The wisdom of keeping the proceedings secret was fully justified.  The framers of the Constitution knew that it was to a large degree a new experiment, that it would be subjected to all kinds of criticism, but that it must be judged by its entirety and not by its parts; and that therefore it must be presented entire.  At the outset some of the members, foreseeing opposition, were for suggesting palliatives and for sugar-coating.  Some of the measures they feared might excite hostility.  To these suggestions Washington made a brief but very noble remonstrance which seemed deeply to impress his hearers.  And no one could question that it gave the keynote on which he hoped to maintain the business of the Convention.  “It is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted,” Washington said very gravely.  “Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained.  If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterward defend our work?  Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the event is in the hand of God."[1] Among the obstacles which seemed very serious—­and many believed they would wreck the Convention—­was the question of slavery.  By this time all the northern part of the country favored its abolition.  Even Virginia was on that side.  For practical planters like George Washington knew that it was the most costly and least productive form of labor.  They opposed it on economic rather than moral grounds.  Farther South, however, especially in South Carolina where the negroes seemed to be the only kind of laborers for the rice-fields, and in those regions where they harvested the cotton, the whites insisted that slavery should be maintained.  The contest seemed likely to be very fierce between the disputants, and then, with true Anglo-Saxon instinct, they sought for a compromise.  The South had regarded slaves as chattels.  The compromise brought forward by Madison consisted in agreeing that five slaves should count in population as three.  By this curious device a negro was equivalent to three fifths of a white man.  Such a compromise was, of course, illogical, leaving the question whether negroes were chattels or human beings with even a theoretical civil character undecided.  But many of the members, who saw the illogic quite plainly, voted for it, being dazzled if not seduced by the thought that it was a compromise which would stave off an irreconcilable conflict at least for the present; so Washington, who wished the abolition of slavery, voted for the compromise along with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the South Carolinian who regarded slavery as higher than any of the Ten Commandments.

[Footnote 1:  Fiske, Critical Period, 250.]