By the time of the American Revolution, America had developed into a diversity of colonies ranging in age from the “Old Dominion” of Virginia established for over 150 years to Georgia which was barely forty years old. All the colonies had slave populations. When the war ended and Americans achieved independence, unfortunately some Northern merchants and Southern planters immediately revived the African slave trade. Between 1783 and 1787 various states—Maryland, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware and South Carolina—passed laws prohibiting the slave trade or tightening existing laws, while North Carolina laid a prohibitory duty on slave importations. But this state-by-state action was slow, limited, and reversible. Consequently, the institution of slavery continued to occupy a central role in the Philadelphia Convention and ratification debates.
Much of the material in this section originally appeared in John P. Kaminski’s Necessary Evil?: Slavery and the Debate Over the Constitution and was subsequently published in The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution.