Slavery

While the compromise on representation was a critical turning point at the Convention, the issue of slavery was just as important. While northerners were opposed to the South’s “peculiar institution” to varying degrees, southerners believed that their economic well-being depended on the slave trade. They declared that they would walk out of the Convention before they consented to a government that disallowed slavery. Similar objections from the South had been raised during the deliberations of the Second Continental Congress. The Declaration of Independence had originally included a rejection of slavery as immoral, but Southern state delegates refused to sign it until the statement was removed.

Once again, the rest of the delegates were forced to choose between condemning slavery outright or condoning it so the broader interests of the nation could be pursued. It was not an easy choice.

On the issue of slave trade, the proposal was made that slaves could be “imported” for twenty years after the Constitution was ratified, after which bringing new slaves into the country would be illegal. This “importation” restriction was later included in the Constitution. Of the twenty-year ban on the importation of slaves, Madison originally remarked:

Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the National character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution.

To secure the support of the southern states for the Constitution, however, it was a compromise that Madison later embraced. In Federalist No. 42, he wrote:

It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy; that within that period it will receive considerable discouragement from the Federal government and be totally abolished, by a concurrence of the few States which continue the unnatural traffic in the prohibitory example which has been given by so great a majority of the Union. Happy would it be for the unfortunate Africans if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the oppression of their European brethren!

Also at issue was how slaves were to be counted for purposes of representation and taxation. Delegates from the southern states wanted slaves to be counted for the purposes of allotting congressional seats to the states, but not for the purposes of levying taxes. This, of course, was not acceptable to the northern states, who were not inclined to let the South have it both ways. They would either have to count them for both purposes or for neither. Once again, the convention was at an impasse. It was the second major compromise of the summer that salvaged the Convention once again. Under the so-called Three-Fifths Compromise, slaves would be counted as 3/5 of a person for both purposes. While seemingly an arbitrary number, by counting only three out of every five slaves, there would be a rough balance in representation between the northern and southern states in the new Congress. This was important to the southern delegates because they feared that a North-dominated Congress would outlaw slavery as one of its first items of business.

While it is easy to second-guess the decisions made about slavery at the Constitutional Convention, the delegates left with no illusions that the slavery question had been permanently solved. Instead, it had been put off until a later date. Indeed, given the violence with which the southern states opposed the abolition of slavery during the Civil War, it is certain that the United States of America, as it was established by the 1787 Constitution, would have never existed if compromises on slavery had not been made.