its legislation. With the outbreak of the Revolution came unison in
action with regard to the slave-trade, as with regard to other matters,
which may justly be called national. It was, of course, a critical
period,--a period when, in the rapid upheaval of a few years, the
complicated and diverse forces of decades meet, combine, act, and react,
until the resultant seems almost the work of chance. In the settlement
of the fate of slavery and the slave-trade, however, the real crisis
came in the calm that succeeded the storm, in that day when, in the
opinion of most men, the question seemed already settled. And indeed it
needed an exceptionally clear and discerning mind, in 1787, to deny that
slavery and the slave-trade in the United States of America were doomed
to early annihilation. It seemed certainly a legitimate deduction from
the history of the preceding century to conclude that, as the system had
risen, flourished, and fallen in Massachusetts, New York, and
Pennsylvania, and as South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland were
apparently following in the same legislative path, the next generation
would in all probability witness the last throes of the system on our
soil.

To be sure, the problem had its uncertain quantities. The motives of the
law-makers in South Carolina and Pennsylvania were dangerously
different; the century of industrial expansion was slowly dawning and
awakening that vast economic revolution in which American slavery was to
play so prominent and fatal a rôle; and, finally, there were already in
the South faint signs of a changing moral attitude toward slavery, which
would no longer regard the system as a temporary makeshift, but rather
as a permanent though perhaps unfortunate necessity. With regard to the
slave-trade, however, there appeared to be substantial unity of opinion;
and there were, in 1787, few things to indicate that a cargo of five
hundred African slaves would openly be landed in Georgia in 1860.