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On Tuesday, June 24, 1788, after three weeks of impassioned oratory, Patrick Henry rose for his last-ditch efforts to persuade the Virginia convention to reject the proposed Constitution of the United States. New Hampshire had ratified three days earlier, making the nine states that could put the new national government into operation in theory, although while this news had not yet reached Virginia, it did not really matter. Henry, and everyone else, understood that the new frame of government could not work if Virginia held out.1 So, after most of the speeches had been made and most of the out-of-doors arm-twisting accomplished, Virginia's most famous orator pulled out the stops to defeat the Constitution by arguing that northerners would use the new powers of Congress to abolish slavery in Virginia.
"Among ten thousand implied powers which they may assume," Henry threatened, "they may, if we be engaged in war, liberate every one of your slaves if they please."2 Nor would this danger exist only during wars. The Constitution granted the new federal government the "power of manumission." "Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare?" Henry asked. "May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery?-May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?" In fact, Henry claimed, if the Constitution were adopted, Congress inevitably would free "your slaves." They would do it for two reasons. First, everyone knew that slavery was evil; even "we [that is, the slaveholders] deplore it with all the pity of humanity."3 Second, the Constitution would institute majority rule at the national level, allowing simple majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate to pass laws as long as the president did not veto them. Over time, slavery's evil would "press with full force on the minds of Congress," which would free the slaves because "a decided majority of the States have not the ties of sympathy and fellow-feeling for those whose interest would be affected by their emancipation." Henry's idea that slaveholders were the only ones with an "interest" in slavery's future was obviously short-sighted, although the racism that allowed him to ignore the interests of African Americans was replicated largely in the North. Henry...