Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 1).djvu/40

28 tical effects had been mainly confined to the North, where slavery was of little economic consequence, and where, moreover, the masses of the population were more accessible to the currents of opinion and sentiment prevailing among men of thought and culture. There slavery was abolished. Further, by the Ordinance of 1787, slavery was excluded from the territory northwest of the Ohio. But nothing was accomplished in the South except the passage of a law by the Virginia legislature in 1778, prohibiting the further introduction of slaves from abroad, and the repeal, in 1782, of the old colonial statute, which forbade the emancipation of slaves except for meritorious services. Maryland followed the example of Virginia, but then Virginia, ten years after the repeal, put a stop to individual emancipation by reënacting the old colonial statute. The convention framing the Constitution of the United States did nothing but open the way for the abolition of the slave-trade at some future time. On the whole, as soon as the philosophical anti-slavery movement threatened to become practical in the South, it stirred up a very determined opposition, and the reaction began. Indeed, the hostility to slavery on the part of some of the Southern Revolutionary leaders was never of a very practical kind. Very characteristic in this respect was a confession Patrick Henry made concerning the state of his own mind as early as 1773, in a letter to a Quaker: —