Though the Continental Congress did pass a law in 1787 prohibiting slavery in the territory of the United States northwest of the Ohio River, the friends of the Negro were not satisfied. They turned to the Constitutional Convention. Here was an august assembly of freemen, composed of the most illustrious statesmen, warriors and patriots of the new nation, presided over by the chieftain who had led its military force to victory. Surely, it was thought the black man would get justice from men who had just won their freedom from the usurpation of the British crown. He deserved to receive it. For, from the opening to the closing of the Revolutionary War, on many fields of strife and triumph, Negroes had fought the battles of the American Nation with a valor no less distinguished than that of their white brothers with whom they passed through that desperate struggle shoulder to shoulder. This is the cold fact of history. The ill-luck that was with the Negro in the Congress of 1784, when his future was determined by the neglect of one man, followed him to the Constitutional Convention. Unfortunately, two powerful influences for freedom, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, were not present. They were abroad representing their country at European Courts. The great commoner George Mason of Virginia pleaded for the slave, but in vain. And when slavery tacitly went into the Constitution, like a man and a freeman worthy of the name, he refused to sign it, and walked out of the Convention. He prophesied then that God would finally punish a national sin like slavery by a national calamity. And so He did. The Negro had been a brave soldier in the hour of his country’s peril; the Constitutional Convention virtually declared that he was only a chattel in time of his Country’s peace. In the shadows of the expiring days of the eighteenth century an influence for the perpetuation of slavery came from a source least expected. Among other inventions of the period was the cotton gin. It rooted the institution into the very marrow of the political and industrial life of the young Republic. The north began to develop cotton manufactories. It grew lukewarm on the subject of the freedom of the Negro. In the south the slaves increased in value, and slavery took on a new life. From this time on it became darker in its shades of inhumanity and moral degradation. It finally reached a point in its cruelty not far removed from the horrors and terrors of the “Middle Passage.” It approached, indeed, that monstrous maxim which is said to have come from the nation’s Supreme Court—“A Negro has no rights which a white man is bound to respect.”