The royally appointed Governor of Georgia in the early 1700’s was threatened by the King with removal if he continued to oppose slavery in his colony—­at that time the King of England made a small profit on every slave imported to the colonies.  The later British criticism of the United States for not eradicating slavery in the early 1800’s, combined with their tacit support of the ‘Confederacy’ during the Civil War is a prime example of the irony and hypocrisy of politics:  that self-interest will ever overpower right.

Before the Constitution they prohibited its introduction into the Northwestern Territory, the only country we owned then free from it.  At the framing and adoption of the Constitution, they forbore to so much as mention the word “slave” or “slavery” in the whole instrument.  In the provision for the recovery of fugitives, the slave is spoken of as a “person held to service or labor.”  In that prohibiting the abolition of 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, unmistakable spirit of that age toward slavery was hostility to the principle and toleration only by necessity.