Slavery in the Constitution: Why the Lower South Occasionally Succeeded at the Constitutional Convention

• Author: Keith Dougherty
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912919848843
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919848843

Political Research Quarterly

2020, Vol. 73(3) 638 –650

© 2019 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912919848843

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Article

Introduction

In 1786, tensions between the North and South came to a

head when Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay asked

Congress to forgo navigation of the Mississippi River for

a period of twenty-five to thirty years to close a deal with

Spain that protected Northern fishing. Jay had been

instructed to secure both objectives, but he requested to

forgo the Southern part of the deal to attain the Northern

part. After a bitter debate, Congress repealed Jay’s earlier

instructions to protect the Mississippi River by a vote of

seven states to five. All seven Northern states voted in

favor of the proposal and all five Southern states,

Maryland southward, voted against.1 The vote illustrated

why the South could not win purely sectional votes in the

Congress of the Confederation.

Jillson and Wilson’s (1994) multidimensional scaling

of the Congress of the Confederation illustrates the polar-

ization in Congress at the time. Sectional issues were so

dominant that Congress divided itself into two disjoint

clusters in 1786, a Northern cluster and a Southern one,

along a sectional dimension of voting.

Shortly thereafter, the Lower South, South Carolina

and Georgia,2 was surprisingly successful at the

Constitutional Convention. The convention agreed to

prohibit federal interference with the slave trade until

1808, to guarantee fugitive slaves would be returned to

their masters, and to prevent export tariffs.3 It also

provided a louder voice for Southerners by counting

three-fifths of slaves in the apportionment of the House of

Representatives. The latter agitated Northerners and led

extreme New England Federalists, such as Timothy

Pickering and William Plummer, to propose New

England’s secession from the union.

Counting Delaware northward as the North, Northern

states outnumbered Southern states eight to five in the

confederation, making it particularly surprising that the

Lower South partly succeeded at the convention.4 Why

does the Constitution have so many clauses that seem to

protect slavery? What caused the Lower South to succeed

on some votes at the convention and to fail on others?

The standard historical account is that these clauses

resulted from vote trades (Lynd 1966; McDonald 1965;

Rossiter 1966; Stewart 2008; Van Cleve 2010). For the

purposes of this paper, it is important to differentiate a

vote trade from a compromise. A Vote Trade occurs if one

person votes for (or against) another person’s issue in

exchange for the other person’s vote for (or against) their

issue. For example, delegates from the Lower South

848843PRQXXX10.1177/1065912919848843Political Research QuarterlyDougherty

research-article2019

1University of Georgia, Athens, USA

Corresponding Author:

Keith Dougherty, Department of Political Science, University of

Georgia, 180 Baldwin Hall, Athens, GA 30602, USA.

Email: dougherk@uga.edu

Slavery in the Constitution: Why the

Lower South Occasionally Succeeded

at the Constitutional Convention

Keith Dougherty1

Abstract

The Lower South’s successes at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 contributed to a constitution that prohibited

federal interference with the slave trade until 1808, guaranteed fugitive slaves would be returned to their masters,

and prevented export tariffs. We explain why the Lower South occasionally succeeded on sectional issues at the

convention using a multiple-dimensional model of sincere voting, estimated using a new dataset of delegate votes,

multiple imputation, and optimal classification. We argue that mixing sectional issues with powers of the federal

government made the Lower South more mainstream and helped it gain support from various Northern delegations.

We test this relationship using regression analysis and apply it to two substantive issues where the Lower South

succeeded. The result is a largely new account of how slavery became encoded in the Constitution.

Keywords

U.S. Constitutional Convention, Lower South, slavery