y the parties to it
would find small favor in a court of law. But even a desperate shift is
some easement when sorely pushed. If this question is to be settled by
"suppositions," suppositions shall be forthcoming, and that
without stint.

First, then, I affirm that the North ratified the constitution,
"supposing" that slavery had begun to wax old, and would speedily vanish
away, and especially that the abolition of the slave trade, which by the
constitution was to be surrendered to Congress after twenty years, would
plunge it headlong.

Would the North have adopted the constitution, giving three-fifths of
the "slave property" a representation, if it had "supposed" that the
slaves would have increased from half a million to two millions and a
half by 1838--and that the census of 1840 would give to the slave states
thirty representatives of "slave property?"

If they had "supposed" that this representation would have controlled
the legislation of the government, and carried against the North every
question 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