Slave Nation (19 page)

Only one body, the House of Representatives, would be elected by the people of each state.
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The second and smaller body, the Senate, would be elected by the House of Representatives from among persons nominated by the state legislatures.
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On June 11, James Wilson of Pennsylvania and Charles Pinckney of South Carolina proposed that the three-fifths formula be applied to determine membership in the House of Representatives.
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This would give the slave-holding states a greater representation in the House than they would have if only whites were counted. The proposal passed in the committee, nine to two,
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but only after Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts asked, “Why should the blacks, who were property in the South, be in their rule of representation more than the cattle and horses of the North?”
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Nevertheless, Massachusetts supported the motion because the state would benefit. The result of this vote was that the states that contributed more to the federal budget would effectively dominate the House and the Senate because both were based on the same principle of representation. The large states and a few supporting states would control the Congress. The smaller states, foreseeing a loss of influence, immediately fought back.

Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut proposed that states have equal votes in the Senate. If not, “The smaller states would never agree to the plan.” Madison was adamant that giving the states equal voting power in any form would merely replicate the weakness of the Articles of Confederation. The Sherman-Ellsworth motion was defeated six to five. The larger free states plus the slave states ganged up on the smaller states.
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The small states obtained a day’s adjournment to consider what to do.

On June 15, Patterson presented the New Jersey Plan on behalf of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Luther Martin of Maryland.
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It insisted on an equal vote for each state in a single legislative body, as was the case under the Articles of Confederation.

This issue was debated until June 19, when the committee of the whole rejected the Patterson plan by seven votes—Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia—to three—New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, those states that had originally proposed it.
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The committee recommended that the Virginia plan be adopted. For ten more days, the convention debated inconclusively. Tempers and temperatures rose as the debate grew more heated inside the hall, as did the weather outside.

On June 28, Hugh Williamson of North Carolina added a new dimension to the debate. He:

begged that the expected addition of new states from the westward might be kept in view. They would be small states, they would be poor states, they would be unable to pay in proportion to their numbers; their distance from market rendering the produce of their labor less valuable; they would consequently be tempted to combine for the purpose of laying burdens on commerce and consumption which would fall with greatest weight on the old states.
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On the same day, Benjamin Franklin, whose experience and judgment, according to historian Walter Isaacson, “exemplified qualities of enlightenment, tolerance and pragmatic compromise,” expressed the frustration of the convention:
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The small progress we have made after four or five weeks close attendance and continual reasonings with each other—our different sentiments on almost every question, several of the last producing as many noes as ayes, is methinks a melancholy proof of the imperfection of the human understanding.…

    In this situation of this assembly, groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the father of lights to illuminate our understandings?

Franklin recommended prayer. When delegate Hugh Williamson of North Carolina pointed out that the Convention had no funds to pay a minister, the proposal was dropped.
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On Friday, June 29, the debate continued, culminating in a six to four vote rejecting the equality of states principle of the Articles of Confederation in the House and proposing that it be “according to some equitable ratio.”
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The six states voting against equal representation were Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia; the three largest states by population and the four slave states. The Convention was precisely at the same point it had been on June 14, before the Patterson plan for equal votes in the state legislature had been proposed. The Patterson plan was dead and at that point, small state representatives fought back to save equal representation for states in the Senate with their strongest weapon.

On Friday, June 29, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut moved to save some influence for the states. This time he moved that each state should have an equal vote in the Senate, and accepted a two house legislature as in the Virginia plan. Madison reported Ellsworth’s speech:

The proportional representation in the first branch was conformable to the federal principle and was necessary to secure the large states against the small. An equality of voices was conformable to the federal principle and was necessary to secure the small states against the large. He trusted that on this middle ground a compromise would take place. He did not see that it could on any other. And if no compromise should take place, our meting would not only be in vain but worse than in vain. To the eastward, he was sure that Massachusetts was the only state that would listen to a proposition for excluding the states as equal political societies, from an equal voice in both branches. The others would risk every consequence rather than part with so dear a right. An attempt to deprive them of it was at once cutting the body (of America) in two, and, as he supposed would be the case, somewhere about this part of it.
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Ellsworth may have used much more colorful language. Rufus King of Massachusetts reported that he had said, “the political body must be cut asunder at the Delaware.”
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Abraham Yates of New York reported that he said, “If the great states refuse this plan, we will be forever separated.”
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This was the strongest threat to split the country made by a northerner at the Convention. Ellsworth demanded an equal vote in both House and Senate for the states, but if the larger states insisted on proportional representation in both houses, he was willing to compromise on equality in one and proportionality in the other.

Suddenly, the entire convention was facing an abyss. They had come together to strengthen the union; now they were coming perilously close to dissolving it. They were all men of business, law, and politics. Division of the union threatened the economic and social stability of the states they represented, and of their own generally prosperous lifestyles.
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Southerners—who frequently used the threat themselves —had to take this threat seriously.
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They could ill afford to be cut loose from the northern states. They had not recovered from the brutal warfare in the later years of the war or the loss of a quarter of their slaves who had been liberated by the British. The South was economically and militarily weaker than it had been in 1774, compared to the North. It had been devastated by the later years of the war. It had no navy and it was exposed to hostile Native Americans, possible British meddling to the west, and the Spanish to the south. A division of the nation would have left it prey to external forces as well as to the risk of slave uprisings and poor white protests over debts as in Shays’s Rebellion.
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The next day, June 30, Madison responded to Ellsworth’s threat to split the union. His speech was the analytical and thoughtful Madison at his best. He had reached a new understanding of the real issue before the Convention. Since the beginning of the Convention, the dispute had appeared to be between small and large states. But it was really about slavery.

The States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but by other circumstances; the most material of which resulted partly from climate, but principally from (the effects of) their having or not having slaves. These two causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the U. States. It did not lie between the large and small states; it lay between the northern and southern. And if any defensive powers were necessary, it ought to be mutually given to these two interests.
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This powerful analysis from the most respected thinker at the Convention constituted the first public acknowledgment of the central role of slavery at the Convention. Even if it was overstated, it sank into the collective consciousness of the Convention. By July 14, Madison could report that his analysis had been accepted.

It seems now to be pretty well understood that the real difference of interests lay, not between the n(orthern) and southern states. The institution of slavery and its consequences formed the line of discrimination. There were five states in the South, eight on the northern side of this line.
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Madison may have exaggerated the slavery issue by suggesting it was the only difference between the states. But he made his point that it was the important issue before the Convention. The Convention had heard little concerning slavery prior to this time. Gerry’s statement of June 11—that if slaves were property, they should have no more votes than cattle and horses—is the only direct critical statement concerning slavery made between May 28 and June 30.
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Either Madison and the other note takers did not report such statements, or, more likely, they were made off the floor in social contacts between the delegates.
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We assume that most of the comments which were made on the record—everyone knew that Madison was taking copious notes—had first been discussed off the floor. We know that the delegates had a busy social life but we know little of the content of the conversations and discussions that took place because the delegates were sworn to secrecy. Particularly since some of the delegates did not know each other well it was likely that comments made on the record had been carefully thought out beforehand.
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Those informal antislavery comments must have been sufficiently strong that the southerners had to mount a major defense of their states’ rights position. These southern responses began on May 30, shortly after the convention convened.
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If the discussions about large versus small states scattered throughout the record really described differences between slave and free states, then there was extensive deliberation on the issue. Ellsworth’s threat to “cut the political body asunder” on June 29, along with Madison’s the next day that slavery was the central issue between the North and the South, forced the Convention to face the reality that the union of the colonies was likely to break up at the Convention.

Madison’s comment was a result of careful reflection, not a spontaneous expression. As the concluding lines of his statement indicated, he was searching for a balanced approach to the issue of slavery: “If any defensive powers were necessary, it ought to be mutually given to these two interests.”

Madison continued, in his notes:

He [Madison] was so strongly impressed with this important truth that he had been casting about in his mind for some expedient that would answer the purpose. The one which had occurred was that instead of proportioning the votes of the states in both branches to their respective numbers of inhabitants computing the slaves in the ration of five to three, they should be represented in one branch according to the number of free inhabitants only; and in the other according to the whole n[umber] counting the slaves as (if) free. By this arrangement the southern scale would have the advantage in one House, and the northern in the other. He had restrained from proposing this expedient by two considerations; one was his unwillingness to urge any diversity of interests on an occasion when it is but too apt to arise itself—the other was the inequality of powers that must be vested in the two branches, and which would destroy the equilibrium of interests.
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The thrust of Madison’s proposal—that the two houses of Congress could be based on different principles of representation—was a striking departure from the original Virginia plan that relied on a single principle of representation in both houses.
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But there was a problem: in one house he would count slaves as free men, upping the ante from three-fifths to counting all slaves the same as free people. Nevertheless, Madison’s analysis that the basic difference between the states was over slavery gave rise to the possibility of different ways to achieve a balance between these interests.

Ben Franklin pounced immediately on the possibilities of a new framework based on the Ellsworth and Madison statements:

The diversity of opinions turns on two points. If a proportional representation takes place, the small states contend their liberties will be in danger. If an equality of votes is to be put in place, the large states say their money will be in danger. When a broad table is to be made, and the edges (of the planks do not fit) the artist takes a little from both and makes a good joint. In like manner here both sides must part with some of their demands, in order that they may join in some accommodating proposition.
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He proposed equal numbers of delegates from each state to the Senate and that states have “equal suffrage” on three issues, all of which related directly to the ever-present concern of the South to protect slavery: (1) those issues involving individual state sovereignty; (2) where state authority over their own citizens might be diminished or augmented; and (3) where appointments to federal offices were subject to Senate confirmation.