after some modifications the clause is inserted without much opposition.
In 1789 South Carolina, who had continued to hold her land grants in the West, which covered the territory of the present State of Tennessee, ceded them to the United States on the condition among others “that no regulation made or to be made by Congress, shall tend to emancipate slaves.” The western territory held by Georgia, comprising the States of Alabama and Mississippi, was ceded to the Union in 1802, upon about the same condition. There was no alternative but to accept these cessions with their conditions. If the States held the lands, they would plant slavery there themselves, and thus increase their own greatness; and the United States could not secure the territory without the conditions.
Thus has slavery in the infant days of our Republic, by menaces and strategy triumphed over Congress and the will of the majority of our people.
The framers of our Constitution thought that they had laid a legislative coil which would sometime restrict the growth of slavery when they limited slave importation to twenty years; and they were no sanguinary visionists, but based their judgement upon the teachings of history. “In all former ages,” says Greeley in his “American Conflict:” “slavery so long as it existed and flourished, was kept alive by a constant or frequent enslavement of captives, or by importation of bondmen. Whenever that enslavement, that importation, closed, slavery began to decline.” But American slavery has set at naught the teachings of history and baffled the calculations of statesmen. The acquisition of Louisiana, thus opening a vast territory for the introduction of slaves, and the invention of the Cotton Gin, thus increasing the value of slave labor, rendered the commerce in human flesh as profitable as in the days of the African West India Company. Rapacious avarice unable longer to satisfy its greediness for gain by importation, invents a new system for multiplying human chattels. “Slave-breeding for gain, deliberately proposed
