ddle States,
and a majority of those from Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware were
inspired to a greater or less extent with these sentiments, and would
have supported any practical measures that would, in a reasonable
time, have put an end to slavery. South Carolina and Georgia
positively refused to come into the Union unless the clause, denying
to Congress the power to prohibit the importation of slaves prior to
1808, was inserted. The Northern States were not so strenuous in
opposition to this clause as Virginia and Maryland.[33] State after
state was abolishing the institution; anti-slavery opinions were
becoming universal; and it was generally supposed at the North that
slavery would soon die out. The financial and business interests of
the country were prostrated. Union at any cost must be had. The words
_slave_ and _slavery_ were carefully avoided in the draft, and the
best terms possible were made for South Carolina and Georgia. The
Constitution, as finally adopted, suited nobody; and by the narrowest
margins it escaped being rejected in all the States. The vote in the
Massachusetts Convention was 187 yeas to 168 nays; and in the Virginia
Convention, 89 yeas to 78 nays.

From this examination of the subject, we see that the popular idea,
that the political anti-slavery agitation was forced upon the South by
the North, and especially by Massachusetts, is not a correct one. In
the second period of excited controversy, from 1820 to 1830, the
South again took the lead. In 1827, there were one hundred and thirty
abolition societies in the United States. Of these one hundred and six
were in the slaveholding States, and only four in New England and New
York. Of these societies eight were in Virginia, eleven in Maryland,
two in Delaware, two in the District of Columbia, eight in Kentucky,
twenty-five in Tennessee, with a membership of one thousand, and fifty
in North Carolina, with a membership of three thousand persons.[34]
Many of these societies were the result of the personal labors of
Benjamin Lundy.

The Southampton insurrection of 1830, and indications of insurrection
in North Carolina the same year, swept away these societies and their
visible results. The fifteen years from 1830 to 1845 were the darkest
period the American slave ever saw. It was the reign of violence and
mob law at the North. This was the second great reaction. The first
commenced with the invention of the cotton-gin, by Eli Whitney, in
1793, a