the question of the Mississippi Valley opened an immensely wider field for the play of economical and political forces within the Union than the question of the Fisheries. The former, in its newly emerging issues, was destined to supply recurring questions of purely sectional and domestic politics. The latter, in its newly emerging issues, could but supply such questions in the second degree, for in the first degree they are always questions of international politics. All this was clearly perceived, I say, in 1787 and in 1788, when Patrick Henry and William Grayson "thundered and lightened" in the Virginia Convention against the ratification of the Constitution. The struggle for the Territories under our present Constitution has always been, down to 1860, as Grayson phrased it in 1788, "a contest for dominion-for empire" in the Federal Government. It has been a contest on the one side for the protection and extension of slave labor, with the order of economics and politics which such a social system implies; and a contest on the other side, for the protection and extension of free labor, with the order of economies and politics subtended by a diversified system of industry. The distinction between the opposing forces and the point of their impact was revealed at once when the shock of battle came in 1860; for, with the first shock of that battle, the Question of the Territories, as a watchword and challenge between the two sections, sank beneath the horizon of the national consciousness in the twinkling of an eye. The "Territorial Question" never had any significence, except as the earnest and pledge of political ascendency in the Federal Union; and when the civil war came, that significance was buried out of sight by the new form which the impact had taken in passing from words to blows. The antagonistic forces now stood face to face in battle array. The house so long divided against itself had come at last to realize that, if it was not to fall, it "must become all one thing or all the other;" and so it came to pass, rather by the logic of events than by the logic of human wisdom, that the war for the political Union of the States passed into a war for the social and economical unification of the American people. It is sorrow and shame that this beneficent result could not have been reached without the rage and pain of a great civil war; but now that it has been reached, the sorrow and shame of the old epoch, with the rage and pain of the transition period, are slowly but surely melting away into a new and deeper sense of national unity, with its vaster problems of duty and opportunity. The problems before us are indeed of increased complexity and difficulty, but they move no longer in the political dynamics of two distinct civilizations, each boasting its superiority to the other, and each wasting its energy by working at perpetual cross purposes with the other. The energies formerly expended in the "irrepressible conflict of opposing and enduring forces" can now be conserved in the political dynamics of a unified civilization, and can be correlated into new forms of social and economical evolution, without detriment to our "indestructible Union of indestructible States." THE ENFORCEMENT OF THE SLAVE-TRADE LAWS. By W. E. B. Du Bois. This paper is a partial presentation of the results of an investigation carried on in the Seminary of American History at Harvard University. It has not been possible as yet thoroughly to digest the mass of material collected, and hence the conclusions here stated may be somewhat modified on maturer study. The efforts at suppressing the slave trade in the United States fall naturally into four main periods: First, Colonial legislation; second, National legislation from 1789 to 1818; third, International efforts and national legislation to 1840; fourth, the period from 1840 to 1862. When President Jefferson, in his sixth annual message congratulated his fellow-citizens on the near approach of the period when they constitutionally could suppress the trade, it seemed as though the time had come to crown the efforts of a century and a half by a careful statute, and thus to annihilate the slave trade at a blow. These efforts began early in colonial times, and may roughly be divided into three successive phases. From 1638 to 1695 there was a period of prohibition, in which the Swedes on the Delaware, the colonists of Connecticut and Massachusetts, and the home Government by the Duke of York's laws, prohibited the traffic, though the prohibitions were rather indefinite and theoretical. From 1695 to 1770 there were from seventy-five to one hundred acts which were aimed at the suppression or limitation of the trade. They were for the most part prohibitive * Among my authorities have been U. S. Statutes; Colonial and State statutes; Congressional journals, debates, Globe, and Record; executive documents, reports, etc.; reports of abolition and colonization; contemporary accounts, biographies, newspapers, etc. |