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

The desire of the southern states to keep slavery going was the biggest driver of what ended up in our Constitution, argues Goldstone convincingly. That idea you had about how high-minded and idealistic the Founding Fathers were - well, put it away. Most of them were motivated by the economic interests of their own state and region, far more than by the idea of forming a union. James Madison was seemingly one of the few who was motivated solely or mostly by his wishes for union, and it was precisely this desire for compromise at all costs that enabled him to allow such pro-slavery positions into the document. The lower South had everyone else over a barrel, and they knew it. We think of Madison as the "Father of the Constitution," but you may as well give that title to John Rutledge of South Carolina, argues Goldstone. Rutledge got everything he wanted into the Constitution, while most of Madison's propositions went by the wayside.

I'm pretty ignorant of many of the nuances of American history. I didn't know, for example, that the upper South and lower South had completely different ideas about slavery and the slave trade. The lower South (the Carolinas, Georgia) depended on the slave trade - imports of slaves from Africa - because of the crops they grew, rice and indigo. (The colonial era predated the cash crop of cotton.) Rice was wickedly difficult to grow and harvest, requiring swamps and brutal labor conditions, and slaves' life expectancies on rice plantations were lower than slaves' life expectancies on the tobacco plantations of the upper South (Virginia and Maryland). The convention delegates from Virginia, such as George Mason, although he owned 300 slaves and was one of the wealthiest men in America, wanted to abolish the slave trade. Naturally there was an economic motive for this: slaves in Virginia bred amply, there was an oversupply, and the upper South wanted to sell their oversupply to the lower South. But the lower South could buy slaves from overseas much more cheaply than the upper South was willing to sell them. A slaveowner put a lot of capital investment into a slave, raising him or her from babyhood to adulthood and working age, and slaveowners like George Mason weren't going to sell a slave in his prime below cost.

The topic of slavery and the Constitution is a fascinating and horrible one. There's a lot of interesting material here. But there's also a lot of dry recitation and details about committee work, which accounts for the 3-stars.