“The southern states would not have ratified the constitution, if they had supposed that it gave this power.”  It is a sufficient answer to this objection, that the northern states would not have ratified it, if they had supposed that it withheld the power.  If “suppositions” are to take the place of the constitution—­coming from both sides, they neutralize each other.  To argue a constitutional question by guessing at the “suppositions” that might have been made by the parties to it, would find small favor in a court of law.  But even a desperate shift is some easement when sorely pushed.  If this question is to be settled by “suppositions,” suppositions shall be forth coming, and that without stint.

First, then, I affirm that the North ratified the constitution, “supposing” that slavery had begun to wax old, and would speedily vanish away, and especially that the abolition of the slave trade, which by the constitution was to be surrendered to Congress after twenty years, would cast it headlong.

Would the North have adopted the constitution, giving three-fifths of the “slave property” a representation, if it has “supposed” that the slaves would have increased from half a million to two millions and a half by 1838—­and that the census of 1840 would give to the slave states, 30 representatives of “slave property?”

If they had “supposed” that this representation would have controlled the legislation of the government, and carried against the North every question vital to its interests, would Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Elbridge Gerry, William Livingston, John Langdon, and Rufus King have been such madmen, as to sign the constitution, and the Northern States such suicides as to ratify it?  Every self-preserving instinct would have shrieked at such an infatuate immolation.  At the adoption of the United States constitution, slavery was regarded as a fast waning system.  This conviction was universal.  Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Grayson, St. George Tucker, Madison, Wythe, Pendleton, Lee, Blair, Mason, Page, Parker, Edmund Randolph, Iredell, Spaight, Ramsey, William Pinckney, Luther Martin, James McHenry, Samuel Chase, and nearly all the illustrious names south of the Potomac, proclaimed it before the sun, that the days of slavery were beginning to be numbered.  A reason urged in the convention that formed the United States constitution, why the word slave should not be used in it, was, that when slavery should cease there might remain upon the National Charter no record that it had even been. (See speech of Mr. Burrill, of R.I., on the Missouri question.)