Up to Lincoln’s time it had not been determined whether the fathers of the Republic had really produced a nation, or merely a contract or treaty between independent and sovereign States. The system of separated, incoordinate and aloof colonies--a shrewd and stubborn British device for keeping their American subjects weak by disunion--grew into the system of States which formed the Republic. When the Constitution of the United States was framed, ten of the thirteen States had prohibited the importation of slaves. Georgia and the two Carolinas still permitted the slave trade with Africa. In order not to leave these three States out of the Union, the Constitution permitted the importation of slaves until 1808. But the conscious horror of that concession is to be recognized in the care with which the word slavery is avoided. To satisfy all the slave-owning States, whose consent was necessary to the adoption of the Constitution, slavery itself, within those States, was recognized and sanctioned by a clause providing that five slaves should equal three free persons as a basis of representation in the national House of Representatives. So that, whether we like the remembrance or not, it is a fact that the founders of the nation actually did sanction slavery, although there was some righteous talk in the Constitutional Convention over the reluctant compromise. While this convention, in Philadelphia, was legalizing slavery, the Continental Congress, in New York, passed an ordinance for the government of the “territory of the United States northwest of the river Ohio,” providing that slavery should be forever prohibited in that territory. In 1820 the ocean slave-trade was declared to be piracy, punishable by death. In that same year Congress, under pressure from the slave owners, adopted the Missouri Compromise, by which Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave State, with the proviso that slavery should be always forbidden in any other part of the territory north of 36° 30´ north latitude. New England raged against slavery. Her abolitionists cried out against it night and day. To the assertion of the South that slaves were valuable property, legally acquired and legally held, they answered that slavery was a deep damnation in the sight of God, an unspeakably cruel crime, intolerable among civilized men. They helped slaves to escape from their masters, and did everything in their power to make a farce of the laws under which such fugitives might be returned. A great gulf opened between the free States and the slave States, a gulf flaming with passion and menace. Could the nation hold together? There were tremendous scenes in the Senate in 1850, when a compromise was reached. California was to be admitted a free State, slavery was to be abolished in the District of Columbia, and there was to be an effective Fugitive Slave Law. These were the principal points.