20 The Constitution does not require that “fugitive slaves” shall be delivered up. It requires that “persons bound to service in one State, and escaping into another, shall be delivered up.” Mr. Madison opposed the introduction of the term slave, or slavery, into the Constitution; for, he said that he did not wish to see it recognized by the Constitution of the United States of America, that there could be property in men. Now, sir, all this took place at the' Convention in 1787; but, connected with this, concurrent and cotemporaneous, is another important transaction not sufficiently attended to. The Convention for framing this Constitution assembled in Philadelphia in May, and sat until September, 1787. During all that time, the Congress of the United States was in session at New York. It was a matter of design, as we know, that the Convention should not assemble in the same city where Congress was holding its sessions. Almost all the public men of the country, therefore, of distinction and eminence, were in one or the other of these two assemblies; and I think it happened, in some instances, that the same gentlemen were members of both. If I mistake not, such was the case of Mr. Rufus King, then a member of Congress from Massachusetts, and at the same time a member of the Convention to frame the Constitution. Now, it was in the summer of 1787, the very time when the Convention in Philadelphia was framing this Constitution, that the Congress in New York was framing the ordinance of 1787. They passed that ordinance on the 13th July, 1787, at New York, the very month, perhaps the very day, on
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