The smaller States were satisfied with this
concession, and the larger were willing to make it, not only for the
sake of the Union, but because of the just estimate in which they held
the rights belonging to all the States alike. The real difficulty, as
Madison said in the debate on that question, and as he repeated again
and again after that question was settled, was not between the larger
and smaller States, but between the North and the South; between those
States that held slaves and those that had none.

Slavery in the Constitution, which has given so much trouble to the
Abolitionists of this century, and indeed to everybody else, gave quite
as much in the last century to those who put it there. Many of the
wisest and best men of the time, Southerners as well as Northerners, and
among them Madison, were opposed to slavery. They could see little good
in it, hardly even any compensation for the existence of a system so
full of evil. There was hardly a State in the Union at that time that
had not its emancipation society; and there was hardly a man of any
eminence in the country who was not an officer, or at least a member, of
such a society. Everywhere north of South Carolina, slavery was looked
upon as a misfortune which it was exceedingly desirable to be free from
at the earliest possible moment; everywhere north of Mason and Dixon's
line, measures had already been taken, or were certain soon to be taken,
to put an end to it; and by the ordinance for the government of all the
territory north of the Ohio River it was absolutely prohibited by
Congress in the same year in which the Constitutional Congress met.

But it was, nevertheless, a thing to the continued existence of which
the anti-slavery people of that time could consent without any violation
of conscience. Bad as it was, unwise, wasteful, cruel, a mockery of
every pretense of respect for the rights of man, they did not believe it
to be absolutely wicked. If they had so believed, let us hope they would
have washed their hands of it. As it was, it was only a question of
expediency whether, for the sake of the Union, they should protect the
system of slavery, and give to the slaveholders, as slaveholders, a
certain degree of political power. To refuse to admit a slaveholding
State into the Union did not occur, probably, to the most earnest
opponent of the system; for that would have been simply to say that
there should be no Union. That was what Madison meant i