The South was not united on the issues of slavery. Virginia and Maryland, with a surplus of slaves, wanted the foreign slave trade closed immediately. Georgia and South Carolina, and to a lesser extent North Carolina, all in need of additional slaves, wanted the foreign trade to remain open at least for a period of time.
Virginia Antifederalists never made this mercenary argument for closing the foreign slave trade. They argued, were dangerous during peacetime and would assuredly join the enemy during war. Federalists in the Deep South disparaged the biased stance taken by Virginia Antifederalists to increase the value of their surplus slave property. Most Southerners who opposed the closing of the foreign slave trade argued that slaves were needed to develop their economies.
Only occasionally did Southerners publicly denounce the slave trade as morally abominable. Luther Martin, a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention, was among the few Southerners in the public debate over the ratification of the Constitution to condemn this New England-Deep South coalition, which he publicly denounced as an evil bargain.
Southern Federalists found the Constitution’s slavery provisions easy to defend noting Northerners had conceded a great deal: conceding representation to a species of property that they themselves did not possess; allowing the slave trade to remain open for twenty years with no guarantee that Congress would close the trade after 1808; granting slaveowners the right to recover their runaway property in any part of the Union; and, because it had no specific authority, Congress could never emancipate slaves. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney suggested that “considering all circumstances, we have made the best terms for the security of this species of property it was in our power to make. We would have made better if we could, but on the whole I do not think them bad.”
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Debates Over Slavery in General
- Luther Martin: Genuine Information VIII, Maryland Gazette, 22 January 1788
- Republicus, Kentucky Gazette, 1 March 1788
- Debates in the Virginia Convention, 24 June 1788
Debates Over the 3/5 Clause
- Report of the North Carolina Delegates to the Constitutional Convention, 18 September 1787
- Luther Martin: Genuine Information V, Maryland Gazette, 11 January 1788
- A Native of Virginia, Observations upon the Proposed Plan of Federal Government, 2 April 1788
- Debates in the Virginia Convention, 17 June 1788
- Debates in the North Carolina Convention, 24 July 1788
Debates Over the Foreign Slave Trade
- Lachlan McIntosh to John Wereat, 17 December 1787
- Debates in the South Carolina House of Representatives, 16-17 January 1788
- Luther Martin: Genuine Information VII, Maryland Gazette, 18 January 1788
- Luther Martin: Genuine Information VIII, Maryland Gazette, 22 January 1788
- Civis Rusticus, Virginia Independent Chronicle, 30 January 1788
- Civis, Columbian Herald, 4 February 1788
- Republicus, Kentucky Gazette, 1 March 1788
- One of the People Called Quakers in the State of Virginia, Virginia Independent Gazetteer, 12 March 1788
- A Native of Virginia, Observations upon the Proposed Plan of Federal Government, 2 April 1788
- Debates in the Virginia Convention, 11-12 June 1788
- Debates in the North Carolina Convention, 26 June 1788