It was the plain duty of a Revolution based upon
"Liberty" to take steps toward the abolition of slavery: it preferred
promises to straightforward action. It was the plain duty of the
Constitutional Convention, in founding a new nation, to compromise with
a threatening social evil only in case its settlement would thereby be
postponed to a more favorable time: this was not the case in the slavery
and the slave-trade compromises; there never was a time in the history
of America when the system had a slighter economic, political, and moral
justification than in 1787; and yet with this real, existent, growing
evil before their eyes, a bargain largely of dollars and cents was
allowed to open the highway that led straight to the Civil War.
Moreover, it was due to no wisdom and foresight on the part of the
fathers that fortuitous circumstances made the result of that war what
it was, nor was it due to exceptional philanthropy on the part of their
descendants that that result included the abolition of slavery.
With the faith of the nation broken at the very outset, the system of
slavery untouched, and twenty years' respite given to the slave-trade to
feed and foster it, there began, with 1787, that system of bargaining,
truckling, and compromising with a moral, political, and economic
monstrosity, which makes the history of our dealing with slavery in the
first half of the nineteenth century so discreditable to a great people.
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