Slave Nation (21 page)

Franklin was eighty-one and infirm. Although he lived nearby, it was difficult for him to attend all the convention meetings of the because of his health. He wrote out some of his comments, rather than delivering them himself. He could not have converted this idea into legislative action. He had to find other delegates who had the physical energy, the talent at persuading legislators, the breadth of vision, and the respect of the legislators at the Convention and at the Congress in New York to make the concept work. Franklin’s home was only a few doors away from the hall where the Convention met, and it would require little energy to discuss the prospect with men like Richard Henry Lee. It is likely that it was Richard Henry Lee who carried out Franklin’s plan because of his standing among the southerners in both Philadelphia and in New York. Richard Henry Lee was a member of Congress, but not the Convention. He had appeared in Philadelphia at the end of June en route to the Congress in New York just as the Convention appeared to be deadlocked.
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It is possible that Lee never knew it was Franklin’s plan. While appearing all innocence, Franklin was wise in devious ways of proceeding.
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One difficulty with this analysis is that Lee and Franklin were not friends. Both Walter Isaacson and Gordon Wood, who have recently published books about Franklin, trace the strained relationship back to Arthur Lee, Richard Henry’s brother, who invoked family support in pursuit of his dislike of Franklin.
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Historian J. Kent McGaughy attributes the hostility to the fact that Franklin had sided with Pennsylvanians in a conflict with Virginians over expansion into western lands.
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Isaacson does say that “on rare occasions, Lee and Franklin put aside their animosity as they discussed their common cause.”
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Saving the union from dissolution at the Convention could have qualified as one of those “rare occasions.”

Now we leave the realm of speculation for facts. Shortly after the Grand Committee had voted for equal representation in the Senate and population plus three-fifths of slaves in the House, five members of the Continental Congress rode north from Philadelphia and joined the proceedings of the Continental Congress in New York. On July 3 or 4, William Blount and Benjamin Hawkins of North Carolina and William Pierce and William Few of Georgia left for New York City. These four were members of both the Convention and the Congress.

Richard Henry Lee probably left Philadelphia on July 5, arriving in New York on July 7, and taking his seat in Congress on July 9.
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Thus he would have had a day in Philadelphia before he left and a day in New York before he took his seat in Congress to discuss the proposal to prohibit slavery north of the Ohio River with delegates in both places.

Although the meetings of the Constitutional Convention were secret, Lee was not an outsider. McGaughy writes, “In spite of the Convention delegates’ efforts to maintain security, Richard Henry Lee obviously found a line into the inner workings of the gathering.”
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He was privy to the thinking of the leaders from both the South and North with whom he had worked during the Revolution and at the Continental Congress. In the previous year, he had served as president of the Congress. Lee took this role seriously, living and entertaining lavishly after Congress decided to pay the expenses of its president.
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He had declined membership in the Constitutional Convention because he viewed it as a body that would report to Congress; and that Congress would make the “real” decisions. He thought it inappropriate to be a member of this “subordinate” body.
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Lee enjoyed his role in the pantheon of the American Revolution. His eloquence and reasoning as a speaker, and his unceasing activity in the name of colonial freedom, coupled with a desire for recognition on a national scale, made him a public figure recognized by both North and South.
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Historian Jack Greene describes Richard Henry Lee thusly:

Unlike John Wilkes or Patrick Henry, he seems to have lacked the inclination or the necessary breadth of appeal to secure a broad following among the public at large and become a demagogue. His proper forum was the legislative chamber; his audience, his fellow legislators.…He was not an ideologue who would take his case to the country, but a “parliamentary politician” who preferred to operate inside the legislative halls and within the small circles of the politically powerful.
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Lee had often been the public voice of Virginia in legislative halls. He had vetoed the Galloway plan at the First Congress in 1774 by threatening to walk out and had been selected to make the motion for independence in 1776. That year he also circulated a draft constitution for Virginia developed in consultation with John Adams. The draft, according to historian Robert Sutton, was, “pivotal in persuading the delegates [to the Virginia Convention] that there was a better government than royal authority.”
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He had been treated as a senior statesman for a decade, having served as president of the Continental Congress during passage of the Land Ordinance of 1785. That year, he had presided over—and helped defeat—Rufus King’s effort to revive Jefferson’s antislavery clause.
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As a result, he knew firsthand the problems of the territory; the interest of the North in a slave-free area as well as the concerns of the South. By 1787, the increasing pressures of the Ohio Company to purchase land free of slavery also would have focused Lee’s attention on the northern territory.

The capacity to translate political sentiments into legislative action was a major hallmark of his career. It makes him the preeminent candidate as the promoter of the antislavery clause in the Northwest Ordinance at both the Constitutional Convention and the Continental Congress in New York.

Lee’s own attitude toward slavery and the North had distinctive characteristics. His initial speech in the House of Burgesses in 1759 blamed slavery for Virginia’s cultural backwardness.
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Lee, in his youth, saw that the evils of slavery adversely affected whites as well as blacks who were “equally entitled to liberty and freedom by the great law of nature.”
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Beyond that, Lee had cultivated friendships with New Englanders, beginning in 1773, with a letter to Samuel Adams and followed up with long-term relations with John Adams, that sometimes got him into trouble with fellow Virginians.
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Lee was more friendly toward the New Englanders than to some of his Virginia colleagues, whose “hasty, unpersevering, aristocratic genius of the South suits not my disposition and is inconsistent with my ideas of what must constitute social happiness and security.”
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According to historian Pauline Maier, he was not only among the Jeffersonians in his opposition to slavery while living on its proceeds, but was an admirer of the spartan culture of New England. Maier captured the complex forces animating his distinguished Revolutionary career in her essay on Lee.
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It concludes:

Men like Lee were hardly conservative revolutionaries, dedicated only to preserving Virginia’s past. Their Virginia was by nature too impermanent to afford men like Lee the “social happiness and security” they sought. The task they faced was to wrest from instability a more satisfying world. If Lee abandoned the prospect of personal migration [to Massachusetts], he could still hope to resolve his own dilemmas and those of his family not by independence alone but through a larger moral redefinition that for him and others was integral to the Revolution of 1776—by refashioning all America after his image of a sober, diligent, meritocratic northeast. Thus it was that the ways of New England, which for Richard Henry Lee as for Samuel Adams came to represent the hope and meaning of a new American republic, had great appeal to a Virginian of good family, but poor prospects.

This portrait of Lee’s character enhances the likelihood that he supported the expansion of northern culture both because he thought it would limit slavery and because he saw virtues in a slave-free society. Although the date he left for New York is uncertain, he arrived there in time to take his seat on July 9. While the five delegates made their way to New York and the Continental Congress, the Convention in Philadelphia spent the week arguing about a number of issues that always seemed to return to the question of slavery. The level of depression rose as the risks of failure discussed on Monday, July 2, continued to mount. On July 10, the New York delegation pulled out of the Convention altogether. George Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton asking him to return, but painting a woeful picture of what he would find if he did:

The state of our councils which prevailed at the period you left this city…are now, if possible, in a worse train than ever; you will find but little ground on which the hope of a good establishment can be formed. In a word, I almost despair at seeing a favorable issue to the proceedings of the convention, and do therefore repent having had any agency in the business.
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Historian Richard Brookhiser emphasized the importance that Washington placed on his reputation, and how he considered the risks to that reputation of each new venture that presented itself as an opportunity. But the risks to his reputation in attending the Convention were simultaneously risks to the principle of self-government that he valued so highly.
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Washington’s unhappiness in his letter to Hamilton reflected the condition of the convention on July 10. It worsened the next day. Some examples of comments concerning slavery made between July 11 and 14 come from Madison’s notes, taken to record the proceedings.
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On July 11, Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania told the Convention he was:

Reduced to the dilemma of doing injustice to the southern states or to human nature, and he must therefore do it to the former. For he could never agree to give such encouragement to the slave trade as would be given by allowing them a representation for their Negroes, and he did not believe those states would ever confederate on terms that would deprive them of that trade.

The next day, July 12, William Richardson Davie of North Carolina became impatient. He said it was

high time now to speak out. He saw that it was meant by some gentlemen to deprive the southern states of any share of representation for their blacks. He was sure that North Carolina would never confederate on any terms that did not rate them as at least three-fifths. If the eastern states meant therefore to exclude them altogether the business was at an end.

Gouverneur Morris responded that

He came here to form a compact for the good of America. He was ready to do so with all the states. He hoped and believed that all would enter into such a compact. If they would not he was ready to join with any state that would. But as the compact was to be voluntary, it is in vain for the eastern states to insist on what the southern states would never agree to. It was equally vain for the latter to require what the other states can never admit; and he verily believed the people of Pennsylvania will never agree to a representation of Negroes.

Gouverneur Morris continued the next day, July 13, when he saw that:

The southern gentlemen will not be satisfied unless they see the way open to their gaining a majority in the public councils.…Either this distinction [between northern and southern states] is fictitious or real. If fictitious let it be dismissed and let us proceed with due confidence. If it be real, instead of attempting to blend incompatible things, let us at once take friendly leave of each other. There can be no end of demands for security if every particular interest is to be entitled to it. The eastern states may claim it for their fishery, and for other objects, as the southern states claim it for their peculiar objects.

In response, Pierce Butler of South Carolina explained: The security the southern states want is that their Negroes may not be taken from them which some gentlemen within or without doors, have a very good mind to do.

On Saturday, July 14, Luther Martin of Maryland took on the larger states:

They are…the weakest in the union. Look at Massachusetts. Look at Virginia. Are they efficient states? He was for letting a separation take place if they desired it. He had rather there be two confederacies than one founded on any other principle than an equality of votes in the Senate.

Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey reiterated that, “The smaller states can never give up their equality. For himself he would in no event yield that security for their rights.”

Rufus King of Massachusetts had a “firm belief that Massachusetts would never be prevailed on to yield to an equality of votes.”

James Madison of Virginia, a staunch opponent of equal votes for the states in either branch of Congress explained that:

If a proper foundation of government was destroyed by substituting an equality in place of a proportional representation, no proper superstructure would be raised.… The evil instead of being cured by time, would increase with every new state that should be admitted, as they must all be admitted on the principle of equality…the perpetuity it would give to the preponderance of the northern against the southern scale was a serious consideration. It seems now to be pretty well understood that the real difference of interests lay, not between the large and small but between the n(orthern) and southern states. The institution of slavery and its consequences formed the line of discrimination. There were five states in the South, eight on the northern side of this line. Should a proportional representation take place it is true, the northern side would still outnumber the other; but not in the same degree at this time; and every day would tend toward an equilibrium.

And James Wilson of Pennsylvania reminded the Convention that:

The great fault of the existing confederacy is its inactivity. It has never been a complaint against Congress that they governed overmuch. The complaint has been that they have governed too little. To remedy this defect we were sent here.…Will not our constituents say we sent you here to form an efficient government and you have given us one more complex indeed, but having all the weakness of the former government?