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The Grand Convention - All Other Persons · American Political History

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Season sixteen of American Political History, The Grand Convention, All Other Persons.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: On march twenty eighth, seventeen eighty three, four years before the convention, in the same room, the Congress of the Confederation was arguing about fraction.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: The subject was taxes, the articles apportioned the Union's expenses among the states by the value of their land, and the rule had failed.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Land was impossible to assess, and every state gained their appraisals.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Congress wanted a new basis, and the obvious one was people.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Count each state's inhabitants and build the state accordingly, population as the stand in for wealth.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: The more hands, the more production, the larger the share of the common burden.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Which raised the question in the states there were tens of thousands of slaves.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: How were the slaves to be counted?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Every man in the room understood what the count meant.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: It meant money.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Count the slaves fully, and the slave holding state's tax bills swelled.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Count them low, and the burden shifted north.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: So the northern states argued that a slave's labor should be counted as one person for fixed taxation.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: The southern states argued the opposite, that slave labor produced less, that the count should be discounted half or quartered.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: The North arguing that a slave should count as a whole person, the south arguing it must not.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: In seventeen eighty three, that was the appropriation of taxes.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: The fraction did not die.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: It sat in the public record as the settled federal arithmetic, the ratio eleven states had already agreed to, the number everyone knew.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Men called it the federal ratio.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Four years later, on june eleventh, seventeen eighty seven, the Committee of the Whole was fixing the rule of representation for the first branch of new government.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: An equitable ratio had been agreed.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: The question was what to count.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: James Wilson rose, seconded by Charles Pickany of South Carolina.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: He proposed that representation should be apportioned in proportion with the whole number of white and other free citizens and inhabitants of every age, sex, and condition, including those bound to servitude for a term of years, and three fifths of all other persons not comprehended in the foregoing description, except Indians not paying taxes in each state.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Three fifths of all other persons.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Even the words were second hand, and Madison's note explained in the same breath exactly where the room understood them to come from.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: This being the rule in the Act of Congress agreed to by eleven states for apportioning quotas of revenues on the states.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: The rule in the Act of Congress, the tax formula of seventeen eighty three lifted whole and laid into the foundation of the House of Representatives.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Elbridge Jerry objected, and his objection went to the principle underneath.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: The South could then purchase apportionment.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Why then should the blacks who were property in the South be in the rule of representation more than the cattle and horses in the North?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Madison's notes record no further debate.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: The motion carried nine states to two.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: On june eleventh, 1787, the three fifths rule entered the plan of the new government.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: But something had changed since 1783 that nobody paused over that afternoon.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: The fraction now ran the other way.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: In 1783, counting the slaves had meant taxation, and every additional fifth cost the South money.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now counting them meant seats, and every additional fifth with Southern power in the national government.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: The state's interest had swapped sides of the equation.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And through the summer, as the arithmetic sank in, the arguments swapped with them.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: On June 30th, in the middle of the small state crisis, Madison told the convention that the fight over state size was not the real fight.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: The states were divided into different interests not by their differences of size, but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: It did not lie between the large and small states, it lay between the northern and southern economies.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Madison had sketched a settlement built on it, one house counting only the free, the other counting the whole number, before setting it aside as too dangerous to propose.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: The North would own one chamber and the south the other, so he kept it in his notes.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: The first house had to be dealt out seat by seat before any census could exist.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it took two committees to do it.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: A committee of five under Governor Morris reported a first map of fifty six seats, drawn, it said, on estimates of wealth and numbers together, and the room, distrusting both the map and the map makers, recommitted it to a committee of eleven, one member per state.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: That committee returned the map that went into the finished draft, 65 seats.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: New Hampshire three, Massachusetts eight, Virginia ten, the largest allotment on the sheet, Georgia three.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: On July 9th, as the House fought over the first apportionment, William Patterson of New Jersey took the fraction apart from the northern side.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: He could regard the slaves, he said, in no light but as property.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: They were allowed no personal liberty, no property of their own, no agency.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Their own states laws said so.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Has a man in Virginia a number of votes in proportion to the number of his slaves?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if negroes are not represented in the states to which they belong, why should they be represented in the general government?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: If such a meeting of the people was actually to take place, would the slaves vote?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: They would not.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why then should they be represented?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: The seats in the house, the count inflated with slaves, would be held by men who owned those slaves.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Not one of the slaves would cast a ballot for the representation their numbers created.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Patterson's conclusion was to count them not at all, zero fifths, and shrink the slave holding state's power accordingly.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Wednesday, july eleventh, was the day the whole arithmetic came apart.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: It began over the census.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Randolph had moved a periodic count written into the Constitution to redress the representation as the people moved.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Judge Sherman was against shackling the legislature, choose wise and good men, he said, and then confide in them.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: And George Mason answered with the sentence under the whole machine.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: From the nature of man, we may be sure that those who have power in their hands will not give it up while they can retain it.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: On the contrary, we know they will always, when they can, rather increase it.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: The first apportionment, Madison argued, gave the Atlantic North the majority, and rightly by present numbers.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: But fix that map forever, and when the people shifted south and west, a quarter would be given three quarters, and the quarter would never let go unless the Constitution itself forced their hand.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: If the Western states are to be admitted into the Union as they arise, they must be treated as equals and subject to no degrading discriminations.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: They will have the same pride and passion which we have and will either not unite with us or will speedily revolt from the Union.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Randolph added the pledge already given.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: They never would nor ought to accede on any other.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the count could not be left to the states who had never numbered themselves honestly.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: The census must be taken under the direction of the general legislature.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hugh Williamson of North Carolina then moved the census in form, a count of the free white inhabitants and three-fifths of those of other descriptions, taken on a fixed schedule, with representation regulated accordingly.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: The fraction now sat inside the counting clause itself.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: And Pierce Butler and General Pickany of South Carolina rose against the fraction.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: They moved to strike the words three-fifths and count slaves equally with whites.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Whole persons, five-fifths, every one of them a full unit of their master's representation.
• 9:44
  unknown: Mr.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Jerry answered that three-fifths was, to say the least, the full proportion that could be admitted.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, who sat in the Congress of 1783, stood up.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: The ratio was fixed by Congress as a rule of taxation.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Then it was urged by the delegates representing the states having slaves that the blacks were still more inferior to freemen.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: At present, when the ratio of representation is to be established, we are assured that they are equal to freemen.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: The argument of 1783, Mr.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Gorham added, had convinced him then that three-fifths was pretty near the just proportion, and he would vote the same opinion now.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Butler made the Southern case in full.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: The labor of slaves in South Carolina, he insisted, was as productive and as valuable as that of free men in Massachusetts.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Wealth was the great means of defense and utility to the nation, and an equal representation ought therefore to be allowed in a government instituted principally for the protection of property and itself to be supported by property.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason of Virginia, master of Gunston Hall and its hundreds of slaves, rose against the motion of his fellow Southerners, though it was favorable to Virginia because he thought it was unjust.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: The slaves were certainly valuable, he said.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: They raised the value of land, increased the exports and imports, and so the revenue, would supply the means of feeding and supporting an army, and might in cases of emergency become themselves soldiers.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: In these important respects, they were useful to the community at large, and ought not to be excluded from the estimate of representation, but he could not answer, however, regard them as equal to free men and could not vote for them as such.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Mr Williamson reminded the room of the other half of the same memory.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: If the southern states contend for their inferiority of blacks to whites when taxation is in view, the eastern states on the same occasion contend for their equality.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Both sections had already argued both sides of the question, the full count.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Three states to seven, only Delaware, South Carolina, and Georgia voted to count slaves as whole persons.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: The afternoon turned to the standard of appropriation itself, wealth or numbers, and became a duel.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Morris attacked the census machine root and branch.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Numbers were no measure of wealth.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: The legislature should be left free to adjust representation, and he said out loud who the freedom was for.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: The busy haunts of men, not the remote wilderness, was the proper school of political talents.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: If the Western people get the power into their hands, they will ruin the Atlantic interests.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Leave the interests of the people, he concluded, to the representatives of the people, trust the legislature.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Madison rose, and his own notes preserve his reply in the third person.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: He was not a little surprised to hear this implicit confidence urged by a member who, on all occasions, had inculcated so strongly the political depravity of men.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: To reconcile the gentleman with himself, it must be imagined that he determined the human character by the points of the compass.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: The human character determined by the points of the compass, trust for a northern majority, jealousy for a western one.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: The truth, Madison went on, was that all men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree, and as for the Western country, no unfavorable distinctions were admissible in justice or in policy.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason added the arithmetic of the time, leave representation to the legislature, and the legislature would remain the representatives of the people only until the people moved.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as the southern and western population predominated, the power would sit with the minority and would never be yielded unless the Constitution provided for it.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Judge Sherman, who had opened the day against shackling the legislature, announced that the observations of Randolph and Mason had convinced him.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: The periods and the rule of revising representation ought to be fixed in the Constitution.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: The census of free inhabitants carried six to four.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Then the next clause was read, the three-fifths considered, and the fraction itself stood alone before the House at last.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Rufus King was much opposed.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: The admission of slaves into the rule at all, he said, would excite great discontents among the states having no slaves.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: He had never yet said of any point that he would in no event acquiesce, but if such a declaration was ever to be made by him, it would be on this one.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was Mr.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Gorham who answered his own colleague with a memory from home.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: When the Revenue Amendment of 1783 had come before the legislature of Massachusetts, the only difficulty then was to satisfy them that the Negroes ought not to have been counted equally with whites instead of being counted in the ratio of three-fifths only.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Massachusetts in 1783 had needed convincing that three fifths was not too low.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: The count at that time had meant Southern taxes.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: And Massachusetts wanted it high.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: James Wilson, the mover of the fraction, rose and confessed that he could not explain his own clause.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: He did not well see on what principle the admission of blacks in the proportion of three fifths could be explained.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Are they admitted as citizens?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Then why are they not admitted on inequality with white citizens?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Are they admitted as property?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Then why is not other property admitted into the computation?
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: These were the difficulties, however, which he thought must be overruled by the necessity of compromise.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Citizens or property?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: The fraction answered neither way, and Mr Wilson knew it and moved on, overruled by the necessity of compromise.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: And Governor Morris did not move on.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: Madison recorded his declaration.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: He was compelled to declare himself reduced to the dilemma of doing injustice to the southern states or to human nature, and he must therefore do it to the former, for he could never agree to give such encouragement to the slave trade as would be given by allowing them the representation for their slaves.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Injustice to the southern states or to human nature.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: He chose his side of the dilemma out loud, and did not believe those states would ever confederate on terms that deprived them of their slave trade.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: The question was put on the three-fifths clause, and it lost.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Four states for it, six against.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Connecticut, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, I.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, no.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: South Carolina voting no because three fifths was too little to them.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: The Northern states because it was too much.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: The House filled in the census periods, deadlocked at five five on the detail, and then at the end of the day, voted on Mr.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Williamson's whole resolution as it stood, amended, mangled and missing its fraction.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Every state voted no, nine zero against the day's work.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: The convention adjourned, having unmade everything it had made.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: The next morning, Governor Morris, the man who had chosen human nature the day before, rose with the device that put the fraction back.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: He moved a proviso.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: The taxation shall be in proportion to representation.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever estate counted for seats, it would be assessed for taxes.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Claim your slaves as population for power in the house, you claimed the tax bill that came with the count.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Objections came at once.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason feared it would drive the legislature back to requisitions, and Morris narrowed it to direct taxation, the headcount taxes, where the rule could bite.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Butler admitted the justice of the principle and contended again for the full count.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: General Pickney stated the South's bottom line as a proposition on property.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Property in slaves should not be exposed to danger under a general government instituted for the protection of property.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: And William Davy of North Carolina ended the dance.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was high time, he said, to speak out.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: He saw that some gentlemen meant to deprive southern states of any share of representation for their slaves.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: North Carolina would never confederate on any terms that did not rate them at least three fifths.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: If the eastern states meant therefore to exclude them all together, the business was at an end.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Ellsworth, he said the small states would walk over the Senate.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Davy now said the South would walk over the fraction.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: The Convention had heard the sentence before and knew what it meant.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: That evening, the package was voted, representation by numbers, the slaves, and others to count as three fifths, direct taxation locked to the same count, a census within six years of the first meeting of the legislature, and within ten every year after.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: The vote?
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Six states to two, two divided.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: The federal ratio of seventeen eighty three was back, no longer a tax formula, no longer a representation formula, but both at once, each half holding the other in place.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: There was one more day of arithmetic.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: On july thirteenth, Governor Randolph moved to strike wealth as a basis of apportionment altogether.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Numbers of people, so counted, would be the whole rule, and the recount would be perpetual.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Representation would not be set once by men in the room and frozen.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: It would be retaken decade after decade, and the seats would move with the people.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Into the West, Governor Morrist had argued to keep waiting at the door.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: The finished constitution carries the whole statement in a single sentence of Article I.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: The representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among several states, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, please subscribe, leave a five star rating, and share this show with someone you think would enjoy listening.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.