It was about the Revolutionary epoch, that is, the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when the conscience of men began to be active on the subject of human bondage.  We think that the disposition to recognize the wickedness and impolity of slavery was a part of the general movement which came on in civilization, tending to revolutionize not only the political but the social and ethical condition of mankind.  We know well that in our own country, when our political institutions were in process of formation slavery was courageously challenged.  It was not challenged more audaciously in the Northern than in the Southern colonies.  Some of the latter, as, for example, Georgia, had at the first excluded slavery as a thing intolerable to freedom and righteousness.  The leading men of the old Southern States at the close of the last century nearly all repudiated slavery in principle.  They admitted it only in practice and because it was a part of their inheritance.  The patriots, both North and South, were averse not only to the extension of the area of bondage, but to the existence of it as a fact.

Washington was at heart an anti-slavery man.  He wished in his heavy but wholly patriotic way as heartily as Lincoln wished that all men might enjoy the blessings of freedom.  Jefferson was almost radical on the question.  Though he did not heartily believe in an overruling Providence, he felt the need of one when he considered the afflictive system of slavery with which his State and country were encumbered.  He said that considering it he trembled when he remembered that God is just.

Meanwhile the unprofitableness of slavery in the Northern colonies had co-operated with the conscience of Puritanism to engender a sentiment against slavery in that part of the Union.  So, although the institution was tolerated in the Constitution and even had guarantees thrown around it, it was, nevertheless, disfavored in our fundamental law.  One may readily see how the patriots labored with this portentous question.  Already in Great Britain an anti-slavery sentiment had appeared.  There were anti-slavery leaders, statesmen, philosophers and philanthropists.  By the terms of the Constitution the slave trade should cease in the year 1808.  Sad to reflect that the inventive genius of man and the prodigality of nature in her gifts of cotton, sugar and rice to the old South should have produced a reaction in favor of slavery so great as to fasten it more strongly than ever upon our country.

The fact is, that to all human seeming at the middle of our century American slavery seemed to be more firmly established than ever before.  Neither the outcry of the Northern abolitionists nor the appeals of Southern patriots such as Henry Clay, availed to check the pro-slavery disposition in fully one-half the Union, or to abate the covert favor with which the institution was regarded in nearly all the other half.