Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Foreign Slave Trade And The Constitution: Virginia's Position The supreme opportunity for suppressing the importation of slaves and thus hastening the day of emancipation came with the adoption of the Federal Constitution. As we have seen, with every increase in the number of slaves the difficulties and dangers of emancipation were multiplied. The hope of emancipation rested in stopping their further importation and dispersing throughout the land those who had already found a home in our midst. To put an end to this pernicious traffic was therefore the supreme duty of the hour, but despite Virginia's protests and appeals the foreign slave trade was legalized by the Federal Constitution for an additional period of twenty years. The nation knew not the day of its visitation? with blinded eyes and reckless hand it sowed the dragon's teeth from which have sprung the conditions and problems which even to-day tax the thought and conscience of the American people. This action of the convention is declared by Mr. Fiske, to have been a bargain between New England and the far South. New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut, he adds, consented to the prolonging of the foreign slave trade for twenty years, or until 1808; and in return South Carolina and Georgia consented to the clause empowering Congress to pass Navigation Acts and other30 OPPOSITION TO FOREIGN SLAVE TRADE wise regulate commerce by a simple majority of votes.1 George W. Williams, the negro historian, avers that, Thus, by an understanding or, as Gouverneur Morris called it, 'a bargain' between the commercial representatives of the Northern States and the delegates of South Carolina and Georgia, and in spite of the opposition of Maryland and Virginia, the unrestricted power of Congress to enact Nav...