Constitutional Convention Guarantees 20-Year Protection for International Slave Trade

The Constitutional Convention’s Committee of Eleven, chaired by William Livingston of New Jersey, recommends prohibiting Congress from banning slave importation until 1808—initially proposing twelve years but extending to twenty years after southern delegates demand more time. This compromise, codified in Article I, Section 9, Clause 1, states “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight.” The provision never uses the word “slave” but everyone understands it protects the international slave trade, with South Carolina and Georgia threatening to reject the Constitution unless guaranteed continued access to African captives for two decades.

James Madison objects strenuously, warning “Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves” and later calling the provision “dishonorable.” Connecticut’s Roger Sherman counters that it is “better to let the southern states import slaves than to part with those states,” revealing how northern delegates prioritize Union over human rights. The twenty-year protection represents a calculated trade: southern states drop opposition to giving Congress commerce regulation power (requiring only majority votes rather than supermajorities) in exchange for guaranteed slave trade access until 1808, plus the fugitive slave clause requiring northern states to return escaped enslaved people. Gouverneur Morris orchestrates this corrupt “bargain among the Northern and Southern States” despite his moral objections to slavery.

The slave trade protection clause exemplifies institutional corruption embedded in constitutional design—the founding document itself guarantees twenty years of human trafficking, kidnapping, and bondage to satisfy elite southern economic interests. During this protection period, an estimated 170,000 additional African people are forcibly imported into American slavery, their captivity constitutionally guaranteed by a document claiming to establish justice and secure liberty. The clause allows Congress to impose a maximum $10 tax per imported person, treating human beings as taxable commodities rather than rights-bearing individuals. This constitutional provision demonstrates how slaveholding elites captured the founding process, writing permanent structural advantages into American governance that persist long after 1808: although Congress bans international slave trade in 1807 (effective January 1, 1808), the domestic slave trade flourishes for another 57 years, and the precedent of constitutional protection for slavery requires Civil War to overthrow.