Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/425

 enumerated five distinct commercial interests: the fisheries and West India trade, belonging to New England; the interest of New York in a free trade; wheat and flour, the staples of New Jersey and Pennsylvania; tobacco, the staple of Maryland and Virginia, and partly of North Carolina; rice and indigo, the staples of South Carolina and Georgia. The same ground was taken by Williamson and Mason, and very warmly by Randolph, who declared that an unlimited power in congress to enact navigation laws "would complete the deformity of a system having already so many odious features that he hardly knew if he could agree to it." Any restriction of the power of congress over commerce was warmly opposed by Gouvernenr Morris, Wilson, and Gorham. Madison also took the same side. C. C. Pinckney did not deny that it was the true interest of the south to have no regulation of commerce; but, considering the commercial losses of the eastern states during the revolution, their liberal conduct toward the views of South Carolina (in the vote just taken, giving eight years' further extension to the slave-trade), and the interest of the weak southern states in being united with the strong eastern ones, he should go against any restrictions on the power of commercial regulation. "He had himself prejudices against the eastern states before he came here, but would acknowledge that he had found them as liberal and candid as any men whatever." Butler and Rutledge took the same ground, and the amended report was adopted, against the votes of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Thus, by an understanding, or, as Gouverneur Morris called it, "a bargain," between the commercial representatives of the northern states and the delegates of South Carolina and Georgia, and in spite of the opposition of Maryland and Virginia, the unrestricted power of congress to enact navigation laws was conceded to the northern merchants, and to the Carolina rice planters, as an equivalent, twenty years' continuance of the African slave-trade. This was the third great compromise of the constitution. The other two were the concession to the smaller states of an equal representation in the senate, and, to the slave-holders, the counting three fifths of the slaves in determining the ratio of representation. If this third compromise differed from the other two by involving not merely a political, but a moral sacrifice, there was this partial compensation about it, that it was not permanent, like the others, but expired at the end of twenty years by its own limitation.

When the article came up providing for the mutual delivery of fugitives from justice, a motion was made by Butler, seconded by C. Pinckney, that fugitive slaves and servants be included. Wilson objected that this would require a delivery at the public expense. Sherman saw no more propriety in the public seizing and surrendering a servant than a horse. Butler withdrew his motion; but the next day he introduced a clause substantially the same with that now found in the constitution, which provides that "no person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another,