Slavery and the New Nation

Throughout the debate over the ratification of the Constitution, Federalists insisted that a tariff on imported goods would provide the federal government with most of its needed revenue. Consequently, when the first federal Congress assembled, one of its first and most pressing concerns was to enact an impost bill that would lay a five-percent tariff on most imports. Thus, Virginia Representative Josiah Parker, proposed a ten-dollar tax on each imported slave, the maximum permitted under the Constitution. The proposal generated much debate in Congress in May, 1789.

Likewise, the debate over the slave clauses of the Constitution invigorated abolitionist societies in Philadelphia, New York, and New England in their efforts to gain gradual emancipation in their states and in others if possible, to ameliorate the condition of slaves throughout America, to educate the children of slaves and freedmen, and to protect freedmen from kidnappings and sale back into slavery. Quakers in Philadelphia and the New York and Pennsylvania abolition societies petitioned the first federal Congress to take action against the African slave trade and in favor of emancipation. Additional petitions and efforts to abolish slavery developed at the state level as well, with limited success. The general attitude of Americans in the North and South toward slavery continued to drift apart and solidify.

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