"Provided always, that any person escaping into the same, from whom labor-service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully retained and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid."
This was at once unanimously accepted by the slave States. The next day, the 13th, the ordinance was passed, every slave State present, viz.: Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and every member from those States voting for it. The same prohibition—which a large majority of the South had resisted when presented alone—was now, when accompanied with the proviso, unanimously agreed to.
Here was a sudden change. But the proviso giving the right of reclamation in the said territory, only partially explains it. For a full explanation we must turn again to the Convention. And the first thing is a further extract from Mr. Madison, respecting a letter, before quoted, as follows:
"The distracting question of slavery was agitating and retarding the labors of both bodies—Congress and the Convention; and led to conferences and intercommunications of the members, which resulted in a Compromise, by which the Northern, or anti-slavery portion of the country, agreed to incorporate into the ordinance and Constitution, the provision to restore fugitive slaves; and this mutual and concurrent action was the cause of the similarity of the provisions contained in both, and had its influence in creating the great unanimity by which the ordinance passed, and also in making the Constitution the more acceptable to the slaveholders."
Mr. Madison, also, in the Virginia Convention, urged the ratification of the Constitution for the following among other reasons, viz.:
"At present, if any slave escape to any of those States where slaves are free, he becomes emancipated by their laws; for the laws of the States are uncharitable to one another in this respect. This clause was expressly inserted to enable owners of slaves to retain them. This is a better security than any that now exists."
General Pinckney, one of the delegates in the Federal Convention, from South Carolina, in a debate in the House of Representatives of that State on the Constitution, said:
"We have obtained a right to remove our slaves in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before. In short, considering all the circumstances, we have made the best terms we could, and on the whole I do not think them bad."
In the speech made by Mr. Webster on the 7th of March, 1850, he remarked that:
"So far as we can now learn, there was a perfect concurrence of opinion between those respective bodies—the Congress and the Constitution—and it resulted in this ordinance of 1787."