the African slave trade for twenty years, that trade is spoken of as "the
migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now
existing shall think proper to admit," etc. These are the only provisions
alluding to slavery. Thus the thing is hid away in the Constitution, just
as an afflicted man hides away a wen or cancer which he dares not cut out
at once, lest he bleed to death,--with the promise, nevertheless, that
the cutting may begin at a certain time. Less than this our fathers could
not do, and more they would not do. Necessity drove them so far, and
farther they would not go. But this is not all. The earliest Congress
under the Constitution took the same view of slavery. They hedged and
hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity.

In 1794 they prohibited an outgoing slave trade--that is, the taking of
slaves from the United States to sell. In 1798 they prohibited the
bringing of slaves from Africa into the Mississippi Territory, this
Territory then comprising what are now the States of Mississippi and
Alabama. This was ten years before they had the authority to do the same
thing as to the States existing at the adoption of the Constitution. In
1800 they prohibited American citizens from trading in slaves between
foreign countries, as, for instance, from Africa to Brazil. In 1803 they
passed a law in aid of one or two slave-State laws in restraint of the
internal slave trade. In 1807, in apparent hot haste, they passed the
law, nearly a year in advance,--to take effect the first day of 1808, the
very first day the Constitution would permit, prohibiting the African
slave trade by heavy pecuniary and corporal penalties. In 1820, finding
these provisions ineffectual, they declared the slave trade piracy, and
annexed to it the extreme penalty of death. While all this was passing in
the General Government, five or six of the original slave States had
adopted systems of gradual emancipation, by which the institution was
rapidly becoming extinct within their limits. Thus we see that the plain,