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against slavery in that part of the Union. So, although the
institution was tolerated in the Constitution and even had guarantees
thrown around it, it was, nevertheless, disfavored in our fundamental
law. One may readily see how the patriots labored with this portentous
question. Already in Great Britain an anti-slavery sentiment had
appeared. There were anti-slavery leaders, statesmen, philosophers and
philanthropists. By the terms of the Constitution the slave _trade_
should cease in the year 1808. Sad to reflect that the inventive
genius of man and the prodigality of nature in her gifts of cotton,
sugar and rice to the old South should have produced a reaction in
favor of slavery so great as to fasten it more strongly than ever upon
our country.

The fact is, that to all human seeming at the middle of our century
American slavery seemed to be more firmly established than ever
before. Neither the outcry of the Northern abolitionists nor the
appeals of Southern patriots such as Henry Clay, availed to check the
pro-slavery disposition in fully one-half the Union, or to abate the
covert favor with which the institution was regarded in nearly all the
other half.

Meanwhile, however, slavery was suffering and expiring in nearly all
parts of Europe. England began her battle against it even before the
beginning of the century. The work of the philanthropists, begun as
far back as 1786-87, when the Quakers, under the leadership of
Clarkson and Sharpe, began to cry out against the atrocity of human
bondage, now reached the public authorities, and ministers found it
necessary to take heed of what the people were saying and doing. Both
Pitt and Fox became abolitionists before the close of the eighteenth
century. The first attack was against the slave _trade_. Bills for the
abolition of this trade were passed in 1793-94 by the House of
Commons, but were rejected by the Peers. In 1804 another act was
passed; but this also was rejected by the Lords. So too, the bill of
1805! The agitation continued during 1806; and in 1807, just after the
death of Fox, the slave trade _was_ abolished in Great Britain.

The abolitionists went straight ahead, however, to attack slavery
itself. The Anti-slavery Society was founded. Clarkson and Wilberforce
and Buxton became the evangels of a new order that was seen far off.
It was not, however, until the great reform agitation of 1832 that the
government really took up the question of the aboli