navigation laws would complete the
deformity of a system having already so many odious features that he
hardly knew if he could agree to it. Any restriction of the power of
Congress over commerce was warmly opposed by Gouverneur Morris, Wilson,
and Gorham. Madison also took the same side. Charles C. Pinckney did not
deny that it was the true interest of the South to have no regulation of
commerce; but considering the commercial losses of the Eastern States
during the Revolution, their liberal conduct toward the views of South
Carolina--in the vote just taken, giving eight years' further extension
to the slave trade--and the interest of the weak Southern States in
being united with the strong Eastern ones, he should go against any
restriction on the power of commercial regulation. 'He had himself
prejudices against the Eastern States before he came here, but would
acknowledge that he found them as liberal and candid as any men
whatever.' Butler and Rutledge took the same ground, and the same report
was adopted, against the votes of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina,
and Georgia.

"Thus, by an understanding, or, as Gouverneur Morris called it, 'a
bargain,' between the commercial representatives of the Northern States
and the delegates of South Carolina and Georgia, and in spite of the
opposition of Maryland and Virginia, the unrestricted power of Congress
to pass navigation laws was conceded to the Northern merchants; and to
the Carolina rice-planters, as an equivalent, twenty years' continuance
of the African slave trade. This was the third 'Great Compromise' of the
Constitution. The other two were the concessions to the smaller States
of an equal representation in the Senate, and, to the slaveholders, the
counting of three-fifths of the slaves in determining the ratio of
representation. If this third compromise differed from the other two by
involving not only a political but a moral sacrifice, there was this
partial compensation about it, that it was not permanent, like the
others, but expired at the end of twenty years by its own limitation."

Of the important subjects remaining to be disposed of, that of the
executive department was, perhaps, the most difficult. The modified plan
of Edmund Randolph left the executive to be elected by the Legislature
for a single term of seven years. The election was subsequently given to
a college of electors, to be chosen in the States in such manner as the
legislatures of the St