declared that "Congress have no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them within the States," and that ‘the migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit cannot be prohibited by Congress prior to the year one thousand, eight hundred and eight."
Four years passed before anything was done under these declared powers. The ills of the slave-trade as described by the witnesses before the English Parliament became widely known in this country, and the abolitionists, led by the persistent Quakers, kept nagging Congress with petitions for the abolition of slavery, but Congress went on, brushing these aside, until the shadow of the storm raised in Hayti by Toussaint L'Ouverture darkened the southern horizon. The slaves of the great island just east of Cuba arose, and in a day, so to speak, had asserted and maintained the principle that all men are born free and equal. Their rising, like that of the oppressed in France, was marked with the violence that power suddenly released from restraint always shows. Many and frightful were the deeds of bloodshed and rapine, and the thought of these and of the real cause of them made the white American legislators cower.
"A Quaker petition for a law against the transport traffic in slaves was received without a murmur in 1794, and on March 22 of that year the first national act against the slave-trade became a law."
The student finds, as he reads through the great mass of American works on slavery printed since that day, that many of the writers announce, with a flourish of Old Glory, that the United States was the first nation
