We need not discuss the way or the reason of their becoming slave-holding communities.

It is sufficient for our purpose that all of them greatly deplored the evil and that they placed a provision in the Constitution which they supposed would gradually remove the disease by cutting off its source.

This was the abolition of the slave trade.

So general was the conviction, the public determination, to abolish the African slave trade, that the provision which I have referred to as being placed in the Constitution declared that it should not be abolished prior to the year 1808.

A constitutional provision was necessary to prevent the people, through Congress, from putting a stop to the traffic immediately at the close of the war.