I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war; been loaded with class rates, town rates, province rates, Continental rates and all rates...been pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less than they were worth....
The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers.28
The rich and powerful that ruled America decided to close ranks and try to resolve their differences in order to establish a strong, central state. A veteran of George Washington’s army, General Henry Knox, founded an organization of army veterans who would be on alert for signs of rebellion from below. As Knox wrote to Washington in 1786 of Shay’s Rebellion:
The people who are insurgents have never paid any, or but very little taxes—But they see the weakness of government; They feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to remedy the former. Their creed is “That the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all. And he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equity and justice, and ought to be swept off the face of the earth.”29
At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the rich and powerful gathered to debate and settle their differences. The convention brought together fifty-five men, many of whom were slaveholders and some of whom considered themselves abolitionists. The question of slavery loomed large. As James Madison put it, in many of the debates “the institution of slavery and its consequences formed the line of discrimination.”30 The Constitution was a compromise between slaveholding interests in the South and moneyed interests in the North.
The Southern ruling class knew that its wealth and power derived almost exclusively from their ownership of slaves. The South Carolina delegation expressed this sentiment with the utmost clarity and with no hint of embarrassment. Without slaves, stated General Pinckney, “South Carolina would soon be a desert waste.” Speaking against ratification of the Constitution, Rawlin Lowndes, a delegate from South Carolina, stated, “Without Negroes, this state would degenerate into one of the most contemptible in the union.... Negroes are our wealth, our only natural resource.”31
Michael Goldfield writes,
Although the Continental Congress rejected the South Carolinian attempt to place the adjective white in the Constitution, it acceded or compromised on almost every other demand. Yet, this complete capitulation in accepting the legality of slavery did not eliminate it as a major issue. Sectional disputes on how to regard Negro slavery came up over taxation (1783) and representation (1787). The Founding Fathers made a final compromise on July 12, 1787, by assigning three-fifths representation for both purposes. The three-fifths compromise had momentous consequences.32
As Donald Robinson puts it, the three-fifths compromise “gave constitutional sanction to the fact that the United States was composed of some persons who were ‘free’ and others who were not.” Furthermore, he argues, it established a new idea, “new in republican theory, that a man who lived among slaves had a greater share in the election of representatives than the man who did not. With one stroke, despite the disclaimers of its advocates, it acknowledged slavery and rewarded slave owners. It is a measure of their adjustment to slavery that Americans in the eighteenth century found this settlement natural and just.”33
The main provisions in the Constitution regarding slavery can quickly be summarized: First, Congress was prohibited from outlawing the importation of slaves before the year 1808.34 Second, states were obliged constitutionally to return all fugitives from slavery to their owners.35 Third, for purposes of electoral representation and taxation three-fifths of the slaves and the free population would be counted.36 Later in the Constitutional Convention, the delegates agreed upon the method for electing presidents. Rejecting direct elections (because the voters couldn’t be trusted), the delegates agreed to set up an electoral college to select the president. Then, it was decided, each state would elect the president by casting a fixed number of winner-take-all electoral college votes equivalent to its total of representatives in the House. This in turn would be proportional to the state’s population—artificially boosted in the South by the three-fifths clause. Enslaved and denied a vote, Blacks added political power to their Southern white oppressors.
In order to abate the sensibilities of some of the delegates at the Convention, the words “slave” and “slavery” do not appear in the final document. Instead the document refers to slaves as “other persons” and persons “held to service or labor.” Luther Martin, a Maryland attorney who strongly argued against ratification, noted that his fellow delegates “anxiously sought to avoid the admission of expressions which might be odious in the ears of Americans.” But, they were “willing to admit into their system those things which the expressions signified.”37
The Constitution was made more palatable when the first Congress, responding to pressure and criticism, passed a set of amendments known as the Bill of Rights. These amendments give the appearance that the new government was not in fact run in the interests of the rich, but rather was an institution that rose above class interests and was the guardian of everyone’s freedom to speak, to publish, to assemble, and to be tried fairly. This packaging of the amendments was designed to garner popular support for the government. The difference between appearance and reality was made clear soon enough, however. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, passed in 1791 by Congress, provides that “Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Yet, only seven years after the First Amendment became part of the Constitution, Congress passed a law doing just that—the Sedition Act of 1798, passed under John Adams’ administration. As one historian put it, “The fears of men like Adams and Hamilton had been aggravated by the social unrest of the 1780s and particularly by Shay’s Rebellion in 1786. This event, however shocking it was, paled in significance when compared with the French Revolution.”38 The law made it a crime to say or write anything “false, scandalous and malicious against the government, Congress, or the United States or either house of the Congress of the United States or the United States President, with intent to defame said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or bring them...into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them...the hatred of the good people of the United States.”39
In 1790, Adams had already complained that “too many Frenchmen, after the example of too many Americans, pant for equality of persons and property.” Years later he recalled that the idea of a democratic government in France had always struck him as “unnatural, irrational and impracticable.” As he said then, “the French Revolution I dreaded.”40
Some antislavery proponents believed that slavery would die a slow death as a result of the 1808 slave trade ban. But the enormous growth in demand for cotton—in large part due to the growth of the textile industry in Britain—ensured that the opposite took place. The prohibition by Congress against the importation of slaves after 1807 could not slow the expansion of the cotton plantations in the fifteen Southern states. Slavery had become too entrenched. In any case, the prohibition of the importation of slaves was quite different to the prohibition of slavery. Even pro-slavery advocates supported an end to the slave trade as a prudent measure to reduce the possibility of slave rebellions. The slave system would instead rely on the internal reproduction and trade in slaves.
Members of the ruling class, who had in the past expressed hostility to slavery, came to make their peace with its slow disappearance in the Northern states. In 1790, 698,000 slaves were in the United States; by the close of the century, the number had reached 893,000. An estimated 35,900 slaves still lived in the North: the Emancipation Laws41 had usually freed the children of slaves rather than slaves themselves. In New York, for instance, the Emancipation Law of 1799 freed no living slave; it merely provided for the liberty of any child born to a slave mother and only after he or she had served the mother’s master until adulthood as compensation for the owner’s future loss of property rights.42
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison illustrate the quandary of the antislavery