that Constitution are under any obligation to repeal the African slave trade.  I know, or at least I think I know, that the framers of that Constitution did expect the African slave trade would be abolished at the end of twenty years, to which time their prohibition against its being abolished extended there is abundant contemporaneous history to show that the framers of the Constitution expected it to be abolished.  But while they so expected, they gave nothing for that expectation, and they put no provision in the Constitution requiring it should be so abolished.  The migration or importation of such persons as the States shall see fit to admit shall not be prohibited, but a certain tax might be levied upon such importation.  But what was to be done after that time?  The Constitution is as silent about that as it is silent, personally, about myself.  There is absolutely nothing in it about that subject; there is only the expectation of the framers of the Constitution that the slave trade would be abolished at the end of that time; and they expected it would be abolished, owing to public sentiment, before that time; and the put that provision in, in order that it should not be abolished before that time, for reasons which I suppose they thought to be sound ones, but which I will not now try to enumerate before you.

But while, they expected the slave trade would be abolished at that time, they expected that the spread of slavery into the new Territories should also be restricted.  It is as easy to prove that the framers of the Constitution of the United States expected that slavery should be prohibited from extending into the new Territories, as it is to prove that it was expected that the slave trade should be abolished.  Both these things were expected.  One was no more expected than the other, and one was no more a compromise of the Constitution than the other.  There was nothing said in the Constitution in regard to the spread of slavery into the Territory.  I grant that; but there was something very important said about it by the same generation of men in the adoption of the old Ordinance of ’87, through the influence of which you here in Ohio, our neighbors in Indiana, we in Illinois, our neighbors in Michigan and Wisconsin, are happy, prosperous, teeming millions of free men.  That generation of men, though not to the full extent members of the convention that framed the Constitution, were to some extent members of that convention, holding seats at the same time in one body and the other, so that if there was any compromise on either of these subjects, the strong evidence is that that compromise was in favor of the restriction of slavery from the new Territories.