29 December 2008
A Land of Liberty?
Americans compromised on slavery to secure sectional political unity
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
Slavery divided Americans from their very first day of independence. As the South grew more dependent on a new staple crop — “King Cotton” — and on the slave-intensive plantations that cultivated it, the prospect of a clash with increasingly antislavery northern states grew. The young nation delayed that conflict with a series of moral evasions and political compromises.
The United States’ Declaration of Independence (1776) includes stirring language on universal brotherhood: “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 these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” And yet its principal draftsman, Thomas Jefferson, was himself a slaveholding Virginian. Jefferson understood the contradiction, and his draft sharply condemned the slave trade — although not slavery itself — calling it “a cruel war against human nature.” But the Continental Congress, America’s de facto government at the time, deleted the slave trade reference from the Declaration to avoid any controversy that might fracture its pro-independence consensus. It would not be the last time that political expediency would trump moral imperatives.
By 1787, many Americans had determined to replace the existing loose, decentralized alliance of 13 states with a stronger federal government. The Constitutional Convention, held in Philadelphia from May to September of that year, produced a blueprint for such a government. “There were big fights over slavery at the convention,” according to David Stewart, author of The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution. While “many of the delegates were actually abolitionist in their views … there was not a feel for abolition in the country at the time.”
Because any proposed constitution would not take effect until ratified by 9 of the 13 states, it became necessary to reach a compromise on the status of the African-American slaves. Northern delegates to the convention, led by James Wilson of Pennsylvania, reached an agreement with three large slaveholding states. Both sides agreed that every five “unfree persons” — slaves — would count as three people when calculating the size of a state’s congressional delegation. They also agreed to bar the U.S. Congress for 20 years from passing any law prohibiting the importation of slaves. (Congress later would abolish the slave trade, effective 1808. By then, this was not a controversial measure owing to the natural increase of the slave population.)
This “three-fifths compromise” has been described as America’s Faustian bargain, or original sin. As David Walker, a free northern black, argued in an 1829 pamphlet: “Has Mr. Jefferson declared to the world that we are inferior to the whites, both in the endowments of our bodies and of minds?” The compromise allowed the states to form a stronger union, but it also ensured that slavery would continue in the South, where the 1793 invention of the cotton gin had sparked the growth of a slave-intensive plantation system of cotton cultivation. It also bore profound political consequences for the young nation. In the hotly contested presidential election of 1800, the additional electoral votes awarded southern states by virtue of their slave populations supplied Thomas Jefferson with his margin of victory over the incumbent president, John Adams of Massachusetts.
Of even greater importance was how slavery affected the nation’s expansion. The question of whether new states would permit slavery assumed decisive importance upon the congressional balance-of-power between the “slave” and “free” states. During the first half of the 19th century, Congress hammered out a number of compromises that generally ensured that states allowing slavery would enter the Union paired with new states that prohibited it. The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act all maintained this political balance. In 1857, however, the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott v. Sanford case that Congress could not bar slavery in western territories not yet admitted as states. The decision intensified the sectional conflict over slavery and hastened the ultimate confrontation to come.
Even as the young nation’s political system failed to secure for African Americans the civil rights enjoyed by their white countrymen, brave men and women were launching efforts to abolish slavery and to ensure that the United States would live up to its own best ideals.
