sent to the annexation of Texas,
lest his countrymen should fill it with slaves; Madison, who said,
"slavery is the greatest evil under which the nation labors--a
portentous evil--an evil, moral, political, and economical--a sad blot
on our free country"--went mournfully into old age with the cheerless
words: "No satisfactory plan has yet been devised for taking out the
stain."

The men of the Revolution passed away; a new generation sprang up,
impatient that an institution to which they clung should be condemned
as inhuman, unwise, and unjust. In the throes of discontent at the
self-reproach of their fathers, and blinded by the lustre of wealth to
be acquired by the culture of a new staple, they devised the theory
that slavery, which they would not abolish, was not evil, but good.
They turned on the friends of colonization, and confidently demanded:
"Why take black men from a civilized and Christian country, where their
labor is a source of immense gain, and a power to control the markets
of the world, and send them to a land of ignorance, idolatry, and
indolence, which was the home of their forefathers, but not theirs?
Slavery is a blessing. Were they not in their ancestral land naked,
scarcely lifted above brutes, ignorant of the course of the sun,
controlled by nature? And in their new abode have they not been taught
to know the difference of the seasons, to plough, and plant, and reap,
to drive oxen, to tame the horse, to exchange their scanty dialect for
the richest of all the languages among men, and the stupid adoration of
follies for the purest religion? And since slavery is good for the
blacks, it is good for their masters, bringing opulence and the
opportunity of educating a race. The slavery of the black is good in
itself; he shall serve the white man forever." And nature, which better
understood the quality of fleeting interest and passion, laughed as it
caught the echo, "man" and "forever!"

A regular development of pretensions followed the new declaration with
logical consistency. Under the old declaration every one of the States
had retained, each for itself, the right of manumitting all slaves by
an ordinary act of legislation; now the power of the people over
servitude through their legislatures was curtailed, and the privileged
class was swift in imposing legal and constitutional obstructions on
the people themselves. The power of emancipation was narrowed or taken
away. The slave might not be disqu