certificate thereof to such claimant,
his agent or attorney, which shall be sufficient warrant for
removing the said fugitive from labor, to the state or territory
from which he or she fled.

It will be observed that by the terms of this enactment a master had
the right to recover a fugitive slave by proving his ownership before a
magistrate without a jury or any other of the ordinary forms of law. A
human being was thus placed at the disposal of the lowest of courts and
subjected to such procedure as was not allowed even in petty property
suits. A great field for the bribery of magistrates was opened up, and
opportunity was given for committing to slavery Negro men about whose
freedom there should have been no question.

By the close of the decade 1790-1800 the fear occasioned by the Haytian
revolution had led to a general movement against the importation of
Negroes, especially of those from the West Indies. Even Georgia in 1798
prohibited the importation of all slaves, and this provision, although
very loosely enforced, was never repealed. In South Carolina, however,
to the utter chagrin and dismay of the other states, importation,
prohibited in 1787, was again legalized in 1803; and in the four years
immediately following 39,075 Negroes were brought to Charleston, most of
these going to the territories.[1] When in 1803 Ohio was carved out of
the Northwest Territory as a free state, an attempt was made to
claim the rest of the territory for slavery, but this failed. In the
congressional session of 1804-5 the matter of slavery in the newly
acquired territory of Louisiana was brought up, and slaves were allowed
to be imported if they had come to the United States before 1798, the
purpose of this provision being to guard against the consequences of
South Carolina's recent act, although such a clause never received rigid
enforcement. The mention of Louisiana, however, brings us concretely to
Toussaint L'Ouverture, the greatest Negro in the New World in the period
and one of the greatest of all time.

[Footnote 1: DuBois: _Suppression of the Slave-Trade_, 90.]

_2. Toussaint L'Ouverture, Louisiana, and the Formal Closing of the
Slave-Trade_

When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, it was not long before its
general effects were felt in the West Indies. Of special importance was
Santo Domingo because of the commercial interests centered there. The
eastern end of the island was Spanish, but the weste