Gen. Pinckney moved to strike out the words “the year 1800 and to insert the words eighteen hundred and eight.”
Mr. Gorham, of Massachusetts, seconded the motion. This action brought from one, who up to that time does not appear to have participated in the discussion, Mr. Madison, the declaration that: “twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the national character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution.”[10]
The reported clause had been referred to the committee against the vote of New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Virginia and New Jersey both opposed the amendment; but as it received the vote of both New Hampshire and Massachusetts, which had not voted for the commitment, it was supported by seven out of the eleven States, the three New England States present and four of the five Southern States, the three Middle States present, and one Southern State, opposing.
While reasonable men must always be alive to the necessity of compromise, and while also the great responsibilities of the situation concerning this matter are apparent, yet this most important discussion and vote establishes some facts, with regard to the constitutional Union, which the honest historian cannot disregard.
First: The migration or importation of Negroes was prohibited in spite of the declaration of the representatives of the three Southern States, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, that some of the Southern States could not accept the Constitution if it did.
Second: A tax upon the importation was imposed through the aid of the vote of New England, whose representatives had warned the Convention that it would be a recognition of slavery to tax importation. The claim, therefore made, that South Carolina and Georgia forced the recognition of the slave trade is not borne out by the facts in the case. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia followed the suggestion of Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, and, abandoning the principles for which they had contended, “formed a bargain” by which the slave trade was surrendered for the recognition of slavery by the Constitution.
Upon considering the discussion, although Ellsworth’s shrewd criticism crippled, to some extent, the lofty flight of Mason of Virginia, yet the speech of the latter puts him upon a higher plane of statesmanship than that occupied by any deputy present. On the other hand, no matter how high their reputations otherwise may have been established, none descended to so low a plane as King, of Massachusetts and Rutledge of South Carolina; while no individual exhibited as much ignorance of the existing situation as he, who by the temperance of his utterance and the influence of his high personal character, most thoroughly mastered it.
Gen. C. C. Pinckney did not seem to know that South Carolina had not been permitted by Great Britain to throw off the slave trade, when, as a province, she sought to do so,[11] or that the sentiment of the people of his State, even while he was speaking, had found expression in an Act which prohibited the bringing into the State of “any Negro slave contrary to the Act to regulate the recovery of debts and prohibiting the importation of Negroes”[12] and which was sufficiently strong even after the above compromise to negative, by a vote of 93 to 40, Gillon’s attempt in the South Carolina Legislature in 1788, to repeal the law prohibiting importation.[13] No severer criticism of the General’s statesmanship on this point was ever promulgated than that, thirty-four years later, which his devoted brother, Gen. Thomas Pinckney, furnished, in some reflections, published by him[14] without any thought of how positively they ran counter to the dictum of his brother—“South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves”—he warned South Carolinians that Negro artisans were taking the places of whites.
But, turning from this discussion, it is of importance to consider just how the Negro population of the United States was located at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.
By the census taken in 1790 it was indicated that about six-sevenths of the entire colored population of the thirteen States constituting the Union, inhabited the four States of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, of which about one-half were found in Virginia, the population in the order of their numbers being as follows: Virginia 305,493; Maryland 111,099; South Carolina, 108,895; North Carolina, 105,547. The Negro population of Georgia at that date was but slightly in excess of the Negro population of New York, being only 29,662 to New York’s 25,978, while in the region north of Maryland there were nearly three times as many Negroes as in the region south of South Carolina.