If the supporters of slavery continue to control the policy of the American government; to trample under foot the “higher law;” to render the Declaration of Independence a nullity; to denationalize liberty; to nationalize slavery and perpetuate and extend it; and thus to belie all our professions of Democracy, and render this government a Godless tyrant, delighting in crushed hopes and hearts—then the whole human race may weep. That our government has been progressing toward this terrible consummation for the last thirty years is but too evident.
The Declaration of Independence is a sound anti-slavery document. It does not regard the right of all men to liberty as an unsettled opinion or a question to be proved by abstruse argument, but pronounces it a “SELF EVIDENT TRUTH.”
The Constitution in form if not in fact, pretty fully embodies the sentiments of the Declaration. The word slave is not found in it, and it was kept out not accidentally, but purposely. The framers of the Constitution carefully guarded that instrument against any endorsement of slavery. In the convention which formed the Constitution, Gov. Morris of Pennsylvania said, “He never would concur in upholding domestic slavery. It was a nefarious institution.” Mr. Getry, of Massachusetts, in the same convention said, “we had nothing to do with the conduct of the States as to slavery, but we ought to be very careful not to give any sanction to it.” The idea that there could be property in man was carefully excluded from the Constitution. It was about to be foisted into that instrument by the adoption of a report of a committee fixing a tax on importations. But Mr. Sherman was against “acknowledging men to be property, by taxing them as such under the character of slaves.” Madison “thought it wrong to admit in the constitution the idea that there could be property in man.” But if the idea of property in man was carefully excluded from the Constitution, then it is clear that chattel slavery is not in form recognized, much less established by that instrument.
It is evident that the framers of the Constitution expected the speedy abolition of slavery; and hence, while providing in fact though not in form, for its continuance under the constitution, by virtue of local State laws, they so framed that instrument that it would not countenance slavery or deny the glorious doctrines of the immortal Declaration, which contained what Mr. Sumner calls “the national heart, the national soul, the national will, and the national voice.”[23]
Washington said “That it was among his first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery may be abolished by law.”
Adams regarded slavery as “a sacrilegious breach of trust.”
Hamilton considered slaves, “though free by the law of God, held in slavery by the laws of men.”
Jefferson said that the “abolition of domestic slavery was the greatest object of desire.”
Patrick Henry said—“I will not, I cannot justify it.”
Benj. Franklin, when 84 years of age, came up before Congress with a petition from the “Abolition Society of Pennsylvania, praying that body to countenance the restoration of liberty to those unhappy men, who alone, in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage, and who, amidst the general joy of surrounding freemen are groaning in servile subjection.” This petition besought Congress to “step to the VERY VERGE of the power vested in them for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow men.”