was made to be only three
fifths of a full social unit, or three fifths of a man. This would
seem to imply that in the social consciousness of the nation at large
the slave was part chattel and part person and this doubtless was the
fact. Certainly this is not the last instance where a tendency has
manifested itself to assign to the Negro a sort of intermediary status
between a chattel and a full social unit. The question came up in 1829
in the Virginia constitutional convention in the struggle between the
slaveholding eastern and the free western section of that State.[162]
Doubtless one reason for the refusal of Congress to reduce the
representation of the Southern States, after the legislation of a few
years ago, that practically disfranchised the Negro in the far South,
has been an unwillingness thus to lend national sanction to the
inferior political as well as social status to which this legislation
has at least for the time being reduced the Negro.

The clause in the constitution which subjected its framers to the
bitterest criticism at the hands of anti-slavery agitators is that
which requires that a "person held to service"--the term "slave" is
here avoided also--in one State and escaping to another shall be
delivered up on claim of the party to whom the service is due. In view
of the interests to be reconciled this clause was undoubtedly
necessary to union.[163] If the free States were to become a place of
refuge for escaping slaves it meant disaster for the States in which
the institution of slavery existed and they insisted upon this as a
self-protective measure. The constitution recognized the right of each
State to preserve the integrity of its own domestic institutions. "It
can never too often be called to mind," says Rhodes, "that the
political parties of the Northern States and their senators and
representatives in Congress, scrupulously respected the constitutional
protection given to the peculiar institution of the South, until, by
her own act, secession dissolved the bonds of union."[164] The tragedy
of the situation lay in the fact that the political necessities of the
time made unavoidable this strange union between freedom and slavery,
the fundamental incompatibility of which the expanding national life
was bound to make clear to the minds of men.

Looking back on this momentous period we are struck with what Lecky
calls "the grotesque absurdity of slaveowners signing a Declaration of
Independen