Till the extensive cultivation of cotton opened a vast field of rapid development in the lower South, there was in all the Union a steady progress in anti-slavery sentiment. This was due chiefly to the fact that slavery did not pay in the middle and eastern colonies, to the acceptance in the revolutionary period of the theories of the rights of man, to the continual fear of black insurrections, and to the fact that most of the American slave-markets were overstocked. This tendency manifested itself in two movements: one against the foreign slave-trade, by which that source of slavery was at length cut off from the whole country; and the other for the actual extinction of slavery, by which all the north and northwest except Delaware were made free territory.
The attack on the slave-trade began with the first Continental Congress. In the famous "Association," or non-importation resolutions of 1774, it was agreed that no slaves should be imported into any of the thirteen colonies after December 1, 1774, and that no colony vessels should engage, or be hired to others to engage, in that traffic. In 1776, the Congress, now committed to resistance, reaffirmed their position in a special resolution. The war, which followed throughout a period of seven years, cut off importations so generally that it is impossible to estimate the precise effect of these restrictions; but it is certain that till 1783, slave importations almost entirely ceased. No further restriction was placed on the traffic by the national government till the formation of the Constitution.
In the meantime, individual states passed laws against the foreign slave-trade, and did much to rid the country of the evil. By 1778, all the northern states, and Virginia and Maryland as well, had, by statute, or as a result of other action, made importations impossible. When the war was over, there was a tendency for the far south to revive the trade; but in 1786, North Carolina laid a prohibitive duty on slaves brought into her borders, and in 1787 South Carolina declared for absolute prohibition. For a time, Georgia held out for slaves, but the Haitian insurrection of 1791 created in the south a lively suspicion of all newly imported blacks. South Carolina passed a new prohibitory law in 1792; North Carolina, which had repealed its high duties in 1790, declared against all importations in 1794; and Georgia came reluctantly to the same position in 1798. Thus, by state action, the country was rid of the slave-trade before the close of the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless, any of these states might, if left to themselves, repeal their prohibitions and restore the traffic, to prevent which result, many people desired that the new national government be given control over the slave-trade. In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, such a proposition was made and supported by the northern states and by Virginia and Maryland, but the extreme south resisted it stoutly. It was well enough, they said, for the north, which had no slaves, and for Virginia and Maryland, which were overstocked with them, to desire to check importations, but for the lower south, the matter was different. Georgia was still an unsettled region, and the same was true to a lesser extent in the Carolinas. So earnestly did these three states resist that the delegates were convinced that they would not ratify the Constitution if it contained the objectionable clause. The majority, therefore, did not dare force them, but adopted a compromise, the purport of which was to give the three states mentioned an opportunity to acquire the desired stocks of negroes before the trade was forbidden by national statute.
Congress, declared the Constitution as finally framed, should not, before 1808, prohibit the introduction to the Union of such persons as any state saw fit to admit, but they might impose a tax of ten dollars on each imported person. In 1807, a law was passed by which Congress put into effect the powers granted to it. Four years earlier, the nation received an illustration of how much power was needed when South Carolina repealed its law restricting the trade. Various attempts were made to lay the ten-dollar duty authorized in the Constitution, but for several reasons, they all failed.
In another relation, slavery proved a source of dissension in the Constitutional Convention. When the apportionment of members of the popular branch of Congress was taken up, conflicting opinions quickly appeared over the counting of the slaves in the South. Delegates from that section urged that the whole population, black and white, ought to be the basis of representation. The northern delegates generally opposed this claim. The South, they urged, did not let the slaves vote and should not expect to count them in fixing its share of representation. Much angry debate followed, till the amicable conduct of the proceedings seemed in danger, when Madison and some of his intimate friends proposed a compromise. In 1777, a similar controversy had arisen over the apportionment of direct taxes, with the difference that at that time the North had desired and the South had opposed the counting of the slaves. The question, under the delicate adjustments of the old constitution, could not be settled; but it was now revived, and a compromise was made by which it was agreed that three-fifths of the slaves should be counted for the purpose of representation and three-fifths for apportioning direct taxes. The infrequency with which these taxes have been laid by the national government resulted in a compromise to the benefit of the South.
While the slave-trade was being disposed of by state and national enactment, an important movement was in progress against the very existence of slavery in a large part of the Union. One by one, the northern states came to legislate against the legal basis of bondage, till by the time the traffic was forbidden, every state but one lying north of Mason and Dixon's historic line had either established freedom or taken steps for its gradual accomplishment.
It was not difficult for the North to do this, since slavery was not widespread or economically profitable in that section. The non-slaveholders in the South were always numerous, but they were not people of influence. In the north, they were both numerous and influential, and when those earnest men, like the Quakers, who believed it a duty to rid the country of slavery, set out to organize public opinion on the subject, they had no great difficulty in succeeding. They sought to destroy slavery by three methods: by constitutional enactment, by laws for immediate emancipation, and by laws for gradual liberation.
The first of the American states to declare for freedom was Vermont, the state in which slavery was weakest. In a bill of rights adopted in 1777, when the people declared themselves a state, slavery was forbidden. New Hampshire, in 1784, declared in her organic law that "all men are born equally free and independent," and in the face of so plain a declaration, slavery, essentially weak in that state, made no contest. In Massachusetts, it had a stronger hold, but here the anti-slavery faction was also strong and aggressive. Several attempts for emancipation by legislative enactment having failed, the friends of freedom now turned to a clause in the Constitution of 1780, which declared that "all men are born free and equal." A case was made up for the courts, by which it was claimed that the import of the clause was to establish freedom; and these finally held, about 1783, that the contention was a good one. Thus, Massachusetts became a free territory, and with it went Maine, which was then under its jurisdiction.
Immediate emancipation by state statute was frequently attempted, but only successful in New York, and then not till 1827, which was many years after a law for gradual emancipation had been passed. All the other northern states but Delaware adopted this latter form of abolition. Pennsylvania, urged to it by the activity of the Quakers, acted first, passing its law in 1780. Connecticut and Rhode Island followed in 1784, and New Jersey in 1804. Gradual emancipation is defined as "the extinction of slavery by depriving it of its hereditary quality." In all those states in which slavery was forced out of existence, it was defended earnestly by the general body of slave-holders and slave-traders; and when it had been defeated, it was necessary in some of the states to pass laws to prevent these disappointed ones from sending their slaves out of the states, presumably in order to sell them.
In the South, there was considerable anti-slavery feeling, especially in Virginia, where most of the leading public men were opposed to the institution. But the mass of the people clung to their slaves, because they were an important form of wealth, and the wisest of the liberators could not suggest a practicable method of disposing of the negroes after they were freed; so the movement, although favored by so influential a man as Jefferson, came to naught. The failure here marked the point which peaceful emancipation was to reach in its southward course. From the fading of hope in Virginia, the country was committed to a free and a slave section. In the one was an aggressive element which proclaimed its hostility to slavery and expressed freely its opinion that it made the nation responsible for the crime of denying liberty to human beings. In the other was an increasing feeling that slavery was condemned, and that all southerners must act together if it were not overridden. Out of this grew a solidifying of the sections, an opposition of north to south and south to north, and a sensitiveness on the slave question which, although for a time subservient to other issues, was never quite forgotten, and which eventually became the cause of secession and civil war.
While the opponents of slavery contended against it in the original thirteen states, they did not fail to try to forestall it in the West. In the part north and west of the Ohio, they won an easy victory, southerners and northerners uniting to dedicate it to freedom, and Jefferson led the movement. In 1784, he and others supported a bill in the old Congress to prohibit slavery after 1800 in all the West, but this was defeated by one vote. In 1787, the demand was limited to the prohibition of slavery in the northwest, and this attempt was successful. Five states were later hewn out of the region to which this Northwest Ordinance applied, and all of them were free states. Since nothing was done to prohibit slavery in the territory south of the Ohio, slave-holders went into it freely, and when it reached the stage of statehood, it came into the Union as slave territory, thus preserving the sectional character of the Union. When Mississippi became a territory in 1798, an attempt was made in Congress to have it declared free territory, but so strong was the feeling that the South was reserved for slavery and the North for freedom that only twelve votes were given in support of the proposition. In another instance, the same determination was manifested in 1805, when a bill was introduced in Congress to secure gradual emancipation in the District of Columbia. It was rejected by a vote of 77 to 31.
Soon after the organization of the new Congress there began that series of petitions for the restriction of slavery in one way or another which was not to cease till 1865. The petitioners knew that many of the things asked for were impossible or politically improbable, but they continued their petitions, thinking that this would crystallize anti-slavery sentiment and believing that in the long run constitutional restrictions and adverse public opinion would give way before their demands for what they felt was right. Many of the petitioners were Quakers, a people always active against slavery and at this time unpopular in sections where they had no political influence, because they would not fight in the Revolutionary armies.
In February 1790, three petitions came to Congress for the prohibition or the restriction of the slave-trade. This was not unexpected by the southerners, who particularly desired that the first utterance of Congress on a question so dear to them should recognize the rights of the states over slavery. Cautious southerners, even those who like Madison were opposed to slavery, hoped that the southern congressmen would be reasonable and secure a clear statement of their rights. They were already caught in the great solidifying movement of the South on this question, and there could be no doubt that the petitions referred to were against the compromise of the Constitution on the prohibition of the slave-trade, an agreement to which Madison and the group of southern opponents of slavery had given their assent. The South, therefore, stood together, but they did not show the temperateness which Madison had hoped for. There were always some southerners who would not be quiet when slavery was criticised, and these were soon on their feet demanding that the anti-slavery petitions should not be referred to a committee. Defeated on this point, they were thrown into a rage when the committee reported with a decided leaning towards emancipation in the abstract. A heated discussion followed in which the report of the committee was modified. Resolutions including the following important principles were adopted:
"1. That the migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, cannot be prohibited by Congress prior to the year 1808.
"2. That Congress have no power to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them within any of the states, it remaining with the several states alone to provide any regulations therein which humanity and true policy may require.
"3. That Congress have authority to restrain the citizens of the United States from carrying on the African trade for the purpose of supplying foreigners with slaves, and of providing by proper regulations, for the humane treatment during their passage of slaves imported by the said citizens into the states admitting such importation.
"4. That Congress have also authority to prohibit foreigners from fitting out vessels in any port of the United States for transporting persons from Africa to any foreign port."
The resolutions plainly declared that Congress would do all it could under the Constitution to restrain the foreign slave-trade; and in 1794 it did pass a law in keeping with the third resolution.
The recovery of fugitive slaves was provided for in 1793 in a law concerning extradition and in this case the south got all that it could expect. It was provided that a master or his agent might recover a fugitive by taking him before a federal judge or local magistrate, who, without a jury and by oral testimony or by affidavits, was to determine the question of ownership. This law was made to meet a serious difficulty. A northern jury was not likely to be entirely unprejudiced, to carry before them ordinary witnesses from the south was practically impossible, and in the usual procedure the delays which the defendant could secure would be very trying to the claimant. All of this could make the recovery of a real fugitive slave so expensive that it would not pay the owner.
On the other hand, the law worked a hardship to the negroes. It made kidnapping of free negroes in the north easy and profitable. Even in the south a negro was treated as a freeman in a trial for his freedom; but as a fugitive in the north he was deprived of the rights of a freeman in anticipation of a verdict as to his freedom. The master's rights and the slave's conflicted, and the master was the law-maker. It was ever the habit of slavery to balance one wrong by another.