[62]
it seems to have been supposed by many that they would both disappear together.
Nor do any words employed in our day denounce it with an indignation more burning than that which glowed on the lips of the fathers.
Mr. Morris, of Pennsylvania, said in Convention, that ‘he would never concur in upholding domestic slavery.
It is a nefarious institution.’
In another mood, and with mild judicial phrase, Mr. Madison ‘thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea of property in man.’
And Washington, in a letter written near this period, says, with a frankness worthy of imitation, ‘There is but one proper and effectual mode by which the abolition of slavery can be accomplished, and that is by legislative action, and this as far as my suffrage will go, shall never be wanting.’
When the earliest Congress assembled, under the
Constitution, a petition was early presented from the Abolition Society of
Pennsylvania, signed by
Benjamin Franklin, as
President.
This venerable man, whose active life had been devoted to the welfare of mankind at home and abroad, who both as a philosopher and a statesman had arrested the attention of the world,—who had ravished the lightning from the skies, and the sceptre from a tyrant,—who, as a member of the Continental Congress, had set his name to the Declaration of Independence, and as a member of the Convention, had again set his name to the Federal Constitution,—in whom, more perhaps than in any other person, the true spirit of American institutions, at once practical and humane, was embodied,—than whom no one could be more familiar with the purposes and aspirations of the founders,—this veteran, eighty-four years of age, within a few months only of his death, now appeared by his petition at the bar of that Congress, whose powers he had helped to define and establish.
‘Your memorialists,’ he says, and this Convention now repeats the words of Franklin, ‘particularly engaged in attending to the distresses arising from slavery, believe it to be their indispensable duty to present this subject to your notice.
They have observed with real satisfaction that many important and salutary powers are vested in you for promoting the welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to the people of the United States; and as they conceive that these blessings ought rightfully to be administered, without distinction of color, to all descriptions of people, so they indulge ’
