t all with slavery was
the act of 1793 empowering the master of an interstate fugitive to seize
him wherever found, carry him before any federal or state magistrate in the
vicinage, and procure a certificate warranting his removal to the state
from which he had fled. Proposals to supplement this rendition act on the
one hand by safeguarding free negroes from being kidnapped under fraudulent
claims and on the other hand by requiring employers of strange negroes to
publish descriptions of them and thus facilitate the recovery of runaways,
were each defeated in the House.

On the whole the glamor of revolutionary doctrines was passing, and self
interest was regaining its wonted supremacy. While the rising cotton
industry was giving the blacks in the South new value as slaves, Northern
spokesmen were frankly stating an antipathy of their people toward negroes
in any capacity whatever.[25] The succession of disasters in San Domingo,
meanwhile, gave warning against the upsetting of racial adjustments in the
black belts, and the Gabriel revolt of 1800 in Virginia drove the lesson
home. On slavery questions for a period of several decades the policy
of each of the two sections was merely to prevent itself from being
overreached. The conservative trend, however, could not wholly remove the
Revolution's impress of philosophical liberalism from the minds of men.
Slavery was always a thing of appreciable disrelish in many quarters; and
the slave trade especially, whether foreign or domestic, bore a permanent
stigma.

[Footnote 25: _E. g., Annals of Congress_, 1799-1801, pp. 230-246.]

CHAPTER VIII

THE CLOSING OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE

The many attempts of the several colonies to restrict or prohibit the
importation of slaves were uniformly thwarted, as we have seen, by the
British government. The desire for prohibition, however, had been far from
constant or universal.[1] The first Continental Congress when declaring the
Association, on October 18, 1774, resolved: "We will neither import, nor
purchase any slave imported, after the first day of December next; after
which time we will wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither
be concerned in it ourselves nor will we hire our vessels nor sell our
commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it."[2] But even
this was mainly a political stroke against the British government; and the
general effect of the restraint lasted not more than two or three