This is a very complicated issue, and in order to understand the whole thing, we have to take into account a bunch of important criteria: small versus large states (in terms of population); states with many slaves versus states with few; states that relied on slavery versus those that did not; and the question of representation based on population versus the question of the electoral college (because those are not exactly the same thing).
It is worth dealing with the issue of state populations, and the percentage of those populations that were slaves. Let’s look at Damuri Ajashi’s post from the other thread, which CarnalK quoted above, in this thread:
CarnalK is asking the right questions here, and Damuri Ajashi’s use of total population without considering the percentage of the population that was enslaved is, at best, misleading and historically and analytically problematic.
I’m not sure where Damuri Ajashi got his figures, but if you look at the US census numbers from the first national census, in 1790 (just a few years after the Constitutional Convention), you can get a better sense of the total population of each state, as well as the slave population. Here’s a link to an image, and below i’ve given a breakdown of some of the key figures:
State Slaves Total % Slave
VT 16 85539 0.02
NH 158 141885 0.11
ME 0 96540 0.00
MA 0 378787 0.00
RI 948 68825 1.38
CT 2764 237946 1.16
NY 21324 340120 6.27
NJ 11423 184139 6.20
PA 3737 434373 0.86
DE 8887 59094 15.04
MD 103036 319728 32.23
VO 292627 747610 39.14
KY 12430 73677 16.87
NC 100572 393751 25.54
SC 107094 249073 43.00
GA 29264 82548 35.45
The last column, showing slaves as a percentage of the total population, is my own calculations, designed to give a sense of the importance of slavery within each state.
And this question of the role of slavery is crucial to our understanding of this issue. Damuri Ajashi blithely refers to any state that had any slaves as a “slave state,” and in some sense that’s true. I certainly don’t advocate ignoring the history of slavery in the North. But the numbers show how much more important slavery was in the Southern states, and historians of the period also make very clear that the Revolutionary period saw a growing sectional divide over the future of slavery in the United States. New England states like Massachusetts were abolishing slavery, often using judicial measures to do away with it, and many of what we now call the mid-Atlantic states were moving in the direction of gradual abolition, whereby slaves would not be freed immediately, but the institution of slavery would not be allowed to persist generationally. Some states did this more quickly than others.
More generally, historians also draw a distinction between “slave societies” and “societies with slaves,” and this distinction is relevant is discussions of the United States during the Revolutionary and early National period. You can see it in the numbers: no Northern state had more than 6.5% of the population enslaved, and most were under 2%; no Southern state had less than 15%, and most were over 25%
In “slave societies,” as understood by historians, slaves are crucial to the central productive economic processes of the society, and the society would collapse economically without the labor done by slaves. Those central economic processes are also, usually, made up of large-scale commodity agriculture - plantations of various sorts. Such societies also tend to be dominated, in terms of political and economic power, by slaveholders. It was pretty rare in places like Virginia or South Carolina for a rich and powerful person NOT to have wealth based, in considerable measure, on the institution of slavery.
In “societies with slaves,” slaves often perform important economic labor, but the central productive processes of the society do not rely on slavery just stay afloat, and also tend not to rest on large-scale agricultural commodities. Slaves in such societies more commonly did non-agricultural labor, such as working on docks as part of the mercantile economy. If all the slaves disappeared from such societies, they could survive economically with some relatively minor adjustments. Also, “societies with slaves” are not politically and economically dominated only by those whose wealth rests directly on the institution of slavery.
This is obviously something of an oversimplification of a pretty complex set of social and political economic phenomena, but it gives a sense of the way that historians think about the ideas implicit in CarnalK’s earlier post: “There were slave states and then there were SLAVE STATES!” Many Americans at the time understood this distinction, and it played a key role in the debates over slavery and the American political system.