Abstract
This chapter challenges the long-standing conclusion that North-South alignments helped bring the 1787 Constitutional Convention to a successful conclusion. The widely divergent economic interests between the regions regarding commercial and merchant activities, imports and exports, and slavery and the slave trade created such widely divergent sectional differences that the North-South agreements and compromises that were necessary to complete the Constitution created a governing institution that sowed the seeds of its own downfall. By 1861, the Constitution’s original design could no longer serve as the nation’s governing institution; its design created circumstances that led to southern secession and a civil war that killed and wounded more than a million Americans, cost several billion dollars, and required three major amendments to “save” the Constitution as the nation’s governing institution. This chapter draws on economic reasoning, political theory, and the historical record of the 1787 Constitutional Convention to challenge the long-standing conclusion that the North-South alignments helped bring the convention to a successful conclusion. The methodological approach involves juxtaposing economic principles and the issue positions of the framers and their states on the major North–South agreements and compromises among the delegates.
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Notes
- 1.
For an excellent discussion of the development of regional specialization and trade, see Shepherd and Walton (1972, Chapters 2 and 3).
- 2.
Exports per capita and per white resident are taken from Table 3.2 in Shepherd and Walton (1972, p. 47).
- 3.
- 4.
Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of speeches at the Constitutional Convention are from James Madison’s “Notes” contained in Farrand (1911a,b) and are Madison’s synopses of what was said at the convention. It needs to be noted that Madison made various changes to his notes after they were initially transcribed; some of these were made as much as forty or more years later. All such changes “are indicated by enclosing them within angle brackets 〈〉” (Farrand 1911a, p. xix). All abbreviations, punctuation, and spelling in the quotes are exactly as found in Farrand. In cases where a quotation is from another delegate’s notes, that delegate’s name is also listed in the parentheses.
- 5.
The vote, though, was in no sense a decisive vote on the three-fifths rule as it was a vote of the Committee of the Whole to consider the resolution put forth by Randolph; it was not a binding vote or the final vote of the convention. As a Committee vote, it simply meant that the approved resolution would afterward be presented to the convention to consider. And the rules of the convention allowed individual framers freedom to propose and discuss any issue at the convention, including the ability to reconsider previously debated issues.
- 6.
This begins intense debate on the three-fifths rule, which was agreed to 2 days later on July 13.
- 7.
Interestingly, for the first time in the convention, the southern view that exports should not be taxed was expressed explicitly: C.C. Pinckney said that he hoped a clause would be inserted in the proposed constitution that prohibited export taxes (Farrand 1911a, p. 592).
- 8.
Pinckney’s July 12 motion to count “blacks equal to the whites” was defeated, again with only the two lower South states, Georgia and South Carolina, voting for the motion (Farrand 1911a, p. 596).
- 9.
This section borrows freely from Baack et al. (2009).
- 10.
Because the decisions at the Philadelphia convention were based on the support of state delegations not individual delegates per se and the size of the state delegations ranged from three to eight delegates, the vote of one or two delegates from a particular state delegation could have easily changed that state’s vote on particular issues.
- 11.
- 12.
Awareness of tax symmetry pre-dates Lerner, going back at least to the seventeenth century (Irwin 1996). Irwin considers symmetry one of the three most important propositions in international economics.
- 13.
McGuire and Van Cott (2002) explain tariff symmetry in a straightforward supply and demand setting.
- 14.
- 15.
For discussion of these “facts” among traditional historians, see Jensen (1964). For discussion among legal scholars, see Finkelman (1987). For a modern economic examination of the Constitution’s design espousing these “facts,” see McGuire (2003). I was unable to find any discussion in the constitutional and historical literature that disputes the view that southern slave-holding interests were the driving force behind the export tariff clause.
- 16.
In discussing the apportionment issue the day before, Gouverneur Morris had said that he could “never agree to give such encouragement to the slave trade as would be given by allowing them a representation for their negroes” (Farrand 1911a, p. 588).
- 17.
McGuire (2003, pp. 70–72) estimates that delegates who represented states with the greatest concentration of slaves, ceteris paribus, were much more likely to vote in favor of prohibiting export tariffs. It should be noted, however, that because the individual delegate votes in McGuire (2003) are inferred from, among other information, the recorded voting sentiments of the convention delegates, the votes are not independent information that can then be used to corroborate whether a particular delegate voted as part of a specific North-South alliance at the Constitutional Convention. In other words, the delegate votes cannot be used as a dependent variable in a regression model to test whether a specific delegate participated in a particular North-South agreement or compromise because the votes are inferred from the delegates’ sentiments expressing how they were going to vote.
- 18.
There were, though, various changes to the remainder of Article I, Section 8, Clause 1, later in the convention. These changes amended and/or clarified the purposes of government tax revenues and inserted the uniformity limitation on duties, excises, and imposts, but no changes were made to the “power to lay and collect taxes” itself (Farrand 1911b, pp. 326–327, 355–356, 392, 412–414, 418, 470, 481, 497, 499, 529–530, 614).
- 19.
The slave trade clause did allow a tax or duty up to ten dollars per slave, but no tariff on slave imports was ever enacted.
- 20.
Details of state restrictions on slavery and the slave trade can be found in Phillips (1918 [1966], pp. 132–133) and Fogel and Engerman (1974, pp. 33–34). Du Bois (1896 [1969], pp. 223–239) presents somewhat different information on slave trade restrictions for Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York.
- 21.
Interestingly, just prior to the start of the Constitutional Convention in spring 1787, the same South Carolina delegates (actually, three of the four; Pierce Butler, Charles Pinckney, and John Rutledge) voted in the South Carolina state legislature to prohibit slave imports into their state (Brady 1972, p. 602).
- 22.
Despite the possibility of obscuring effects of vote trading on this integral part of the bargain, McGuire (2003, pp. 77–79) indicates that delegates with merchant interests (mostly from New England) unanimously opposed the proposal and southern delegates from states with greater concentrations of slaves, ceteris paribus, were statistically more likely to have supported it. His results also hint at the possibility that delegates who personally owned slaves might have been less likely to vote yes. Consequently, the effect on the vote of personal slaveholdings might have been opposite the effect on the vote of the amount of slaves in a delegate’s state. Perhaps these possible opposite effects are due to the obscuring effects of vote trades on the issue.
- 23.
George Mason, in a lengthy declaration of his objections to the Constitution that he circulated to several people, went on at even greater length about the voting rule for navigation acts. To wit: “by requiring only a majority to make all commercial and navigation laws, the five Southern States, whose produce and circumstances are totally different from that of the eight Northern and Eastern States, may < will> be ruined, for such rigid and premature regulations may be made as will enable the merchants of the Northern and Eastern States not only to demand an exorbitant freight, but to monopolize the purchase of the commodities at their own price, for many years, to the great injury of the landed interests, and < the> impoverishment of the people; and the danger is the greater as the gain on one side will be in proportion to the loss on the other. Whereas requiring two-thirds of the members present in both Houses would have produced mutual moderation, promoted the general interest, and removed an insuperable objection to the adoption of this < the> government” (Farrand 1911b, pp. 639–640).
- 24.
Even when in effect, the state restrictions are commonly believed to have been porous. There is little reason to believe that a national restriction on slave imports would not have been porous as well. In fact, it has been suggested that as many as a quarter million slaves were smuggled into the country before 1860 even though a national prohibition on imports took effect in 1808 (Walton and Rockoff 2002, p. 271).
- 25.
Fogel and Engerman (1974, pp. 24–25) provide an often-cited indirect estimate of 291,000 slave imports into “North America” for 1780–1810, but their estimate does not include any year or state-by-state breakdown.
- 26.
Finkelman (1987, p. 221) contends that the constitutional ban on national interference in the international slave trade could not have been much of a “lure” to southerners for constitutional settlement “because at the time of the convention none of these states was actively importing slaves from Africa”. The accuracy of his statement is dubious as Georgia and South Carolina were actively importing slaves from the end of Revolutionary War until about the time of the Philadelphia convention (Goldfarb 1994, pp. 22–23; Mcmillin 2004, pp. 30–48, Tables 7 and 9). In Finkleman’s view, the key ingredients of what he calls the “dirty compromise” were the passage of the export tariff prohibition to “lure” lower South delegates to defeat passage of the two-thirds super-majority requirement for all commercial regulations (Finkelman 1987, pp. 213–223). This, though, ignores that tariff symmetry blunted the “lure” of the export tariff prohibition.
- 27.
Similarly, Brady (1972) and Goldfarb (1994) both maintain that lower South framers participated in the bargain because of the expected benefits to their states’ dominant economic interests in keeping the slave trade open, even if for only twenty years. Yet neither recognizes that tariff symmetry and the simple-majority vote component of the bargain cost the southern economy. As a result, the extension of the limitation on national interference in the slave trade apparently benefited two lower South states, but the other parts of the Slave Trade Compromise cost the overall southern economy, both the upper and the lower South.
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McGuire, R.A. (2018). North-South Alliances During the Drafting of the Constitution: The Costs of Compromise. In: Hall, J., Witcher, M. (eds) Public Choice Analyses of American Economic History. Studies in Public Choice, vol 35. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77592-0_2
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