Gouverneur Morris Condemns Slavery as Curse of Heaven at Constitutional Convention

Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania delivers a powerful moral condemnation of slavery during Constitutional Convention debates over representation, attacking the Three-Fifths Compromise and challenging southern delegates who profess little willingness to end slavery in their states. Morris declares slavery “the curse of Heaven on the States where it prevailed” and contrasts “the happiness and prosperity of the free states” with “the misery and poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia, Maryland, and the other States having slaves.” He moves for representation to be based solely on “free inhabitants,” directly challenging the logic of counting enslaved people for political power.

Morris asks the fundamental question that exposes the moral bankruptcy of the Three-Fifths Compromise: “Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them citizens, and let them vote. Are they property? Why, then, is no other property included? The houses in this city (Philadelphia) are worth more than all the wretched slaves who cover the rice swamps of South Carolina.” This rhetorical challenge cuts to the heart of slavery’s contradiction—enslaved people are simultaneously claimed as property for slaveholders’ benefit and as persons for representation purposes, yet denied all rights and protections afforded to either category. Morris declares he “came here as a Representative of America; he flattered himself he came here in some degree as a Representative of the whole human race,” framing the slavery question as one of universal human rights rather than sectional compromise.

Despite Morris’s eloquent moral arguments, his motions fail and the Convention proceeds with slavery compromises including the Three-Fifths Clause, twenty-year slave trade protection, and fugitive slave provision. Morris’s speeches demonstrate that delegates fully understood slavery’s moral depravity and economic inefficiency, yet chose political expediency and Union preservation over human rights and justice. Five weeks before these debates, Madison recorded: “It seems now to be pretty well understood that the real difference of interests lies not between the large and small but between the northern and southern states. The institution of slavery and its consequences form the line of discrimination.” Morris himself later orchestrates the corrupt bargain trading slave trade protection for commerce clause powers, proving even the most vocal slavery opponents prioritize Union over abolition. The episode reveals how institutional corruption operates: elites with full knowledge of moral wrongs embed those wrongs into constitutional structures when doing so serves their political and economic interests, establishing frameworks of injustice that persist for generations.