was sitting, for the concrete purpose of buying land. He doubtless
did much to hasten action by Congress, and on July 13 was passed "An
Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States,
Northwest of the Ohio," the Southern states not having ceded the area
south of the river. It was declared that "There shall be neither slavery
nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in
punishment of crimes, whereof the parties shall be duly convicted." To
this was added the stipulation (soon afterwards embodied in the Federal
Constitution) for the return of any person escaping into the territory
from whom labor or service was "lawfully claimed in any one of the
original states." In this shape the ordinance was adopted, even South
Carolina and Georgia concurring; and thus was paved the way for the
first fugitive slave law.

Slavery, already looming up as a dominating issue, was the cause of
two of the three great compromises that entered into the making of the
Constitution of the United States (the third, which was the first made,
being the concession to the smaller states of equal representation in
the Senate). These were the first but not the last of the compromises
that were to mark the history of the subject; and, as some clear-headed
men of the time perceived, it would have been better and cheaper to
settle the question at once on the high plane of right rather than to
leave it indefinitely to the future. South Carolina, however, with able
representation, largely controlled the thought of the convention, and
she and Georgia made the most extreme demands, threatening not to accept
the Constitution if there was not compliance with them. An important
question was that of representation, the Southern states advocating
representation according to numbers, slave and free, while the Northern
states were in favor of the representation of free persons only.
Williamson of North Carolina advocated the counting of three-fifths of