At the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia in 1787, Jefferson urged as a step towards the ultimate ending of slavery, the immediate abolition of the importation, but Pinckney of South Carolina moved that the traffic be extended until 1808, and he was seconded by Gorman of Massachusetts. The motion carried in all the New England States, in South Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland; Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware were against it. This exigency of extending it for twenty years was a subject of grave apprehension to many thoughtful and patriotic men who were slave owners, among them Jefferson, Washington, and Madison; though the attitude of the last was frequently ambiguous about many questions, he commits himself very fully on this clause of the Constitution in _The Federalist_: “It were doubtless to be wished that the power of prohibiting the importation of slaves had not been postponed until 1808, or, rather, that it had been suffered to have immediate operation. But it is not difficult to account either for the restriction on the general government or for the manner in which the whole clause is expressed. It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever within these States, a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern polity.” It may be assumed that the majority of those engaged in framing the Constitution regarded slavery as a domestic problem nearing its end, and it was a policy which at that time received more vehement denunciation from men of the South than those of the North, probably because a part of the North was actively engaged in the traffic and that the humanitarians of the South, born in the midst of slavery, were not only awake to the ethical significance of the evil, but were averse to raising within their midst thousands of an alien race. That the disposition to discontinue all avenues which led to a continuation of slavery was not more general was incomprehensible to Jefferson, and absolutely out of harmony with the spirit of freedom which permeated American life: “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through trial, and inflict on his fellow-men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery, than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose. But we must await, with patience, the workings of an over-ruling Providence, and hope that that is preparing the deliverance of those, our suffering brethren. When the measure of their tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness, doubtless, a God of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, or at length,