eloquence of
which you are master, that its influence on the future decision of
this important question would be great, perhaps decisive."[11] Works,
i, p. 377.

There was great progress in anti-slavery sentiment between 1785 and
1791, when Maryland was fully awake, as we see from Dr. Buchanan's
Oration. In proof of this progress, it may be stated that, in 1784,
Mr. Jefferson drew up an ordinance for the government of the Western
territories, in which he inserted an article prohibiting slavery in
the territories after the year 1800. On reporting the ordinance to the
Continental Congress, the article prohibiting slavery was forthwith
stricken out, and the report, as amended, was accepted; but the
ordinance itself was a dead letter. Three years later, the celebrated
Ordinance of 1787, for the organization of the Northwest Territory,
embracing what is now the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan,
and Wisconsin, was reported by a committee consisting of Edward
Carrington of Virginia, Nathan Dane of Massachusetts, Richard Henry
Lee of Virginia, John Kean of South Carolina, and Melanethon Smith of
New York, acting under the advice of Dr. Mannasseh Cutler, citizen of
Massachusetts, who was then in New York, attending the session of
Congress, for the purpose of buying land for the Ohio Company, which
made, the next year, the first English settlement in that Territory,
at Marietta. The Ordinance provided that "there shall be neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory." It was
passed without debate, or the offer (except by the committee) of an
amendment, by the vote of every state. A few years earlier or later,
such a vote would have been impossible.[12] Just before this date,
commenced the great Southern awakening on the subject of slavery, of
which so little is now known, and of which Dr. Buchanan's Oration is
an illustration.

There never has been a time since 1619, when the first slave ship, a
Dutch man-of-war, entered James river, in Virginia, when in our
country there were not persons protesting against the wickedness and
impolicy of the African slave trade and of the domestic slave system.
Slavery was introduced into the American colonies, against the wishes
of the settlers, by the avarice of British traders and with the
connivance of the British government. Just previous to the Revolution,
the Colony of Massachusetts made several attempts to relieve itself
of the incubus, and the acts of the