quences which have come from it. The opinions of mankind upon the whole matter have been made up, and are not to be changed. However much men may differ as to forms of government, and the administration of government, whatever divergence of opinion may exist touching political measures and political instrumentalities, no one in any part of the world enlightened by Christian civilization will now dare to defend slavery as a system of labor. It has ceased to be; but its death-struggles convulsed the country as nothing else could, and provoked the most dreadful of all wars, — civil war. Let it be forgotten and buried with the dead past; and in its grave let us put all the wild passions and bitter animosities it evoked. It was hostile to national union and domestic peace; but, now that its baleful influence is over, let us hope that we may be again one people, politically and socially, so that we may be the better able to work out our destiny and mission among the nations of the earth. I propose to recall to your attention at this time some of the causes which led to emancipation.

When the Declaration of American Independence was promulgated all the thirteen colonies were slaveholding States. At the North it was generally believed that the proposition therein set forth, that all men were born free, applied alike to the negro as

well as to the white man. In Massachusetts the Supreme Court, reflecting the sentiments of the Puritans and their steady devotion to the right of personal liberty in all men, declared that not only the slaves here were emancipated by that instrument, but that they had been already made free, by the adoption of the State Constitution and Bill of Rights,. previous to the formation of the Federal Constitution.

In other Northern States similar judicial decisions were made, and slavery soon ceased to exist therein. It was otherwise at the South. The material prosperity of that portion of the country was thought to depend upon the maintenance of slavery, for the time at least; and, influenced by their supposed interests, our southern brethren did not consider the declaration as universal in its operation, and therefore restricted its application to white citizens alone.

Whoever inquires into the opinions and sentiments of the leading minds of the country when the Federal Constitution was formed will find that slavery was regarded everywhere as a political, if the enlightened sense of the people had not then begun to consider it as a moral, evil. Thinking men, North and South, believed its existence was a source of national weakness, and that its influence on free labor was unwholesome and depressing. Its ultimate

extinction was therefore desired and expected. Both sections of the country deprecated the continuance of the African slave-trade, from fear that the institution would be perpetuated to an indefinite period; for the belief obtained that slavery would die out if the slave-trade were abandoned.

OPINIONS OF THE EARLY SOUTHERN STATESMEN.'

As early as 1772 the Legislature of Virginia had memorialized the King of Great Britain upon the dangers of slavery, and expressed the desire that the slave-trade might be abolished; but the king replied, "that, upon pain of his highest displeasure, the importation of slaves should not be in any respect obstructed." How are we to reconcile this declaration from the crown with the decision of the English court in 1772, in the celebrated Sommersett case, that no man could make a slave of another? Well may honest Ben Franklin indignantly say, "Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single slave that happened to land on thy coast, while thy laws continue a traffic whereby so many thousands are dragged into a slavery that is entailed upon their posterity."

As I have said, it was thought that slavery would soon die out if the importation of slaves should cease. When it was proposed in the Federal Con

vention by some northern delegates that the slavetrade should continue beyond the term of twenty years, the southern members objected that the period was too long. Mr. Madison was strongly of this opinion, and so expressed himself. Jefferson said during the war of the Revolution, "The way, I hope, is preparing, under the auspices of Heaven, for a total emancipation." At another time he confessed that "he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just." Washington declared, "there was not a man living who wished more sincerely than he to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery." Luther Martin and William Pinckney, the great lawyers of Maryland, both advocated emancipation, — the former in the Federal Convention of 1787, and the latter in the Maryland House of Delegates in 1789. Mr. Iredell, of North Carolina, said in the Constitutional Convention, "When the entire abolition of slavery takes place, it will be an event which must be pleasing to every generous mind, and to every friend of human nature." I might quote the opinions of many other southern statesmen of that day to the same effect. Mr. Webster observes in his great speech on the Constitution and the Union, "that the eminent men, the most eminent men, and nearly all the conspicuous politicians of the South, then held the same sentiments, that slavery was an

There are no vehement in the

The North was

evil, a blight, a scourge, and a curse. terms of reprobation of slavery so North at that day as in the South. not so excited against it as the South; and the reason is, I suppose, that there was much less of it at the North, and the people did not see, or think they saw, the evils so prominently as they were seen, or thought to be seen, at the South."

Reverdy Johnson, Senator from Maryland, in his memorable speech made on the 5th April, 1864, in the Senate of the United States, on the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, said, "The men who fought through the Revolution, those who survived its perils and shared its glory, and who were called to the convention by which the Constitution of the United States was drafted and recommended to the adoption of the American people, almost without exception thought that slavery was not only an evil to any people among whom it might exist, but that it was an evil of the highest character, which it was the duty of all Christian people, if possible, to remove, because it was a sin as well as an evil. I think the history of those times will bear me out in the statement, that if the men by whom the Constitution was framed, and the people by whom it was adopted, had anticipated the time in which we live, they would have provided by constitutional enact