Sean Wilentz in the September
16 edition of the New York Times presents
the romantic Lincolnian story of the Constitutional Convention. In this narrative, “proslavery delegates” who
“fought to inscribe the principle of property in humans in the Constitution . .
. were crushed.” The resulting “Constitution
was based on a repudiation of the idea of a nation dedicated to the proposition
of property in humans,” and “without that antislavery outcome in 1787, slavery
would not have reached “ultimate extinction” in 1865.
A reader of Wilentz’s oped
piece would be stunned to discover that at no point in the written record
(which is admittedly incomplete) did any proslavery delegate propose to “inscribe
the principle of property in humans in the Constitution” or that, contrary to
his claim that northerners refused to accede to slaveholding demands for opening
the international slave trade, Virginians led the fight against that commerce, which many northern delegates were perfectly willing to stomach in return for commercial
concessions. More to the point, southerners
for the most part got what they wanted at the constitutional convention. Whether that was a pro-slavery constitution
depends on one’s perspective and hindsight.
All parties to the debate
over whether the constitution was pro-slavery or anti-slavery in 1787 rely on
selective quotations. Proponents of the antislavery constitution cite the northern Quaker who declared that the power to abolish the slave trade after
20 years encompassed the opportunity “of abolishing slavery forever.” Proponents of the proslavery constitution are
fond of quoting Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who informed South Carolinians
that “We have a security that the general government can never emancipate them,
for no such authority is vested.”
Madison more accurately captured the spirit of the drafting convention when
during the debate over the Connecticut Compromise, he observed, “the real
differences of interests lay, not between the large & small but between the
N. & Southern States.”
The crucial compromise that
proslavery and antislavery forces reached in 1787 was over the structure of the
national government. Contrary to Wilentz,
southern delegates did not seek to inscribe “the principle of property in
humans in the Constitution.” They sought to structure a federal government that
would always be friendly to proslavery interests. Contrary to Wilentz, slaveholders thought
they succeeded. The main demand
slaveholders made at the constitutional convention was that total population, including
slave population, be the means for allocating representation in all elected
governing institutions. Southerners wanted
representation by population because everyone in 1787 was confident that population
was flowing southward. Georgia with a
tiny population in 1787, consistently voted against state equality in the
Senate, confident that in 20 years that state would have a population greater
than Pennsylvania. What slaveholders got
was a House of Representatives they were likely to control, a 3/5s clause that augmented southern control of the House of Representatives and the presidency,
and a Supreme Court whose members were likely to be appointed by the Virginians
who were likely to hold the presidency.
Given their expected control over national institutions, slaveholders
did not need or ask for many parchment protections for their human
property. At the very least, they could
veto any proposal that damaged their interests.
More likely, from their perspective, they could pass affirmative
legislation, such as fugitive slave laws, that placed the federal government on
the side of human bondage. South
Carolinians in 1787 had no interest in state rights, particularly when compared
to the delegates from the small New England states.
What seems relatively clear
when examining the constitutional convention becomes less clear when the
ratification conventions are added to the analysis. Framers in different
state conventions had very different ideas of the constitutional status of
slavery. Framers in New England ratified
a constitution that had more to do with commerce than slavery. Attitudes towards slavery ranged from “none
of our business” to the more Lincolnian hope that slavery was on “a course of
ultimate extinction.” South Carolinians
ratified a proslavery constitution. Many
insisted that northerners would become increasingly proslavery over time once
they realized the profits to be made in the slave trade and commerce in slave
goods. Virginians ratified a
constitution they expected to be controlled by Virginians. “We will soon outnumber them,” George Nicholas
said, so that “this Government will be very shortly to our favor.”
[The longer version of this essay can be found in Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil]