That phrase, attributed to Patrick Henry in a speech before the Second Virginia Convention, credits himwith swinging the delegates to supporting the revolution by providing troops. Too bad it only applied to white colonials.
Henry in his attack on ratification of the Constitution adopted a very different tone with regard to slaves who most definitely were to be given the choice of liberty or death (well, death maybe.) Robin Einhorn examined the documents and records** of the history of the ratification in an enlightening article.* Henry was adamantly opposed to ratification on several grounds. He thought it too democratic for one, as it would institute majority rule at the national level. He also was afraid of what the national government could do to abolish slavery. "They're coming to take your niggers," was his cry.
Even though he decried slavery as an evil, its abolition should never happen as it was so tied to the economics of the south. :"We ought to possess them in the manner we have inherited them from our ancestors, as their manumission is incompatible with the felicity of the country." The "felicity"of owning should not be subject to the will of the majority because not everyone understood the importance of owning slaves, the decision " should not be "in the hands of those who have no similarity of situation with us."
His attitude was interesting in that the Constitution's compromises heavily favored that "peculiar institution." The Fugitive slave clause was a gift to slave-holding states. Protection of property was paramount and the slave-holding states had a decided advantage in Congress thanks to the 3/5ths rule.
Einhorn proposes that even though many historians saw politics as encompassing both national and state ideals, the interests of southern slave-holding states differed radically from those where slavery was not present. A national government with majority rule could easily overwhelm the interests of slave-holding states. It was much like the argument for maintaining and arming state militias in the 2nd Amendment. The southern states desperately feared slave uprisings and didn't trust a national army to protect them. In time of war, white southern males could be called upon to serve and that would leave their plantations without supervision.
Taxation on the national level was also a fear. Henry argued a majoritarian national government could impose "ruinous" taxation on southern plantation leading to the necessity of manumitting or selling slaves to pay the taxes. Even though it was never levied, the $10 tax on imported slaves before 1808 when the trade could be prohibited, displayed the dangers of a national government. "Those feeble ten," he lamented, "cannot prevent the
passing the most oppressive tax law." (He meant the 10 representatives Virginia would have in Congress even with the 3/5ths Clause. Henry was not impressed by the direct tax clause that apportioned tax based on population, which Federalists argued would prevent such a broad tax.)
"The oppression arising from taxation,"he explained,"is not from the amount but, from the mode." The direct tax clause governed only the amount of Virginia's total tax liability, "yet the proportion of Virginia being once fixed, might be laid on blacks and blacks only. For the mode of raising the proportion of each State being to be directed by Congress, they might make slaves the sole object to raise it of."
Einhorn has written a fascinating analysis of the economic arguments made by Henry and his supporters against ratification. His analysis also sheds light on Madison's famous piece in the Federalist Papers regarding factions and the advantages of a larger republic in protecting property. . In a large republic, a majority sharing any "passion or interest"can "be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression." In the United States, as Madison famously wrote in Federalist 51, society "will be broken into so many parts,interests and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority." Little did he know...
*Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
"Patrick Henry's Case against the Constitution: The Structural Problem with Slavery"
Author(s): Robin L. Einhorn
Source: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter, 2002), pp. 549-573
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the
Early American Republic http://www.jstor.org/stable/3124758
**The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution,(vols. 9-10,
Madison, WI, 1990, 1993)
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