extensively engaged in kidnapping in Africa, and transporting slaves thence for sale to Southern planters. They had, it was added, such interests at stake in this business that twenty years would be required to wind it up. At that time the political balance between the sections was equal; and the South, to pacify the North, agreed that the new Government should have no power until after twenty years should have elapsed to restrict their traffic; and thus the North gained a lease and a right to fetch slaves from Africa into the South till 1808. That year, one of Virginia's own sons being President of the United States, an Act was passed forbidding a continuance of the traffic and declaring the further prosecution of it piracy.
Virginia was the leader in the war of the Revolution, and her sons were the master-spirits of it, both in the field and in the Cabinet. For an entire generation after the establishment of the Government under the Constitution, four of her sons—with an interregnum of only four years—were called, one after the other, to preside, each for a period of eight years, over the affairs of the young Republic, and to shape its policy. In the meantime Virginia gave to the new Government the whole of her North-West Territory, to be held by it in trust for the benefit of all the States alike. Under the wise rule of her illustrious sons in the Presidential chair, the Republic grew, and its citizens flourished and prospered as no people had ever done.
During this time the African slave-trade having ceased, the price of negroes rose in the South. Then the Northern people discovered that it would be better to sell their slaves to the South than to work them; whereupon acts of so-called emancipation were passed in the North. They were prospective, and were to come in force after the lapse generally of twenty[1] years, which allowed the slave-holders among them ample time to fetch their negroes here and sell them to our people. This many of them did; and the North got rid of her slaves for value received, rather than through any real desire to set her bondmen free.
About this time also, Missouri—into which the early settlers had carried their slaves—applied for admission into the Union as a State. The North opposed it, on the grounds that slavery
- ↑ Slavery did not cease in New York till 1827.
