[207] In this spirit was the National Constitution adopted. In this spirit the National Government was first organized under Washington. And here there is a fact of peculiar significance, well worthy of perpetual memory. At the time this great chief took his first oath to support the Constitution of the United States, the National Ensign nowhere within the National Territory covered a single slave. On the sea, an execrable piracy, the trade in slaves, was still, to the national scandal, tolerated, beneath the national flag. In the States, as a sectional institution, beneath the shelter of local laws, Slavery, unhappily, found a home. But in the only territories at this time belonging to the Nation—the broad region of the North-West—it had already, by the Ordinance of Freedom, been made impossible, even before the adoption of the Constitution. The District of Columbia, with its Fated Dowry, had not yet been acquired.
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