Slavery and the Founding Fathers
- In This Quick Guide:
- Slavery, North and South
- The Three-Fifths Compromise
- Slave Importation and Fugitive Slaves
As everyone now knows, slavery was a big bone of contention during the creation of the Declaration of Independence. How could a nation founded on freedom depend on slave labor? In forming a new code of rules, would the Federal Convention condemn slavery or protect it? In this guide, you will see how delegates addressed, or didn’t address, issues pertaining to the enslavement of other human beings.
Slavery, North and South
To understand the relationship between the Founders and slavery, and why delegates to the Federal Convention failed to deal in a serious way with its immorality, we need to view these men in the context of their times. In 1787, slavery still existed in the North (the 1790 census listed over 40,000 slaves north of the Mason-Dixon Line), but several states had taken tentative steps toward abolition. Slavery had been outlawed by court order in Massachusetts in 1780; recent laws in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island provided for the emancipation of slaves born after the enactment of the legislation once they had reached certain ages; similar laws had been introduced but defeated in New York and New Jersey.
In the South, by contrast, some 650,000 slaves were counted in 1790. Land and slaves passed from generation to generation, conferring privileges on an elite master class. The abolition of slavery would have necessitated a radical restructuring of society and the economy. Thomas Jefferson, while calling slavery a “disease,” explained why the South could not easily be cured. “Where the disease is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the northern States it was merely superficial and easily corrected. In the southern it is incorporated with the whole system and requires time, patience, and perseverance in the curative process.” Patience, of course, meant one thing to a master and another to the men, women, and children he held in bondage.
Abolition in this context was politically impossible. Nobody could wipe out slavery in the South with the wave of a magic wand. If a particular slave master felt bad about the situation, though, he could manumit, or free, his own slaves. Robert Carter III of Virginia manumitted 452 slaves, not all at once, which would have stirred great resistance, but gradually. Other owners also freed slaves, some in their lifetimes, others in their wills.
Manumission was not easy, however. There were tight legal restrictions, for two reasons. First, whites feared that free blacks would become a burden on society, so owners had to ensure that the men and women they freed would be self-supporting. Whites also thought free blacks might stir dangerous longings amongst slaves who had not been freed. Until 1782, no one could free a slave in Virginia unless the Assembly gave permission. When the Assembly did free someone, it was often for good deeds; one man gained freedom because he had turned in counterfeiters.
The Three-Fifths Compromise
From the start, the issue of slavery placed delegates to the Federal Convention in a bind. Southern delegates wanted to count their slaves when determining how many representatives they had in Congress, but northern delegates insisted that would not be fair. Were slaves to be considered as people? If so, they should vote; if not, they should not be counted. Or were slaves to be considered as property? If so, why shouldn’t “the cattle and horses of the North” also be counted?
Four years earlier, Congress had faced a similar situation when trying to determine how much money each state should contribute to the federal treasury. At that time, though, southerners maintained slaves should not be counted, while northerners thought they should. Now, both sides reversed their positions to suit their interests.
Back then, Congress had settled on a compromise: slaves would count as three-fifths of a free person. There was no particular logic to this figure, although some people tried to maintain that a slave was three-fifths as productive as a free person. Now, too, logic would fall by the wayside. “The labour of a slave in S. Carolina” was “as productive as that of a freeman in Massachusetts,” observed Pierce Butler of South Carolina. Had slaves suddenly become more productive in four years time? Hardly. Although the sides had reversed, one thing that remained the same was that magical fraction. The Federal Convention determined that for purposes of representation in Congress, a slave would once again count as three-fifths of a person.
Of course, the 400,000 people held in bondage did not enjoy any of the power they brought to their states. Worse yet, from their perspective, the additional representation in Congress gave their masters increased influence in the new nation’s affairs. In years to come, that influence would be used, in part, to perpetuate slavery.
Slave Importation and Fugitive Slaves
Congress could not ban slave importation until 1808, but after that it could. Why this date? That took some haggling. The first date proposed was 1800, but South Carolina and Georgia, playing hardball, managed to buy eight additional years of slave trading.
Further, fugitive slaves would have to be returned to their owners, even if they had run to states in which slavery was illegal.
In return for these concessions from the North, southern delegates agreed to drop one of their demands. They were concerned that the eight northern states would gang up on the five southern states and pass commercial laws or taxes that interfered with slavery or favored northern merchants and manufacturers at the expense of southern farmers and consumers, so they wanted to require a two-thirds majority for any such measure. With a two-thirds threshold, the southern states could have doomed any attack on their regional interests, including the preservation of slavery, through commercial regulation. But to gain 20 more years of slave importation and a fugitive slave clause, southerners let this one go.
The deal was complete, but it had been a deal with the devil, some would later maintain. Slavery would continue in the land of the free, unfettered by national law. Starting in 1808, if it wished, Congress could outlaw the slave trade, but there was nothing in the Constitution that authorized it to interfere with slavery in states where it already existed.
From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Founding Fathers and the Birth of Our Nation by Ray Raphael
