the North and the South; though, within the South, Georgia and South Carolina had each at least one more than its share. The final division was approved by all except South Carolina and Georgia; and these two favored states now opened a resolute but not stormy debate to gain still more legislative strength. To this end Rutledge moved to reduce the absent state of New Hampshire from three to two members, pleading its deficiency in population and its poverty.* King, after demonstrating the rights of New Hampshire, proceeded: "The difference of interests lies not between the great and small states, but between the southern and eastern. For this reason I have been ready to yield something in the proportion of representatives for the security of the southern. I am not averse to yielding more, but do not see how it can be done. They are brought as near an equality as is possible; no principle will justify giving them a majority."† Cotesworth Pinckney replied: "If the southern states are to be in such a minority, and the regulation of trade is to be given to the general government, they will be nothing more than overseers for the northern states. I do not expect the southern states to be raised to a majority of the representatives; but I wish them to have something like an equality." Randolph, speaking the opinions of Richard Henry Lee and of Mason as well as his own, announced that he had it in contemplation to require more than a bare majority of votes for laws regulating trade. For reducing New Hampshire none voted but South Carolina and Georgia. There followed successive motions to give one additional vote to each of the three southernmost states. They were all lost; Georgia alone obtaining the voice of Virginia. On that day Robert Yates and John Lansing of New York were on the floor for the last time. The governor of their state had unreservedly declared that no good was to be expected from the deliberations at Philadelphia; that the confederation on more full experiment might be found to answer all the purposes of the union.# The state which had borne itself with unselfish magnanimity through the war of the revo*Gilpin, 1057; Elliot, 290. Gilpin, 1059; Elliot, 291; Elliot, i., 198. Gilpin, 1057, 1058; Elliot, 290, 291. #Penn. Packet, 26July 1787. lution had fallen under the sway of factious selfishness. Yielding to this influence, Yates and Lansing, renouncing the path to glory and the voice of duty, deserted their post, leaving to the South the power to mould the commercial policy of the union at its will. Hamilton, being left alone, had no vote, and from this day to the end was absent more than half the time, taking very little part in the formation of the constitution. In the convention, from its organization to its dissolution, there was always a majority of at least one on the side of the southern states. After the defection of New York the proportion remained six to four till New Hampshire arrived. Slavery in the United States was a transient form, not an original element of their colonization, nor its necessary outgrowth. In the division between northern and southern states the criterion was, whether a state retained the power and the will by its own inward energy to extricate itself from slavery. Seven had abolished, or were preparing to abolish it. Madison* and others counted the southern states as no more than five; but Delaware, like all south of it, gave signs of being not equal to the high endeavor of setting all its bondmen free; and its votes in the convention prove that it was rightly classed by Dayton with the South. The boundary between the two sections was Mason and Dixon's line. Pennsylvania, purely popular, without family aristocracies or the ascendency of any one form of religion, first in agriculture and commerce, and not surpassed in ship-building, stood midway between six northern states and six southern ones, the stronghold of an undivided, inseparable federal republic. The abolition of slavery in the North, which was aided by the long British occupation of Boston, Rhode Island, and New York, had not been accomplished without a quickening of conscience on the wrongfulness of hereditary bondage and its inconsistency with the first principles of American polity. By the act of Pennsylvania of 1780 for the gradual abolition of slavery, persons merely sojourning in the state were permitted to retain their slaves for a term of six months; delegates in congress from other states, foreign ministers and consuls, as long as they continued in their public characters. The right of *Gilpin, 1104; Elliot, 315. Gilpin, 1058; Elliot, 291. the masters of absconding slaves to take them away remained as before. But the recovery of a slave through the interposition of the courts was resisted with zeal by self-appointed agents; and the southern master sometimes had no relief but to seize the runaway and bring him back to bondage by force. * Abolition and manumission societies were formed in various parts of the North. Of one of these Hamilton was the secretary, with Jay, Duane, and Robert R. Livingston for associates. Just at this time Franklin was elected president of the society in Pennsylvania. The newspapers of all parties at the North teemed with essays against slavery. The opposition to it prevailed in nearly all religious and political sects, but flamed the brightest among those of extreme democratic tendencies. In 1783 deputies from the yearly meeting of the Quakers were admitted to the floort of congress, and delivered their address, entreating that body to use its influence for the general abolition of the slave-trade, and in several later years the meeting renewed the petition. The Presbyterian synod which met at Philadelphia in the same week as the federal convention resolved "to procure eventually the final abolition of slavery in America." # The Pennsylvania Abolition Society adopted a memorial to the convention to suppress the slavetrade, though, from motives of prudence, it was not presented. This conspicuous action at the North on the slave-trade and slavery might have baffled every hope of a consolidated union but for the wide distinction between those states that were least remote from the West Indies and those that lay nearer the North; between the states which planted indigo and rice and those which cultivated by slave labor maize and wheat and tobacco; between Georgia and South Carolina which had ever been well affected to the slave-trade, and the great slave-hold * Dallas, i., 179, 180; ii., 224. Journals of Congress, iv., 289. Address presented 8 October 1783, MS., at State Dept., Vol. of Remonstrances and Addresses, 339; Letter to R. H. Lee, President, 21 January 1785; ibid., 347. See the MS. Records of the Friends, 20 October 1786, and October 1789. * Acts and Proceedings of the Synod of New York and Philadelphia, A. D. 1787. | Penn. Packet of 14 February 1788; Independent Gazetteer of 7 March 1788. ing state to the north of them which had wrestled with England for its abolition. In the three northernmost of the southern states slavery maintained itself, not as an element of prosperity, but as a baleful inheritance. The best of the statesmen of Virginia, without regard to other questions which divided them, desired its abolition-alike Washington, Richard Henry Lee, Jefferson, Randolph, Madison, and Grayson. George Mason had written to the legislature of Virginia against it with the most terrible invectives and gloomiest forebodings. This comparative serenity of judgment in Virginia was shared, though not completely, by North Carolina, of whose population three parts out of four were free, and whose upland country attracted emigrants by its fertility, salubrity, and beauty. The difference between the two classes of slave states was understood by themselves, and was a guarantee that questions on slavery would neither inflame nor unite them. Virginia and North Carolina held the balance of power, and knew how to steer clear of a fatal collison. The preliminary distribution of representatives having been agreed upon, Gouverneur Morris on the ninth desired to leave the control of future changes to the national legislature.* Perceiving peril in confiding so vast a discretion to those who might be tempted to keep to themselves an undue share of legislative power, Randolph, following the precedent of 1781, on the tenth insisted on an absolute constitutional requirement of a census of population and an estimate of wealth, to be taken within one year after the first meeting of the legislature, and ever thereafter periodically; and that the representation should be arranged accordingly.t Gouverneur Morris, supported by King and others, resisted this "fettering of the legislature," by which a preponderance might be thrown into the western scale. In various debates it was urged by Morris and King and others that the western people would in time outnumber those of the Atlantic states, while they would be less wealthy, less cultivated, less favorable to foreign commerce, and less willing to bide the right moment for acquiring the free navigation of the lower Mississippi; * Gilpin, 1052; Elliot, 288. Gilpin, 1063; Elliot, 293. that the busy haunts of men are the proper school for statesmen; that the members from the back country are always most averse to the best measures; that, if the western people should get the power into their hands, they would ruin the Atlantic interests; and therefore that, in every future legislature, the original states should keep the majority in their own hands.* To this Mason replied: "A revision from time to time, according to some permanent and precise standard, is essential to fair representation. According to the present population of America, the northern part of it has a right to preponderate; and I cannot deny it. But, unless there shall be inserted in the constitution some principle which will do justice to the southern states hereafter, when they shall have three fourths of the people of America within their limits, I can neither vote for the system here nor support it in my state. The western states as they arise must be treated as equals, or they will speedily revolt. The number of inhabitants is a sufficiently precise standard of wealth."+ "Congress," said Randolph, "have pledged the public faith to the new states that they shall be admitted on equal terms. They never will, they never ought to accede on any other." Madison demonstrated that no distinctions unfavorable to the western states were admissible, either in point of justice or policy.# By a vote of seven to three the first legislature under the new constitution was required to provide for a census; a periodical census ever after was then accepted without a division. Its period, first fixed at fifteen years, after repeated debates, was reduced to ten.A Yet an ineradicable dread of the coming power of the South-west lurked in New England, especially in Massachusetts. On the fourteenth, only three days after the subject appeared to have been definitively disposed of, Gerry and King moved that the representatives of new states should never col * Gilpin, 1063, 1064, 1072; Elliot, 294, 298. # Gilpin, 1073; Elliot, 299. Gilpin, 1078; Elliot, 301. A Gilpin, 1086; Elliot, 305. |