to have been personally guilty.”  This early ordinance, although it did not go into effect, is interesting as an attempt to exclude slavery from the great West that was beginning to be opened up.  On March 3, 1786, moreover, the Ohio Company was formed in Boston by a group of New England business men for the purpose of purchasing land in the West and promoting settlement; and early in June, 1787, Dr. Manasseh Cutler, one of the chief promoters of the company, appeared in New York, where the last Continental Congress was sitting, for the concrete purpose of buying land.  He doubtless did much to hasten action by Congress, and on July 13 was passed “An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, Northwest of the Ohio,” the Southern states not having ceded the area south of the river.  It was declared that “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the parties shall be duly convicted.”  To this was added the stipulation (soon afterwards embodied in the Federal Constitution) for the return of any person escaping into the territory from whom labor or service was “lawfully claimed in any one of the original states.”  In this shape the ordinance was adopted, even South Carolina and Georgia concurring; and thus was paved the way for the first fugitive slave law.

Slavery, already looming up as a dominating issue, was the cause of two of the three great compromises that entered into the making of the Constitution of the United States (the third, which was the first made, being the concession to the smaller states of equal representation in the Senate).  These were the first but not the last of the compromises that were to mark the history of the subject; and, as some clear-headed men of the time perceived, it would have been better and cheaper to settle the question at once on the high plane of right rather than to leave it indefinitely to the future.  South Carolina, however, with able representation, largely controlled the thought of the convention, and she and Georgia made the most extreme demands, threatening not to accept the Constitution if there was not compliance with them.  An important question was that of representation, the Southern states advocating representation according to numbers, slave and free, while the Northern states were in favor of the representation of free persons only.  Williamson of North Carolina advocated the counting of three-fifths of the slaves, but this motion was at first defeated, and there was little real progress until Gouverneur Morris suggested that representation be according to the principle of wealth.  Mason of Virginia pointed out practical difficulties which caused the resolution to be made to apply to direct taxation only, and in this form it began to be generally acceptable.  By this time, however, the deeper feelings of the delegates on the subject of slavery had been stirred, and they began to speak plainly.  Davie of North Carolina