vital to its interests, would Hamilton, Franklin, Sherman,
Gerry, Livingston, Langdon, and Rufus King have been such madmen, as to
sign the constitution, and the Northern States such suicides as to
ratify it? Every self-preserving instinct would have shrieked at such an
infatuate immolation. At the adoption of the United States constitution,
slavery was regarded as a fast waning system. This conviction was
universal. Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Grayson, Tucker, Madison,
Wythe, Pendleton, Lee, Blair, Mason, Page, Parker, Randolph, Iredell,
Spaight, Ramsey, Pinkney, Martin, McHenry, Chase, and nearly all the
illustrious names south of the Potomac, proclaimed it before the sun. A
reason urged in the convention that formed the United States
constitution, why the word slave should not be used in it, was, that
_when slavery should cease_, there might remain upon the National
Charter no record that it had ever been. (See speech of Mr. Burrill, of
R.I., on the Missouri question.)

I now proceed to show by testimony, that at the date of the United
States constitution, and for several years before and after that period,
slavery was rapidly on the wane; that the American Revolution with the
great events preceding, accompanying, and following it, had wrought an
immense and almost universal change in the public sentiment of the
nation on the subject, powerfully impelling it toward the entire
abolition of the system--and that it was the _general belief_ that
measures for its abolition throughout the Union, would be commenced by
the individual States generally before the lapse of many years. A great
mass of testimony establishing this position might be presented, but
narrow space, and the importance of speedy publication, counsel brevity.
Let the following proofs suffice. First, a few dates as points of
observation.

The first _general_ Congress met in 1774. The revolutionary war
commenced in '75. Independence was declared in '76. The articles of
confederation were adopted by the thirteen states in '78. Independence
acknowledged in '83. The convention for forming the U.S. constitution
was held in '87, the state conventions for considering it in '87, and
'88. The first Congress under the constitution in '89.

Dr. Rush, of Pennsylvania, one of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence, in a letter to Granville Sharpe, May 1, 1773, says "A
spirit of humanity and religion begins to awaken in several of the
colonies in favor of