North-South Issues: Of Ships and Slaves

As the conflict between large and small states became increasingly intense, Madison tried to be conciliatory.  Don’t worry about combinations between large states, Madison reassured the small ones; the large states have no common interests that would lead them to combine.  The real difference in interests is not between large and small states, but between north and south.  At the time, Madison was simply trying to ease the controversy over representation. Controversy between north and south seemed a non-issue at the time.  To us today, knowing what lay ahead, this sounds very prescient, but not at all reassuring.  In any event, no sooner had the Convention agreed to proportional representation in one house, than north-south sectionalism reared its ugly head, with each section trying to get as many representatives in the House as possible.

When I was in school, I learned that there were several main north-south controversies at that Constitutional Convention, which were resolved by a series of compromises.  One was whether slaves would be counted in taxation and/or representation, and as a compromise the Constitution counted three-fifths of all slaves in both taxation and representation.  Another was the importation of slaves, which the parties agreed to allow for another 20 years (until 1808) but not after.  Another was an export tax, which was forbidden as a concession to the South, which produced most of the nation’s exports.  Finally, copies and commentaries of the Constitution showed that fugitive slaves, like fugitive criminals, must be extradited when they crossed state lines.  What my school textbooks never mentioned was perhaps the hottest north-south controversy of all – whether Congress could regulate foreign trade by a simple majority or a two-thirds vote.

Let us step back and survey the differences between the North and the South at the time of the Constitutional Convention.  The biggest difference, as the delegates generally acknowledged, was that the southern states had slaves and the northern states had no slaves.  But “no slaves” was not meant as literally then as it was in the years approaching the Civil War.  Saying that the northern states had “no slaves” did not actually mean that slavery was illegal in the North, or that there were no slaves there whatsoever; it was a generalization, liking saying (as delegates also did) that the South had no ships.  Ships were legal in the South, of course, and Southerners did own a few ships, but they did not own enough ships for Southern shipping to be considered an interest in national politics.  It was the same with Northern slaves.  By the time of the Constitutional Convention, slavery had been declared unconstitutional and totally ended in Massachusetts.  The other New England states and Pennsylvania were in the process of phasing it out.  New York and New Jersey would not even begin phasing out slavery until 1800, and in Delaware slavery was remained legal until the outbreak of the Civil War, although in practical terms it had almost completely died out by then.  Not everyone divided states into states “with slaves” and states “without slaves.”  Others divided states into carrying and non-carrying states, i.e., states with and without major shipping interests, which would carry imports and exports. 

States could also be further sub-divided than simply North and South.  Many people divided them into New England (“Eastern”), Mid-Atlantic (“Middle”) and Southern.  The South could be sub-divided into Upper South and Deep South.  Charles Pinckney divided the states as follows:

(1)                                       New England, whose major interest are fishing and shipping (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island);

(2)                                       New York, whose main interest was trade and commerce;

(3)                                       Mid-Atlantic states, whose main exports were wheat and flour (Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware);

(4)                                       The Upper South, whose main export was tobacco (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina);

(5)                                       The Deep South, whose main exports were rice and indigo (South Carolina and Georgia).  (Cotton did not become king until several years later).

The New England states were the biggest shipping states, transporting imports and exports.  One of the major imports they carried were slaves from Africa; the main exports they carried or hoped to carry was agricultural produce grown by slaves.  This gave New England a common interest with the South as the exporter of its produce, and a potential common interest with the Deep South, which was the main importer of slaves.  It also created a potential conflict between the Deep South and the Upper South.  South Carolina was a land of disease-infested rice swamps, where slaves died faster than they were born, while Georgia was a new state rapidly expanding.  Both areas were large importers of slaves and did not want to discuss the morality of slave trade.  The Upper South had worn-out soil from years of growing tobacco had a surplus of slaves it was happy to sell to the Deep South.  Virginians were eager to talk about the morality of slave trade and denounce it in strongest terms.  The Quaker state and its satellites, New Jersey and Delaware, had strong moral opposition to slave trade and no interest in upholding it.  Among New Englanders, moral sense vied with interest.