aturated with the blood of African bondage, and from midnight of the
31st of December, 1807, not a slave from Africa was suffered ever
more to be introduced upon our soil. But the internal traffic was
still lawful, and the _breeding_ States soon reconciled themselves to
a prohibition which gave them the monopoly of the interdicted trade,
and they joined the full chorus of reprobation, to punish with death
the slave-trader from Africa, while they cherished and shielded and
enjoyed the precious profits of the American slave-trade exclusively
to themselves.

Perhaps this unhappy result of their concession had not altogether
escaped the foresight of the freemen of the North; but their intense
anxiety for the preservation of the whole Union, and the habit
already formed of yielding to the somewhat peremptory and overbearing
tone which the relation of master and slave welds into the nature of
the lord, prevailed with them to overlook this consideration, the
internal slave-trade having scarcely existed while that with Africa
had been allowed. But of one consequence which has followed from the
slave representation, pervading the whole organic structure of the
Constitution, they certainly were not prescient; for if they had been,
never--no, never would they have consented to it.

The representation, ostensibly of slaves, under the name of persons,
was in its operation an exclusive grant of power to one class of
proprietors, owners of one species of property, to the detriment of
all the rest of the community. This species of property was odious
in its nature, held in direct violation of the natural and
inalienable rights of man, and of the vital principles of
Christianity; it was all accumulated in one geographical section of
the country, and was all held by wealthy men, comparatively small in
numbers, not amounting to a tenth part of the free white population
of the States in which it was concentrated.

In some of the ancient, and in some modern republics, extraordinary
political power and privileges have been invested in the owners of
horses; but then these privileges and these powers have been granted
for the equivalent of extraordinary duties and services to the
community, required of the favoured class. The Roman knights
constituted the cavalry of their armies, and the bushels of rings
gathered by Hannibal from their dead bodies, after the battle of
Cannae, amply prove that the special powers conferred upon them were
no