discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.”  After some jockeying, the other two questions were settled by compromise.  Representation in the lower house of Congress was apportioned among the states “according to their several members, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons ... three fifths of all other persons.”  As to the foreign slave trade, Congress was forbidden to prohibit it prior to the year 1808, and was merely permitted meanwhile to levy an import duty upon slaves at a rate of not more than ten dollars each. [23]

[Footnote 23:  Max Farrand ed., The Records of the Federal Convention (New Haven, 1911), passim]

In the state conventions to which the Constitution was referred for ratification the debates bore out a remark of Madison’s at Philadelphia that the real difference of interests lay not between the large and small states but between those within and without the slaveholding influence.  The opponents of the Constitution at the North censured it as a pro-slavery instrument, while its advocates apologized for its pertinent clauses on the ground that nothing more hostile to the institution could have been carried and that if the Constitution were rejected there would be no prospect of a federal stoppage of importations at any time.  But at the South the opposition, except in Maryland and Virginia where the continuance of the African trade was deprecated, declared the slavery concessions inadequate, while the champions of the Constitution maintained that the utmost practicable advantages for their sectional interest had been achieved.  Among the many amendments to the Constitution proposed by the ratifying conventions the only one dealing with any phase of slavery was offered, strange to say, by Rhode Island, whose inhabitants had been and still were so active in the African trade.  It reads:  “As a traffic tending to establish and continue the slavery of the human species is disgraceful to the cause of liberty and humanity, Congress shall as soon as may be promote and establish such laws as may effectually prevent the importation of slaves of every description."[24] The proposal seems to have received no further attention at the time.

[Footnote 24:  This was dated May 29, 1790.  H.V.  Ames, “Proposed Amendment to the Constitution of the United States,” in the American Historical Association Report for 1896, p. 208]

In the early sessions of Congress under the new Constitution most of the few debates on slavery topics arose incidentally and ended without positive action.  The taxation of slave imports was proposed in 1789, but was never enacted:  sundry petitions of anti-slavery tenor, presented mostly by Quakers, were given brief consideration in 1790 and again at the close of the century but with no favorable results; and when, in 1797, a more concrete issue was raised by memorials asking intervention