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10 SLAVERY AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
which includes the present states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan,
and Wisconsin. That’s quite a large swath of land.
All of these developments produced an increase in the number of
free blacks in both North and South. In 1790, it’s estimated that
about 8 percent of all blacks in the United States were free. By 1810,
14 percent were free. The number of slaves was conversely affected,
with the number of slaves dropping in those years.
These few facts should make clear that the world the men at the
Convention faced in 1787 was not the world the nation faced in the
1850s. These facts should make clear that the trajectory of slavery
in 1787 was not the trajectory that led to the entrenching of slavery
in the 19th century. To understand slavery at the Constitutional
Convention, we must look at it as they did with their eyes, and not
with our eyes, either enriched or clouded by our knowledge of subsequent
history.
As I said, the two main ways of looking at this topic are the Neo-
Lincolnian and the Neo-Garrisonian. I’m going to propose a third—
the Neo-Madisonian approach, which is named for James Madison,
who I think was the person at the time of the Founding who understood
the Constitution best. I see the Neo-Madisonian position as a
kind of middle ground between the Neo-Lincolnians and the Neo-
Garrisonians, although not the kind of middle ground that just
splits the difference between them.
One of the ways in which it’s a kind of middle ground is that the
Neo-Madisonian view holds the Constitution to be neither proslavery
as the Neo-Garrisonians say, nor quite antislavery in the way the
Neo-Lincolnians say. The Neo-Madisonian position denies that the
Constitution endorses the institution of slavery as legitimate and
right. But it also denies that the Constitution made provisions to
stamp out slavery—or, as Lincoln put it, that it consigned the institution
to “ultimate extinction.” Rather, the Neo-Madisonian position
says a few things more subtle than these—three things in particular.
First, it affirms that slavery is legal but not legitimate; second, it
postpones or defers any disposition of the issue of slavery; and
third, it does so for reasons deep in the fundamental principles of
the Constitution, so deep as to make it nearly inevitable that slavery