Slavery Clauses in the U.S. Constitution

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The Constitution was not written by any single individual. James Madison of Virginia is often called “the Father of the Constitution,” because he worked tirelessly at the convention and kept notes of the debates. When the convention began, Edmund Randolph of Virginia, the governor of the state at the time, introduced the “Virginia Plan,” which became the basis for debate. Madison most likely drafted the Virginia Plan (also sometimes called the “Randolph Plan”), but the final Constitution differed significantly from the Virginia Plan. It was, in the end, truly the work of the convention.

A few delegates strongly opposed slavery. Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania was the president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, the most active and important antislavery society in the country. Although he had owned a few slaves during his life, using them as house servants, by this time he was adamantly opposed to human bondage. Alexander Hamilton of New York was a founding member of the New York Manumission Society, the main antislavery organization in his state. Hamilton had grown up on the Caribbean island of Nevis, where he had seen slavery throughout his childhood. He moved to New York as a teenager to attend school and was forever an opponent of slavery. Gouverneur Morris was the convention’s most vocal opponent of slavery. Morris came from a very wealthy family with landholdings in New York and New Jersey but represented Pennsylvania at the convention. Morris’s grandfather Lewis Morris had once been the largest slaveholder in the Middle Colonies, with more than sixty-five slaves. But Gouverneur Morris vigorously opposed the compromises over slavery, especially the slave-trade provisions. On the floor of the convention he tied counting slaves for representation to the clause protecting the African slave trade, noting

When fairly explained [it] comes to this: that the inhabitant 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 a Government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind, than the Citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice.

Most of the other northern delegates were ambivalent about slavery. They understood that slavery was an important institution in the South, and they were prepared to compromise when southerners demanded special protection for the institution. A handful of the northern delegates owned a few slaves, as household servants. In the end most of the northern states voted to support the three-fifths clause; on the final vote over the slave trade provision, three New England states joined the South in preventing Congress from ending the trade before 1808. The strongest support on this issue came from Connecticut, where at least one of the delegates, John Dickinson of Delaware, argued that protecting the slave trade was “inadmissible on every principle of honor and safety.” (He owned slaves but disliked his status as “master” and would eventually free them.) James Madison said this provision was “dishonorable to the National character” and would “produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves.” But New Englanders saw it differently, as they voted to support South Carolina’s demand for protection for the trade. Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, who would later become chief justice of the United States, refused to debate the “morality or wisdom of slavery,” simply asserting that “what enriches a part enriches the whole.” When one southerner pointed out that the trade would produce immoral results, he replied that he “had never owned a slave” and thus declared that he “could not judge of the effects of slavery on character.” Roger Sherman, also from Connecticut, backed the slave trade because he wanted South Carolina to support the new Constitution. He argued that “the public good did not require” an end to the trade and that “it was expedient to have as few objections as possible” to the new Constitution. Indeed, none of the northern delegates favored slavery, but most thought it expedient to support the demands of the South to protect it.

By 1787 George Washington had privately committed himself to freeing his own slaves when he died—an unusual act at the time. He also vowed never to buy or sell another slave. James Madison would never free any of his slaves, but he was deeply uncomfortable with the institution, as were George Wythe and James McClurg of Virginia. Still, almost all the southerners supported counting slaves for representation. The only real division among them was on the slave trade. A majority of the delegates from Virginia and Delaware opposed protecting the slave trade, while the Maryland delegation was split.

The delegates from the Deep South had no qualms about slavery or the slave trade. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the leader of the South Carolina delegation, owned huge numbers of slaves and was committed to preserving and protecting the institution. So, too, was his younger cousin, Charles Pinckney, and his fellow planter Pierce Butler, who would later become a U.S. senator. During the debate over the slave trade, Charles Pinckney defused moral arguments with historical references. Citing ancient Rome and Greece, Pinckney declared that slavery was “justified by the example of all the world.” In demanding that slaves be counted equally with whites for purposes of representation, Butler argued that “the labour of a slave in South Carolina was as productive and valuable as that of a freeman in Massachusetts.” Reflecting the nonegalitarian ideas of slave-owning South Carolina, Butler argued that since the national government “was instituted principally for the protection of property,” slaves should be counted fully for representation.