t anomaly," as Mr. George Ticknor Curtis calls it in his
"History of the Constitution," "of a representation of men without
political rights or social privileges." However much they differed upon
the subject in the convention, there was nobody then and there who
regarded the question as "unimportant;" nor was there a political event
to happen for the coming eighty years that it did not influence and
generally govern. There were some who maintained at first that the slave
population should not be represented at all. Hamilton proposed in the
first days of the convention "that the rights of suffrage in the
national legislature ought to be proportioned to the number of free
inhabitants." Madison was willing to concede this in one branch of the
legislature, provided that in the representation in the other house the
slaves were counted as free inhabitants. The constitution of the Senate
subsequently disposed of that proposition.

But why should slaves be represented at all? "They are not free agents,"
said Patterson, a delegate to the convention from New Jersey; they "have
no personal liberty, no faculty of acquiring property, but, on the
contrary, are themselves property, and, like other property, entirely at
the will of the master. Has a man in Virginia a number of votes in
proportion to the number of his slaves? And if negroes are not
represented in the States to which they belong, why should they be
represented in the general government?... If a meeting of the people was
actually to take place in a slave State, would the slaves vote? They
would not. Why, then, should they be represented in a federal
government?" There could be but one reply, but that was one which it
would not have been wise to make. It was slave property that was to be
represented, and this would not be submitted to among slaveholders as
against each other, while yet they were a unit in insisting upon it in a
union with those who were not slaveholders. Among themselves slavery
needed no protection; their safety was in equality. But to their great
interest every non-slaveholder was, in the nature of things, an enemy;
and prudence required that the power either to vote him down or to buy
him up should never be wanting. It was as much a matter of instinct as
of deliberation, for love of life is the first law. The truth was
covered up in Madison's specious assertion that "every peculiar
interest, whether in any class of citizens or any description of
States,