Constitutional Convention: The Problem of Slavery

There is no gentle way to put it. The enslavement of blacks in America was of great concern to the men at the convention. Some genuinely felt that the black man was as much "man" as the white man. But this was a minority view. Southern delegates had one thing in mind when it came to slavery: to keep it going to prop up the Southern economy. Indeed, many of the largest slave holders in the United States were at the Convention. Most Northern delegates did not like slavery, but that does not mean they cared for blacks either. Many felt that the larger the black populations in the South grew, the larger the threat that that population would revolt against their masters and march north to exact revenge on the people who bought the goods they had been driven to tend.

For some, slavery itself was at least tolerable, but the slave trade, the importation of new people from Africa, was deplorable. Some felt it was deplorable because trafficking in human lives is simply deplorable. Others felt it deplorable because it diminished the value of their surplus slaves in the slave market.

First we will address the capitation (counting) of slaves in the Constitution. On June 11, Roger Sherman suggested that representation be based on a count of all free men. The South wanted their slaves counted as whole persons, but that would never happen. James Wilson wanted to get the issue out of the way quickly, and asked the Convention to adopt the same standard as that in the Articles: slaves would count as three-fifths persons. This issue would rise again on July 9, when some began to realize that the South could increase their representation in the Congress by simply importing new slaves. Recall, too, that everyone expected the extreme Southern states to grow in white population as well, over the next few decades. The notion was frightening to many from the North, and Northern states banded together on July 11 to completely remove slaves from the population counts.

In the end, both side got something they wanted. Through what some have theorized was a complicated bargain between Northern and Southern delegates to the Convention and Northern and Southern representatives to the Congress, taxation and representation were tied together (the Congress comes into the story, because on July 12, the day after the compromise was reached, the Northwest Ordinance was passed, detailing the carving up of the north western wilderness of North America, and granting the South fugitive slave rules). The deal allowed the South to keep the three-fifths count for representation that had been used under the Articles for calculation of state levies, as long as they also had a three-fifths count for calculation of taxes.

As for the slave trade, for quite some time in the Convention, it was debated hotly. The states of the deep south wanted it maintained; the North and the middle south was opposed. But alliances between states kept some of the Northern states voting with the deep south, and any prohibition in new slave imports or import taxes were defeated. As the Convention progressed, though, it became clear to the South and her allies that some compromise would be needed. In exchange for a prohibition on export taxes, the South agreed to allowing the slave trade to continue for just 20 more years, and for imported slaves to be taxable. As a side note, the very day that the slave trade could constitutionally be prohibited, it was: on January 1, 1808.

Sounds ugly but there's truth to the assertion, in my exposure at least.

There's no love among the majority of black people for the United States Constitution. Never mind the arduous efforts to find a workable solution to the obvious incompatibility of the institutions of human bondage with the ideals of our Founding, never mind that many State constitutions expressed this incompatibility (even some southern ones), the fact that it continued utterly condemns it in their eyes.

Never mind that the United States didn't invent or impose or even permit for long the African slave trade, or that much of the world continued on with it, or that fellow Africans sold their ancestors into slavery or that Arab Muslim traders were responsible for capturing the majority of them, never mind the blood and death of war that resulted in the end of the practice or the treasure expended in an apparently futile attempt to right the wrongs, real or perceived.

I just wonder what the statute of limitations on the grudge might be. The Axis of Al doesn't appear willing to jump off that gravy train any time soon, so I suppose we'll be penalized for an inherited, legal practice ... forever, bwuahahaha!

Some are for sure. I hear this arguement tossed out from time to time.

My opinion based on observation.

Why do 90+% of blacks vote for Marxists? ...because they revere freedom and liberty? or because they believe the progressive left are really there to help them. I mean as far as indoctrination is concerned that is some neat trick.

...and I have NEVER heard a black man or women articulate the premise of my thread, only the context free distain for the 3/5ths of a person crap.

Col. Allen West is a clear example of the opposite, but blacks who identify themselves as conservative with a reverence for the constitution I would argue are few and far between.

I’d love to be proven wrong.

No need to remind, it’s lurking right below the surface in any political conversation involving black and white in this country. It’s the reason for the alienation and isn’t going away no matter how much wealth is transferred or how much “positive discrimination” is applied, to use the more accurate, European euphemism for affirmative action.

Marxists saw festering, lingering resentments, fed by legally enforced segregation, jumped on the backs of well-meaning, long suffering black people, rode their righteous anger into power and are still piling on. They’re living rent-free in the heads of most as a result, and every attempt to assuage is viewed as a proletarian “victory” in the marxist sense, leading to demands for more rather than a sense of acceptance and justice served.

The best country in the world for Europeans who didn’t have anything prior to coming here, the oppressed religious groups, the races deemed somehow inferior elsewhere who prospered by comparison here, is being dismantled piece by piece and disgruntled black people are serving as the vanguard.

How do you undo that? We don’t believe in the de facto seizing of children in order to indoctrinate as they do. We don’t believe in breaking down the moral structure of the people with unfettered sex and making a fashion statement out of substance abuse in order to undermine, eventually destroy and replace what went before as they do.

The only common ground I see is Christianity, and the answer therefore has to arise from there, as our Constitution did.

Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia, seemed to have been one of the most earnest advocates of the Southern sentiment against slavery.

In 1777, being then a member of the Virginia Legislature, he brought in a bill which became a law, “to prevent the importation of slaves.” He also proposed a system of general emancipation, as a preliminary to which he introduced a bill to authorize manumission; this became a law. (Excerpts from the diary of H.C. Clark)

In these efforts he had the support and sympathy of the slave-holding States, who were overrun with slaves, that returned no adequate remuneration. At this period their numbers reached some 600,000, a part of whom were employed in raising tobacco and rice. The majority of them, however, were occupied in domestic farm-labor, producing no exportable values. Hence there was no profit in slavery at the South, while at the North it was even a greater burden. (Scraps from the prison table: at Camp Chase and Johnson's Island By Joseph Barbière)

Massachusetts had found it so unproductive that, in 1780, she abolished it in her own borders, but she did not cease for that reason to force it, by her importations, on the South.

In the Congress of the Confederation, the views of the North and South on the subject of slavery, founded on interests so antagonistic, frequently came into collision.

It was at this epoch, too, that Virginia, Georgia and other Southern States ceded to the Federal Government for the common benefit of all the States, their immense Western Territories. All the States were then slave-holding, and the idea that a man could not hold his slaves in any part of the territory of the United Stares, had never yet been broached.

On the contrary, the right to carry them everywhere was undoubted. The policy of Virginia, however, was manumission; and Mr. Jefferson, in 1784, prepared in the Congress of the Confederation a clause preventing slaves being carried into the said territories ceded to the United States, north of the Ohio river.

This was a part of the Southern scheme of manumission, which was meant as a check to the trading in Negro slaves, carried on by Massachusetts with unabated activity. This clause did not pass at the time, but in 1787, it was renewed by Nathan Dane, in the Federal Convention. The clause enjoining the restitution of fugitive slaves was then added and it passed unanimously.

By a unanimous vote, it became a vital part of the Federal Constitution, and without it, this compact could never have gone into effect. The slave trade carried on by the North became also the theme of much sharp discussion in the Convention. The North was not disposed, of course, to give it up, but with the South it had become an intolerable grievance. They had long and earnestly protested against it when carried on by the mother country, but their minds were now made up to break with the North rather than submit further to this traffic.

The North then demanded compensation for the loss of this very thriving trade, and the South readily conceded it by granting them the monopoly of the coasting and carrying trade against all foreign tonnage. In this way it was settled that the Slave Trade should be abolished after 1808

(Do not ever discuss the ratification and the issue of slavery without mentioning this:) Without this important clause, the South would never have consented to enter into a Confederacy with the North. The Federal Constitution, with these essential clauses, having passed into operation, it became, henceforth, a certainty that the Slave Trade would finally expire in the United States at the close of 1808. This left it still a duration of nineteen years, and the North seemed determined to reap the utmost possible advantage from the time remaining.

The Duke de Rochefoucault-Liancourt, in his work on the United States, 1795, stated that “twenty vessels from the harbors of the North are engaged in the importation of slaves into Georgia; they ship one negro for every ton burden.”

Thus it is evident, that while New England was vigorously engaged in buying and selling negro slaves, Virginia, on the other hand, was steadfastly pursuing her theory of manumission.

A LETTER TO VISOUNT PALMERSTON, L.G., PRIME MINISTER OF ENGLAND, ON AMERICAN SLAVERY. HENRY WIKOFF

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