Anti-Slavery Delegates: George Mason

George Mason (Virginia): The second strongest denunciation of slavery came from a Virginia planter who was a large-scale slave owner:

"Slavery discourages arts & manufactures.  The poor despise labor when performed by slaves.  They prevent the immigration of Whites, who really enrich & strengthen a country.  They produce the most pernicious effect on manners.  Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant.  They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country.  As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this.  By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins by national calamities."

So what is Mason saying here?  He is denouncing slavery, obviously, but what troubles him most about slavery is not so much the wrong done to slaves as the damage done to (white) society.  Unlike Morris, Mason addressed his strongest denunciation of slavery to slave importation, rather than slave representation.  He was quick to dissociate Virginia from any complicity in the crime:

This infernal trafic (sic.) originated in the avarice of British Merchants.  The British Govt constantly checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to it. . . . He lamented that some of our Eastern [New England] brethren had from a lust of gain embarked in this nefarious traffic [8/22/87, pp. 503-504].

When the compromise was reached protecting the importation of slaves, Mason had no objections to using the word “slaves,” but opposed naming the state which wanted to import them.  He considered taxing imported slaves as a lesser evil than importing them; not to tax amounted to a bounty .  On the subject of slave representation, Mason believed that some slaves should be included in representation because they were a source of wealth and might in cases of emergency become soldiers.  But his opposition to slavery would not allow him to favor including all slaves in representation, even though it would be favorable to Virginia.

            On export taxes and commercial regulations, Mason acted as a Southerner, and particularly as a Virginian.  He opposed a federal tax on exports as oppressive to Southern States [8/16/87, pp. 466-67; 8/21/87, p. 501].  When the states were forbidden from taxing exports (a major source of revenue for Virginia), he held out (successfully) at least for allowing Virginia to charge inspection and storage fees on its exported tobacco.  He also favored requiring a 2/3 majority for a navigation act to protect the South, which would otherwise deliver them up “bound hand & foot” to the North.  What he feared most, Mason said, was not so much in increase in freight, but a few merchants in Boston, New York and Philadelphia monopolizing trade.

            When Mason refused to sign the Constitution, several of the reasons he gave were specifically Virginian objections.  He objected to Congress’s authority to regulate foreign trade by a simple majority, a provision very popular in the North.  He objected to the prohibition on states taxing exports, even though Virginia was using this provision to unjustly tax North Carolina tobacco being exported through Virginia, without any voice or benefit.  And he objected to the protection of slave importation, saying that he would rather see South Carolina and Georgia secede than agree to such a provision.  Mason’s opposition to slavery had its limits.  In the Virginia ratifying convention, he objected not only to the protection of slave trade, but also to the failure to protect slavery where it existed from any interference from Congress.  Nor, so far as I can tell, did he free his own slaves, even in his will.

Anti-Slavery Delegates: Gouverneur Morris

            Because of the differing interests listed in my previous post,, delegates do not line up on as neat a spectrum on north-south issues as they do on centralization.  But they do make a rather rough spectrum, with many uneasy exceptions.

Anti-Slavery Delegates

            I place two kinds of delegates in this category, the ones who expressed serious moral opposition to slavery (some of whom had a southern outlook on other issues) and ones who took a northern position across the board, even if they did not take a strong moral stand.

  Gouverneur Morris:  The strongest denunciation came from the least democratic-minded and most cynical of the delegates.  Gouverneur Morris said:

[T]he inhabitant of Georgia and S.C. who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections & damns them to the most cruel bondages shall have more votes in a Govt instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind, than the citizen of Pa or N. Jersey who views with laudable horror so nefarious a practice.  He would add that slavery is the most prominent feature in the aristocratic countenance of the proposed Constitution.  The vassalage of the poor has ever been the favorite offspring of Aristocracy. 

This speech may be an implied challenge to Virginians and perhaps other southerners who might considered Morris as an advocate or aristocracy – at least he didn’t own human beings or come from a region that (generally) condoned the practice.  One of Morris’s “aristocratic” viewpoints, which he shared with the Deep Southern South Carolinians was that he favored representation by wealth rather than by population.  But the South Carolinians wanted to include slaves in representation because they were a source of wealth.  Morris argued that, on the contrary, slaves were a source of poverty:

Travel thro’ ye whole Continent & you behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance and disappearance of slavery.  The moment you leave ye E. Sts [New England] & enter New York, the effects of the institution become visible, passing thro’ the Jerseys & entering Pa every criterion of superior improvement witness the change.  Proceed southwdly & every step you take thro’ ye great region of slaves presents a desert with ye increasing proportion of these wretched beings . . . The Houses in this city [Philadelphia] are worth more than all the wretched slaves which cover the swamps of South Carolina. . . . [T]he bohea tea used by a Northern freeman, will pay more tax than the whole consumption of the miserable slave, which consists of nothing more than his physical subsistence and the rag that covers his nakedness.  

This is, incidentally, the only acknowledgement that slavery was not an exclusively Southern phenomenon, but also occurred in New York and New Jersey as well.  Morris even went so far as to say, “He would sooner submit himself to a tax for paying for all the Negroes in the U. State, than saddle posterity with such a Constitution.”  This remark was probably more a flourish than something meant to be taken literally.

            These remarks were addressed to slave representation, rather than slave importation.  The condemnation of slave importation is certainly there, but it is secondary.  Morris’s real cynicism on that issue becomes clear in another of his speeches:

[He was] reduced to the dilemma of doing injustice to the Southern States or to human nature, and he must do it to the former.  For he could never agree to give such encouragement to the slave trade as would be given by allowing them a representation of their negroes, and he did not believe those States would ever confederate on terms that would deprive them of that trade.    

The cynicism here is remarkable.  Slave trade is murderous and criminal; everyone agreed on that.  Morris is unwilling to give it indirect encouragement by including slaves in representation, but takes for granted that slave trade itself will be allowed.  The real proof of his cynicism is when the issue of slave importation itself was raised, Morris made no such moral denunciations; he proposed that the provision on slave importation, export taxes and navigation acts be sent to a committee for a sectional compromise.  When the compromise was proposed, he did acidly remark that it ought to read “importation of slaves into N. Carolina, S. Carolina & Georgia shall not be prohibited,” but by and large he was took his moral stands where northern interests were at stake; where mere moral principles were at stake, he was all too quick to cut a deal.

            Morris took a thoroughly Northern view on other sectional issues.  He favored allowing a tax on exports, arguing that the North had exports too (lumber, flour, beaver skins) and favored allowing a navigation act by a simple majority to encourage American shipping and a navy.  In a contest between “Eastern” and Southern states, he made clear that he believed the middle states should take sides with the North.