Chapter 2.0. Debating Slavery in the Constitution, Introduction

Representation and Slavery. The extended debates about how representation of people and states in Congress should work continued, as we saw in Module 8, until the Connecticut Compromise was approved on July 16. Judging by the amount of time that the delegates spent on it, this was the most difficult issue they faced during the Convention. However, the question of representation in the national legislature overlapped with that of slavery, both in terms of the issues involved and in terms of the timing of the debates in Philadelphia.

Financial Contributions or Population? The two issues, representation in the national legislature and slavery, could not be fully separated because some basis had to be established for allocating, or “‘apportioning” as the Constitution would call it, representatives in the “first branch” of the legislature (the later House of Representatives).

Early on several delegates, especially those from the South, suggested using each state’s wealth or total of taxes paid to the federal government (“quotas of contribution”) as the basis for allocating representatives, but a majority ultimately preferred the criterion of state population. However, this standard forced the delegates to specify which people should be counted; in most discussions population was expressed primarily in terms of the estimated number of “free persons.” The southern delegates had in fact suggested using wealth or taxes instead because these measures would give weight to the South’s slaves without having to explicitly equate free persons and slaves.