Under such impulses and influences the Confederate Congress, in spite of the fact that no power in respect to slavery had been conferred upon it, assumed to pass the famous Ordinance of 1787, decreeing the free status exclusively in all of the territory then belonging to the United States north of the Ohio River. The power to enact the Ordinance could not even be derived by the most generous principles of implication from any provision in the Articles of Confederation. To justify the exercise of it by the Confederate {49} Congress it is necessary to go back to the general principle of political science that, as there was no government for this territory but the Confederate Congress, and as there were no limitations in the Articles of Confederation upon the powers of the Congress in this territory, the powers of that Congress must have extended in this territory to all subjects usually regulated by government. The claim sometimes made that this Ordinance was a treaty between the "States" forming the Confederation, or between them and the "States" to be formed out of that territory in the future, is altogether untenable. It was nothing more nor less than a legislative act of the Congress. It is an incontrovertible proof of the universality and intensity of the opposition to the farther spread of slavery that the common consciousness of the age acquiesced in this most latitudinarian construction of the powers of the Confederate Congress, and that the Congress itself voted the measure with but a single dissenting voice. [Sidenote: Slavery and the Constitution of 1787.] At the same moment that this measure was being considered in the Congress, the Constitutional Convention, sitting at Philadelphia, was framing the national Constitution of 1787. The attitude which the nation would assume in this new instrument of its organic law toward the subject of slavery was one of the most, if not the most, important of the questions which the Convention was called upon to consider. There can be little doubt that the men of 1787 had come to regard the question of the rights of man a little more calmly than they did during the heat of the battle with the motherland. In Luther Martin's famous letter to the legislature of Maryland upon the work of the {50} Convention of 1787, a very significant passage concerning the existing views upon slavery occurs. He wrote: "At this time we do not generally hold this commerce" (the slave-trade) "in so great abhorrence as we have done. When our liberties were at stake we warmly felt for the common rights of men. The danger being thought to be past which threatened ourselves we are daily growing more insensible to those rights."