The Great Conspiracy | Page 9

that north-west of it, this did not; and as a direct consequence of this failure to include in it the territory south of that river, the States of Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, which were taken out of it, were subsequently admitted to the Union as Slave States, and thus greatly augmented their political power. And at a later period it was this increased political power that secured the admission of still other Slave States--as Florida, Louisiana and Texas--which enabled the Slave States to hold the balance of such power as against the original States that had become Free, and the new Free States of the North-west.
Hence, while in a measure quieting the great question of Slavery for the time being, the Ordinance of '87 in reality laid the ground-work for the long series of irritations and agitations touching its restrictions and extension, which eventually culminated in the clash of arms that shook the Union from its centre to its circumference. Meanwhile, as we have seen--while the Ordinance of 1787 was being enacted in the last Congress of the old Confederation at New York--the Convention to frame the present Constitution was sitting at Philadelphia under the Presidency of George Washington himself. The old Confederation had proved itself to be "a rope of sand." A new and stronger form of government had become a necessity for National existence.
To create it out of the discordant elements whose harmony was essential to success, was an herculean task, requiring the utmost forbearance, unselfishness, and wisdom. And of all the great questions, dividing the framers of that Constitution, perhaps none of them required a higher degree of self abnegation and patriotism than those touching human Slavery.
The situation was one of extreme delicacy. The necessity for a closer and stronger Union of all the States was apparently absolute, yet this very necessity seemed to place a whip in the hands of a few States, with which to coerce the greater number of States to do their bidding. It seemed that the majority must yield to a small minority on even vital questions, or lose everything.
Thus it was, that instead of an immediate interdiction of the African Slave Trade, Congress was empowered to prohibit it after the lapse of twenty years; that instead of the basis of Congressional Representation being the total population of each State, and that of direct taxation the total property of each State, a middle ground was conceded, which regarded the Slaves as both persons and property, and the basis both of Representation and of Direct Taxation was fixed as being the total Free population "plus three-fifths of all other persons" in each State; and that there was inserted in the Constitution a similar clause to that which we have seen was almost simultaneously incorporated in the Ordinance of '87, touching the reclamation and return to their owners of Fugitive Slaves from the Free States into which they may have escaped.
The fact of the matter is, that the Convention that framed our Constitution lacked the courage of its convictions, and was "bulldozed" by the few extreme Southern Slave-holding States--South Carolina and Georgia especially. It actually paltered with those convictions and with the truth itself. Its convictions--those at least of a great majority of its delegates--were against not only the spread, but the very existence of Slavery; yet we have seen what they unwillingly agreed to in spite of those convictions; and they were guilty moreover of the subterfuge of using the terms "persons" and "service or labor" when they really meant "Slaves" and "Slavery." "They did this latter," Mr. Madison says, "because they did not choose to admit the right of property in man," and yet in fixing the basis of Direct Taxation as well as Congressional Representation at the total Free population of each State with "three-fifths of all other persons," they did admit the right of property in man! As was stated by Mr. Iredell to the North Carolina Ratification Convention, when explaining the Fugitive Slave clause: "Though the word 'Slave' is not mentioned, this is the meaning of it." And he added: "The Northern delegates, owing to their peculiar scruples on the subject of Slavery, did not choose the word 'Slave' to be mentioned."
In March, 1789, the first Federal Congress met at New York. It at once enacted a law in accordance with the terms of the Ordinance of '87-- adapting it to the changed order of things under the new Federal Constitution--prohibiting Slavery in the Territories of the North-west; and the succeeding Congress enacted a Fugitive-Slave law.
In the same year (1789) North Carolina ceded her western territory (now Tennessee) south of the Ohio, to the United States, providing as one of the conditions of that cession, "that no regulation made, or to be made, by Congress, shall tend to emancipate