner climate and less kindly soil of the Northern States, which yield no return, unless to thrifty and persevering labour, made slave-holding there unprofitable, and it soon became repugnant to the temper and habits of the people. It was abolished or prohibited altogether by the State Constitutions of Vermont and New Hampshire, and by the new Constitution framed in 1780 for Massachusetts; and Emancipation Acts, gradual in their operation, were passed between 1770 and 1804

Chap. I.

by Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. The handful of slaves which existed there they are supposed to have been about 50,000 in 1790-died out: the tide of emigration from Europe poured, slowly at first, but with increasing volume, through the Northern ports, spread over the seaboard States, and rolled westwards; and a vast population grew up, of more than average intelligence, passionately fond of freedom, keenly sensitive to opinion, and impatient of anything like national discredit. A strong hostility to slavery always existed in the North and West, though it did not, till a comparatively recent date, become an active element in the politics of the Union. On the reasons which prevented this I need not dwell; it is enough to say that, so long as slavery remained a mere matter of State legislation, it was practically shut out from the arena of political controversy. The Constitution, by giving Congress no control over it, placed it beyond the reach of interference, and no attempt to meddle with it unconstitutionally would have been countenanced by public opinion. Questions might, however, arise, strictly within the domain of Congress, which, without directly jeopardizing the institution itself, might embroil the interests of the Slave States with those of the Free, and widen the chasm between them. Three such questions arose, of very unequal importance-one relating to the admission of new States and the organization of Territories, a second to the recovery of fugitive slaves, and a third to the commercial policy of the Union.

I. To understand the magnitude of the first of these questions, and the frequency with which it was liable to

1 Slavery in New York finally ceased in 1827, under the operation of an Act passed in 1817. This Act set free 10,000 slaves. A gradual Emancipation Act had been passed as early as 1799. At the date of the Census of 1840 there were still 674 slaves in New Jersey, which had passed an Act in 1804.-Greeley's American Conflict, p. 108.

Negro slaves existed in Massachusetts as early as 1638.-Curtis, History of the Constitution of the United States, vol. ii, p. 454.

recur, we have only to glance at any old map of the Chap. I. United States side by side with a map of the present day. The American Republic at its formation occupied but a narrow strip of its present wide dominion. Of the chain of States which now divide the valley of the Mississippi, and of those which border the lakes west of Lake Erie, not one was then in existence. Between the left bank of the river and the present confines of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, lay a great expanse of wild land, thinly settled here and there, and roamed over by the Creek and Cherokee Indians. This now forms the States of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee. West of the great stream, from its sources to its mouth, and from its banks as far at least as the chain of the Rocky Mountains, and embracing also the seaboard between New Orleans and Mobile, extended the old French dominion of Louisiana, then a dependency of Spain, and uninhabited except at a few points where small settlements had been formed. West Florida, Texas, and the whole range of plain and highland stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, were also Spanish. Oregon was an unexplored wilderness. All these immense regions have by degrees been organised as Territories, and from Territories erected into States; each step has called into action the powers of Congress; and the question whether slavery should be admitted into, or excluded from, section after section of this new domain, has given rise to repeated and violent struggles. It has been insisted, on the one hand, that the soil of the Territories, being held by the common Government of the Union in trust for all the States, must be deemed common ground, in which all the States had equal rights; that all citizens indiscriminately had the right of settling there; that the right to settle was incomplete unless the settler could carry his property along with him; that Congress had by the Constitution no power to exclude from the Territories any species of property; that no such power could be

Chap. I.

ascribed to Territorial Legislatures, which are subordinate and temporary; and that slaves were a species of property. The conclusion from these premises was, that slavery ought to be recognised and protected by law in all the Territories up to the moment at which they were converted into States. The most determined adversaries of this view arrived, by a different course of reasoning, at a diametrically opposite conclusion. Freedom, they said, was, according to the principles of the Constitution, the normal condition of the Territories; slavery had and could have no legal existence there, being a status created entirely by the local laws of some particular States; and, where it did not exist, Congress had no power to permit or uphold it, nor, of course, had any Territorial Legislature. These conflicting views, the former of which was affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott case,1 were not distinctly asserted in the earlier stages of the contest; but on each recurrence of

1 "The United States, under its present Constitution, cannot acquire territory to be held as a colony to be gverned at its will and pleasure. But it may acquire territory which, at the time, has not a population that fits it to become a State, and may govern it as a territory until it has a population which, in the judgment of Congress, entitles it to be admitted as a State of the Union. During the time it remains a territory Congress may legislate over it within the scope of its constitutional powers in relation to citizens of the United States, and may establish a Territorial Government; and the form of this local Government must be regulated by the discretion of Congress, but with powers not exceeding those which Congress itself, by the Constitution, is authorized to exercise over citizens of the United States, in respect to their rights of persons or rights of property. The territory thus acquired is acquired by the people of the United States for their common and equal benefit; and every citizen has a right to take with him into the territory any article of property, including his slaves, which the Constitution recognizes as property, and pledges the Federal Government for its protection."Dred Scott v. Sandford, Howard's R., xix, 395.

The clause of the Constitution on which the question turned is Art. IV, § iii, 1, 2, "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union. The Congress shall have power to dispose of, and make all needful rules and regulations respecting, the territory or other property belonging to the United States."

the question they were advanced with greater sharpness Chap. I. and precision. Four times it became formidable; each time-the last perhaps excepted-it was composed by an arrangement which had more or less the character of a compromise. The Ordinance passed on the 13th June, 1787, by the Congress of the Confederation, for regulating the government of the waste lands then called the North-Western Territory, now forming Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, prohibited slavery within that region; but it provided, in terms nearly the same as the general clause which was afterwards embodied in the Constitution (Art. IV, sec. ii, 3) that should any person escape into the same "from whom labour or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labour or service as aforesaid." The Missouri Compromise, in 1820, extended the same prohibition, guarded by the same proviso, to so much of the tract between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains (then called the Missouri Territory)

1 This question was twice dealt with by the Continental Congress—in 1784, when an Ordinance was adopted extending in terms over the whole unoccupied territory above the 31st parallel north latitude, and including tracts not at that time ceded by North Carolina and Georgia, which now form the States of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, and again in 1787. The Ordinance of 1784, as drawn by the Committee of Congress, of which Jefferson was the principal member, contained the following clause:-

"That after the year 1800 of the Christian era there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted to have been personally guilty."

66

"The votes in Congress," says Mr. Greeley, were 16 for Mr. Jefferson's interdiction of slavery to 7 against it, and the States stood recorded 6 for it to 3 against it; but the Articles of Confederation required an affirmative vote of a majority of all the States to sustain a proposition, and thus the restriction failed through the absence of a member from New Jersey, rendering the vote of that State null for want of a quorum." In the Ordinance of 1787 the clause was inserted, but with the addition mentioned in the text. This Ordinance was adopted and re-enacted, with the clause unaltered, by the first Congress of the Union in 1789.

C