Dark Bargain

Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution by Lawrence Goldstone

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This is a nice book focused on some key personalities and issues involved in framing the Constitution. The author, Lawrence Goldstone, provides an informative survey of how the Constitution came to be written, what the framers were originally intending, and what the alternatives might have been.

According to Goldstone, the event that provided an impetus to the drafting of a new Constitution was Shay's Rebellion, which suggested that even northern states might be more susceptible to internal insurgencies than they had previously believed. Southern states knew that they had such a problem in the form of slave rebellions, although the south had largely avoided that form of domestic revolt. All states had some interest in a common defense against both domestic and foreign enemies, but they also had interests that were opposed.

Goldstone's thesis is that the interest that most divided the states - and which explains the development of the Constitution - was slavery. The northern states were opposed to slavery and wanted it ended; the lower southern states wanted to protect slavery; the upper South was more ambivalent than the lower South; they wanted to end the slave trade so that it could sell its own slaves more profitably and dreamed that slavery would naturally come to an end as had happened in the North.

The North's interest in ending slavery in the United States is a surprising feature for the time. No other sovereignty in the world had outlawed slavery at the time. The states were essentially separate countries, and they could have taken the position that what went on in other countries was not their business. This understanding obviously strengthened the hand of the deep South on issues pertaining to slavery since those issues mattered very much domestically to those states. Goldstone points out that the deep South was very successful in the struggle over the constitutional clauses dealing with slavery.

One such clause was the “3/5th Clause.” The issue was whether slaves would count as the population for apportionment of representatives in one of the two houses of the legislature or not be counted. Goldstone locates the origin of the 3/5th compromise in prior compromises over taxation of states. The apportionment of taxes was to be done on the basis of state wealth, and slaves were certainly part of that calculation. Similarly, in the Constitution, any taxation was also to be done on the basis of wealth by apportioning taxes to states based on their representation. As it turned out, this method of taxation was never used and the Constitution was subsequently amended to permit direct taxation, but only based on the income of citizens.

One interesting feature is how James Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” essentially receded from the picture as the negotiation went along. His ideas, such as basing one house of the legislature on apportionment by population excluding slaves and one house including slaves, were rejected in favor of the approach we have today.

There were high-minded calls against compromising with slavery from some delegates. However, even abolitionist New Englanders compromised their principles to avoid a walk-out by the lower South:

“Ellsworth and Sherman were creatures of their upbringing, their values, and the society in which they lived. They were in Philadelphia to protect and promote a way of life and this, not personal gain, or even a specific commercial advantage for Connecticut prompted them to act as they did. Both men genuinely believed that their actions, even their compromises with slavery, were for the betterment of the society they represented and, as such, were also for the betterment of the United States.”

As a consequence, a fugitive slave provision was included, the slave trade was left untouched for twenty years, the electoral college was established, and even the census was compromised. Concerning the census, the belief of the delegates was that population growth would favor the South. Southerners, therefore, wanted more frequent census in order to adjust the House of Representatives in their favor. The ten-year census was very much a product of compromise.

The Northwest Ordinance may have been involved in the compromise. The Northwest Ordinance was passed by the old Congress virtually unanimously the day after the 3/5th compromise was accepted. Goldstone speculates that the passage of the Northwest Ordinance, which outlawed slavery in Northwest territories, was part of the inducement for the compromise. If so, that may have been what spelled the doom for southern slavery since those states were part of the alliance that defeated the Confederacy.

There is a lot of convenient finger-pointing about the compromise with slavery by people who were not there. Goldstone concludes on that subject:

“Philosophical concerns seemed to play only a minor role in the proceedings, and only then with but a few of the participants. Nonetheless, for all that, precisely because the delegates in Philadelphia were pragmatic, and were there to represent specific, parochial interests, they were able to draft a document that was workable, adaptable, and able to survive challenges that could never have been imagined in 1787. It is distinctly possible that had idealism dominated in Philadelphia, American democracy would have failed.”

I found this to be a well-written, interesting and informative book. I appreciated that it avoided the moralism that is all too common in this day and age.