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The Grand Convention - Interest Alone · American Political History

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Season sixteen of American Political History The Grand Convention Interests Alone.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: On august eighth, seventeen eighty-seven, in the middle of a routine second reading of the representation clauses, Governor Morris rose against the institution itself.
0:18
SPEAKER_00: The thing the Summers Fights had counted, taxed, and apportioned without once debating.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: Madison took down the whole eruption.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: He never, Morris declared, would concur in upholding domestic slavery.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: It was a nefarious institution.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: It was the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: Compare the free religions of the Middle States, where a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and happiness of the people, with the misery and poverty which overspreads the barren wastes of Virginia, Maryland, and the other states having slaves.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: And then he turned to the three fifths clause over and read out what he found on its underside.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: The inhabitants of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in the general government instituted for the protections of rights of mankind than a citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: The room heard him out, then his motion to strike the three fifths and count only the free was put to the table and lost, one state to ten, New Jersey alone.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: The subject went back under the surface for thirteen days.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: On august twenty first, in the debate over the Committee of Details Trade Clauses, it came up for good.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: The committee's draft contained a sentence its chairman's section had written for itself no tax on exports, and no prohibition ever, and no tax on the migrant or importation of such persons as the several states shall think proper to admit.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: The slave trade, placed beyond the new government's reach, not for ten years, not for twenty, but permanently.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: The export half fell first that same day.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: Madison argued for keeping the power to tax exports as proper in itself.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: As the states become manufacturers, they could tax their own produce on its way out, and the Union ought to hold the same tool.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: Wilson stood with him.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: Oliver Ellsworth answered that taxing exports would discourage industry and set the states fighting over whose staple bore the burden.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: And the planting states heard any export tax as a tax on tobacco, rice, indigo laid by other people's representatives.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: The prohibition held seven states to four.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: No tax or duty shall be laid on the articles exported from any state.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: Luther Martin of Maryland moved to amend it and gave the Convention three reasons.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: First, since five slaves counted as three free men in the appropriation of the House, the clause was an encouragement to the traffic.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: Every cargo landed at Charleston was future seats in Congress.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: Second, the slaves weakened the part of the Union the other parts were bound to protect, so the privilege of importing more was unreasonable.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: And third, it was inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution, and dishonorable to the American character to have such a feature in the Constitution.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: John Rutledge of South Carolina, whose own committee of detail had written the clause, answered him.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: Religion and humanity had nothing to do with this question.
4:07
SPEAKER_00: Interests alone is the governing principle with nations.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: The true question at present is whether the southern states shall or shall not be parties to this union.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: If the northern states consult their interests, they will not oppose the increase of slavery, which will increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: Interest alone an offer made in the same breath.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: Your ships will carry what our slaves grow.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut accepted the framework at once.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: Let every state import what it pleases.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: The morality or wisdom of slavery are considerations belonging to the states themselves.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: What enriches a part enriches the whole of the nation.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: And Charles Pickney closed the day with South Carolina's position stated as a fact of nature.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: South Carolina can never receive the plan if it prohibits the slave trade.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: The next morning, august twenty second, the convention took up the clause again, and the whole argument came out every position, every voice, every knife.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman opened for leaving the clause alone.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: He disapproved of the slave trade, he said, but the states now possessed the right to import.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: The public good did not require it to be taken from them, and it was expedient to have as few objections as possible to the plan.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: The abolition of slavery, he observed, seemed to be going on in the United States, and the good sense of several states would probably by degrees complete it.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: Then George Mason of Virginia, the master of Gunderson Hall, owning hundreds of slaves.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: This infernal traffic originated in the avarice of the British merchants.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: The British government consistently checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to it.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: The room had heard the argument before.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: Eleven years earlier, a few feet away, when Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence laid the trade at the king's feet, and South Carolina and Georgia had the passage struck out.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: George Mason pressed on, passed the king to the thing itself.
6:25
SPEAKER_00: The evil of having slaves, he reminded them, was experienced during the late war.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: Had the enemy dealt with the slaves as they might have, they would have proved dangerous instruments in their hands.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: Maryland and Virginia had already prohibited the importation expressly.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: North Carolina had done the same in substance.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: All of it would be in vain if South Carolina and Georgia stood at liberty to import.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: The Western people were already calling out for slaves for their new lands and would fill that country with them if they could be got through South Carolina and Georgia.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: Madison went on in his speech.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: The poor despised labor when performed by slaves, and then they produce the most pernicious effects on manners.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant.
7:21
SPEAKER_00: They bring the judgment of heaven on a country.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be punished in this.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.
7:41
SPEAKER_00: He lamented that some of the Eastern Brethren had, from a lust of gain embarked in this nefarious traffic, and he held it essential in every point of view that the general government have the power to prevent the increase of slavery.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: Oliver Ellsworth rose to answer him.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: I have never owned a slave, and cannot judge the effects of slavery on one's character.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: However, if it was to be considered in a moral light, we ought to go further and free those already in the country.
8:15
SPEAKER_00: And then the economics were laid on the table.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: Slaves multiplied so fast in Virginia and Maryland it was cheaper to raise them than import them.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: Well in the rice plantations of the South it was necessary.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: Prohibit the slave trade and Virginia's surplus rose in value while Carolina's fields went unworked.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: If we go on further than is urged, we shall be unjust towards South Carolina and Georgia.
8:43
SPEAKER_00: Let us not intermedle.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: As our population increases, poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut had already provided for abolition, he noted.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: Massachusetts abolished it outright, and to Mason's warning of insurrections, as to the danger of insurrections from foreign influence, that will become a motive to kind treatment of the slaves.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: Charles Pickany answered him.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: If slavery be wrong, it is justified by the example of all of the world, the case of Greece, Rome, and other ancient states, the sanction given by France and England and Holland and all other modern states, in all ages one half of mankind has been slaves.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: His cousin the general followed.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: If he and all his colleagues signed the Constitution and spent their whole personal influence, it would avail nothing with their constituents.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves, and he turned to Virginia.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: As to Virginia, she will gain by stopping the importations.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: Her slaves will rise in value, and she has more than she wants.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: Close the trade, the general was arguing, and Virginia gained twice over, her surplus becoming the only supply on the market.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: And the interest ran north too.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: The general reminded the carrier states, the more slaves, the more produce to employ the carrying trade, the more consumption, the more revenue for the common treasury.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: He would admit one thing, though.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: It was reasonable that slaves be duted like other imports, but a rejection of the clause was an exclusion of South Carolina from the Union.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: Abraham Baldwin spoke for Georgia a local question, not a national one.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: Georgia, if left to herself, may probably put a stop to the evil.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: And as ground for the conjecture, Madison recorded, he took notice of a respectable sect of people, the Quakers, who carried their ethics beyond the mere equality of men, extending their humanity to the claims of the whole animal creation.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: James Wilson put a needle through that assurance.
11:13
SPEAKER_00: If South Carolina and Georgia were themselves disposed to give up the importation in a short time, as had been suggested, they would never refuse to unite because the importation might be prohibited.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: And he noted what the clause actually did.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: Every article imported into the new nation was to be taxed, slaves alone exempt.
11:35
SPEAKER_00: This is, in fact, a bounty on that article.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: Elbridge Jerry stated the Northern Scruple in a sentence.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: John Dickinson considered it inadmissible on every public principle of honor and safety that the importation be authorized by the Constitution.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: If England and France permitted slavery, he observed, slaves were at the same time excluded from both those kingdoms, and Greece and Rome were made unhappy by their slaves.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: Hugh Williamson laid out what North Carolina's law actually did.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: No direct prohibition, but a duty of five pounds on each slave imported from Africa, ten pounds from elsewhere, and fifty on each from a state licensing manumission, the freeing of slaves, the traffic taxed, graded, and priced by statute.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: Rufus King asked the room to consider it in a political light only, and pointed at the same tax exemption Wilson had.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: An equality that could not fail to strike the commercial wisdom of northern and middle states.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: And John Langdon of New Hampshire was strenuous for giving the power to the general government.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: He could not, with a good conscience, leave it with the states.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: It was General Pickany who found the door.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: He was bound to declare candidly that he did not think South Carolina would stop her importations in any short time, and he moved to commit to the clause so that the slaves might be made liable to an equal tax with other imports, which he thought was right.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: Governor Randolph seconded, he was for committing in order that some middle ground might, if possible, be found.
13:31
unknown: Mr.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: Rutledge seconded him with South Carolina's bottom line restated once more.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: If the Convention thinks that North Carolina and South Carolina and Georgia will ever agree to the plan unless their right to import slaves be untouched, that expectation is vain.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: The people of those states will never be such fools as to give up so important an interest.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: And Governor Morris rose and moved the mechanisms for the settlement.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: I wish the whole subject to be committed, including the clauses related to taxes on imports and to the Navigation Act.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: These things may be from a bargain among the northern and southern states.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: These things may form a bargain.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: Put the slave trade clause and the export tax ban and the navigation acts on the table and let the sections trade.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman stated New England's price of union without ornament.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: It was better to let the southern states import slaves than to part with them if they made that the condition of entering the Union.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: The committee carried seven states to three.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: The Navigation Act Clause followed it into committee.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: Nine to two over Nathaniel Gorham's cold reminder of what held New England in the room at all.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: The eastern states had no motive to union but a commercial one.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: They were able to protect themselves and did not need the aid of the southern states.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: And Ellsworth, voting no, named the stakes of failure.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: If this middle and moderate ground was lost, the states would fly into a variety of shapes and directions, and most probably into several confederations, and not without bloodshed.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: The bargain went to a committee of eleven, one member from each state.
15:22
SPEAKER_00: Langdon, King, Johnson, Livingston as the chair, Clymer, Dickinson, Luther Martin, Madison, Williamson, General Pickany, and Baldwin.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: It reported in two days.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: The terms?
15:34
SPEAKER_00: The importation of slaves could not be prohibited before the year 1800, but it could be taxed like other imports.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: And the Navigation Act Clause, the two-thirds requirement that had shackled New England's prize, struck out entirely.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: Commerce would be regulated by simple majority.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: On August 25th, General Pickany moved to strike the year 1800 and insert the year 1808.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: Eight more years of open trade.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts seconded the motion.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: Madison rose against his own committee's bargain.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: So long a term will be more dishonorable to the national character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: The motion passed seven states to four.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: New Hampshire, I.
16:27
SPEAKER_00: Massachusetts, I.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut, I.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, I.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia, no.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: Then Governor Morris rose with a provocation dressed as an amendment.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: Let the clause say what it meant.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: Let it read the importation of slaves into North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia shall be permitted.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: The words written out, the states named.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: He wished it to be known, he said, that this part of the Constitution was a compliance with those states.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: Mason did not object to the word slave, but objected to the naming of the states least it give offense.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: Sherman and Clymer objected to the word itself, it was not pleasing to some people.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: Mr Morris withdrew the amendment, the clause kept its wording.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: Such persons as the states now existing shall think proper to admit.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: The duty clause produced one more exchange.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: Sherman opposing taxing imported slaves at all, not from a tenderness for the traffic, but because a duty on them implied they were property.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: I think it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property of men.
17:47
SPEAKER_00: King, Langdon, and General Pickany answered that the duty was the price of compromise, the clause settled at a tax not exceeding ten dollars for each person, and Sherman observed in closing that the smallness of the duty showed revenue to be the object, not the discouragement of the importation.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: The subject had one more voice in the city that summer, and it never reached the floor.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: The Pennsylvania Abolition Society, organized that April, weeks before the convention met, had prepared a speech to the Federal Convention against the slave trade, and its newly elected president was Dr.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: Franklin.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: The society's president sat in convention every day.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: He withheld the speech, by the accounts that survive from a judgment that pressing the subject would cost the Constitution more than it could win.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: Three days later, on august twenty eighth, Pierce Butler and Charles Pickany moved a new clause with no committee behind it.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: Fugitive slaves and servants escaping into another state to be delivered up like criminals.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: James Wilson objected to the expense.
18:54
SPEAKER_00: Why should the public executive of a free state be bound to seize at the public charge?
19:00
SPEAKER_00: Roger Sermon said he saw no propriety in the public seizing and surrendering a slave or servant than a horse.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: Mr.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: Butler withdrew the motion overnight, and moved it again the next day, redrawn as its own article.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: It was agreed to without a dissenting vote and almost without debate.
19:19
SPEAKER_00: On august twenty ninth, Charles Pickany moved to restore the two thirds requirement for the Navigation Acts, the shield against the northern majority legislating Southern commerce, and he had the votes of the whole Southern interest behind him.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: General Pickany rose.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: Considering the loss brought on the commerce of the eastern states of the Revolution, their liberal conduct toward the views of South Carolina, and the interests the weak southern states had in being united with the stronger eastern states, he thought it proper that no fret should be imposed on the power of making commercial regulations.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: And Madison added, taking it down, he meant the permission to import slaves.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: An understanding on the two subjects of navigation and slavery had taken place between those parts of the Union.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: The bargain Governor Morris had proposed on the twenty second closed in private conversations and honored on the floor.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: Twenty years of the trade for New England's eye, majority navigation acts for the deep souths.
20:24
SPEAKER_00: Pierce Butler, seconding the surrender of his own shield, told the room exactly how far the sections stood apart even as he paid.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: I consider the interests of South Carolina and the eastern states to be as different as the interests of Russia and Turkey.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: One shield the South did keep, and it kept at the other sectional table over treaties.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: The memory in every southern and western area was two years old.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: John Jay authorized by seven states offering Spain the closure of the Mississippi for twenty five years in exchange for a commercial treaty worth everything to the Northeast and nothing to the West.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: Seven states for it, five against, and only the Confederation's nine states treaty rule standing between the settlers on the Western waters and a deal that sold their river.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: The Convention wrote that lesson into Article II.
21:20
SPEAKER_00: The President shall have the power to make treaties, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided two-thirds of the senators present concur.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: No simple majority of states would ever again be enough to trade away a section's lifeblood by treaty.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: The Mississippi's insurance policy, written into the power of treaty making itself.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: And Governor Randolph, who had opened the convention with the Virginia plan in May and had said on the twenty second that he would sooner risk the Constitution than agree to the clauses as it stood, rose on august twenty ninth, with the bargain four days old and told the room where he was now.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: There are features so odious in the Constitution as it now stands that I doubt whether we should be able to agree to it.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: The mover of the plan, doubting his own signature, the convention had three weeks left.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
22:22
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22:29
SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.