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land ship owners amassed fortunes by plying the business of buying negroes in Africa, transporting them to the United States, and selling them for the most part to southern people.
The evil of this traffic soon became apparent to the people of the South, and when the Constitution was framed in 1787, the South demanded that the fundamental law of our land should inhibit this traffic of importing human beings from Africa. The South was resisted by the New England slave-traders, and as a compromise, it was agreed that the trade should be restricted, and after the year 1800, entirely prohibited, but, by the persistency of New England, the provision was finally extended to the year 1808.
It has been charged that the opposition of southern slave-holders, which was manifested in the convention to the continued importation of slaves, was attributable to their desire to maintain the value of the slave property they already possessed, but contemporaneous writing clearly shows that the mass of these people were actuated by no such selfish motives.
Very soon the people of the North found that their climate was not adapted to slave labor, and as the Constitution prohibited the continuance of the profitable business of catching or buying negroes in Africa and selling them to the people of the South, they ceased to have any interest in this class of property. I do not say that the lack of pecuniary interest actuated any one, but about this time there commenced what history will record as a war upon the institution of slavery.
NORTHERN STATES NULLIFY THE CONSTITUTION".
Instead of upholding and enforcing the constitutional guarantee which I have read, many States of the North enacted laws making it a criminal offence for any official to comply with his oath of office and comply with the terms of the Constitution, so far as it affected this question. This was done against the protest of such great men as Edward Everett and Daniel Webster.
This precise question was discussed by that great statesman, Daniel Webster, in his Buffalo speech of May 22, 1851. He said:
Then there was the other matter, and that was the fugitive-slave law. Let me say a word about that. Under the provisions of the Constitution, during Washington's administration, in the year 1793. there was passed by general consent a law for the restoration of fugitive slaves. Hardly any one opposed it at that period; it was thought to be necessary in order to carry the Constitution into effect;
