It urged the Congress to "take such measures in their wisdom, as the powers with which they are invested will authorize, for promoting the abolition of slavery, and discouraging every species of traffic in slaves." . . . this new petition made two additional points. . . First, it claimed that both slavery ands the slave trade were incompatible with the values for which the American Revolution had been fought . . . Second, it challenged the claim that the Constitution prohibited any legislation by the federal government against the slave trade for twenty years, suggesting instead that the "general welfare" clause of the Constitution empowered the Congress to take whatever action it deemed "necessary and proper" to eliminate the stigma of traffic in human beings and to "Countenance the Restoration of Liberty for all Negroes."The reaction from the representatives of the southern states was strong:
. . . several representatives from South Carolina . . . objected to the suggestion that the petitions should be read along in the halls of Congress. Aedanus Burke . . . warned that the petitioners were "blowing the trumpet of sedition" and demanded that the galleries be cleared of all spectators and newspaper reporters. . . . The position of all the speakers from the Deep South seemed to be that the Constitution not only prohibited the Congress from legislating about slavery or the slave trade; it forbade anyone in Congress from even mentioning those subjects publicly.Hence the name of the chapter -- "The Silence."
Although James Jackson from Georgia was the major spokesman for those who opposed the petition, the politician who did the most, not only to defeat the petition but to strengthen the Southern position, was James Madison.
Madison's position on slavery captured the essence of what might be called "the Virginia straddle." On the one hand, he found the blatantly proslavery arguments "shamefully indecent" and described his colleagues from South Carolina and Georgia as "intemperate beyond all example and even all decorum." . . . But a fault line ran through the center of his thinking, a kind of mysterious region where ideas entered going in one direction but then emerged headed the opposite way.Ellis goes on to explain as best he can:
In the midst of this willful confusion, one Madisonian conviction shone through . . . -- namely, that slavery was an explosive topic that must be removed from the political agenda of the new nation. It was taboo because it exposed the inherent contradictions of the Virginia position, which was much closer to the position of the Deep South than Madison wished to acknowledge, even to himself. And it was taboo because, more than any other controversy, it possessed the political potential to destroy the union.The contrast between Franklin and Madison is summed up as follows:
Franklin wanted to put slavery onto the national agenda before it was too late to take decisive action in accord with the principles of the Revolution. Madison wanted to take slavery off the national agenda because he believed that decisive action would result in the destruction of either the Virginia planter class or the nation itself.Franklin lost, and Madison won. But Madison's "victory" went far beyond defeating the petition: "Madison wanted to use the vote on the committee report to create the equivalent of a landmark decision prohibiting any national scheme for emancipation."
When Madision succeeded, even George Washington was "relieved," writing to a Virginia friend that "the slave business has at last [been] put to rest and will scarce awake."
Of course, it would awake again, and the full awakening would be called the Civil War.
