What were the key compromises over slavery at the Constitutional Convention?

0:05I think that one of the most important contributions made over the last 20 or 30 years in the profession is a recognition that the issue of slavery is you can't ignore it. In other words, it has to be part of an agenda to understand what happened in the convention and in the founding itself. Realized from the start what we said that this is going to be a hail Mary pass for a new federal government that has powers to make domestic policy and foreign policy. To the extent that it succeeded, it would then have the power to make a decision on the slavery issue. But the slavery issue is so the divisive, and it's not the first time it came up. It came up at the start of the war in the summer of '76. It came up in the debate over something called the Dickinson Draft

0:56on a projected government for the United States after we declare independence. It's clear from the start in that debate that the states that are slave states and the Northern states that are not predominantly slave are in fundamental disagreement about this. It's clear at the end, they can't reach any agreement and so the net result is a recommendation that eventually produces the Articles of Confederation, where power does reside in the states. But if they had faced squarely and insisted frontally on a resolution of the slave request and in '76, the South would has seceded or the South would has stopped supporting the movement for independence.

1:39The feeling in the Congress was that the same principle held true in 1787. If we attack slavery frontally, if we insist on this, every state South of the Chesapeake will secede. I'm not sure about Virginia. I think Virginia is a question mark, but North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia are going to bolt. I think in the deliberations outside the convention, in restaurants and bars, the Southern delegates got together and formed a coalition that said, "We're going to threaten secession if slavery is not protected." If the slave trade is not allowed to continue, and that we're going to refuse to budge on this. If you're an absolute moralist on this, any compromise with the South is unacceptable. What's the later abolition a compromise with

2:37death. No compromise meant the end of the convention. The Southern delegates also said, well, even if we go along with this, I can assure you when I go back to South Carolina or Georgia, it's never going to be ratified that we cannot exist without slavery. Our economy cannot exist.

2:58That's the reason what I said earlier is relevant here, the answer to that could have been the proposal that Franklin was supposed to read, but didn't. "We grant you for now slavery. But the slave trade will have to end at a certain point," 1800 was the original idea. "You have to recognize that over time, slavery must go out of existence. We're not going to put a date on." That didn't happen because even that was regarded as too threatening. What the moralists have to come to terms with is the answer to the following question. Suppose they took the moral stand, suppose they did what the Quakers wanted them to do. What would have happened? Well, in 1787, you wouldn't have any state South of Virginia, you wouldn't have had a union. Well,

3:46what would they have done? They would have formed their own country. Now, you can't play out to take to know this with certainty. But I'm just saying that the judgment that the members of the Convention made was a compromise that they were forced to make. That's why, again, I think that Franklin's speech at the end about the need, because Franklin didn't agree with these compromises, is worthy of our understanding. In some ways, you wish they'd called their bluff just to see what would have happened, but they weren't in a position to take that particular risk.