The Great Conspiracy | Page 8

very people to rise in arms among us, and purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying of former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of our people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another."
[Prior to 1752, when Georgia surrendered her charter and became a Royal Colony, the holding of slaves within its limits was expressly prohibited by law; and the Darien (Ga.) resolutions of 1775 declared not only a "disapprobation and abhorrence of the unnatural practice of Slavery in America" as "a practice founded in injustice and cruelty, and highly dangerous to our Liberties (as well as lives) but a determination to use our utmost efforts for the manumission of our slaves in this colony upon the most safe and equitable footing for the masters and themselves."]
During the war of the Revolution following the Declaration of Independence, the half a million of slaves, nearly all of them in the Southern States, were found to be not only a source of weakness, but, through the incitements of British emissaries, a standing menace of peril to the Slaveholders. Thus it was that the South was overrun by hostile British armies, while in the North-comparatively free of this element of weakness--disaster after disaster met them. At last, however, in 1782, came the recognition of our Independence, and peace, followed by the evacuation of New York at the close of 1783.
The lessons of the war, touching Slavery, had not been lost upon our statesmen. Early in 1784 Virginia ceded to the United States her claims of jurisdiction and otherwise over the vast territory north-west of the Ohio; and upon its acceptance, Jefferson, as chairman of a Select Committee appointed at his instance to consider a plan of government therefor, reported to the ninth Continental Congress an Ordinance to govern the territory ceded already, or to be ceded, by individual States to the United States, extending from the 31st to the 47th degree of north latitude, which provided as "fundamental conditions between the thirteen original States and those newly described" as embryo States thereafter--to be carved out of such territory ceded or to be ceded to the United States, not only that "they shall forever remain a part of the United States of America," but also that "after the year 1800 of the Christian era, there shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States"--and that those fundamental conditions were "unalterable but by the joint consent of the United States in Congress assembled, and of the particular State within which such alteration is proposed to be made."
But now a signal misfortune befell. Upon a motion to strike out the clause prohibiting Slavery, six States: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania, voted to retain the prohibitive clause, while three States, Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina, voted not to retain it. The vote of North Carolina was equally divided; and while one of the Delegates from New Jersey voted to retain it, yet as there was no other delegate present from that State, and the Articles of Confederation required the presence of "two or more" delegates to cast the vote of a State, the vote of New Jersey was lost; and, as the same Articles required an affirmative vote of a majority of all the States--and not simply of those present--the retention of the clause prohibiting Slavery was also lost. Thus was lost the great opportunity of restricting Slavery to the then existing Slave States, and of settling the question peaceably for all time. Three years afterward a similar Ordinance, since become famous as "the Ordinance of '87," for the government of the North-west Territory (from which the Free States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin have since been carved and admitted to the Union) was adopted in Congress by the unanimous vote of all the eight States present. And the sixth article of this Ordinance, or "Articles of Compact," which it was stipulated should "forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent," was in these words:
"Art. 6. There shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory, otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted; provided always that any person escaping into the same from whom labor 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 labor, or service, as aforesaid."
But this Ordinance of '87, adopted almost simultaneously with the framing of our present Federal Constitution, was essentially different from the Ordinance of three years previous, in this: that while the latter included the territory south of the Ohio River as well as