The Convention Debates

Part 1 documented what individual founders wrote about slavery in letters, petitions, and personal papers. This episode documents what delegates said on the Convention floor about the three slavery provisions in the Constitution. Both are from the primary record. They are not the same record.

Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution apportioned congressional representation and direct taxes by counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. The word "slave" does not appear in the clause. The Constitution uses "all other Persons" throughout. On August 8, 1787, Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania moved to insert "free" before "inhabitants" in the apportionment article. The motion would have excluded enslaved people from the count entirely.

Morris's motion to insert "free" failed. The Three-Fifths Clause remained as drafted. Madison recorded the vote. He also recorded, in a footnote added after the Convention, his own account of the arrangement that produced the slavery provisions. That footnote is the only record of what Madison believed happened behind the formal floor proceedings.

On August 21 and 22, 1787, the Convention debated the clause allowing Congress to prohibit the importation of enslaved people, but not before 1808. Delegates from five states argued on each side. Madison recorded the speeches in full. The positions are not paraphrased here. They are quoted from the record.

Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 required that any person "held to Service or Labour" who escaped to another state be returned to the state from which they escaped. The words "slave" and "slavery" do not appear in this clause either. The Convention passed it with little recorded debate. It became the constitutional basis for the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850.

Madison added a footnote to his Notes on the Convention, not on the floor record but as a retrospective account. He wrote that three provisions emerged from a private understanding: the Three-Fifths Clause, the Slave Trade Clause, and the Fugitive Slave Clause. The arrangement involved between delegates from the Deep South and delegates from New England. New England would agree not to disturb the slave trade; the South would agree to a simple majority vote on navigation acts rather than a two-thirds requirement. Madison called this arrangement, in his own words, "the real distinction of interests" that shaped the outcome.

Madison kept his Convention notes private throughout his life. He revised them after the fact; the extent of those revisions has been the subject of sustained scholarly inquiry. They were published in 1840, four years after his death, by order of Congress. Max Farrand compiled them alongside the notes of other delegates in his Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, published by Yale University Press in 1911. Farrand Vol. I and II are at the Library of Congress digital collections and at the TFR Founders' Library.

The Yale Avalon Project has the full text of Madison's Notes by date. The August 8 session (debates_808.asp), the August 21 session (debates_821.asp), and the August 22 session (debates_822.asp) contain all the speeches quoted in this episode. The text is public domain. Every quote above is from those three pages.