state, but it was the first time such a law had been made from humane motives only.
To consider the course of events on our side of the Atlantic, it appears that "the slave-trade was hardly touched upon in the Congress of the Confederation." It was mentioned only in connection with "the counting of slaves as well as of freemen in the apportionment of taxes;" but when the articles were finally adopted a law was enacted by which fugitive slaves, captured on the sea, or on the beach below high-water mark, were to be free unless claimed by the owner!
From the adoption of the articles of confederation until it was found that those articles were utterly inadequate to their proposed object of holding the States together as a nation, the slave-trade was not an object of national legislation. But when the convention which adopted the present Constitution met, the subject of the slave-trade had a fair discussion, though it must be said that no one foresaw the extent to which slavery was to grow. On the contrary, the people as a whole believed that it was a dying institution, destined speedily to take itself from the nation.
A fair examination of the discussions in this convention shows that the trade would have been prohibited in the Constitution but for the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina. Delegates from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia all denounced the traffic, even though all of them were slave-holders. Mason, of Virginia, called it "infernal." Georgia was ruled by the feeling in favor of slavery that had come down from the days when her financial interests had suffered for want of slaves under the proprietary government.
