Page:The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 Volume 3.djvu/446

 not direct, as was expected; if I can show that all their pretensions and claims are wholly untrue and unfounded, and that while they are fully represented, they did, by force, or something like it, deprive us of a rightful part of our representation, I shall then be able to take the mask from all their pretended reasons and excuses, and show this unpardonable attack, this monster, in its true and uncovered hideousness.…

If, as no doubt, you will in future confine your imports to the amount of your exports of native products, and all your revenue is to be, as it is now, raised by taxes or duties on your imports, I ask you who pays the expense, and who, in fact, enables you to go on with your Government at all, and prevents its wheels from stopping? I will show you by the papers which I hold in my hand. This, sir, is your Secretary of the Treasury’s report, made a few weeks ago, by which it appears that all the exports of native products, from Maine to Pennsylvania, inclusive, for the last year, amounted to only about eighteen millions of dollars; while those among the slaveholding States, to the Southward of Pennsylvania, amounted to thirty-two millions or thereabouts, thereby enabling themselves, or acquiring the right, to import double as much as the others, and furnishing the Treasury with double the amount the Northern and Eastern States do. And here let me ask, from whence do these exports arise? By whose hands are they made? I answer, entirely by the slaves; and yet these valuable inhabitants, without whom your very government could not go on, and the labor of two or three of whom in the Southern States is more valuable to it than the labor of five of their inhabitants in the Eastern States, the States owning and possessing them are denied a representation but for three-fifths on this floor, while the whole of the comparatively unproductive inhabitants of the Northern and Eastern States are fully represented here. Is it just—is it equal? And yet they have the modesty to complain of the representation, as unjust and unequal; and that they have not the return made them that they expected, by taxing the slaves, and making them bear a proportion of the public burdens.…

Before I proceed to the other parts of this question, I have thus endeavored to give a new view of the subject of representation in this House; to show how much more the Eastern and Northern States are represented than the Southern and Western; …

The supporters of the amendment contend that Congress have the right to insist on the prevention of involuntary servitude in Missouri; and found the right on the ninth section of the first article, which says, “the migration or importation of such persons as the