Dark Bargain
Dark Bargain
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SLAVERY, PROFITS,
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AND THE STRUGGLE
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FOR THE CONSTITUTION
LAWRENCE GOLDSTONE
Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Goldstone
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Art Credits
Frontispiece: National Archives. Library of Congress.
Independence National Historic Park.
New York Public Library.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this book as follows:
Goldstone, Lawrence, 1947-
Dark bargain : slavery, profits, and the stuggle for the Constitution / Lawrence Goldstone.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. United States. Constitutional Convention (1787)—History. 2. Constitutional history—United States. 3. Slavery—Law and legislation—United States—History. 4- United States—Politics and governmental783-1789. I. Title.
KF4510.G65 2005
342.73202'9—dc22
2005042315
First published in the United States in 2005 by Walker & Company
This paperback edition published in 2006
eISBN: 978-0-802-71836-5
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For Nancy and Emily
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE Fulcrum
PART I Reluctant Nation
1. Devil in the Mist
2. Reluctant Nation: The Articles of Confederation
3. Rabble in Black and White: Insurrection
4. Taming the West: The Ohio Company of Virginia
PART II Four Architects
5. Sorcerer's Apprentice: Virginia and the Upper South
6. Gold in the Swamps: South Carolina, Rice, and the Lower South
7. The Value of a Dollar: Connecticut
PART III Supreme Law of the Land
8. Philadelphia: The Convention Begins
9. June: The Colloquium
10. Slavery by the Numbers: The Mathematics of Legislative Control
11. Sixty Percent of a Human Being
12. Balancing Act: Two Great Compromises
13. Not a King, But What?
14. Details
15. Dark Bargain: The Slave Trade and Other Commerce
16. Closing the Deal: September
17. Supreme Law of the Land
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Dark Bargain
PROLOGUE
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Fulcrum
On the morning of Thursday, January 17,1788, General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney rose to address his colleagues in the South Carolina General Assembly. One of the state's most distinguished and respected citizens, famed for his exploits in both peace and war, the general was a fourth-generation Carolinian who could trace his lineage to a vassal of William the Conqueror.
Born in 1746, son of a future chief justice of the South Carolina courts, Pinckney had been sent to Oxford to study law, where he read with the great legal theorist William Blackstone. He had returned to set up his own practice, but soon joined the struggle for independence as an aide-de-camp to General Washington. Pinckney won quick promotion and in 1780 was one of the officers charged with resisting the British siege at Charleston. Even in the face of overwhelming force, he had advocated fighting on, only agreeing to surrender after intense persuasion by his fellow officers. As a result, he spent the next year as a British prisoner of war. When his captors tried to persuade him to change sides, Pinckney said, "If I had a vein that did not beat with the love of my Country, I myself would open it. If I had a drop of blood that could flow dishonourable, I myself would let it out."1
For all his lineage and fame, however, on that January morning in 1788, General Pinckney, described as "an indifferent Orator,"2 faced possibly the greatest challenge of his life. The debate he was about to join, which had begun the previous day and would continue for two more, was crucial not only to the future of his state, but quite possibly would determine the very survival of the fledgling nation he had battled for and been imprisoned to secure. The subject was whether to call a convention to ratify the proposed new Constitution.
The Constitution had been drafted the previous summer in Philadelphia, fifty-five men from twelve states participating in often rancorous debate on how best to rescue the United States from the obviously inadequate Articles of Confederation.* General Pinckney, along with his younger cousin Charles,3 had been one of the four delegates chosen to represent South Carolina.
According to the plan that had emerged from the convention, nine states would have to ratify the new Constitution if the Articles were to be replaced. Fulcrum By the time the South Carolina legislature took up the question of whether to authorize a ratifying convention, five states had already approved the document and conventions to take up the question were scheduled in a number of others. Still, adoption was very much in doubt. Intense opposition existed in New York, and ratification was far from certain in Massachusetts. Virginia, perhaps the most important state in the Union in terms of wealth and strategic location, would not even meet to consider the new Constitution for months, and sentiment in the Old Dominion was not encouraging. Virginia's governor, Patrick Henry, a rabid opponent of ratification, was already famous for his refusal to even attend the convention. "I smelt a rat," he had noted with typical understatement. If the South Carolina legislature declined to call a ratifying convention, it could well start a cascade of rejection.
Many South Carolinians were leery of ceding local prerogative to a central government, particularly one that might be dominated by the North. Under the Articles, each state voted as a unit, and at least nine votes were required to pass even the most basic legislation. As a result, the five southern states effectively maintained veto power over any measure that might be rammed through by the eight states to the north. Under the voting rules of the new Constitution, that blanket veto would be lost. Fear that tyranny and despotism were therefore just around the corner had to be overcome if South Carolina were to approve the new Constitution.
Heading the opposition was a figure of equal stature, Rawlms Lowndes, who had been South Carolina's second president.4 At the close of the Wednesday session, Lowndes had insisted that while "he believed the gentlemen that went from this state to represent us in Convention possessed as much integrity, and stood as high in point of character, as any gentlemen that could have been selected," the plan would be a disaster.5
"It has been said that this new government was to be considered as an experiment," Lowndes had said.* "He really was afraid it would prove a fatal one to our peace and happiness. An experiment! What, risk the loss of political existence on experiment! So far from having any expectation of success from such experiments, he sincerely believed that, when
this new Constitution should be adopted, the sun of the Southern States would set, never to rise again."6
Lowndes's proclamation had ended a day of long and grueling debate. It had begun with Charles Pinckney, the general's cousin, giving a lengthy description of the plan that had emerged the previous September. The younger Pinckney, headstrong and brilliant—he had lied about his age so as to appear to be the youngest delegate in Philadelphia—had spoken for most of the morning. When he finally concluded his remarks, the delegates had eschewed a paragraph-by-paragraph reading of the new Constitution, but had instead launched immediately into a debate on the aspect of the plan that they found most frightening. Since, as one of the representatives put it, the president of the United States "was not likely ever to be chosen from South Carolina or Georgia" ( a prediction that remained accurate for almost two centuries),7 executive power seemed to be of the most concern. Curiously, of all the powers of the presidency, it was the authority to negotiate treaties on which the delegates focused.
Almost the entire afternoon was spent discussing the treaty power, both in terms of its being binding on individual states and the need for a two-thirds vote in the Senate to ratify. Still, there was a surprising lack of specifics as to just what sort of treaties the South Carolinians found most objectionable. Instead, the debate was conducted on a philosophical plane, filled with comparisons to other governments—England and France, especially—and the theoretical dangers of treaty making and the potential for despotism. Then, just before the delegates were to adjourn for the day, Lowndes rose to speak, and the meaning of the previous debates became clear.
"The interest of the Northern States would so predominate, as to divest us of any pretensions to the title of a republic," he protested. "In the first place, what cause was there for jealousy of our importing negroes? Why confine us to twenty years* or rather why limit us at all? For his part, he thought this trade could be justified on the principles of religion, humanity, and justice; for certainly to translate a set of human beings from a bad country to a better, was fulfilling every part of these principles.8 But they don't like our slaves, because they have none themselves, and therefore want to exclude us from this great advantage. Why should the Southern States allow of this . . . ?"
Slavery, as Lowndes made clear, was at the very heart of the matter. "Without negroes, this state is one of the most contemptible in the Union . . . Negroes were our wealth, our only natural resource; yet behold how our kind friends in the north were determined soon to tie up our hands, and drain us of what we had!"
The session ended and the delegates were left to spend the night pondering a South Carolina in which, because of treaties with foreign powers or Congressional fiat, slavery had withered away or had been prohibited altogether. Thus, when General Pinckey rose to speak on Thursday morning, he likely felt that in order to save the United States, he had to persuade his fellow Carolinians of what he himself was already convinced and had struggled for four long months to achieve—that the new Constitution did, in fact, protect and even encourage the institution of slavery.
He immediately went on the attack, refuting Lowndes point by point. Due to the rule of secrecy under which the debates in Philadelphia had been conducted, only the general and the other three members of the South Carolina delegation had any idea of what had actually been said, and all of them favored the plan. He was therefore able to both slant his description of the proceedings and assure his suspicious fellow planters that the Yankees were not the conniving ogres that Lowndes had made them out to be. The northerners, in fact, General Pinckney observed, had turned out to be a group of quite reasonable fellows, eager to find middle ground.
When, for example, he described the compromise over apportionment, the general noted, "As we have found it necessary to give very extensive powers to the federal government both over the persons and estates of the citizens, we thought it right to draw one branch of the legislature immediately from the people, and that both wealth and numbers should be considered in the representation. We were at a loss, for some time, for a rule to ascertain the proportionate wealth of the states. At last we thought that the productive labor of the inhabitants was the best rule for ascertaining their wealth."
Not having been present in Philadelphia, Lowndes and the other opponents of the plan could not have known that this statement was patently false, that wealth had been repeatedly rejected as a means of apportionment, and productive labor had never been seriously considered as a standard.
"In conformity to this rule, joined to a spirit of concession," General Pinckney went on, "we determined that representatives should be apportioned among the several states, by adding to the whole number of free persons three fifths of the slaves. We thus obtained a representation for our property; and I confess I did not expect that we had conceded too much to the Eastern States, when they allowed us a representation for a species of property which they have not among them."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
This was, once again, less than a fully accurate account. Northern acquiescence in allowing slaves to be counted in apportionment of legislators was a victory for southerners, to be sure, but Pinckney and the rest of the South Carolina delegation had continually urged that slaves be counted in full and been rebuffed not just by northerners, but even by their slaveholding brethren in Virginia and Maryland.
"The first House of Representatives will consist of sixty-five members," the general continued. "South Carolina will send five of them. Each state has the same representation in the Senate that she has at present; so that South Carolina will have, under the new Constitution, a thirteenth share in the government, which is the proportion she has under the old Confederation: and when it is considered that the Eastern States are full of men, and that we must necessarily increase rapidly to the southward and south-westward, I do not think that the Southern States will have an inadequate share in the representation. The honorable gentleman alleges that the Southern States are weak. I sincerely agree with him. We are so weak that by ourselves we could not form a union strong enough for the purpose of effectually protecting each other. Without union with the other states, South Carolina must soon fall."
When Pinckney moved on to the most volatile issue of all, that of the slave trade, he was on firmer ground. "By this settlement we have secured an unlimited importation of negroes for twenty years. Nor is it declared that the importation shall be then stopped; it may be continued."*
"I am of the same opinion now as I was two years ago . . . that, while there remained one acre of swampland uncleared of South Carolina, I would raise my voice against restricting the importation of negroes. I am as thoroughly convinced as that gentleman is, that the nature of our climate, and the flat, swampy situation of our country, obliges us to cultivate our lands with negroes, and that without them South Carolina would soon be a desert waste."
General Pinckney then persuasively summed up the many advantages that the new Constitution offered to slaveholders. "We have a security that the general government can never emancipate them, for no such authority is granted; and it is admitted, on all hands, that the general government has no powers but what are expressly granted by the Constitution, and that all rights not expressed were reserved by the several states. We have obtained a right to recover our slaves in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before. 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."
Immediately after the general ended his remarks and took his seat, another legislator, Dr. David Ramsay, observed that he "thought our delegates had made a most excellent bargain for us, by transferring an immense sum of Continental debt, which we were pledged to pay, upon the Eastern States, some of whom (Connecticut, for instance) could not expect to receive any material advantage from us. He considered the old Confederation as dissolve
d."
Lowndes continued to oppose the Constitution personally, but Pmckney's performance had been powerful and persuasive. When the vote to call a ratifying convention was held a day later, it passed unanimously. Even Lowndes himself was forced to grudgingly acknowledge that perhaps South Carolina should allow a ratifying convention to consider the plan. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney had convinced the planters of South Carolina. Acting in the interest of their social system, slaveholders had helped preserve the chance of union.
*Rhode Island—"Rogue's Island" to some—by this time dominated by what was popularly seen as a radical agrarian government, had refused to send a delegation.
*Both in the records of legislative meetings and the notes to the Constitutional Convention, speakers were often referred to in the third person by whoever was taking the notes. Although en countering a speaker referred to as "he" takes some getting used to, for accuracy and to give a flavor of the proceedings, these records will always be cited as written. In this case, for example, the "he" in the following sentence is Lowndes himself and the statement is a quote, not a paraphrase. This treatment will be adhered to with respect to convention delegates as well. Therefore, unless specifically noted to the contrary, quoted passages will always be those of the speaker indicated.
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