out of the hands of Dr. Johnson, the chairman of the “committee on style,” read thus:  “No person legally held to service, or labor, in one State, escaping into another, shall,” &c., and that the word “legally” was struck out, and the words “under the laws thereof” inserted after the word “State,” in compliance with the wish of some, who thought the term legal equivocal, and favoring the idea that slavery was legal “in a moral view.”  A conclusive proof that, although future generations might apply that clause to other kinds of “service or labor,” when slavery should have died out, or been killed off by the young spirit of liberty, which was then awake and at work in the land; still, slavery was what they were wrapping up in “equivocal” words; and wrapping it up for its protection and safe keeping:  a conclusive proof that the framers of the Constitution were more careful to protect themselves in the judgment of coming generations, from the charge of ignorance, than of sin; a conclusive proof that they knew that slavery was not “legal in a moral view,” that it was a violation of the moral law of God; and yet knowing and confessing its immorality, they dared to make this stipulation for its support and defence.

[Footnote 95:  Madison Papers, p. 1589]

This language may sound harsh to the ears of those who think it a part of their duty, as citizens, to maintain that whatever the patriots of the Revolution did, was right; and who hold that we are bound to do all the iniquity that they covenanted for us that we should do.  But the claims of truth and right are paramount to all other claims.

With all our veneration for our constitutional fathers, we must admit,—­for they have left on record their own confession of it,—­that in this part of their work they intended to hold the shield of their protection over a wrong, knowing that it was a wrong.  They made a “compromise” which they had no right to make—­a compromise of moral principle for the sake of what they probably regarded as “political expediency.”  I am sure they did not know—­no man could know, or can now measure, the extent, or the consequences of the wrong, that they were doing.  In the strong language of John Quincy Adams,[96] in relation to the article fixing the basis of representation, “Little did the members of the Convention, from the free States, imagine or foresee what a sacrifice to Moloch was hidden under the mask of this concession.”

[Footnote 96:  See his Report on the Massachusetts Resolutions.]

I verily believe that, giving all due consideration to the benefits conferred upon this nation by the Constitution, its national unity, its swelling masses of wealth, its power, and the external prosperity of its multiplying millions; yet the moral injury that has been done, by the countenance shown to slavery by holding over that tremendous sin the shield of the Constitution, and thus breaking down in the eyes