As the delegates to the convention debate the future of the country, they have to grapple with the contradiction that is presented by slavery.

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Hello, and welcome to the political history of the United States, episode 5.14, the bounds of Idealism.

When we wrapped up last time, we had just finished up the biggest single issue facing the Constitutional Convention, how representation in Congress would work, and had finished by looking at the Executive branch and how it would be finalized.

As I had mentioned last time, I'm not tackling the Convention in a purely chronological order.

The Constitutional Convention was often a disjointed and chaotic affair.

Delegates would passionately debate a topic to the point that everybody was sick to death of it, and then they would put it to a side and move on to something else.

Plus, even once they did decide on something, all that was required for them to reconsider it was for somebody to make the motion and somebody else to second it.

In this way, the Convention jumped around, often seemingly haphazardly.

As a result, rather than following a strictly chronological narrative here I have been doing my best to try and take the major arguments and stitch them together in order to make everything a bit more cohesive and understandable.

So first, understand that as the Convention moved along, all of these things are being talked about, often at overlapping times.

And second, the debates between these different issues were absolutely affecting each other.

I'm laying all of this out here again because there still remains an elephant in the East Room of Independence Hall.

Chiefly to this point, we have not spent any time talking about the institution of slavery.

Slavery is going to become the paramount political issue over the next 70 plus years.

Before we jump into how slavery was addressed at the Convention, I would like to spend some time looking at the institution of slavery in the United States at that point.

I have mentioned before, but I think it is worth exploring further that slavery was not a popular thing in the United States.

In due time, we are going to see men come on the scene like John C. Calhoun, who, as slavery came more and more under attack by northern states and abolitionist groups, would begin arguing that slavery was actually a good thing for all involved.

However, this is still a few decades away.

Even during the convention, we had seen James Madison make his speech where he talked about the evils of slavery and how it stood as a good example of what a majority abusing a minority could look like.

Although this made other delegates likely squirm in their seat a little bit, considering that many of them, Madison included, were the majority oppressing a minority, he was able to get away with it because those same men likely agreed with his statements.

None of them liked the institution of slavery and fully understood how inconsistent it was with the ideals of the revolution that they had just fought.

Despite this, however, they were unable to look past the economic implications to ever meaningfully consider doing something like emancipation.

There was a sense of either idealism or at the very least, optimism that eventually slavery would end up just fading away, doomed to a slow incremental death.

There was a real shame amongst many in the south for slavery.

George Washington himself wrote that it was his hope that there would be emancipation dealt out in imperceptible degrees.

In other words, Washington fully understood that slavery was so baked into the system at this point that pulling the rug out from underneath everybody and issuing blanket emancipation would never be a possibility.

Instead, he favored a system that worked so slowly that by the time slavery was abolished, nobody would really notice.

Although it is clear from the statement that Washington was no fan of slavery, it was likewise as clueless as everybody else when it came to figuring out just what you do with it.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

These are, of course, the opening lines to the Declaration of Independence, A document that, if taken to its logical conclusion, is directly contradicted by the institution of slavery.

That the author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, held some 600 people in bondage personally underscores that contradiction.

Thomas Jefferson was certainly aware of this contradiction and always was at least uneasy with the institution as a whole.

We know that he tacitly supported anti slavery movements.

Despite these feelings, though, it would be impossible to pretend that Thomas Jefferson was some kind of an abolitionist.

Sure, he hated the institution.

However, any support he gave against it was kept to a minimal amount, but he did his best to keep very quiet.

Jefferson claimed that his reluctance to come out more vocally against slavery was because he worried about how his endorsement of the anti slavery movement might be taken and thought that he might actually damage the movement.

Not to mention that it is impossible, if not outright ridiculous, to count a man who owned some 600 slaves as being the leader of an Anti slavery movement historian David Davis writes in his book Slavery in the Age of Revolution, that there were other prominent American leaders during these years that did vocally come out against slavery, who, like Jefferson, actively did, or at least had in the past, owned slaves.

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and Benjamin Franklin all fell into this camp.

The problem, however, as Davis points out, is that Hamilton, Jay and Franklin were all from northern states, where taking such a stance was far less controversial.

In the south, the anti slavery movement took on a sense of subversiveness that Jefferson simply was unwilling to wade into.

Jefferson would end up, especially moving towards the second half of his life, taking a position that agreed that slavery was a bad institution and that it did need to go, however that can would need to be kicked down the road because the people are just not ready for such dramatic action.

At least not yet.

If all of this sounds to you like Jefferson mostly spent his time just sidestepping the issue, I think that is probably a pretty good take.

Jefferson would continually claim that he abhorred the institution.

However, at no time did he take any actions that might speed up its demise.

For a people who were interested in, as Washington put it, the incremental, virtually imperceptible abolishment of it, they were leaning real hard on the imperceptible part.

Jefferson's view on slavery was far more along the lines of a strong theoretical support for the abolitionist movement, with absolutely no interest in meaningful follow up any time in his life.

He had a particular knack for avoiding it altogether.

None of this is meant to pick on Jefferson in particular either, but rather to explore just what the sentiment towards slavery in the south was during the Constitutional Convention.

Thomas Jefferson was not unique in his feelings towards slavery.

There were a whole lot of slave owners, Madison and Washington amongst them, that hated the institution and fully understood the contradictions that existed between the meaning of the revolution and the holdings of humans in bondage.

That the founding generation could not work their way through this quagmire maybe should not come as a surprise, as subsequent generations would prove just as incapable of living up to that task.

We of course know that slavery will not die a quiet, imperceptible death, but rather it is literally going to tear the country in two and send everybody hurtling towards the darkest moment in American history.

Before we move on, I did want to make a comment about this discussion here today.

I want to be clear that nothing I'm doing here is meant to provide a moral examination of slavery.

My goal with this podcast is and will remain giving you all the most accurate rendition of history that I can write in an understandable way.

Slavery and how it fits in is a tremendously complicated subject.

I'm attempting to provide some insight into how these men dealt with such an obvious contradiction.

At the same time, though, I'm not exonerating anybody from the stain of slavery.

I'm providing you with all of the facts that I can and I will leave it to all of you to cast any moral judgments that you may see fit Even before the Revolution, there was increasing momentum in the Northern states to abolish slavery.

However, it still does speak to the growing sentiment in many of the Northern states.

I think it should be considered that it was always going to be easier for the northern states to act against slavery in general.

We have discussed on multiple occasions that the economy of New England and the Mid Atlantic states was not so directly built on the backbone of slavery.

The Southern plantations required a lot of labor, and so long as slavery was legal in any of those Southern states, it would be impossible for the others to compete should they abolish it.

What this means, therefore, is, is that whereas the Northern states had that advantage where they could more or less dismantle slavery in a more piecemeal fashion, the Southern states really never had that ability.

It never really mattered all that much for Massachusetts.

If New Jersey abolished slavery, there was not really much of an economic disadvantage for either state to act alone on the matter.

However, if, say, North Carolina decided to abolish the practice and stand alone in the south, it would put them at a tremendous economic disadvantage.

However, those efforts were largely stymied by the British victory at Ticonderoga.

This is something that we had talked about back in episode 4.44.

Although it was a temporary victory for the pro slavery groups, Massachusetts was moving in a direction away from slavery.

By the beginning of the Revolution.

Already, Massachusetts would take a somewhat more meandering road towards the emancipation of their slaves, when as a part of the new state constitution, they declared that all men were born free and equal.

Now, although there is similar language in the declaration of independence, the mood across the country was obviously not one conducive to wide scale emancipation.

A few years after the new declaration of rights was put into effect, Fort slaves would test out the new Massachusetts constitution and see just how far local judges were willing to take things.

The case that would finally push things to meaningful change was a criminal case whereby a slave by the name of quack Walker sued his owner, Nathaniel Jennison, for assault.

Following an incident where Jennison beat Walker for attempting to escape.

Jennison was quick to admit that, yeah, he had indeed beat Walker.

However, that was well within his right as a slave owner.

Walker argued that based on the state's declaration of rights, he was not a slave because all men were born free and equal.

The court's chief justice, William Cushing, agreed with Walker's argument and gave the jury an instructed verdict.

A verdict where a judge tells the jury what they should find.

That based on the state's constitution, slavery as an institution was banned in Massachusetts.

As a result, Denison was not acting within his rights as a slave owner, as slavery was illegal in the state and therefore the jury should find him guilty.

The jury went along with Cushing and just like that, the Massachusetts courts had outlawed slavery throughout the state.

Although this was a monumental ruling, it did not outright free the slaves, Nor did it move anybody towards a gradual emancipation, as would be the path that other states took.

However, the case had laid down the necessary precedent for slaves to sue their owners for their freedom.

Many Massachusetts slave owners, when threatened with a lawsuit by their slaves, Just went ahead and freed them proactively, Knowing that the lawsuits were expensive and that the law likely meant that they were going to lose anyway.

Pennsylvania would abolish slavery through what they believed was going to be a process of slow emancipation.

The plan called for any enslaved person born following the date of the passage of the act to serve a 28 year apprenticeship to the mother's owner.

The problem was that in virtually all of these cases, these plans would prove to be so gradual that they effectively would just hit a point where they stalled out.

Only their unborn children had hopes of eventually legally escaping bondage.

However, as compensation to their owners, they would have to serve another 10 years in bondage.

This was a common occurrence throughout many of the northern states.

Even though state legislatures in the north and several of the mid Atlantic states were willing to consider and pass laws for gradual emancipation, this process was oftentimes painfully slow, sometimes to the point of requiring future legislation to actually get the job done once and for all.

Likewise, it is important to understand that emancipation did not mean that racial prejudices also faded away.

None of these states offered any kind of meaningful support system.

Once they were released from their servitude.

These now freed blacks were completely on their own.

There was, to be sure, something of a sense of idealism that ran throughout all of the states during the late 18th century.

Southern delegates at the Constitutional Convention truly did seem to dislike the institution of slavery.

Yet they remained unable to convert that idealism into anything much resembling meaningful action.

Yet that was about as far as anybody in the south was willing to go.

George Washington, incidentally, would take this route for freeing his slaves.

However, their emancipation was conditional upon both his and Martha Washington's death.

She would, about a year after George Washington died, free his slaves when she became worried that maybe somebody yearning for freedom might just take the option to speed up her own demise and satisfy that one last condition.

It is worth noting, however, that we are only talking about George Washington's slaves, as Martha Washington did not extend the same emancipation to her own slaves.

As historian David Davis points out, emancipation was always a question that was fraught with problems.

He writes that although the northern states were more likely to allow for gradual emancipation, either through legislative or judicial decisions, those Ideals, even in the northern states, still had their limits.

Despite their willingness to allow slavery to die in New England, there was absolutely no action taken to divest their economies from the lucrative markets of the West Indies.

Way back, and I really do mean way back, in episode 1.29, we talked about how the Massachusetts economy, although not requiring slave labor to the degree that the southern colonies did, was still dependent on supplying those slave populations in the West Indies with B grade fish to eat, as it had been since the very early years of the colony.

This was still an important revenue source for Massachusetts, and one that they were not about to let some pesky ideals dissuade them from continuing to be a major provider to the West Indies.

The problem was that slavery was in so many ways the ultimate contradiction to the Revolution.

While there was a true commitment of the founding generation to the ideals of freedom and liberty, there was an equally strong commitment to property rights.

The war had been, at its most basic level, won over the rights of property in America via taxation.

The British Parliament was seizing American property without the due representation of American colonists in that body.

You can go back and listen to the first 30 or so episodes of season four if you need a refresher.

Returning again here to historian David Davis, whom I've obviously relied upon heavily here today.

Imagine the pushback that would exist if the government came along today and just eliminated ownership over some kind of personal property.

Think for a moment what would happen if the government came out and announced that that in order to curb global warming, they were going to go ahead and outlaw cars and trucks.

They would of course, let you continue to use your existing vehicle for another few years, but eventually those would also become illegal.

Even now there is considerable pushback in places where they have begun to announce the phase out in the coming decades of the internal combustion engine in exchange for electric vehicles.

I don't think that it is a stretch to say that if the government ever tried to eliminate this form of property, there would be very wide scale pushback.

Now, to be very clear, this is not meant to create a moral equivalency between cars and humans being held in bondage.

Rather, the point is that people are very protective over their personal property, and in the late 18th century and in the decades to follow, this included human property.

Broad emancipation would, just as much as the British had back during the imperial crisis, constitute government interference.

With the sacred rights of private property.

Remember that in the original draft of the declaration of independence, Jefferson had written about those unalienable rights, which included life, liberty, and property.

Although Franklin would suggest changing property to happiness in the final draft, I think the point remains.

Slave owners would tell you that broad emancipation threatened their rights to property, Whereas for the enslaved, it was their rights to liberty and indeed life that were being denied.

Even in the northern states, the death of the institution of slavery was slow and often painful.

This was in places where the economics were nowhere near as dependent on the practice as in the south.

In the southern states, the roadblocks that existed Made any meaningful push towards emancipation that much more difficult.

Despite any amount of dislike for the institution amongst the slave owner class, these questions are not going anywhere for a very long time.

And indeed, they are going to quickly become the predominant political question facing the United States in the decades to come.

Okay, with that primer now out of the way, I want to wrap up today by looking at how the delegates at the constitutional convention would address slavery.

The convention left the delegates with several key questions that they had to answer over the future of slavery.

The first, and probably most morally dubious that I want to look at Is the question of exactly how representation was to be doled out.

With it now settled that the house would be a representative body, the question became just how enslaved people would count towards the overall population.

This, however, was never a terribly controversial decision.

The southern states did make a brief attempt to convince everybody that a slave should count as a full person, Something which would have greatly increased their own amount of representation.

Unsurprisingly, the northern states quickly balked at the prospect.

The southern states seemed to be pretty aware that full representation for their slaves was not in the cards.

And this never became really that hard of a thought issue.

We are left, therefore, with the question of exactly how it was decided that a slave was going to be counted as three fifths of a person.

Going all the way back to the drafting on the articles of confederation, it was suggested that slaves be counted as a fraction of a total person.

When it came to the question of population, this would prove to be important, as those requisitions that Congress was making to the states Was based upon a state's total population.

The higher the population, the more money that you are going to owe.

Not that anybody actually paid those requests, but, you know, it's nice to keep those bills low.

Per year.

This 1.5 million was to be divided amongst the states proportionally to their populations.

At the time, there had been a debate, with the north seeking to have the slaves count as a full person and the south arguing that they should not count at all.

It was James Madison, here, acting as a congressional delegate, that suggested the compromise of counting the slaves as three fifths a person.

Madison would later admit that the number was mostly just picked out of nothing.

There was no rational basis behind it.

When the vote came in, only Delaware and New Jersey stood opposed.

The opposition to the three fifths clause that did exist came as a matter of northern states trying to minimize the representation of the southern states.

I bring this up to say that nobody seemed to have any real qualms with the morality of.

Of counting an enslaved person as being less than a full person.

Native Americans, at the same time, it was decided, would not be counted at all.

Although the decision on how to count the slaves did not prove to be controversial, and by all regards, nobody made much of an attempt to do anything about the institution of slavery.

The southern states still wanted guarantees that slavery would be in no way interfered with.

Led by South Carolina, they wanted assurances that the slave trade would be protected, even if only temporarily, and that further slaves being imported would not be taxed as imports.

On August 6, the Committee of detail returned with several additions.

Regarding slavery, there were built in protections for the south, limiting the ability of Congress to tax or in any way interfere with the importation of slaves, while further allowing them to export goods without taxes.

For the agricultural south, this guarantee of protection of export taxes was a huge boon.

The south was, by a very large margin, the nation's leading center of exports.

Protection from export taxes was a huge economic boost to the southern economies.

It therefore should not come as a surprise that such concessions caused the northern states to raise an eyebrow.

Rufus King of Massachusetts would suddenly find himself a whole lot less excited about the already agreed upon three fifths compromise, seeing as how it sure seemed like the southern states were getting a whole lot with very little benefit coming back to the north.

King argued that by crippling the ability of Congress to regulate the slave trade while at the same time counting a state's enslaved population in any way towards that state's representation, it meant that, in effect, a state could purchase a house majority.

Now, with the door open, Gouverneur Morris, who himself was a fairly ardent abolitionist, launched into a tirade over the evils of slavery and called out the three fifths clause for both political reasons as well as for its inherent immorality.

However, as Madison biographer Noah Feldman points out, Morris was stopping short here of calling for the outright abolition of slavery.

Rather, the argument that he was making was that it made little sense that the states that had abolished the evil practice of slavery would somehow end up with less of a voice than the slave holding states.

In other words, oh, you're importing slaves.

Cool.

Have some extra congressional delegates while we're at it.

Despite making otherwise sound arguments, nobody was really on board with most of what Morris was proposing.

And quickly his brief attack on the three fists clause fell flat, with only New Jersey voting yes on the proposal.

Although the three fifths clause was seemingly safe, the question over that export tariff continued to be a sticking point for the convention.

The problem is that the question of the tariff had become tied directly to Congress's ability to control the slave trade.

This meant that every time they decided to wander into the waters of export tariffs, they found themselves stuck in a debate over slavery.

Amongst the biggest proponents of ending the slave trade outright was Virginia's George Mason, himself a major slave owner.

Mason bristled at the idea of allowing the slave trade to remain in perpetuity.

Now, although this may seem counterintuitive, Mason's arguments here were hardly unique.

Sure, an unchecked slave trade might mean that the Southern states could effectively purchase a House majority.

However, that also put them in a position of having to deal with their worst nightmares.

We have talked several times about how all slave owners slept with one eye open, always on guard, just in case their slaves decided to slit their throats while they slept.

The unchecked importation of slaves would risk the balance between the white owner class and the enslaved population.

Should too many people be imported, it greatly increased the risk posed by a potential slave rebellion.

Back during the Imperial Crisis, imports of slaves were halted to prevent this very thing from happening.

This is something that we had talked about back in episode 4.10 and again in episode 4.15.

Mason would further tack on an argument that slavery further hurt the economy as it sapped white productivity.

Oliver Ellsworth called Mason out on this, pointing out that it was awfully hypocritical for a guy who owned some 300 slaves to attack slavery.

Ellsworth suggested, more tongue in cheek than serious proposal, that based on what Mason was saying, maybe they should just go ahead and eliminate slavery altogether.

This back and forth was then interrupted by Charles pinckney, who pointed out that can slavery really be all that bad if the greeks and the romans did it?

Slavery was a fact of life.

Everybody did it, and everybody had indeed always done it.

So why is everybody getting so worked up in here over it?

With everybody indeed getting pretty worked up, the delegates decided to turn to the most surefire way to settle this contentious issue.

As we have seen a few times now, they decided that this question needed to head to a committee.

The committee was going to look at the question of slaves, as well as the related question of export tariffs.

Just two days later, the committee came back with a compromise that at least they hoped would knock out the final sticking points.

Taxes could be levied on imported slaves, but those taxes could not exceed the average amount of duties on all other imports, Although by the final draft, even this proved to be too cumbersome, and they simply agreed that the tax could not exceed $10 per person.

The delegates also made a whole lot of effort here to avoid using the word slave, Recognizing that maybe that was not the best sounding thing to throw into a constitution that was purportedly designed to protect individual liberties.

As far as export duties went, the compromise agreed that those were going to be prohibited.

The delegates to the constitutional convention were an idealistic bunch.

They genuinely did not approve of the institution of slavery.

Yet, as we have discussed at length today, there were bounds on the idealism of the delegates.

Sure, yes, the delegates hated the institution and thought that it was a moral failing.

With the possible exception of Charles pinckney, who basically just shrugged and pointed out that this is how everybody had always done things, the delegates took steps to sanitize the new constitution that they were writing from explicitly bearing the stain of slavery.

By making sure that the word never actually appeared in the text, they cared enough to make speeches and pronouncements of their most ardent desires that someday the United states would be free of the scourge of slavery, so long as it wasn't today.

The problem, of course, is that this was the limit of their idealism.

Even in the northern states, we saw the difficulty that came with often painfully slow emancipation.

Everybody was happy to say the right words, but when it came to action, well, that was in far shorter supply.

The delegates to the constitutional convention, try as they might to keep explicit mentions of slavery out of the final document, failed to take any action that might one day accomplish bringing about an end to the institution that they all claimed to hate so much.

As we are going to see, and as I'm sure you already know, there will never be a gradual abolition of slavery in the southern states.

Rather, the process is going to prove to be one of often unimaginable violence and brutality that is going to force the United States to endure its darkest chapter.

Next time, we are going to return to the convention for a final time as the delegates reach an uneasy agreement on the constitution.

With the document now completed, the real challenge would follow getting the states to ratify it.

Until then, I hope you all have a fantastic two weeks.

I hope that you are staying healthy and that you are staying safe, and I will see you back here next time.

As the states begin the process of ratification.