ry sentiment for nearly sixty years after the adoption of the
Constitution, the young flood beginning to set strongly in again after
the full meaning of the annexation of Texas began to be understood at
the North, but not fairly filling up again even its own deserted
channels till the Southern party succeeded in cutting the embankment of
the Missouri Compromise. Then at last it became evident that the real
danger to be guarded against was the abolition of Freedom, and the
reaction was as violent as it was sudden.

In the early days of the Republic, slavery was admitted to be a social
and moral evil, only to be justified by necessity; and we think it more
than doubtful if South Carolina and Georgia could have procured an
extension of the slave-trade, had there not been a general persuasion
that the whole system could not long maintain itself against the growth
of intelligence and humanity. As early as 1786 a resident of South
Carolina wrote: "In countries where slavery is encouraged, the ideas of
the people are of a peculiar cast; the soul becomes dark and narrow,
and assumes a tone of savage brutality.... The most elevated and
liberal Carolinians abhor slavery; they will not debase themselves by
attempting to vindicate it." In 1789 William Pinckney said, in the
Maryland Assembly: "Sir, by the eternal principles of natural justice,
no master in the State has a right to hold his slave in bondage for a
single hour." And he went on to speak of slavery in a way which, fifty
years later, would have earned him a coat of tar and feathers, if not a
halter, in any of the Slave States, and in some of the Free. In 1787
Delaware passed an act forbidding the importation of "negro or mulatto
slaves into the State for sale or otherwise;" and three years later her
courts declared a slave, hired in Maryland and brought over the border,
free under this statute. In 1790 there were Abolition societies in
Maryland and Virginia. In 1787 the Synod of the Presbyterian Church
(since called the General Assembly), in their pastoral letter,
"strongly recommended the abolition of slavery, with the instruction of
the negroes in literature and religion." We cite these instances to
show that the sacredness of slavery from discussion was a discovery of
much later date. So also was the theory of its divine origin,--a
theological slough in which, we are sorry to say, Northern men have
shown themselves readiest to bemire themselves. It was when slave labor