The Federal Convention to revise the old, or frame a new Constitution, assembled in Philadelphia on the second Monday of May, 1787. And here let me read a single paragraph from a lecture by Mr. Toombs, of Georgia, delivered in Boston in 1856. It is as follows:
"The history of the times and the debates in the Convention which framed the Constitution, show that the whole subject of slavery was much considered by them, and perplexed them in the extreme, and that those provisions which relate to it were earnestly considered by the State Conventions which adopted it. Incipient legislation providing for emancipation had already been adopted by some of the States. Massachusetts had declared that slavery was extinguished by her Bill of Rights. The African slave trade had already been legislated against in many of the States, including Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, the largest slaveholding States. The public mind was unquestionably tending toward emancipation. This feeling displayed itself in the South as well as in the North. Some of the present slaveholding States thought that the power to abolish, not only the African slave trade, but slavery in the States, ought to be given to the Federal Government; and that the Constitution did not take this shape, was made one of the most prominent objections to it by Luther Martin, a distinguished member of the Convention from Maryland; and Mr. Mason, of Virginia, was not far behind him in his emancipation principles. Mr. Madison sympathized to a great extent. Anti-slavery feelings were extensively indulged in by many members of the Convention, both from the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States."
Mr. Madison's testimony is important here. He was a member of the old Congress in New York, until the assembling of the Constitutional Convention, and took his seat as a member of that body.
The History of the Ordinance of 1787, by Hon. Edward Coles, contains the following statement, as made to him by Mr. Madison:
"The old Congress held its sessions, in 1787, in New York, while at the same time the Convention which framed the Constitution of the United States held its sessions in Philadelphia. Many individuals were members of both bodies, and thus were enabled to know what was passing in each—both sitting with closed doors and in secret sessions. The distracting question of slavery was agitating and retarding the labors of both, and led to conferences of intercommunications of the members."
I quote this testimony now, to show that Conferences were held between the members of Congress and the Federal Convention, upon the subject of slavery. I shall quote farther from it on another point, after turning for a moment to the proceedings of Congress.
On the 9th July, 1787, the Convention having been in session about two months, the ordinance for the government of the Western Territory, which had been reported in a new draft on the 26th of the preceding April, and ordered to a third reading on the 10th May, and then postponed, was referred to a new committee, consisting of Messrs. Carrington, of Virginia; Dane, of Massachusetts; R.H. Lee, of Virginia; Kean, of North Carolina; and Smith, of New York. Two days afterwards, July 11th, Mr. Carrington reported what has since been known as the "Ordinance of 1787," with the exception of the 6th article of compact, prohibiting slavery. When it came up the next day, the 12th, for a second reading, Mr. Dane rose and stated as follows:
"In the committee, as ever before, since the day when Jefferson first introduced the proposal to prohibit slavery in the territory, it was found impossible to come to any arrangement; that the committee desired to report only so far as they were unanimous; that they, therefore, had omitted altogether the subject of slavery; but that it was understood that any member of the committee might, consistently with his having concurred in the report, move in the house to amend it in the particular of slavery. He therefore moved as an amendment, to add a prohibition of slavery in the following words:
"That there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."
And as a compromise, Mr. Davis proposed to add the following proviso: