With a prescience wonderful for those days and on that subject, he saw that slavery meant the up-growth in the United States of two systems so radically hostile, both socially and economically, that they could lead only to a struggle for political supremacy, which in its course he feared would imperil the Union.

For this reason he deprecated the introduction of the slavery question into the debates of the first Congress, because he realized its character, and he did not believe that the Union or the government at that early day could bear the strain which in this way would be produced.

At the same time he felt that a right solution must be found or inconceivable evils would ensue.

The inherent and everlasting wrong of the system made its continuance, to his mind, impossible.

While it existed, he believed that the laws which surrounded it should be maintained, because he thought that to violate these only added one wrong to another.