RE: Migrant has a definition

Posted on: September 15, 2022 at 12:33:02 CT

While the first debate over slavery at the Constitutional Convention concerned representation (see Article I, Section 2, Clause 3), the second debate arose when Southern delegates objected that an unrestricted congressional power to regulate commerce could be used against Southern commercial interests to restrict or outlaw the slave trade. That the resulting provision was an important compromise is underscored by the fact that the clause stands as the first independent restraint on congressional powers, prior even to the restriction on the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus.

Taking Southern concerns into consideration, the draft proposed by the Committee of Detail (chaired by John Rutledge of South Carolina) dealt with trade issues as well as those relating to slavery. The draft permanently forbade Congress to tax exports, to outlaw or tax the slave trade, or to pass navigation laws without two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress. Several delegates strongly objected to the proposal, including Gouverneur Morris, who delivered one of the Convention’s most spirited denunciations of slavery, calling it a “nefarious institution” and “the curse of heaven.”

When the issue came up for a vote, the Southern delegates themselves were sharply divided. George Mason of Virginia condemned the “infernal traffic,” and Luther Martin of Maryland saw the restriction on Congress’s power over the slave trade as “inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution and dishonorable to the American character.” But delegates from Georgia and South Carolina announced that they would not support the Constitution without the restriction, with Charles Pinckney arguing that failing to include the clause would trigger “an exclusion of South Carolina from the Union.”

This same divide had also occurred in debating the Declaration of Independence. Though that document proclaimed the central principle of the Revolution that all men are created equal, a draft clause specifically condemning the slave trade was dropped based on Southern objections.

At the Constitutional Convention, the serious split caused by Southern insistence was referred to the Committee of Eleven (chaired by William Livingston of New Jersey), which took the opposite position from Rutledge and recognized a congressional power over the slave trade, but recommended that it be restricted for twelve years, though allowing a tax on slave importation. Although that was a significant change from the Committee of Detail’s original proposal, Southern delegates accepted the new arrangement but with the extension of the time period to twenty years, from 1800 to 1808.

Agitation against the slave trade was the leading cause espoused by the antislavery movement at the time of the Constitutional Convention, so it is not surprising that this clause was the most immediately controversial of the so-called slave clauses of the proposed Constitution (see also Article I, Section 2, Clause 3; Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3; and Article V). Although some denounced the Migration or Importation Clause as a major concession to slavery interests, most begrudged it to be a necessary and prudent compromise. Roger Sherman of Connecticut stated “better to let the southern states import slaves than to part with those states.” James Madison argued at the Convention that the twenty-year exemption was “dishonorable,” but in The Federalist No. 42, he declared that it was “a great point gained in favor of humanity that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States” what he called an “unnatural traffic” that was “the barbarism of modern policy.”