Is Mr. Adams quite sure that “this vicious compromise was the price of the perpetuation of slavery”?
Of course, I knew in a general way that slavery had been responsible for pretty nearly every mean old thing that has ever happened to this country; and it has always grieved me, with more or less poignancy, that New England could not have foreseen that she couldn’t make slavery pay. We lost much precious time while she was discovering that she couldn’t. When at length she did discover that there was no money in it for her, she thoughtfully sold most of her slaves, and went in for Emancipation.
Then, to be sure, the sacred “Cause of Freedom” advanced at a gallop; but, as I said, we had lost a good deal of time waiting for New England to make her experiment, and a good deal of unhappiness resulted.
But while I knew all this, in a general way, I really was not aware that the slave-owning states in the Constitutional Convention forced Washington, Madison, Franklin and Randolph to act in the cowardly and vicious manner described by Mr. Adams.
The state of Virginia bitterly opposed the equal representation of the states in the Senate. This was strange conduct in Virginia, if the purpose of that compromise was the “perpetuation of slavery.”
The state of New Jersey was the leader of those states in the convention which demanded equal representation in the Senate. If that senatorial equality was intended to perpetuate slavery, New Jersey’s attitude was most peculiar.
This compromise which Mr. Adams calls “vicious, cowardly and unfair” is known to constitutional history as the Connecticut Compromise. The men who championed it most ably were Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth. Were these men actuated by a desire to perpetuate slavery?
All the books which I have read upon the subject state that equal representation in the Senate was a compromise which the smaller states wrung from the larger states, as the price of the union, not the price of the “perpetuation of slavery.”
New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware were afraid to give up their independent, sovereign existence as states and to go into a union where the large states, like Pennsylvania and Virginia, would have so much greater power than themselves, if that power should be based on population.
When New Jersey refused to consider any plan of union which did not safeguard the interests of the small states, she was not thinking of perpetuating slavery. When Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth made such a determined fight to preserve, in part, the equality which then prevailed among the states, they were not thinking of perpetuating slavery. Their motive was to protect Connecticut, the small state, against Virginia and other large states.