The Constitution of 1787 contains evidence of the correctness of this statement. Among its provisions were to be found three most important compromises with the slavery interest, three most important recognitions of slavery. The first was political in its nature. It counted the negro for three-fifths of the white man in the distribution of the representation in the House of Representatives and in the Presidential Electoral Colleges. The second was commercial in its nature. It forbade the Congress to prohibit, before the year 1808, the migration or importation of such persons as the existing "States" might see fit to admit. The third was a direct guarantee of slave property. It required the surrender to his master of an escaped slave wherever found in the United States. These were most momentous provisions. They secured slave property, increased slave property, and made slavery a vast political power in the hands of the slave-masters. There is no doubt that the clock of the ages was turned back full half a century in regard to this great question by the Constitution of 1787. [Sidenote: Reaction against the humanitarian principles of the Revolution.] From 1787 to 1808 the reactionary course was pursued almost without a single break. Kentucky was made a Commonwealth with the slave status. The Congress accepted from North Carolina and Georgia cessions of the territory which lay to the west of them, and which they claimed as belonging to them, with a condition {51} that slavery should not be forbidden therein by Congress. The slave Commonwealth of Tennessee was immediately formed out of a part of this territory. The vast territory of Louisiana, in which slavery existed wherever it was inhabited, was added to the domain of the Union. The District of Columbia, the seat of the general Government, was made a slave-holding community, through the adoption by Congress of the laws of Maryland as the code of the District. A fugitive slave-law was passed by Congress, which enabled any white man to seize, as his slave, any man of color, and bring him before any magistrate, and, upon proof satisfactory to the latter, to demand such papers and certificates as would legally warrant him in reclaiming the slave and transporting him to the place whence he was said to have escaped; and petitions to Congress complaining of the abuse of this arbitrary power were laid aside without consideration. Even the Territory of Indiana prayed Congress to suspend for it that part of the Ordinance of 1787 which forbade slavery within its limits. And South Carolina abolished her law against the importation of slaves, and opened the way wide for a vast increase of the slave population. [Sidenote: Abolition of the foreign slave-trade by Congress.]