a national majority. This result at once placed the foreign slave-trade by American vessels or citizens within the control of the national legislature, and enabled Congress to forbid the carrying of slaves to foreign countries; and at the end of the year 1808, it brought the whole traffic within the reach of a national prohibition.1 Too high an estimate cannot well be formed, of the importance and value of this final settlement of conflicting sectional interests and demands. History has to thank the patriotism and liberality of the Northern States, for having acquired, for the government of the Union, by reasonable concessions, the power to terminate the African slave-trade. We. know, from almost every day's experience since the founding of the government, that individual cupidity, which knows no geographical limits, which defies public opinion whether in the North or in the South, required and still requires the restraint and chastisement of national power. The separate authority of the States would have been wholly unequal to the suppression of the slave-trade: for even if they had all finally adopted the policy of a stringent prohibition, without a navy, and without treaties, they could never have contended against the bold artifice and desperate cunning of avarice, stimulated by the enormous gains which have always been reaped in this inhuman trade. The just and candid voice of History has also to 1 See the note on the American abolition of the slave-trade, ante, Vol. I. p. 460. thank the Southern statesmen who consented to this arrangement, for having clothed a majority of the two houses of Congress with a full commercial power. They felt, and truly felt, that this was a great concession. But they looked at what they had gained. They had gained the exemption of their staple productions from taxation as objects of foreign commerce; the enumeration of their slaves in the basis of Congressional representation; and the settlement of the slave-trade upon terms not offensive to State pride. They had also gained the Union, with its power to maintain an army and a navy, — with its power and duty to protect them against foreign invasion and domestic insurrection, and to secure their republican constitutions. They looked, therefore, upon the grant of the power to regulate commerce by the ordinary modes of legislation, in its relations to the interests of a great empire, whose foundations ought to be laid broadly and deeply on the national welfare. They saw that the Revolution had cost the Eastern States enormous sacrifices of commercial wealth, and that the weakness of the Confederation had destroyed the little remnant of their trade.2 They saw and admitted the necessity for an unrestrained control over the foreign commerce of the country, if it was ever to rise from the prostrate condition in which it had been placed by foreign powers. They acted accordingly; and by their ac 1 See the remarks of John Rut- 2 General Pinckney. Ibid. 489. ledge. Madison, Elliot, V. 491. tion, they enabled the States of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia to enter the new Union without humiliation and without loss.1 1 The point respecting the slavetrade was insisted upon by the delegates of those three States, both as a matter of State pride and a matter of practical interest. They regarded the increase of their slave population by new importations as a thing of peculiarly domestic concern, the control of which they were unwilling to transfer to the general government. But they also contended for a political right which their States intended to exercise. The following table, taken from the United States Census, shows that in the twenty years which elapsed from 1790 to 1810 during eighteen of which the importation of slaves could not be prohibited by Congress, the slaves of those three States increased in a ratio so much larger than the rate of increase after the year 1808, as to make it apparent that it was not a mere abstraction on which they insisted. The right to admit the importation of slaves was exercised, and was intended to be exercised;-as some of the delegates of the three States declared. in the Convention. PROGRESS OF THE SLAVE POPULATION FROM 1790 TO 1850, SHOWING THE INCREASE PER CENT IN EACH PERIOD OF TEN YEARS. Thus was accomplished, so far as depended on the action of this Convention, that memorable compromise, which gave to the Union its control over the commercial relations of the States with foreign nations and with each other. An event so fraught with consequences of the utmost importance cannot be dismissed without some of the reflections appropriate to its consideration. Nature had marked America for a great commercial nation. The sweep of the Atlantic coast, from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of Florida, comprehending twenty degrees of latitude, broken into capacious bays and convenient harbors, and receiving the inward flow of the sea into great navigable rivers that stretched far into the interior, presented an access to the ocean not surpassed by that of any large portion of the globe. This long range of sea-coast embraced all the varieties of climate that are found between a hard and sterile region, where summer is but the breath of a few fervid weeks, and the ever blooming tropics, where winter is unknown. The products of the different regions, already entering, or fit to enter, into foreign commerce, attested as great a variety of soils. The proximity of the country to the West Indies, where the Eastern and the Middle 1810 was 48.4, and in 1850, 58.93; in Georgia, in 1810 it was 42.4, and in 1850, 42.44. It is not probable, therefore, that the prosperity of those States has been diminished by the discontinuance of the slavetrade; for it is not likely that they could well sustain a much larger ratio of the blacks to the whites than that which now exists, and which will probably continue to be maintained at about the same point for a long period of time. States could find the best markets for some of their most important exports, afforded the promise of a highly lucrative trade; while the voyage to the East Indies from any American port could be performed in as short a time as from England or Holland or France. In the South, there were great staples already largely demanded by the consumption of Europe. In the North, there were fisheries of singular importance, capable of furnishing enormous additions to the wealth of the country. Beyond the Alleghanies, the West, with its vast internal waters and its almost unequalled fertility, had been opened to a rapid emigration, which was soon to lay the foundation of new States, destined to be the abodes of millions of men. The very variety and extent of these interests had for many years occasioned a struggle for some mode of reconciling and harmonizing them all. But divided into separate governments, the commercial legislation of the States could produce nothing but the confusion and uncertainty which retaliation necessarily engenders. Different systems and rates of revenue were in force in seaports not a hundred miles apart, through which the inhabitants of other jurisdictions were obliged to draw their supplies of foreign commodities, and to export their own productions. The paper-money systems of the several States made the commercial value of coin quite different in different places, and gave an entirely insecure basis to trade. The reader, who has followed me through the pre |