Slavery Clauses in the U.S. Constitution

Context

At the beginning of the American Revolution slavery was legal in every one of the thirteen colonies. As early as the 1680s Quakers and Mennonites had challenged the morality of slavery, but very few other white Americans questioned slavery. In 1700 the Puritan lawyer Samuel Sewall published The Selling of Joseph, which argued that slavery was inconsistent with Christian values. However, other Puritans and most other mainstream Christians did not accept this premise. By the eve of the Revolution, Baptists, Methodists, and some New England Congregationalists and Unitarians opposed slavery on religious grounds, but most white Americans found no inconsistency between Christianity and ownership of slaves.

The growing religious opposition to slavery—especially among Quakers, Methodists, and some Baptists—dovetailed with mounting political antislavery sentiment immediately before and during the Revolution. As white Americans challenged the justice of Great Britain’s sovereignty over them, black Americans challenged the justice of slavery. Even before the Revolution, slaves in Massachusetts petitioned the colonial legislature to free them. The Revolution accelerated this growing opposition to slavery. The assertions of the Declaration of Independence—that we are all “created equal” and “endowed” with the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—led many Americans to question the morality and justice of slavery. In addition, from the moment the war began, slaves, especially in the North, moved to gain their own freedom. Throughout New England many masters manumitted their male slaves so that they could serve in the Revolutionary Army. In the South slaves ran away to armies on both sides. A few Patriot masters also freed their slaves.

During the war opposition to slavery took more concrete forms. In 1778 the people of Massachusetts rejected a proposed state constitution because it did not abolish human bondage. Two years late the people approved a constitution written largely by John Adams that began (in Article 1) with an assertion of universal liberty: “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.” A year later the state’s highest court confirmed, in Commonwealth v. Jennison (1781), that this clause had abolished slavery in the Bay State. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania the state legislature passed a gradual abolition law, which did not lead to an immediate end to slavery but set the stage for the institution to gradually disappear. In 1783 New Hampshire followed the Massachusetts model, abolishing slavery in its new Constitution and in 1784 both Connecticut and Rhode Island passed gradual abolition laws. During this period, residents of Vermont, which would become the fourteenth state, wrote a constitution that explicitly banned slavery in the state. At this time slavery was made strong and economically important in New York and New Jersey, where slaves made up more than 6 percent of the population.

Thus, when the Constitutional Convention began, the nation was slowly moving along the road to becoming, in the words of Abraham Lincoln in his “House Divided” speech (1858), “half slave and half free.” However, it was not yet “half free.” Slavery was still legal in eleven of the thirteen states, and the gradual abolition acts in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were experiments that had not yet fully ended bondage. Nevertheless, the delegates from the five biggest slave states—Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—feared that a stronger national government would threaten their most important economic and social and institution. Thus, from the beginning of the Constitutional Convention, they insisted on specific protections for slavery. They gained them, as noted, throughout the Constitution. In the end, slaves were counted for representation and for the election of the president, even though slaves could not vote. Congress was prohibited from ending the African slave trade before 1808 but was not required to do it then. The federal government promised to help suppress domestic insurrections, which for the South meant slave revolts. The structure of the Constitution made it extremely difficult to amend the document. The requirement that three-fourths of the states ratify an amendment gave the slave states what amounted to a perpetual veto over any constitutional amendment.

The two most important slavery-related issues at the convention were the counting of slaves for representation and the demands of the Deep South that the African slave trade be given special protection from the national legislature. Most delegates believed that if the new Congress had the power to regulate international commerce, it would ban the slave trade. The delegates debated these issues a number of times during the convention. What they said and how they voted reflected their own political inclinations. Virtually all of the southerners insisted on counting slaves for representation in Congress. Some demanded that slaves be counted fully, while others were willing to accept what became the three-fifths compromise. The African slave trade was more complicated. Delegates from the Deep South insisted on a clause to prevent the new Congress from closing the trade. Many of the delegates from the Chesapeake region opposed this on a variety of grounds. Some thought the trade was immoral (even though they were not ready to end slavery itself for this reason), and some thought it dangerous to bring new slaves from Africa to the nation. Equally important, by the end of the Revolution both Virginia and Maryland had a surplus of slaves and thus did not need the African trade; if the trade stopped, they could sell their extra slaves to the Deep South at higher prices.

Northern delegates were also split on the slavery issues, but in different directions. Some adamantly opposed counting slaves for purposes of representation not only on moral grounds but also because it would strengthen the South and thus weaken their own section in the Congress. Others were more willing to compromise on this issue. The same was true for the slave trade. New Englanders in the end were willing to join South Carolinians in protecting the slave trade because South Carolinians were willing to support their interest in allowing Congress to regulate all interstate and foreign commerce. Delegates from the Middle Colonies were less willing to compromise on what they considered a “nefarious” commerce.

Fifty-five delegates attended. Thirty-nine delegates remaining at the end of the convention signed the Constitution, and three refused to do so. More than half the delegates came from states that would maintain slavery until the Civil War, and more than half were also slave owners, including all of the delegates from Virginia and South Carolina and some from the North. The delegates differed substantially on slavery. Generally, the southern delegates were adamant in their desire to protect slavery, while the northerners were more willing to compromise to gain a stronger Union.

The debates over the Constitution reveal the way the Framers viewed slavery. Almost all the southerners, who made up more than half the delegates, were almost unanimous in support of counting slaves for representation and in other ways protecting slavery. The only issue they disagreed on was the African slave trade. The northerners were mostly opposed to slavery, but few were willing to risk confronting the South on this issue. Antislavery sentiment, such as it existed in the North, was confined to ending slavery in the northern states and to not interfering with slavery where it existed. Thus, at the insistence of slave owners, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention wrote slavery into the document.

When the Constitution was sent to the states for ratification, a number of opponents of the new form of government focused on the slavery provisions, especially those prohibiting Congress from ending the African slave trade. A New Yorker complained (in the New York Journal of January 22, 1788) that the Constitution condoned “drenching the bowels of Africa in gore, for the sake of enslaving its free-born innocent inhabitants.” The anonymous “Countryman from Duchess County,” another Antifederalist, sarcastically noted that the slave trade provision was an “excellent clause” for “an Algerian constitution: but not so well calculated (I hope) for the latitude of America.” Three Antifederalists in Massachusetts, writing to the Northampton Hampshire Gazette (April 1788), warned that “this lust for slavery [was] portentous of much evil in America, for the cry of innocent blood, … hath undoubtedly reached to the Heavens, to which that cry is always directed, and will draw down upon them vengeance adequate to the enormity of the crime.”

On the other side of the argument, southern supporters of the Constitution praised the document precisely because it protected slavery. In the Virginia ratifying convention, Edmund Randolph told the delegates they had nothing to fear from a stronger national government. He challenged opponents of the Constitution to show “Where is the part that has a tendency to the abolition of slavery?” He answered his own question in asserting, “Were it right here to mention what passed in [the Philadelphia] convention … I might tell you that the Southern States, even South Carolina herself, conceived this property to be secure” and that “there was not a member of the Virginia delegation who had the smallest suspicion of the abolition of slavery.” Similarly, Pinckney, who had been one of the ablest defenders of slavery at the Convention, proudly told the South Carolina House of Representatives: “In short, considering all circumstances, we have made the best terms for the security of this species of property it was in our power to make. We would have made better if we could; but on the whole, I do not think them bad.”