Most states that prohibited slavery before the Civil War phased it out in a very grandfathered way. New Jersey for example’s grandfathering/delay system meant that it still had a small number of slaves when the 13th Amendment was passed, even though a law making it a “free state” had passed in 1804. New Jersey created a legal construct for slaves born before 1804 in which they were considered to be “apprentices for life”, which was basically a life term indenture–or what we’d basically call slavery.
Most states had weird provisions like this. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777, but its law only freed adults. The reasons child slaves were still permitted is not clear, but some believe it was “intended” that they be turned into apprentices to learn a skill, and they would be set free at some point in the future. The Vermont law only made free immediately persons who were adults when it passed (women aged 18 or men aged 21), but didn’t specify if children instantly became free when they reached their majority or not. That’s why you can still read about legal cases in Vermont courts in the early 19th century that are dealing with slaves owned in Vermont.
What appears to have happened is a small number of children were kept as apprentices well into adult hood, and some slaves were converted into “servants” who if you dig a little deeper were basically slaves through various legal loop holes. It’s also worth noting most historians consider the slave counts from the 1790 census to thus be incorrect. In any case Vermont was a very small state and never had a lot of slaves ever, either in terms of real numbers or percentages. But for example the 16 slaves it was listed as having in 1790, is believed to underestimate it by a couple hundred.
I concede that my wording might have implied that popular vote was the first choice, but that was not my intention. In fact, what i was trying to emphasize was that the popular vote was one of the first proposals to be explicitly and emphatically rejected. But when i made this observation, i was mainly trying to answer John Mace’s question about whether any of the founders had even supported a popular model that bypassed the states.
I also concede that the popular vorte was shot down by a large majority, and not just slave interests. But as some of my quotes also show, there was concern among at least some of the delegates that a popular vote would, in fact, have been a particular problem for states with relatively large slave populations and (relatively) smaller free white populations.
And when they moved to the debate over the electoral college, we see that Madison, who explicitly expresses a considerable amount of support for the idea of a popularly elected President, recognized that such a method would not gain the support of the states with large numbers of slaves. And Williamson of NC also explicitly acknowledged that Virginia’s full weight of population would not count in a popular vote, because of the presence of large numbers of slaves.
Look, there are no easy answers here. Like most historical problems, this one involves weighing large and small pieces of evidence, and assigning significance to difference bits of evidence in ways that make sense. I agree that there were many reasons to vote against a popular vote that had nothing to do with slavery, and i agree that there were reasons to vote for an electoral college that were also not about slavery. But it doesn’t mean that slavery can be removed from the issue altogether.
Another thing worth noting is that the weighing of evidence in cases like this is particularly important because it is difficult to find too many smoking guns. The delegates from states like VA and SC were acutely aware, from the start of the Constitutional Convention, that slavery was going to be a touchy subject among a group of men who had just fought a war for the Enlightenment principles of life, liberty, and natural equality. They weren’t dumb, and they recognized that it was a bit rhetorically contradictory to go from complaining about Britain’s tyranny and American slavery to British interests in the 1770s, to setting up a new nation where almost 20 percent of the population were in chains in the 1780s.
If you’re looking for a document where someone from the South says, “We want a three-fifths clause and the electoral college so that we benefit from having a whole lot of slaves,” well, i’m afraid such a document probably doesn’t exist, even if some of the southern delegates might have felt precisely this way. As i said, i think it’s too much to argue that the EC was created to keep slave states in the union (there was not going to be a union, anyway, without 9 states ratifying), but i don’t think it’s too much to argue that southern priorities regarding slavery shaped both the three-fifths clause AND, to a somewhat lesser extent, the adoption of the electoral college.
I’d be interested to know what you think of the argument made by Finkelman, in the document i cited in an earlier post. I think he makes a good argument to support the conclusion i made in the previous paragraph, but i’m not sure that he fully meets the burden of his article’s title.
Or are you just disagreeing with how I get to the same answer as you
What makes the EC “unfair” is that it gives small states more political power than their population warrants, Elvis claims that this was so that slave states would be enticed to join the union. There were small states on both sides of the slave debate. There were large states on both sides of the slave debate. I don’t see how you need a whole lot of nuance unless you don’t like the obvious answer and want to insert nuance to try and get a different one
Did Virginia support the EC? The Virginia plan supporters seemed to be against the notion of straying away from apportionment, never mind giving every state 2 free electors regardless of population. Was Virginia a free state?
Was Rhode Island against the EC? Because they seemed to be in favor of the New Jersey plan that gave every state a single vote. Was Rhode island a slave state?
It was the Connecticut compromise that resulted in the hybrid system we have today. The Connecticut compromise is widely viewed as compromise between large states and small states, not a compromise between slave states and free states.
So what proof have you that the EC was an enticement to the slave states? Or are you just trying to rub my nose into a mistake that I have already admitted to?
None of what i’ve argued has been predicated on the idea that southern states were worried about the elimination of slavery. I agree with you that they were concerned more about their power within the federal system. But they recognized that the nature of their economies, as slave societies with what Madison might have termed a less diffusive right of suffrage than the northern states, left them vulnerable to the possibility of northern domination of the federal government.
They recognized that, even if a President (or Congress, for that matter) couldn’t or wouldn’t ban slavery outright, or even try to reduce it, an imbalance in the national seat of government could still result in decisions that were inimical to their interests; interests that were intimately and (one might argue) inextricably tied to the institution of slavery. It’s more complicated than simply saying, “Well, the President couldn’t have banned slavery anyway, so everything you’ve said is wrong.”
I’m not sure it’s useful to talk about the 13 States represented at the convention as “Northern and Southern”, that’s projecting back into the 1780s attitudes from the 1820s and later.
Sectionalism in a very broad sense certainly existed, the Carolinas and Georgia had more in common with each other than Massachusetts and Connecticut, and vice versa, and the Mid-Atlantic states shared more in common with one another than with New England, but most people of the 1780s were very aligned to their colony/state moreso than ideas about their “region.”
And yet one of the quotations i provided, from the Constitutional Convention, was:
While true political sectionalism didn’t really become a national issue until later, as you suggest, the delegates at the Convention were well aware of the increasingly divergent attitudes to slavery among different states, and they also recognized that the key divisions here were between northern and southern states.
Some New England states were abolishing slavery immediately through judicial processes, and it was clear that states like New York and Pennsylvania were going for gradual abolition. More generally, even without the move to abolish slavery in the north, the delegates also recognized that the institution was much more central to the economies of some states than others, and that it would therefore shape their politics in important ways.
I agree with most of what you said, save for a minor misinterpretation of what I meant about the 3/5ths compromise. I think we actually agree, but I phrase things differently. You say that the slave states more or less pulled one over, by getting three-fifths of their slaves to count, but I would say that they were BOUGHT OFF by way of that compromise. Just a minor point of view thing. I agree that the anti-“count the slaves” people didn’t get what they wanted (zero), but the slave states didn’t get what they wanted either. Bottom line for the sake of this thread, the EC was only peripherally to do with slavery. Not primarily, as the opening thread post asked/suggested.