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Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits and the Struggle for the Constitution

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- A state-by-state survey enables readers to pinpoint differences & their effects on the Constitution's language & intentions
The issue of slavery was actually a concern for convention delegates, and was the main issue which evoked the most resistance to compromise: that's the contention of DARK BARGAIN: SLAVERY, PROFITS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE CONSTITUTION. In fact, the Constitution was molded by the controversies, needs, and presence of slavery: a fact which receives much emphasis and attention in a study which focuses on source material to recreate backroom debates, underlying issues, and philosophical differences between our country's founding fathers. A revealing state-by-state survey enables readers to pinpoint differences and their effects on the Constitution's language and intentions.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch

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- The Father of the Constitution is....John Rutledge??
Lawrence Goldstone, in his new book Dark Bargain, has given us a different view of the Constitutional Convention than the one that we are accustomed to - he has given us a slant on it from a pro-slavery perspective, one that tells the reader that the Constitution was framed largely on the viewpoints of the Pro-Slavery Southern states.

There is no question that the Constitution of the United States is indeed pro-slavery in its original text (exclusive of the Bill of Rights or any amendments), which is why Goldstone makes the argument (quite successfully, in fact) that John Rutledge of South Carolina was the father of the Constitution more than James Madison (the Philosophical leader of the framers) or Gouvernor Morris (the man who wrote the Constitution's text).

There are two major clauses in the Constitution that Goldstone points to as evidence that the document was formed by a Pro-Slavery group of men: The three-fifths compromise (for apportionment purposes, each Slave was counted as 0.6 free persons), and the fact that a 20 year extension of the International Slave Trade was granted by the framers. The three-fifths compromise, naturally, benefited the South above all others - the majority of the Slaves in the republic were in the Southern states (Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia). The extension of the Slave Trade was of benefit to the Carolinas (as they could import Slaves for less cost than purchasing Slaves from Virginia, for example) and the northern Merchants, who were earning vast profits by transporting this human cargo from Africa to North America.

Goldstone calls John Rutledge "Dictator John" because he was able to wrangle compromises out of people that benefited him while giving up very little or nothing of substance. Rutledge was also able to wield a powerful weapon - the threat of a walkout, which nobody else in the convention was able to successfully utilize.

Overall, Goldstone has given us an interesting view of the Constitutional Convention and the men we know as the framers of the Constitution. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding a revisionist theory of the 1787 Convention and comparing it to what most of us were taught in school.

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- Slavery's Effects on Our Founding Law
We have a view, useful in teaching civics and in promoting reverence for governmental authority, that America's Founding Fathers were all amateur Enlightenment philosophers, and that when they met in Philadelphia in 1787 for the Constitutional Convention, they were engaged in high-minded debate about imbuing their principles into the new republic. It does not detract from the amazing document which these men brought forth to realize that they were men, not idealized participants in Socratic dialogues. They were not only men, but they were businessmen, and they were politicians, and what they accomplished was in many cases pragmatic compromising to make practical laws and maintain the Union. The real work of getting the Constitution written involved months of argument and sarcasm, and in the view of Lawrence Goldstone, central to the rancor and the forging of the document was the issue of slavery. In _Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution_ (Walker & Company), he gives a sometimes day-by-day account of how the vexed question of owning other humans entered the debates and how pragmatism triumphed over idealism. Slavery was not a footnote to the proceedings, but according to this book, integral to the writing of the whole.

The greatest conflict that had to be settled concerned the legislative branch. The problem was that southern states were large if slaves were included in the head count, and they were small otherwise, and much of _Dark Bargain_ has to do with the wrangling over this issue. The members of the Convention tried various power-plays, some of which threatened to bring the Convention to a halt, as they jockeyed to get their states and regions more power in the eventual government. A compromise was worked out to allow a Senate composed of two senators from each state, and a House of Representatives, composed of larger numbers of representatives from more populous states. The famous "Three-Fifths Clause," which said that slaves could be counted in the population, but at only 60% of their actual numbers, was the compromise worked out between slave states and free. Goldstone writes that this was a great irony: "Southerners, who insisted that blacks were property, had to assert that they were at least partly people, and northerners, who regularly denounced the enslavement of their fellow human beings, had to acknowledge blacks as at least partly property."

That was the settlement for the most contentious issue, but Goldstone shows that slavery impinged on further discussions of the census, the electoral college, taxes, western expansion, and even the definition of treason. In each case, the founders looked for practical solutions. This forces a shift in our emphasis on how the Constitution was formed. James Madison, for instance, is known as the "Father of the Constitution," and his idealism in seeking a higher good was operative in at least the first weeks of the Convention. As time went on, he gave fewer speeches, and his philosophic tone was more and more ignored, with few of his original proposals adopted. What happened is that practical men, with their own interests (and, let us grant, the interest of their states and regions) at heart took over to make a working document. Madison himself wrote about slavery and the eventual outcome of the Convention, " Great as the evil is, a dismemberment of the Union would be worse." The members of the Convention all knew that continuing slavery was paradoxical in a nation that was so earnest about the pursuit of equality and freedom. In their debates, and even in the final document, they never used the term "slave" or "slavery," preferring euphemisms like "this unique species of property" or "this unhappy class". They had secured the Union in perhaps the only practical way the issue of slavery could have been bypassed, and could not have known that their practical solution set the nation up for slavery to make a bloody divide eighty years later.

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