{ 59} This criticism is rather taking, but a sound view of the Constitution will hardly support it. In making the United States Government the _exclusive_ organ for dealing with foreign countries, the Constitution impliedly confers upon that Government a protectorate against foreign states over interests which are regulated, internally, only by the powers of the respective Commonwealths of the Union. It is true that this doctrine rests upon a national view of the federal system of government in the United States, a view which the slave-holding statesmen did not later share. From their later particularistic principle of the fundamental character of the Union, such a general protectorate over "State" interests by the United States Government against foreign countries could hardly be inferred from the Constitution. If this principle could be assumed by these critics as having been held at that time by the slave-holding statesmen, their charge of inconsistency, if not of insincerity, would be fairly made out. But such, as we have seen, was not the case. Many of the slave-holding statesmen of 1816 were stronger in the national view of the character of the Union than were the statesmen of New England itself.
The United States Government recognized its duty to extend the protection demanded in the case, and it secured from the British Government compensation to the masters for the loss of slave property occasioned by the acts of the British officers during the War.
Such was the status of the slavery question at the close of the War of 1812-15, at the commencement, therefore, of the period when, withdrawing themselves from foreign complications, the people of the United States began to adjust the different parts of their political system, chiefly if not solely, to the demands of their internal interests, and to solve the problems of their { 60} polity from the point of view of their domestic institutions. It is not strange, then, that from this point of time onward the powerful institution of negro slavery recognized more and more clearly its natural relations to all of these questions of internal policy and law, and sought more and more determinedly to bring the political system and the policies of the United States into accord with its own exclusive interests. For the first three or four years after the close of the War this tendency did not, as has been pointed out, appear upon the surface, but it was working in the depths. From 1820 to 1861, certainly, it furnishes the point of view for the correct elucidation of the majority of the great problems of the history of the United States.