A committee of one member from each State was chosen by ballot, to take this part of the system under their consideration, and to endeavor to agree upon some report, which should reconcile those States.  To this committee also was referred the following proposition, which had been reported by the committee of detail, to wit:  “No navigation act shall be passed without the assent of two-thirds of the members present in each house;” a proposition which the staple and commercial States were solicitous to retain, lest their commerce should be placed too much under the power of the Eastern States; but which these last States were as anxious to reject.  This committee, of which also I had the honor to be a member, met and took under their consideration the subjects committed to them.  I found the eastern States, notwithstanding their aversion to slavery, were very willing to indulge the southern States, at least with a temporary liberty to prosecute the slave trade, provided the southern states would in their turn gratify them, by laying no restriction on navigation acts; and after a very little time, the committee, by a great majority, agreed on a report, by which the general government was to be prohibited from preventing the importation of slaves for a limited time, and the restricted clause relative to navigation acts was to be omitted.

This report was adopted by a majority of the Convention, but not without considerable opposition.

It was said, we had just assumed a place among independent nations in consequence of our opposition to the attempts of Great Britain to enslave us; that this opposition was grounded upon the preservation of those, rights to which God and nature had entitled us, not in particular, but in common with all the rest of mankind; that we had appealed to the Supreme Being for his assistance, as the God of freedom, who could not but approve our efforts to preserve the rights which he had thus imparted to his creatures; that now, when we had scarcely risen from our knees, from supplicating his mercy and protection in forming our government over a free people, a government formed pretendedly on the principles of liberty, and for its preservation,—­in that government to have a provision not only putting it out of its power to restrain and prevent the slave trade, even encouraging that most infamous traffic, by giving the States the power and influence in the Union in proportion as they cruelly and wantonly sported with the rights of their fellow-creatures, ought to be considered as a solemn mockery of, and an insult to, that God whose protection we had then implored, and could not fail to hold us up in detestation, and render us contemptible to every true friend of liberty in the world.  It was said, it ought to be considered that national crimes can only be, and frequently are, punished in this world by national punishments; and that the continuance of the slave trade, and thus giving it a national sanction, and encouragement, ought to be considered as justly exposing us to the displeasure and vengeance of him who is equally Lord of all, and who views with equal eye the poor African slave and his American master!