of effectually protecting each other. Without union with the
other States, South Carolina must soon fall." On the part of that State
it had been a game of brag all along. The first lesson in the South
Carolinian policy was given in the Constitutional Convention. Of the
result, this was Pinckney's summing up to his constituents:--

"By this settlement we have secured an unlimited importation of
negroes for twenty years; nor is it declared that the importation
shall be then stopped; it may be continued. We have a security that
the general government can never emancipate them, for no such
authority is granted.... We have obtained a right to recover our
slaves, in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is
a right we had not before. In short, considering all circumstances,
we have made the best terms, for the security of this species of
property, it was in our power to make. We would have made better if
we could, but on the whole I do not think them bad."

A more moderate and a more significant statement could hardly have been
made.

On the foreign slave trade Madison had little to say, but, like most of
the Southern delegates north of the Carolinas, he was opposed to it.
"Twenty years," he said, "will produce all the mischief that can be
apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be
more dishonorable to the American character than to say nothing about
it in the Constitution." The words are a little ambiguous, though he is
his own reporter. But what he meant evidently was, that any protection
of the trade would dishonor the nation; for at another point of the
debate, on the same day, he said that "he thought it wrong to admit in
the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men." Such
property he was anxious to protect as the great Southern interest, so
long as it lasted; but he was not willing to strengthen it by permitting
the continuance of the African slave trade for twenty years longer under
the sanction of the Constitution. But he held it to be, as he wrote in
"The Federalist," "a great point gained in favor of humanity that a
period of twenty years may terminate forever within these States a
traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of
modern policy." He added, "The attempt that had been made to pervert
this clause into an objection against the Constitution, by representing
it as a criminal toler